World Association of Young Scientists

A variety of scholarships and awards have been announced by the australian government for various levels of study. For more information please check the follwing weblink.
http://www.endeavour.deewr.gov.au/

The Centre for Science and Technology of the Non-Aligned and Other Developing Countries (NAM S&T Centre) is currently executing three Fellowship schemes to promote the South-South and North-South cooperation in science and technology;

a) Joint NAM S&T Centre – ZMT Bremen (Germany) Fellowship in Ecology and Biogeochemistry of Tropical Coastal marine Systems

b) Joint NAM S&T Centre – ICCBS (Karachi, Pakistan) Fellowship in Natural Products Chemistry, Drugs and Pharmaceuticals

c) NAM S&T Centre Research Fellowships in Any Scientific Field (Exclusively for the Scientists from the Member Countries of the NAM S&T Centre

This Fellowships schemes aim at supporting the deserving young scientists and researchers in the developing countries to upgrade their academic and research skilss and invites applications from suitable candidates for the year 2010.

Details please visit www.namstct.org.

Dr. M. Akhyar Farrukh

we can reduce polar ice melting.
we can use snow spraying machines which convert water into snow.
when this is done in large scale we can reduce the melting by filling it with new one.
power source for the operation canbe done with solar panels,wind power,nuclear power or batteries in the poles.
so it will be a green process.

so what do you people think of this concept.....

by
sudarshan
www.superrobot.co.in

Here I am at the PhD Conference, it would appear that the PhD Programme in South Africa is working. Their aim is to increase the number of PhD graduates in SA, in an effort to increase capacity and ultimately grow the economy.
My throat hurts already from promoting WAYS and I'm encouraged by the interest shown. I've had a few students express genuine interest in WAYS (they signed my page expressingtheir interest).
One question I've had is why is it for scientists, takes some explaining to convince people that we are inter-disciplinary and not restricted to the classical concept of science.

Later today, I will attend the Semantic Web Day in Leipzig and give a talk on Integrating wikis with scientific workflows. Perhaps appropriate to the topic, I did not prepare slides but a set of wiki pages.

The title of this post misrepresents the position of the Society for Scholarly Publishing just about as much as their recent blog post did with the publishing practice, standards and goals of the Public Library of Science, and their journal PLoS ONE in particular. There may be a grain of truth in this headline, though, in that the rising heat of the debate may indeed be indicative of a tipping point coming in sight, after which toll-access (i.e. subscription-based) scientific journals would shrink into a niche in the prelude to a larger disruption of the scientific communication process, the transition to open science.

For details, please take a look at the reply that PLoS posted yesterday, and at one of the discussions that spun off the original blog post (which is linked from there). Both are embedded below.

The APCTP is looking for applicants for the training of young scientists in the Asia-Pacific region on advanced topics of theoretical physics and related areas. As the first stage of the Young Scientist Training Program, the Center solicits applications at the level of postdoctoral fellows in theoretical physics and related fields. Young physicists from member countries, in particular, from South East Asian countries are encouraged to apply.

http://www.apctp.org/application/young_eng_list.php

Email: sec@apctp.org for further information.

GEMMA Scholarships

GEMMA is the first Erasmus Mundus Master in Women's and Gender Studies in Europe. It is, therefore, a master of excellence supported by the European Commission which selected it as Erasmus Mundus from within 160 project proposals for 2006.
GEMMA is the achievement of long years of efforts trying to advance in the tuning of our diverse educational structures and create common curricula in Women's and Gender Studies. The eight partner institutions represent seven European countries with different locations and cultures across all Europe: University of Granada (Spain, Co-ordinator), University of Bologna (Italy), Central European University (Hungary), University of Hull (United Kingdom), Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (Slovenia), University of Lodz (Poland), University of Oviedo (Spain) and University of Utrecht (Netherlands).
Readmore:
http://cambodiajobs.blogspot.com/2010/04/gemma-scholarships.html

In the spirit of Another Conference I did not attend, I embed below my summary of tweets on OKCon 2010, as well as the piratepad that pleasantly fulfilled the function of collaborative note taking, for which I had proposed a wiki-based attempt yesterday. While the former is unbeatably interactive (one of the best ways to attend a conference online if no audio/video is available), I think that the latter is more suitable for long-term archiving and structuring the information about the conference and its sessions and talks. Looking forward to another Etherpad-based attempt at OpenSciNY.

Later today, OKCon 2010 will take place — the fifth (or fourth, depending on whether WSFII 2005 counts or not) installment of the Open Knowledge Conference, organized on an annual basis by the Open Knowledge Foundation.

I have contributed to a paper (with @Tom Morris, who will present it) that is scheduled for the Community-Driven Research session and describes Citizendium as a platform for the collaborative structuring of knowledge by experts and the public. I cannot attend in person but will do so online via Twitter and Friendfeed, and this blend of wiki and microblogging on the same topic stimulated me to give collaborative blogging another try, this time via the wiki entry on the conference, embedded below. Caveat: only registered users can edit, but everyone can register, and approval rarely takes more than a few hours. If this is too late for you to keep your OKCon 2010 notes there, then the wiki can still serve to structure them later and to contextualize them. Or it can simply link to your blog posts, images and other materials on the matter.

I am also aware that, as long as wikis do not allow parallel editing in the same sections of a document, Etherpad clones would be an alternative, and they may indeed get their try in a few weeks too.

Anyway, here we go for the wiki variant:

Medicinal Uses of Banana

Plantain tree itself is a mine of medicinal properties. Each part of this such as the leaves, inflorescence and the core of the stem enriched with medicinal powers. the underground bulb of a plantain tree (Rhizome, "Vazha Kalla"). green plantain fruit. In our country, we use the leaves of plantain tree for serving food , as plates, especially the rice on special occasions. And we have a concept that, if we take the food from the leaves, it will boost our appetite and taste. Moreover, it is good for our eye sight and enhance the beauty.

Many people come out with lots of great ideas that they need to figure out but do not have the statistical or knowledge to do so.

If you had a good data base of scientists however there are many problems that the world could solve. Is there a place where you can find all the best scientists in your area?

The Public Domain is in danger of being restricted by agreements to digitise Europe's cultural heritage. These contracts sometimes include exclusive rights that restrict access to newly digitised works for years or even decades.

This is why Europeana has recently published the Public Domain Charter: a statement that calls for the Public Domain to be kept freely accessible to Europe's citizens.

Europeana believes that material held in trust for the public for generations, often at taxpayers' expense, should not enter the private sector when it is digitised. As well as asking content providers to keep material in the Public Domain, Europeana will take steps before the end of 2010 to label all new content on Europeana.eu with rights information. This will allow users to exclude content from their results that requires payment or doesn't comply with the Public Domain Charter.

The British Library are currently running what they call a "Biomedical Research Information Support Survey", whose last question is number 31:

I do not think that discussing this supplementary question here would spoil the survey, so I invite possible answers, irrespective of whether you filled in the survey or not. I shall post a screenshot of my answer here tomorrow.

Some classical Texts from the French National Library (Public Domain) will become widely accessible thanks to an agreement with Wikimedia France (Wikisource project) : http://www.wikimedia.fr/wikim%C3%A9dia-france-signe-un-partenariat-avec-...
(English: http://paigrain.debatpublic.net/?p=1582)

In Brazil, a public program was recently started to digitize Brazilian Culture and make it Open, along with the Brasiliana Library initiative (created by some researchers of the University of Sao Paulo) : http://culturadigital.br/simposioacervosdigitais/sobre/ Practical apects are still being discussed (http://www.brasiliana.usp.br/bd_projeto)
Some technical issues are discussed (in Portuguese) here
The project includes the preservation and promotion of Brazilian Portuguese.