Circulars

First Circular:

As you know the Secretariat has no own budget. Until now the expenses of the Secretariat were paid partly by the Polish Physics Olympiad, partly by the President of the IPhOs and partly by different sponsors (sporadically). As the number of participating countries increases very quickly, the expenses increase very quickly either and the above mentioned situation cannot be continued. For that we have decided to reduce our expenses as much as possible. In particular, we have decided to confine using the regular post. Instead, we shall use internet and e-mail only (except situation when it is absolutely necessary to disseminate hard copies of such documents as commitments of the future organisers etc.).

At present all the delegations may access internet either directly or via modem. It is true that some colleagues use these tools rather seldom. Unfortunately, keeping previous way of disseminating documents exceeds our financial possibilities. Sorry!

We, however, would like to stress that all the Olympic documents are available by internet. They are stored on the Olympic ftp account and may be taken without any charge.

Please remark that we are talking about ftp account, not about a WWW page. The Secretariat of the International Physics Olympiad has no typical WWW page. Instead, we have created an Olympic ftp account (devoted to the "International Physics Olympiads" and to the "First Step to Nobel Prize in Physics"). It is an account in a text mode, not in a graphic mode (the number of graphic files is negligible). Due to that the waiting time is substantially shorter. You may access this account by using a typical ftp procedure. In UNIX you may use the following command:

ftp ftp.ifpan.edu.pl

After opening the connection (anonymous as the login name, your full e-mail address as a password) change directory to "pub/competitions". Using ftp in its classical form sometimes is not convenient. The best way is to use WWW browser (e.g. Internet Explorer). In this case you should use the following address:

ftp://ftp.ifpan.edu.pl/pub/competitions

Remark that the address starts with "ftp://", not with "http://". (The files are written not as hypertext files but as ASCII files or as WORD files.)

In the situation described above proper form of your e-mail address becomes to be very important. Please inform us about any changes in your e-mail address. Please also check your mailbox if it is able to accept new messages (some mailboxes are passive for "disk quota exceeded" - in such case you should cancel some old messages to prepare a place for new ones).

We do apologise for any inconveniences. We hope, however, that you understand the difficulties presented at the beginning of this letter.

With best Olympic greetings,
Yours sincerely,

Prof. Maija Ahtee Secretary of the IPhOs

Dr. Waldemar Gorzkowski President of the IPhOs