This book provides young scientists, from physicists through to sociologists, the counsel and tools that are needed to be their own agents and planners, to survive and succeed, hopefully even thrive in science. Making a good career based on peer-reviewed science means navigating many stressful phases from graduate school through to permanent employment. Performing artists pay agents to help them in this effort. In effect, this book is designed to allow you to act as your own agent. You are counseled to analyze yourself deeply to know clearly what you want and whether you can live with it, how to make career choices and what you should then keep in mind, when to fight and when to yield. The unwritten rules of the "science game" are explained, including how to become published and known, the pitfalls of peer review and how to evade them, papers and posters, job interviews and getting your science funded. Interspersed with this are illustrative anecdotes and a fair amount of humor. While the book is aimed at young scientists, from graduate students and beyond, more senior scientists will benefit from seeing the world from the point of view of rising scientists and become aware of the preoccupations of people in a system which has changed much from when the present senior scientists were rather younger.

Symposium S, 'Nanostructured Metal Oxides for Advanced Applications', was held April 1-5 at the 2013 MRS Spring Meeting in San Francisco, California. Metal oxides represent an appealing and assorted class of materials, whose properties cover the entire range from metals to semiconductors to insulators and almost all aspects of material science, chemistry and physics in a very broad application area. In the past few years, progress has been made on the synthesis, structural, physical, and chemical characterization of self-assembled and hierarchically assembled metal oxide nanostructures that exhibit size-dependent properties. In these proceedings, attention is paid to the synthesis, structural and functional characterization of self-assembled nanostructures and architectures of all metal oxides with application potentials, with particular consideration given to the capability to tailor and control material properties via surface and structural modifications.