News

The website for the 11th Sensometric Meeting at Arocampus Ouest in Rennes, France, is online.

For news and informations regarding the event, please check

http://sensometrics2012.agrocampus-ouest.fr

The third CARME (Correspondence Analysis and Related Methods) conference took place at Agrocampus Rennes in France February 9-11, 2011. In a session dedicated to multivariate analysis of sensory data, Marianne Buche talked about the use of projective mapping to identify cultural differences in the main discrimination of picture based stimuli, Marine Cadoret explained the data treatment for a hierarchical sorting task with multiple factor analysis, Mostafa Qannari presented the results of sorting task data treated with multiple correspondence analysis, and Thierry Worch showed an approach for the application of multivariate analysis to ideal profile data. Other presentations of interest for Sensometricians featured the analysis of textual data (word elicitation) and methods in the social sciences (demographics).

Further lectures presented advances in theory, algorithms, computation and applications of CA and MCA. Presentation slides are available on the CARME 2011 homepage.

Perfectly planned, the social program lived up to the high culinary expectations for France and at the Conference Dinner Michael Greenacre and Yuna Blum surprised the audience with Statistical Songs.

The Sensometric Society is pleased to announce that the Institute for Perception is offering discounted registration to members for these upcoming courses:

• Sensory Product and Concept Testing: Analyses, Applications and Computer Workshop (Williamsburg, Virginia, United States, March 28-April 1)
• Short Course Programme (Brussels, Belgium, May 30-June 3)

Please see the Related Events page on this website for more details, and for links to register.

Dear members, dear visitors,

it's the time of the year to review what has been achieved in the course of 2010, and also to share some news from the committee with you.

• The new committee has taken up its work after the successful conference held in Rotterdam. Thanks again to Pieter, Garmt and Aimée for all their efforts in making this a memorable conference.
• This fall, we have launched the new website of the society. Feedback has been positive throughout, and we hope that you continue to benefit from the site and its features. We also feel that the renewal process works much smoother due to the integration to the system. Thanks to everybody involved in the transfer, in particular John, Anne, Ian, Hal and Barbara.
  
• Together with the new website, we have launched additional member benefits like reduction on text books or conferences, and a member directory. Please send additional proposals of what you would like to see in the future to any committee member. Please also re-consider contributing datasets with a description for usage by fellow members. Response has been very slow so far, while many people have expressed their wish to have a variety of datasets available.
• For all those that have not renewed their membership yet, please do so as soon as possible. Elsevier has already started shipping 2011 issues of FQAP. Lapsed members will no longer have access to the members-only part of the website either.
• We plan to hold the Annual General Meeting as usual during the Pangborn Symposium 2011, which will take place in Kyoto, Japan.
• I am happy to announce that after going to Rennes (France) in 2012 and to Chicago (USA) in 2014, the 2016 Sensometrics meeting will be held in Brighton UK. We are grateful to Yvonne Taylor, Dominic Buck and Keith Greenhoff for their great proposal and for their commitment to organize this meeting.

Also in 2011, please do not hesitate to contact me or any other committee member with any questions, proposals or concerns you may have. Until then, on behalf of the committee, I wish all of you a Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and all the best for 2011.

Michael
(chair)

Dear visitor,

Thank you for visiting our completely revised homepage, and welcome on behalf of the Sensometric Society. I hope that you are as exited about the new pages as I am, and I hope that you will find all the information you require here, and even more. We have put a lot of efforts in the pages, and at the same time we have developed new membership benefits. Next to receiving the official journal of the society, Food Quality and Preference, at a very interesting rate, we have agreed on a discount rate for pertinent textbooks by CRC Press (Taylor&Francis group) as well as for selected titles by Wiley. We hope to put similar agreements in place with other print houses as well in the near future. We also provide access to contact information from fellow sensometricians, and hope to make some data sets available for your use in the near future.

Having said that, it is instructive to thank those people that have put tremendous efforts into the re-design of the website. First and foremost, I have to mention John Castura, who pushed hard to get the page online from a first draft he presented to me at breakfast during the Sensometrics meeting end of July to the final launch. Without his passion, we would not even be near anything comparable yet. I also want to thank Nicolas Pineau and Barbara Pfeiffer for their input and work on the new pages. Last but not least, Anne Hasted, Tom Carr, Hal MacFie and Ian Wakeling contributed to the smooth transition of the website and the payment tools. Hal is also acknowledged for hosting the society's website for a number of years until we now finally put it on our own grounds, and Ian for maintaining the previous site. Many thanks to all of you.

I hope you enjoy our new site as much as I do, and I hope that you return frequently for updates and to connect with your fellow sensometricians. If you are not yet a member of the society, I hope that the pages and the benefits we provide to our members will convince you to change your status in this regard rather sooner than later. If you have any questions, comments or feedback, we'll be happy to hear about it. See the contact page for details.

Best wishes,

Michael
(Chairman)

Wiley offers all members of the Sensometric Society a discount of 20% on selected titles, including Naes et al.'s Statistics for Sensory and Consumer Science.

Please check the member benefits section for more details, and log in to access the promotion code.

CRC Press (of the Taylor & Francis Group) has offered members of the Sensometric Society a 20% discount and free shipping on Guillermo Hough’s book on survival analysis and all other titles!

This discount has been guaranteed until December 31, 2010. Please login and visit the Member Discounts page to access the promotion code.

The 10th Sensometric Meeting in Rotterdam was a wonderful success. Thanks to everyone involved, particularly the organizers. The presentations from the conference are available online now. During the conference, the AGM was held and a new committee elected. The agenda and the minutes are available in the members-only area. We would like to thank the outgoing members Tom Carr, Guillermo Hough, Pieter Punter, and Pascal Schlich for their contribution to the society during the past years. We would also like to acknowledge the major contribution of our outgoing chairmain Per Brockhoff, who agreed to continue on the committe for two more years as a secretary.

The next meeting will be held in Rennes, France in 2012, and we look forward to meeting some or all of you there. 

Prof. Per Brockhoff attended the SENSIBER conference in Brazil as a representative of the society. Prior to the conference he offered a well-attended Sensometric Workshop.

Former committee member Guillermo Hough reported that the "Sensometrics Society financed Per's participation in the 6th Iberoamerican Sensory Science Symposium (SENSIBER) held in Sao Paulo, Brazil ... Per gave an excellent 2-hour tutorial on Discrimination Testing with the application of the SensR package. Many colleagues from Latin America told me they found it very useful, with the additional advantages that all his examples and exercises are in open source software. Per also complemented his tutorial with a very interesting talk in a Statistical Workshop chaired by Hal. I have no doubt that the Society's contribution to SENSIBER was much appreciated and well worth it."

Per himself commented on the incidence that he met Rivaldo at a Palmeiras soccer match: "The somewhat funny coincidence was that I already two days before this picture was taken showed the attached slide at my talk in Lavras, Brazil – pointing out that this particular guy actually was the Brasilian football player who killed Denmark in the 1998 WC Quarter final. (An historic match for Denmark for various reasons: best WC result ever – last match of the Laudrup brothers…) (AND moreover, the number of the Brasilian shirt also fits …) I should stress that in spite of the look in my face, I did NOT have too many Cachacas – they didn’t serve alcohol on the stadium...:-)….and just to make sure that you don’t think that I did nothing but hunting down football players
I also share with you a couple of more serious photos... first from Lavras University, Minas Gerais and then from the Conference in Sao Paolo:

www.imm.dtu.dk/~pbb/files/DSC03324.JPG

www.imm.dtu.dk/~pbb/files/DSC03325.JPG

www.imm.dtu.dk/~pbb/files/DSC03338.JPG

www.imm.dtu.dk/~pbb/files/DSC03679.JPG

www.imm.dtu.dk/~pbb/files/DSC03681.JPG

www.imm.dtu.dk/~pbb/files/DSC03708.JPG

I thank the society for making this happen – it was really a memorable trip. I do believe that a point was made about sensometrics – including open source R-based software (also pointing the audience towards SensoMineR and FactoMineR)."