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This article reports that the second Stony Brook Conference on Advances in Computing was held on the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, New York on Friday, June 10, 1966. The Long Island Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery joined with the University to sponsor the conference which was partially supported by International Business Machines Corp. The first technical presentation was a thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion of "Feasible Large-Scale Computer Models" by C. West Churchman of the University of California at Berkeley. He pointed to the very large models that can now be built, and the very much larger models that we will soon be able to build, and stated that the models are not realistic because the quality of information is not adequate and because the right questions remain unasked. Walter F. Bauer, president of Informatics Inc., discussed "On-Line Systems, Past, Present and Future."A talk by Oscar L. Morgenstern of the Mitre Corp. on the Air Traffic Control Subsystem of the Airspace System concluded the morning program.

The article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of increased eligibility levels to gain membership of the Association for Computing Machinery. In a Council of the Association meeting held at New York City in May 1965, it was decided that the eligibility criteria for a voting member would be expanded and a new nonvoting type of membership would be established known as Associate membership. The argument in favour suggests that in view of the increased competitiveness in the field of information processing the increased levels of eligibility criteria are justified. The argument against it goes that increasing eligibility levels is useful only if there is no provision for associate membership.