Is volunteering at a hospital considered "community service"?
Absolutely! Just about anything you do without compensation can be considered community service. Do you pick up litter on the street/in the park? Help a neighbor? Help in your church?
As a community college student looking to volunteer in a research lab at a local university, should I start by reaching out to the lab directors, associate professors, Ph.D. candidates, or another lab faculty member?
Always start with the most immediate player in the field you are selecting. In this case, the lab faculty member. The very worse that will happen is that she/he will send you to their supervisor for confirmation if they cannot grant your request. Go up the command chain. NEVER try and side step the chain of command. It can get you in trouble.
I want to get involved with the scientific community, but I have to admit that I'm completely lost. Where do I start?
The best way, in the long run, is to go to college and study a scientific discipline that interests you. You will immediately be involved with your instructors and their students that are one segment of the scientific community. When you complete your degree you will be a scientist and will likely end up working with other scientists.If you aren’t interested in school, here are some other ways:Participate with a local science-based club that interests you (astronomy, botany, rocketry, geology, birds . . .) See: Science Meetups - MeetupVolunteer at a local museum - especially a science museum, a public aquarium . . . See: List of science museums - WikipediaWatch your newspaper for local events that you can join (here there are native plant walks, star watching events, . . .)Get involved in citizen science, like at a bioblitz See: Upcoming bioblitzesVolunteer for an archaeology dig See: Archaeological Fieldwork Opportunities BulletinVolunteer with a public agency See: Volunteer.gov Home PageBecome a Master Naturalist See: ANROSP - Program DirectoryI’m sure other commenters can add more ideas. In most of the above cases there will be at least one scientist involved. Use that contact to help you get more into your local science scene.
How are open access journals viewed by the scientific community?
From a mixed background of physicist and programmer, I appreciated the open source practice in software industry, and enjoyed the collaborative atmosphere in science community.I think open access journals (e.g. arXiv.org e-Print archive) will benefit the society in many ways, some obvious ones:Open access makes it easy for other researchers in the same field to build on top of your results and findings. They don't need to worry about their library purchasing the database license and etc. Open access makes the work transparent to the public and people in the other disciplines. It will lower the barrier of initiating cross-field collaborations.After people practice open access / open source for a while, they will see the benefit to the community and society more real rather than in words. They will start bringing the mindset to other parts of their life and work. But to maintain an open access journals is challenging:Open access implies that the organization cannot monetize on the material. To build a different revenue stream to support the structure has been a big question for open source community. If staying as a non-profit organization, the operational size will be restricted and some complex supporting structure wouldn't be viable.Open access will definitely have big impact on the traditional publication industry. If the traditional industry collapse before the open access model stabilized, the society will surfer and might turn around against the open access practice.Can't be ignored, there are many scientists depending on their copyright and patent royalties. Open access will create peer pressure on them and it will impact their lives and works in uncertain ways.Open access depends on people's volunteer, so the quality of the work might be hard to control unless quality control and incentive mechanism can be implemented and balanced.Open access, if success, will generate a lot of content in a short period of time. So how to guide people through the content and funnel the relevant information will be a related question for the journal. That's just my two cents. Would love to see other views.
Do colleges count Middle School community service hours?
College don't look at hours -- they look at what you have done for community service, whenever you have done it in life. They want to know what you've learned, what challenges you faced and how you addressed them, how you balanced volunteering and school work and perhaps employment as well, and on and on.
Relay for life volunteer?
My family and i had a group going trying to raise money for the relay for life for 2 years does that count as volunteer experience or community service? I want to include it in my resume.
Hadith/ayah about either community service, volunteering, charity, etc.?
I can pretty much guarantee you that if your community is served by 211 (most US communities are NOT served by such), they will NOT be able to help you find a hadith or ayah about volunteering or charity. I typed in Hadith about charity into google.com and got a long list of references regarding charity, helping the poor, etc. Like this link: http://www.soundvision.com/Info/poor/qur...
Can a 13 year old volunteer at a children's hospital?
Hi, soo. I'm 13, and in February I finished my chemotherapy for Ovarian cancer, during my time on the ward I saw that the children, especially the younger ones were often bored and agitated, with nothing to do but sit there while they were receiving their chemotherapy. I was thinking of volunteering at my city's children's hospitals cancer ward, but I don't know how I would go about doing that? Would I be old enough? I know all of the doctors and nurses in the hospital and I am familiar with most of the people and patients there, I'm also pretty good with children having two little brothers..one being four years old. I also know how to speak to them, and feel completely normal and not awkward around them, because I, myself have been in their situation and have a rough idea how they're feeling and how they wish to be treated..which is the same as every other human being/child. I would raise money for new toys/equipment for the ward and games to play with them. They rarely get any visitors except for these really annoying clowns. I also know the hygiene routine that you need to do to go on them wards and to only visit if I'm 1OO% well so they don't catch any infections.
Why would anyone want to be a scientific journal editor? What's the upside?
As an editor of 4 scientific journals, I can share the following thoughts (not all reasons of why I want to be an editor):The scientific community depends on volunteers to help control quality of research papers, so fundamentally editors are all volunteers who are willing to sacrifice their time to help the community. An editor's job is mainly looking for good reviewers and make a sensible decision based on reviewers' reports which could take a lot of time.As an editor, you don't really often feel you have too much power -- EiC has more such power. On the other hand, you feel more responsibilities and pressure especially when your list of assigned papers keeps increasing.These days it becomes more and more challenging to find competent and willing reviewers, and when authors complain you editors are in trouble (EiC and the publisher will push you).Being on a decent journal's editorial board is indeed an esteem factor and deserves adding to your CV. Most research institutes and your peers will appreciate that.In principle all submissions to a journal are confidential (unless the authors have made them public available somewhere else e.g. on a pre-print server or their own websites), so even if you learn new stuff earlier than others you are not allowed to work on those ideas until they are published. The same applies to reviewers.Not all journals are equal, so you will want to be on one journal but not on others. Bear in mind that there are a lot of fake journals in this highly commercialised world and many decent journals may be exploited by "bad" researchers. Search Google for some interesting lists and stories.Researchers are humans, so EiCs. Most EiCs will look for people they know to serve their journals, so networking is important (and being a journal editor can help you do networking!).In principle, being a journal editor means you are closer to the EiC and the publisher, so could potentially influence how the journal and the whole scientific publishing world work. Donald Knuth's letter to all editors of then J. Algorithms in 2003 can give you some good insights about this: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.e...