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Call for Nominations : 70th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

by | Aug 29, 2019 | HowTo


The Academy of Sciences Malaysia is pleased to announce that Malaysia has been given the opportunity to nominate PhD and Master’s Degree candidates from all higher learning institutions to participate in the 70th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting (Interdisciplinary) from 28 June to 3 July 2020. 
Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting offers a unique chance of an informal get-together with Nobel Laureates in science disciplines (between 30-40 Nobel Laureates) in the fields of Physics, Chemistry and Physiology or Medicine. This is an excellent avenue to develop Malaysian young scientist by providing then an opportunity to gain knowledge and enhance interaction with Nobel Laureates and their peers globally.

For more information, please download the nomination criteria and online application instructions.

Download
More details are also available on the Lindau website: http://www.lindau-nobel.org. .
For further enquiries, please contact Ms Aimi Suraya at 03 6203 0633 or suraya@akademisains.gov.my.
Thank you.

Characteristics of an effective PhD supervisor

by | Jul 31, 2019 | SUPERVISION

  1. Understands the qualities associated with doctoral level research in their discipline, and communicates these to the PhD student
  2. Gives time and thought to the selection and acceptance of students for PhD research
  3. Establishes a good working relationship with the student
  4. Clarifies expectations throughout the PhD
  5. Inspires and motivates the PhD student
  6. Supports the conceptual development of the
  7. Guides the timing and sequencing of project activities
  8. Monitors research activities to ensure timely completion
  9. Supports the student through institutional processes for monitoring progress and reporting
  10. Provides constructive and timely feedback
  11. Identifies and deals with potential conflicts and difficult situations (academic and personal)
  12. Ensures that the research is of publishable
  13. Anticipates problems and assists the PhD student’s adaptation of their research to cope with problems and challenges
  14. Advises, and enforces where necessary, the academic and research standards
    of the PhD research
  15. Encourages and advises the PhD student on appropriate professional development
  16. Encourages the PhD student to have an appropriate work-life
  17. Assists the PhD student with their preparation of the thesis and for the viva
  18. Actively guides the PhD student’s preparation for their post-PhD
  19. Is aware of and responds to the changing relationship with the PhD student over time, and especially the balance between structure and independence
  20. Gives sufficient time to these
  21. Invests time in their own professional development as a PhD supervisor

Queen Guitarist Brian May Is Also an Astrophysicist: Read His PhD Thesis Online

by | Jul 4, 2019 | HowTo

Queen couldn’t possibly have been Queen without Freddie Mercury, nor could it have been Queen without Brian May. Thanks not least to the recent biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, the band’s already larger-than-life lead singer has become even larger still. But its guitarist, despite the film’s surface treatment of his character, is in his own way an equally implausible figure. Not only did he show musical promise early, forming his first group while still at school, he also got his A Levels in physics, mathematics, and applied mathematics, going on to earn a Bachelor of Science in Physics with honors at Imperial College London.

Naturally, May then went for his PhD, continuing at Imperial College where he studied the velocity of, and light reflected by, interplanetary dust in the Solar System. He began the program in 1970, but “in 1974, when Queen was but a princess in its infancy, May chose to abandon his doctorate studies to focus on the band in their quest to conquer the world.” So wrote The Telegraph‘s Felix Lowe in 2007, the year the by-then 60-year-old (and long world-famous) rocker finally handed in his thesis. “The 48,000-word tome, Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, which sounds suspiciously like a Spinal Tap LP, was stored in the loft of his home in Surrey.” You can read it online here.

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Read John Nash’s Super Short PhD Thesis with 26 Pages & 2 Citations: The Beauty of Inventing a Field

by | Jul 3, 2019 | HowTo

Last week John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, and subject of the blockbuster film A Beautiful Mind, passed away at the age of 86. He died in a taxi cab accident in New Jersey.

Days later, Cliff Pickover highlighted a curious factoid: When Nash wrote his Ph.D. thesis in 1950, “Non Cooperative Games” at Princeton University, the dissertation (you can read it online here) was brief. It ran only 26 pages. And more particularly, it was light on citations. Nash’s diss cited two texts: One was written by John von Neumann & Oskar Morgenstern, whose book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), essentially created game theory and revolutionized the field of economics; the other cited text, “Equilibrium Points in n-Person Games,” was an article written by Nash himself. And it laid the foundation for his dissertation, another seminal work in the development of game theory, for which Nash won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994.

The reward of inventing a new field, I guess, is having a slim bibliography.

from http://www.openculture.com/2015/06/read-john-nashs-super-short-phd-thesis.html