Now that we have all had time to recover from the meetings in San Francisco, I wanted to thank all those who worked so hard to make the meeting a success, especially the PAA office staff--Jennifer Kilroy and Mary Boulware, the Program Committee and all those who organized sessions, presented papers and posters and discussed. This meeting had the largest registration ever for a meeting held outside Washington, D.C. This meeting also had more concurrent sessions, more papers and more posters than any previous meeting. The size of the program had some real benefits--a very large proportion of PAA members found a place on the program--but it had some costs too. The costs included somewhat smaller audiences in some sessions than we are used to at PAA, some overlap between sessions in topics, and more potential conflict between schedules of individuals participating in more than one activity. These scheduling conflicts bring up one glitch that occurred in the meetings for which I want to apologize. In several cases, sessions listed in the preliminary program contained conflicts in that the same individual was scheduled to appear in two different sessions scheduled at the same time. Clearly, we needed to move one of these sessions to another time slot. Since PAA presenters make their travel and other plans based on their session time slot in the preliminary program, this need to shift times caused some problems for individuals and for sessions. Both the affected participants and I--all unhappy about the situation--have informed the President-elect, Doug Massey, about this problem and he has promised to make sure that no sessions change time slots after the preliminary program goes out. As the association--the annual meeting--become larger and more complicated, we need to change our traditional way of organizing the meetings from the informal, small-scale strategies we have used to this point to a system that can handle a larger number of authors, discussants, and organizers. Jeff Evans, Secretary-Treasurer of the association, Doug Massey and I have been working on various possibilities for the 1996 meetings. In the meantime, thank you for your patience and your help!
Linda J. Waite