Announcement from the Nordic Node
In connection with the call for proposals for ALMA Cycle 4 the Nordic ARC node will be arranging workshops to provide direct, hands-on help with proposal preparation. In addition to general ALMA workshops, we will this time arrange science oriented workshops to give more focus on the scientific areas of interest to the Nordic region. All meetings are open to all ALMA users, although preference will be given to participants from the Nordic regions.

Announcement from the Italian Node
The Italian node of the European ALMA Regional Centre in Bologna offers a post-doctoral fellowship.
The position is for 2+1 years; proposed starting date March 1, 2016. The deadline for submission is Friday Dec. 18, 12 UT.

On 11 Nov 2015, the EU ARC delivered the first science data (a ToO observation) of Cycle 3 to PIs.
This came closely after the release of the new CASA version 4.5 on 29 Oct 2015 (see http://casa.nrao.edu) which is needed to process Cycle 3 data.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is now offering postdoctoral fellowship positions to join the ALMA science operations group. Fellows will be based in the Santiago Central Office in Chile, with eventual shifts to the ALMA Operations Support Facility (OSF) near San Pedro de Atacama for real-time interaction with the telescope. Full details here.

Announcement from the Italian Node
The Italian ARC-node organizes a workshop on ALMA data reduction and analysis for the Italian community: 9-12 Feb. 2016, Bologna. 
For details and futher updates please visit the workshop web site: http://www.alma.inaf.it/index.php/ALMA_Data_Handling_Workshop

A detailed report on the outcome of the ALMA Early Science Cycle 3 Proposal Review Process is available. The report details the proposal review process, proposal statistics and regional distributions, the proposal distribution across science categories and receiver bands, as well as the anticipated observing pressure as a function of Local Sidereal Time and configuration. The accepted high priority Cycle 3 projects are listed here.

The latest ALMA Status Report, available here, includes Cycle 2 Early Science observing progress (including Cycle 1 Transfer projects), project completion and data delivery summary, Extension and Optimization of Capabilities (EOC) activity, and preparations for Cycle 4, since the last Report (November 2014).

The fourth ALMA user survey was conducted between the 1 May and 1 June 2015. A total of 536 users (representing 15% of the users who were sent the questionnaire and 44% of the Cycle 3 PIs) responded to the survey. This survey focused on topics related to proposal preparation and submission, including interaction with the ARC / ARC nodes for ALMA proposal preparation and usability of tools such as the ALMA Science Portal or the helpdesk. A summary is available.