Am I burning bridges if I am applying for an internship which I am likely to turn down even if I am accepted? There is an internship opportunity at a prestigous institution, which I consider applying for. I do not yet have a job offer for the considered time period. I need a job/internship for financial stability. I am also applying to apply for internships in a different country, where I prefer to spend my time. These are less prestigious institutions, and I think I am more likely to get employment. However, I am not sure.
I want to make sure that I get employment, so I would like to apply for the prestigious institution as well. If I get accepted to both places (ie to the prestigious institution, where I don't want to be in general but I will cope if I have no other job, and to one of the less prestigious institutions, in the country where I prefer to be), is it burning bridges if I turn down the offer of the prestigious institution?

Generally, you should not apply for a position you have no intention of accepting. I find it is unethical to do so; others may see it as merely impolite or even not a problem at all.
That doesn't seem to be the case here - you're applying and would take the offer if it's given to you and you don't have another better choice (better means better for you, not "more prestigious institution"), but might choose another offer if it's presented to you.
There's nothing ethically wrong with this action. Is it possible someone would take your rejection of an offer as a snub and react negatively to your applications in the future? Sure, there are people all over who make judgments on people for reasons they should not. However, that wouldn't be you burning a bridge, it would be someone else acting vindictively towards you. More likely no one will even remember if you apply again in the future.
Adding from Noah Snyder's comment, when you do get an offer you want to take, you should withdraw from other applications and decline other offers as soon as you have confirmed acceptance of the offer you prefer. It is rude to delay or remain in consideration for positions you will not take.


Do “researcher degrees of freedom” invalidate my analysis? I tested a hypothesis using some observational data, but did not find support for the hypothesis (the difference was not significant at the p < 0.05 level). I subsequently realised that the inclusion of a certain subset of individuals was dubious, since there was some doubt over their measurements. I filtered out those individuals (on objective criteria), and lo and behold, I now find evidence to support my original hypothesis.

I am acutely aware that, had the original hypothesis test returned a significant result, I probably would have found justification to support the inclusion of those doubtful measurements (or perhaps never even stopped to think about removing them). Although this wasn't my deliberate intention, what I have done seems a lot like I have employed my “researcher degrees of freedom” to find a version of the analysis that supports my original hypothesis.

I realise that what I should have done was to plan out my analysis more carefully in advance, and decide whether or not to include the doubtful measurements before carrying out any analysis. But I can’t change what has already happened, so my question is, what do I do with my data/analysis now? I can see a number of options that vary in their sensibleness, but none of which seem ideal:

Continue to use my updated analysis and present a clear argument for why those individuals should be excluded (i.e. ignore the RDF issue).
Continue to use my updated analysis but, in any write-up/publication be fully open about the less-than-ideal path that I took to reach it.
Conduct some kind of multiple-comparisons adjustment to take my multiple different analyses into account (I don’t know if this is even a valid approach in this context).
Sigh and throw the analysis in the bin.

How (if at all) can I make good use of my analysis while still adhering to good research practice?

My field is Ecology, in case that makes any difference.

Edit, in response to close vote: I did consider submitting the question to Stats.SE instead, but I felt that this is more an issue of research philosophy than a detailed statistical question. The answers that I am interested in (and indeed have already received) are connected with a general research strategy, and how to present results, rather than details regarding particular statistical methods, and so I felt that it was appropriate for this site. Having received very useful answers and comments already, it won't make too much difference to me personally if it ends up closed (and I can understand the argument for doing so), but I think the material could be useful to others in a similar situation to my own.

Clearly report what you did and both results.  Readers will make up their own minds about the strength of the findings.

The situation that you have encountered is very common.  While testing a prior hypothesis with predefined methods is the right thing to do, in practice it is unavoidable that you will sometimes find problems that you need to correct after running an initial analysis.

Also, if your analysis produces an unexpected result, it is quite logical that this will lead to extra checking of what you have done, and further analyses to confirm it.

There's nothing wrong with doing extra things to refine the analysis. The problem would be refining the analysis and then failing to report on earlier versions.

A multiple testing correction would not typically be used for only two analyses.   Furthermore, it is a judgement call whether this counts as two tests or one.  If the second analysis was really the "correction" of something flawed, that is not quite the same as repeating two different but valid approaches.  And there is not a clear line as to when that becomes true.

In summary, there is no problem with what you have done, as long as you report it, but your concern with doing this the right way is a very good thing--please keep it up!  Inadequate reporting of this sort of thing is quite common, and it undermines the quality of scientific evidence.


No summer funding, what to do during the summer? If a STEM field PhD student is not able to be funded for the summer, what do they typically do?  I'd imagine they can't afford to take an entire summer off from their research - or they would probably risk not graduating in the standard 5 years in a U.S. program - but at the same time it would be hard for them to support themselves, eg, cover rent and living expenses, if they aren't supported by their parents / family.

Depending on your specific field, and when you've found out summer funding isn't guaranteed or available, I present main options in no particular order:

Research internship in 'industry' ($ to $$$$$)
Apply for summer grants to work in another University in different, but hopefully related, research ($ to $$)
Get a summer job or non-research internship - ideal if it uses some set of related skills to your PhD, but if not, oh well, bills to pay ($ to $$$+)
As Dawn suggested, a sub-set of summer job is to seek the option to be an instructor, summer teaching assistant, or grader in your University (or a nearby institution), or even being an adjunct for the summer if that option is available to you ($ to $$)
Vacation, travel, relax rejuvenate, try some hobbies, spend time with friends and family (-$ to -$$$$)
Focus on your own personal research, free of official obligations (at least -$, due to living expenses)
Have an existential crisis due to the lack of driving structure which otherwise distracts you from your morality/mortality and the uncertainty inherent in life itself (free, and can stack with other options)
Choose your own adventure

Above all, I suggest planning ahead - if not for this summer, then for the next one. Most outcomes are uncertain, so judicious planning for multiple applications, budgeting (so you have options on how to spend your summer), and trying to develop a number of options will be important.

Note also that many of the options don't need to - and perhaps should not - take up the entire summer, so you should have the option to try out multiple things. Remember: academic life is a marathon, which extends off into the unknown future until you fade away (go Emeritus) or leave ("go into industry"). That makes the longest ultra-marathon on earth seem short by comparison. No matter what you do, try to change things up a bit, work in some rest and contemplation, friends and family, and a bit of fun for yourself too. If academic life starts to resemble a 24/7/365.25 prison sentence, you might want to reconsider your worldview.


How can an assistant professor have a much higher salary than an associate professor in the same department? Is it possible for a young assistant professor to receive a higher salary than an associate professor in the same department with many more papers, citations, etc?

Why would this happen?

What determines the salary of a faculty member, if not papers and citations?

UPDATE

Although there is overlap, my question is not duplicate. The (realistic but maybe erroneous) example is edited away, so it changes the context of my question. In the situation I want to ask, the associate professor not only stays longer, but also has much more reputation than the assistant professor.

The phenomenon you describe is known as compression and, in the case where salaries are actually reversed, inversion. Unfortunately these are very common especially at state universities. The principal cause is that faculty get hired as assistant professors at market rates, but the university salary structure fails to keep up with inflation and any other sources of increases. Given the severe funding cuts, salary freezes, and so forth that have plagued public higher education over the past few decades, this situation has been almost inevitable. The result is a salary structure such as you describe.

The only ways to fix this are either explicit allocation of funds to correct compression, or for individual faculty to obtain raises via retention packages to fight off outside offers.

In general, salaries are basically set by market rate at hiring (which for assistant professors is largely independent of citations and papers, conditional on getting the job in the first place) and by outside offers received later during the career. Both the availability of outside offers and their magnitude will depend on stature in the field. Even if one does not actually take an outside offer, receiving one or more such offers can prompt the home institution to put together a retention package. The willingness of the home institution to put together a top package will also depend on stature, and similarly the magnitude of the retention package depends on the outside offer and is thus also based on stature.

In principle, regular merit raises could also reward faculty in accordance with their productivity and impact. But for whatever reason (I blame self-governance, but that's another discussion), merit raises and such tend to be allocated in relatively egalitarian form, rather than proportional to differential merit and productivity.

Other answers provide additional important information. Some salaries are 9 month, some 12 month. Some faculty on 9 month appointments can cover summer salary off of grants; others spread 9 months salary across 12 months. Public databases often list total salary received rather than 9 month salary; this considerably increases the variation among faculty.


Submitting Long Papers versus Short Papers I am new really to submitting papers for publication.  I have an upcoming deadline for a conference.  My paper seems to fit the guidelines for a long paper but it is closer to short paper length than long paper length.

How could I submit it?
Could I submit it as both a long paper and short paper?
If I submit is as a long paper, could it be accepted as a short paper if it were rejected as a long paper?

How could I submit it?

The length guidelines are generally for maximum length. You can submit a "long paper" that is shorter than the maximum length allowed for a long paper.

I've published papers 25% under limit without any comments from reviewers on the length. If there is enough original research content for consideration as a full paper, you should be OK.

However, you should consider whether it actually is substantial enough for a full-length paper if it's so short (your advisor can help you make this determination).

Whatever you do, don't pad the paper with unnecessary text (fluff) and/or giant images to fill pages so it looks longer. This lowers the quality of your paper. (As a reviewer, I have seen authors do this and it looks terrible.) If you decide you need to add to your paper to make it substantial enough to be a long paper, then you have to add substantial content.

  Could I submit it as both?

Not unless the conference explicitly says this is allowed (usually it isn't). Submitting the same (or a similar) paper as both a long and short paper will get both papers rejected as duplicate submissions.

  If I submit is as long could it be accepted as short if it were rejected as long?

This depends on the conference. It will either say something like, "Rejected long papers will not be considered as short papers" or "Rejected long papers may be considered as short papers."


How to decide authorship order in this situation? My master's supervisor and I are working on a research project. He offers me the research equipment and the basic ideas. He also writes the paper. I am in charge of coding and conducting all the experiments and analyzing the results. Sometimes I will discuss with him about my ideas but he is the one who decides to use them or not.

Should I be listed as the first author or not?

If you are performing most of the work responsible for conducting the research (designing and conducting experiments, handling the results, etc., just as you say) then you should be the first author. This makes it pretty easy to handle the problem if the only authors on the paper are you and your supervisor. If this is the case, and there is a debate about authorship, you may even elect to list yourselves as co-authors who made equal contributions, though you will still likely be the first author.

There's been a fair amount of published discussion about this subject, as with this 2007 paper by Tscharntke et al. in PLoS Biology.


What should a work supervisor put in a recommendation letter for someone applying to statistics PhD programs? This fall, I'll be applying to PhD programs in statistics in the U.S. I'm currently a full-time student in an applied math master's program in the U.S.; until this fall, I was a part-time student and a full-time data analyst at a financial services company. It looks like I'll only be able to get two good recommendation letters from professors, so I'm considering asking my former work supervisor to write one for me. She was my supervisor for two and a half years, during which time we worked together closely on many projects. She doesn't have a PhD in statistics or any other field, but she was a data analyst before becoming a manager. What sorts of things should I ask her to write about in her letter? The professors I'm going to get letters from taught statistics classes that I took and are supervising statistical research that I'm doing; I'm guessing that I should ask my former supervisor to write about things that my professors might not touch on, but I'm not sure what those things should be.

The readers of such letters will normally be looking for predictions of success in the academic program and thereafter. The past is less important (what you have already done) unless it supports that prediction of success.
If the letter writer understands that, and they are supportive, then you should be fine. But a "bald" statement that "I predict the success of this person." is too easy to discount. It needs to be a bit more subtle than that.


Should the incentive of research be discussed in the literature survey? As a postgraduate engineering student, I'm doing a thesis project on a technical system that encourages people to exercise. Now I need to write a literature survey for it. As I never wrote literature survey before, I wonder whether I should discuss the incentive of my research like the advantages of doing exercises on it, which requires me to spend time looking for some sociology papers and reading them. Instead, if I just discuss the technologies used for my system in my literature survey, is it also OK?

Since you are doing a "thesis project", which seems to be a rather particular kind of writing, you should probably ask your advisor what exactly they expect of you concerning the literature review.

In general, though, normally a literature review for such a topic should mainly cover other research that is related to your topic. Specifically, I would consider surveying research on:

other technical systems that encourage people to exercise;
other systems or approaches (non-technical) that encourage people to exercise;
other research that is generally similar to what you are doing, with "similar" being fairly broadly defined.

In general, I wouldn't expect that you would need to do anything about the advantages of exercise--that is well known and understood, and extremely general.

All that said, again, you should ask your advisor what exactly they expect.


Submitting a subset of my work to ArXiv I've been thinking of publishing a subset of my work in fluid dynamics to arXiv. I realize the following about arXiv:

ArXiv isn't a journal
I would need to be endorsed to submit an article on arXiv

The reasons I would like to submit a subset of my work to arXiv are:

It would only be a subset of my work thereby NOT negating my chances of publishing work in a regular journal.
I would like to disseminate information to the society as soon as possible.

Does anyone have any thoughts or comments about this? Is there something that I'd need to feel uneasy about?

I realize that there has been another question regarding submission of work to arXiv and I read it here.

Opinions on when to submit things to arXiv vary both between and within fields.  See

To Post or Not to Post: Publishing to the arXiv Before Acceptance
How to use arXiv?

for lots of opinions.  You should talk to your advisor/colleagues who can give you a better sense of how people in your field think about this.


Can you "refer" an offer to another applicant? Say I applied to two graduate programs: A and B, in which A is my preferred program. It turns out that I am admitted by both, so I will accept the offer from A and turn B down. I heard from a friend that in this case, I may "refer" the offer from B to someone I know who is waitlisted by B so that s/he can be admitted to B.

Is this practice common in the US? Additionally, can I refer the offer to someone who has been rejected? Searching online just gives me pages of results about "referral programs", which aren't very relevant.

Graduate programs don’t operate based on charity or friendship - admittance is based on merit. If you turn down the offer from B, the only rational thing for the administrators of that program to do after you turn them down is move on to the next person on their ranked list of candidates, if they still have room to admit more students, or simply write off your decision as one of the expected number of declinations they were assuming they would receive for this admissions cycle, if they have done the quite normal thing of sending out admission offers for more students than they actually have the capacity to accept.

In other words, all kinds of weird things can happen in some places that are poorly run or where for accidental historical reasons things run differently than in most places. It’s hard to prove a negative. But as a general rule, your friend is wrong and no such referral option exists.


SOP - UK department offers two distinct masters - I am interested in both There is a department I am interested in, and it offers two distinct MA's. One is more of a broad course (course A), the other one more specialised (course B).

I am interested in two subjects which have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. Also assume that there is no overlap. Subject B is covered by course B, but then I would not be doing any of Subject A. Should I get into course A however I could do Subject B as well. However, Subject A has a slight priority to me.

My problem is that I would like to apply to both courses, but I don't know what to say in my statement of purpose. Since it's the same faculty, they will most likely see both my applications. If I say in application A, that I am primarily interested in subject A, and vice versa in application B, that might look deceptive since they will see both applications.

If I say that I am interested in Subject B, and then (should I get onto course A) would change my interests during my studies and opt for Subject A, - this also might not look the best.

There are professors in both subjects who I potentially like to work with, but I am worried to tell them since the subjects are very different and have no overlap, I feel it would just look not very good.

Any advice what I could do in such a situation? How would I best structure my statements of purpose & contact professors about potential supervisions without looking like I am trying to juggle too many balls at once? I also would like to look determined and less insecure about what I want to do, but I would just like to keep both options until I know where I can get in.

I am on the admission committee for a fairly prestigious UK MSc and see this kind of thing all the time (indeed, we also get quite a lot of candidates who apply to both our MSc and PhD). More generally, it is very common for (a) intelligent people to have a lot of active interests at once, (b) intelligent people who face many open doors to struggle to choose which one the like most. The admissions guys (who are human beings, not machines!) understand this, and applying to both programmes will almost certainly not upset them.

What will upset them is any sign of insincerity on your part, or any sense that you are trying to game the system by feigning an interest in one of the topics. My advice is therefore:

Treat the two applications as separate opportunities to write the strongest statement you can for each. In particular, think about how you can use the statement to give verifiable evidence that you have a real intellectual interest in the topic. Simply saying "I have a lifelong passion for X" won't convince anybody, so look for ways to send a more credible signal. For example, you could talk about how some readings influenced your thinking, or about some open research questions you think are interesting and how they might be solved.

Likewise, if you talk about what you will do with the degree in the future, try to be concrete and show that you have thought about how the programme fits your needs. What are the specific skills you hope to acquire and what specific modules on the degree will help you to develop those skills?

In your particular circumstances, I think it might make sense to include one or two sentences at the end of the statement acknowledging the fact that you are also applying for another programme. But, again, my advice would be to aim for sincerity rather than trying to play mind games. It should suffice to say that you fell passionate about, and ready to commit to either programme should you have the good fortune to be admitted.


How to see peer review comments when rejection letter does not list them? I recently had a paper rejected by a peer-reviewed journal, but the rejection notice gave no indication of where to find the reviewers' comments.  I gather (from questions like this one) that it is customary for authors to get to see this information.  So how do I go about finding it?  Should I contact the editor and ask to see the comments?

Well, there isn't really anything you can do except ask the editor, since he/she is the only one who has them (except of course the reviewers themselves, whose identities are not and will not be known to you).  So if you want those comments, that's what you'll have to do.

Of course, it is possible that:

the paper was "desk rejected" by the editor and never sent out for review at all; or
this journal has a policy of not sharing reviewer comments; or
the editor has decided for some reason that in this case it is not appropriate to share the comments with you.


Research Assistant Professor vs Post-doc Recently, I have completed my PhD in Biomedical Engineering from a 25 - 30th ranked USA university and got  a Post-doc offer from a 9-12th ranked USA University.  To keep me, my PhD advisor offered me a non-tenured tracked Research assistant professor (RSP) position with 1.5 times of offered Post-doc salary. I will be funded through my advisor grant and need to conduct research related to the funded project. However, I will also have the independence to pursue my research interest and apply for external funding. I have a very good relationship with my PhD advisor and good publications in my PhD. Eventually, I want to get a tenure-tracked faculty position. What is best for me “stay in my current university as an RSP ” or “ get the post-doc position in the more reputed university”?

I think you need to think about what that post-doc position can really offer you. Going from a 25th-30th University to a 9th-12th University isn't that significant, since the precision of ranking schools is iffy, at best. Therefore, think about what opportunities the post-doc will offer you: exciting research? Connections/contacts? Does the PI have a solid track record of post-docs getting tenure-track positions? On the other hand, being a non-tenure track research professor may be the better option if you think you can get enough data to apply for a grant. The bump in income is nice, too, especially given the high cost of education in the USA. I'm guessing you probably don't have student loans from grad school, but what about undergrad?

tl;dr- Post-doc:may lead to tenure-track job, possibly better contacts? Research asst prof: may lead to tenure-track job, but with better interim salary.


Level of difficulty of exams in math PhD and anxiety over being able to do well I am a first year PhD student in math. I have a course right now that is pretty challenging as expected. I get high grades on all the homework. On our midterm the highest grade was a 35 percent. I was told this is how nearly all of the exams this professor gives turn out. Is this a common thing to happen? I suddenly feel inadequate to be a PhD student in math.

This depends very much on your university and your professor. There is a whole range of opportunities spanning a wide range of difficulties. This issue alone shouldn't be the reason to drop the idea of the PhD degree itself.

If you are really interested in the field and are willing to work for it, then by all means, continue; don't let a little test put you off. PhD is not about exam scores, it is about research quality and how much you could contribute to your field. If you are able to hold your ground on that, stay strong and move on.

My best wishes!


What does the typesetting process for a math/science journal using LaTeX look like? Hopefully this question isn't too broad. Following up on https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/99123/what-software-do-publishers-use and Elsevier production team messed up my paper. What should I do?, what is the overall process that a typical academic journal uses for typesetting a LaTeX document? I would appreciate a brief step-by-step overview of the process.

Some random questions that I've often wondered about (no need to answer them all): does each journal just have a LaTeX template with a really elaborate preamble, into which they mostly copy and paste the TeX submission and then make minor tweaks from there by hand? Can it possibly really be true that Elsevier usually retypes the entire article by hand, as an answer to the linked question above claims? That seems completely ridiculous. Do the typesetters have any math training at all, or when they typeset equations, are they just manipulating symbols in what is to them effectively a foreign language? Is there at least someone around who understands the paper to whom they can ask questions if they're not sure how an equation should be formatted? Is it true that they're almost always in India?

I would especially hope that during the proof revision stage, there's someone around who understands the paper content, because understanding an error in an equation can be nontrivial. If one were to write a comment on an unrevised proof like, "These parentheses are misplaced; they should group the Jacobian determinant together with the integration measure", would anyone on the other end be able to understand that comment?

This may differ quite a bit from journal to journal. In the best of worlds (from the author's point of view), the LaTeX source is used in some robust automated process to generate the final product, e.g. using latex or pdflatex, possibly with a slightly different documentclass and different fonts.

However, often the paper is typeset using a completely different "professional" typesetting system, for which there may be an automatic conversion from LaTeX. It may well be the case that many equations have to be corrected or completely typeset by humans. In this case, the person in charge will most likely have no training in mathematics, but they just manipulate symbols in what is to them effectively a foreign language. However, they should be able to understand LaTeX.

If the proofs are hopelessly messed up, then don't even try to correct them, but send them back demanding that the paper be properly typeset according to your LaTeX source. Point out roughly what the errors are and how many. It is the responsibility of the typesetter to set your paper properly and according to the LaTeX source.


What are the career prospects after being an RA? I'll be eligible to apply for the master's in Computer Science within a semester (2 max). I'm working as an undergrad for a research group (I'm implementation -- programming).  I'd like to know what I could reasonably expect (in terms of job prospects and recruitment if any) if I work as an RA.  How are RA's typically viewed by prospective employers?

Initially, I thought this would be good and that RA's are sought after since they're pretty well educated and have been working in cutting edge areas.  But then, I wasn't sure if it's just too far removed from industry and that employers might think you just didn't bother to pursue any work in the private sector while getting a degree in a field that is highly employable by the private sector (i.e. they might not be sympathetic to your desire to do interesting research work as opposed to straight coding production work as is often in industry).

Being an RA (Research Assistant) means you get to work closely with one or more post-docs and faculty members in a context that generally requires technical,  problem-solving, and communication skills -- skills that are definitely valued highly by employers.  So, assuming that you do a good job, your supervisors should be able to write strong recommendation letters for you, recommend you to recruiters from industry, or possibly put you in touch with people they know in industry.  Also, you may be able to use your RA work and experience as a discussion item in interviews.

A lot of the industry jobs that undergrads tend to work in look (to me) like grunt-work: website development and maintenance, routine programming, stuff like that.  It seems to me that an RA would be much more preferable than those simply because it can allow you to be more creative and possibly also sharpen your communication skills.  Of course, it's possible that you have some unusual set of skills --- say, Unix guru or security honcho --- that would make you suitable for a very different kind of industry job that would be even more attractive to employers down the road --- but in my experience this tends to be rare.


Why would the conference organizers ban the inclusion of new links (e.g. to datasets or repositories) in the text of the rebuttal? Some conference organizers recently emailed authors who submitted a paper to the conference the following rebuttal policy change:

You are not allowed to include new links (e.g. to datasets or repositories) in the text of the rebuttal

Why would the conference organizers ban the inclusion of new links (e.g. to datasets or repositories) in the text of the rebuttal?

The underlying reason might be that rebuttals should not present new data/results which were not included in the original submission.
Presenting new data/results in a rebuttal is problematic because it increases the review load: The new data might require some detailed explanations of how they were obtained and how they add to the overall work. Effectively, the reviewers have to discuss two versions of each paper (without and with the new results). The organizers might want to avoid that, given that the review load at good conferences is normally already quite substantial.
Of course, one could still allow links if they don't present new data/results. But this raises the question why these links were not included in the original paper. Potentially there have been previous experiences according to which the risk of misusing links to refer to new data/results is seen as too large.


My adviser threatens to kick me out if I am not to be a full time student Background: I have been in the Phd Program since fall 2010, I have made great academic progress (two papers published in journals). From the 4th semester (spring, 2012), I have started working in a company and still a part time student in school. Till now, I am still keeping doing research and publish another paper and one conference paper. As I have finished all coursework requirement (72 semester hours, I transfer some credits from MS), I plan to work in the company and be a part time student to finish the degree.

From last month, my adviser kept asked what's my plan. I told him I will make my decision in mid-July as I can know my H1b working visa is approved or not. He send me another email ( I post here for information). My impression is he is threatening me...

Any suggestion? Again, it's difficult to look for a job for international students in such economics. I hope I can work and study as a part time student to finish the degree.

It is completely inappropriate for an advisor to send an email like that. The email makes it clear that this is an advisor that you should steer clear of. At a minimum a change in advisor is required. I would also approach the department head about the email. Faculty need to know that they need to behave better.


Is it OK to have subsections with the same name? One chapter in my thesis is going to have the following style:

3.1 Topic A
3.1.1 Problem Description
3.1.2 Proposed Solution

4.1 Topic B
4.1.1 Problem Description
4.1.2 Proposed Solution

Is it OK to have subsections with the same name? Or should it rather be something like:

3.1 Topic A
3.1.1 Topic A Problem Description
3.1.2 Topic A Proposed Solution

4.1 Topic B
4.1.1 Topic B Problem Description
4.1.2 Topic B Proposed Solution

Update:

Many thanks to all for the comments and answers. I think understand now that it's more a question about the document structure than about the subsection titles.

You typically have a great deal of freedom in deciding how to structure the presentation of your thesis.  If parallel construction is a good way to present your work, and if you aren't constrained not to by your advisor or your institution's regulations, I see no reason to prefer an overly verbose subsection title over a succinct title that happens to be the same as a subsection title in another section.


How do graduate admissions committees in the US perceive grading systems other than GPA? I am a senior undergraduate student in computer engineering considering applying for Ph.D in the US. In my country we use a grading system based on percentages rather than GPA and it works as follows:

85-100% ---> Distinction
75-85% ---> Very Good
65-75% ---> Good
50-65% ---> Pass

My cumulative grade will probably be about 77% which lands me in the top third of my class. My question is how will graduate admissions committees view and evaluate my academic performance given the differences in the grading systems?

A general answer, not just for countries but even for schools in the US we're not familiar with, is that we don't know how to evaluate transcripts/grades.  Different places apply different standards, both within their curriculum, and for assigning grades.  A 77% on its own could be brilliant or horrible (and we mainly just care about grades in relevant classes).  One thing we'll sometimes do is check with other members of our department who might be familiar with the country/school's grading system and standards.

In any case, the main indicator we use for how talented and well prepared the student is are the letters of recommendation.  As long as you're getting letters from some professors who are known abroad for their research and/or are familiar with the system in the US, you should get helpful letters.


Is it ethical for professors to ask graduate students to teach? Universities require a doctorate degree to apply for a faculty position which involves both teaching and research. Even if the professor did not receive any formal training in pedagogy, it is expected that they will pick up a few things over time.

If a graduate student who does not have a doctorate degree, nor has any formal training teaches a course, wouldn't it be unfair to the students? In many situations, there are no quality/standard checks in place before a graduate student is allowed/asked to teach a course.

Since cultural differences may be important here: I'm in germany.

As you say, the teaching staff in academia learns teaching mostly in a form of training on the job.  Pedagogy training for university teaching staff is a rather recent advance here, and I'm not sure how widespread that is done (read: likely still rare).

Within that system, you have to start at some point: said professors would lack teaching experience if they had not started accumulating this experience as grad students.

Here, grad or PhD students start their "teachin career" by first teaching "low impact" courses: settings where bad teaching doesn't do too much harm.
E.g. a single experiment in a labwork practicum. Or a seminar that discusses homework (i.e. the excercises that all students should already be able to solve on their own). As they accumulate experience (also experience with oral presentations in general), they advance step by step: teaching internal seminars to the group, at some point teaching a single lecture for a colleague. Someone teaching a whole but still small course (typically on subjects related to their research specialization) is typically advanced postdoc/PI level. All these are still under the official supervision of the professor. Finally, teaching university courses without any supervision (i.e. in their own responsibility) is typically achieved after habilitation.

What about quality checks?
The professor stays responsible for the teaching. So while they can ask a grad student to help with the teaching, they must make sure that this teaching will be at an acceptable quality.


Different types of conference publications Consider a conference publishing papers related to any EC/CS engineering field. What is the exact difference between different types of papers published in such a conference, i.e., main conference paper, mini-conference paper and workshop paper? Is it inferior to have one's work published in a mini-conference or workshop as opposed to a full conference? Are there any other such sessions within usual conferences for these areas?

For the value of the publication, it will matter more how it is published than whether it's a workshop or conference. If the proceedings are published by a well-known publisher (i.e. with ISBN/ISSN), a workshop paper might be as "valuable" as a conference paper. If on the other hand there are no formal proceedings or just something like a folder, it would be less "valuable". That usually leaves the opportunity to publish the same paper elsewhere though.

Most workshops in CS don't have formal proceedings, so in general it would be better to publish at a conference. That said, in some cases the reviewing process for a workshop/symposium might be more stringent. As smaller events are more specialised, the feedback you get on your work might be better than at a bigger event.

I personally would always go for publication at a conference if I thought the content of the paper to be good enough.


Is Visa required to obtain a very short term research grant (15 days) from a US University? I am an associate professor and I am going to the US for two weeks. I am going to visit a colleague who is arranging with her university a small grant for me to cover the basic expenses.
According to the agreements between the US and my country, I do not need to apply for a Visa to enter the US for tourism or business reasons.
However I wonder whether I will need a J-1 Visa (or any other type of visa) in order to receive the grant (I hope not, since there are only 10 days left, and my colleague has not provided me with the formal letter yet...).
Thanks!

If the grant is only to reimburse you for your travel expenses (airfare, lodging, meals, etc), then you should be fine with the visa waiver.  You are not considered to be employed by the host institution and do not need a work visa.  (Source: Personal experience - I've been responsible for arranging travel reimbursements for many visa-waiver visitors.)

You will probably need to document your expenses, so save receipts for airfare, lodging, meals, ground transportation, and so on.


Are open access papers read by a larger readership than paywalled papers? One of the potential upsides of open access papers is that they can be accessed by anyone for free, including people who don't live or work in a university. As a result, one might think that non-"professional" researchers may access open access papers more than paywalled papers.

Is there any research/study/survey that tried to quantify to what extent open access papers are read by a larger readership  than paywalled papers?

This answers is not exactly what you ask for — you ask for readership, but most of the research has focused on citations. The two are, of course, related, and the answer seems to be a pretty clear yes. (In my field, it's practically the only way I find stuff from overseas, as many online repositories don't seem to have much international coverage except for a handful of big general journals but not the niche ones).

Gargouri, Yassine. “Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research.” Public Library of Science ONE 5.10 (2010): n.p. Web.
This article indicates that citations are more common for open access articles, and that this is a result of higher availability and access (=likely readership) by researchers. [Link]
Lawrence, Steve. “Free online availability substantially increases a paper’s impact.” Nature 411 (2001): 521. Print.
This comes to the same conclusion — way back in 2001. The effect is found to be quite massive: “Averaging the percentage increase across 1,494 venues containing at least five offline and five online articles results in an average of 336% (median 158%) more citations to online computer-science articles compared with offline articles published in the same venue.” [Link]


Why do some journals allow their papers to be open access for a short period of time after publication? Some journals upload their accepted papers for public viewing shortly after the papers were accepted, examples of this include J. Math. Phys and Cell Systems. What's the reason for doing this if the journal needs revenue?

I don't know about either of the two journals you specifically mention, but in math things like this are sometimes done to attract more high quality submissions to the journal to raise it's profile, particularly for new journals, since academics generally like open-access, and it can be a selling point when choosing a journal.  (From what I remember, with new journals what I sometimes see is that the journal is open-access for its first couple years.)


How do institutions evaluate requests for faculty startup funds if they have never hired in the subfield before? Smaller departments typically want to hire someone with different expertise from the faculty they already have.  Suppose they have decided to advertise that they want to hire an experimentalist in an area of research with which the institution has no experience.  How do they evaluate applicants' requests for laboratory start-up funds?  Assume this is an experimental area where equipment costs are in the six figure range (USD).

We usually follow the following routine:

A) The department chair calls their friends at comparable rank and size schools who have hired in a comparable field and ask them what their new faculty member's startup packages are. The chair may also ask the candidate if they have any special equipment needs.

B) We assume the Provost (who is in charge of finances) is checking with their colleagues at other institutions as well as what the campus recruitment budget is.

C) The chair goes into a meeting with the provost and comes up with a third figure.

D) We then bring that to the candidate who may come back with a counteroffer either based on chutzpah or an actual figure based on what another or their current school is offfering.

E) We negotiate by going back to Step C or drop candidate #1 as too expensive and go to candidate #2.


Someone reported cheating during a quiz, but I didn't catch it myself There was a weekly quiz in a TA discussion section I led today. During the quiz I was writing things I planned to talk on the board and didn't pay attention to students.

Then one student suddenly said to public "Frank, we're not allow to use note in the quiz right? These(point to a region that contains 2-3 people) people are using notes."

I looked back and confirm with that students about where she points to, but the people she accused cheating(if accurate) already put away the notes so I got no direct evidence.

Should I do anything in this scenario?

Quiz only worth 0~2%(0% if it's lowest quiz grade, 2% if not) of overall grade if that matters.

  Update: The case was also reported to the Professor today and according to Professor's email it looks like the case is more serious than I expected and I'll have to explore a little more. Thanks for all responses so far.

You're the teaching assistant.  Inform the professor and let them handle the matter or offer you guidance.  That's their job.  In this case the evidence for cheating is tenuous at best, so I suspect nothing will be done against any of the students.  I've known more compelling cases of cheating to go reasonably unpunished, and one case of very blatant (and easily proved) cheating that was handled with just a stern admonishment and warning from the professor.  But you (and the professor) would rather the professor hear of the matter through you, than the possibly salacious gossip of the students.

So what what really needs to be addressed is:

Always keep your eye on the students during exams/quizzes.

As much as you want to believe that they're all perfectly moral and self-policing people (and quite probably most of them are), or that they can't possibly fit in cheating during "brief" windows, there will always be exceptions, and you owe it to the students who are such from giving such a clear opening to those who aren't (for whatever reasons).  You can't prevent all cheating all the time—it comes in a lot of forms, and some people are really good at it—, but this was easily preventable.

You may find yourself needing to apologize to the professor for this lapse, though I wouldn't get too worked up over that.  Most of us have made such a mistake at some point (although not all of us may be aware of it), and the minor value of the quiz helps take the edge off, such that a simple apology and recognition of the error is sufficient to make things right.


Historical Course Descriptions for Master's and Ph.D in Statistics/Data Science Programs I'm writing to ask whether there's any references for course descriptions for the classes required of a master's degree back in the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, 1960s,...., 1900s. I wanted to know how the curriculum for masters degree in statistics has changed over time and how fast or when recent advancements trickle down to graduate education.

How fast does it take for institutions to change their curriculum with each new
fad in the development in Statistics? When was bootstrapping invented versus when was it taught in school? What's the newest technique in classification/prediction/machine learning or Statistical Theory or database management and when were those techniques marketed as courses taught in Master's or Ph.D programs?

Personally, I'm asking because I want to trace the development of Statistics and get a sense of how up to date my professors are in the field and find the most updated program. I'm not sure if they know how pervasive or old their knowledge is.

I'm not looking for individual program suggestions. It's the case that in computational sciences that things outdate. I don't know if some branches of Statistics are more updated than others are. Unfortunately there isn't a class in school called the History of Statistics and Data Science and Machine Learning and history of math is more famous.

I'll guess that it would be very difficult to get such information in any methodical way. In some fields, such as CS, professional societies publish undergraduate curriculum guides that are followed by many universities, at least in the US. But I've never heard of any such at any graduate level.

As you note, curriculum tends to change with the times and old courses are replaced with new ones. A university will probably keep an historical record for a few years, since it still has students that started under an earlier regime. Many will keep records for a longer time to help respond to student requests for information from graduates.

But there is no requirement that they be kept, that I'm aware of, and no regulatory body to assure it.

The most you could hope for is that some universities might have a local historian who can get access to archives of old course catalogs and compile the local information. But it would be pretty spotty, I think.

Another avenue that might produce some incomplete data, or provide a starting point, is to set up a workshop at a national or international conference, and invite professors near retirement to reflect on their own experiences with coursework in the field. This might produce some course titles, at least. And some people who taught over a long period might be able to do more.

But all of that is overkill for your stated purpose. A simpler way to answer your concerns is to just look at what they are publishing now. If nothing, then they are probably not up to date. If a lot, then they are possibly at the forefront. But even that is probably overkill. Most of your career will likely be concerned with things that are only present now in nascent form, or even currently entirely unexplored.

And for many of us (now retired) most of what we know is old or even obsolete. This is true even if we are at the forefront. Probably more true in CS than in statistics, actually, but still.

Moreover, for someone truly at the edge of the research world, their knowledge is likely to be deep but narrow. They examine the bark on a particular tree, never mind the tree, or the forest in which it grows. At the MS level all this is probably less important that it seems, though it becomes more so at the doctoral level when you need to find your own tree to study.


Should medical conditions that affected performance be stated in personal/research statement? And how? Condition

I have been suffering from day time sleepiness (9-10 hrs of sleep and still struggle to stay awake), fatigue, memory loss and lack of concentration. The doctor found that I suffocate in my sleep: I stop breathing several times per hour.

In a few days, I will be undergoing surgery to modify my airway (nose, throat) that, according to the doctor, will completely resolve these problems.

Background

My profile is OK: undergrad valedictorian, scholarships, awards, numerous research experiences and skills. But my condition was exacerbated during the masters and I graduated "B+" instead of continuing my straight "A" performance during undergrad. Also, I felt that I could have performed better in standardized tests (GREs), do more research etc without my condition.

Questions

Should I make this medical condition known in my research/personal statement? I fear the reader might assume that I am not as "able" as completely healthy candidates. Or perhaps there is no benefits at all to bringing this up?
If so, how should I put it to avoid sounding like I am making excuses or whining?

Your potential advisor is interested in (mostly) one thing: your potential as a graduate student. To that end, your personal statement/interviews/etc. should serve to convince him that you will be able to do excellent research. Any issues that could be a potential problem should be noted and addressed.

With that background, do you think this condition could be perceived as affecting your output as a graduate student? From the way you posed it, I would suggest that the answer is "yes". As such, I would mention the condition towards the end of the letter/interview, but I would state  with confidence that past performance has demonstrated that it will not affect output, and you're confident it would not be a problem in the future. Don't dwell; just mention it as you would a disclosure and move on.


Is it possible to be accepted to a Communications Engineering PhD program without a Masters degree? I'm a communications engineering undergraduate in London South Bank University. I'm curious whether it's possible to gain acceptance to a PhD program without having to first complete a Masters.

Specific to my case, I'm performing very well (near-perfect GPA, significant coursework completed under self-study, significant percentage of masters coursework completed during undergraduate). I was wondering whether that would have any impact my ability to skip the Masters degree.

In Europe it's very uncommon to start a PhD program without finishing your MSc. However, it might be possible in some countries / programs to start a research project as a part of your masters, and finish this in a 3-year PhD program. You barely even started your MSc (you probably did the self-study for the easiest/fastest 30%), so it might be an option to switch to a university where you can do one big research project for your MSc and PhD.


Should I include independently derived but not novel results in my thesis? I'm writing up my physics PhD thesis, and am wondering whether to include the derivation of a formula that I worked out myself. I've recently found that this work isn't actually a novel contribution to the field, as the formula (though not a detailed derivation) appears in the appendix of a 10 year old paper.

Is there any sense in including it? And, if so, how would one describe the contribution?

There is usually no reason not to include something in a thesis.  Your thesis is a place for you to give a coherent account of all your work on a topic.  There are (usually) no page restrictions, and it should serve as a reference document for future readers.

Many theses include a lot of review material, beyond just what might be contained in a literature survey.  A thesis has to contain new material, of course, but it does not all need to be novel.  There can be a lot of merit in giving detailed explanations of known results, if the reader is not necessarily going to be familiar with them in detail.  A derivation that has not previously appeared in the literature (even if the final result is known) is clearly suitable for inclusion.


Most effective free software for publication-grade structure diagrams I have done extensive research on trying to find free software that I can use to create publication quality structure diagrams with but have yet to find something suitable.

Tools I currently know about are:

Xmind
Freeplane
FreeMind

And then there are a bunch listed here.

The problem with all of these are that they either make mind-maps that have quirky stiles that don't look very technical/professional or they don't support PDF or PS or high quality bitmap exporting.

I really like XMind, but the free version export totally rubish quality bitmaps and no PDF.

I currently use Libreoffice Draw, but I have to manually place objects and manually connect them with lines and arrows etc. Thus not a very efficient workflow.

To clarify my need:

I am doing engineering research so I am in look of something more utilitarian than 'pretty', although I like for the figures I create to be soft on the eyes as well. To sumarize, efficiency of use and clarity of the structure diagram are the important factors.

yEd can produce the 'research grade' diagrams that you'd be interested in.

It can produce nearly all sorts of figures includeing graphs, network diagrams, flow charts, architecture diagrams and block diagrams.
It has a whole wide range of auto arrange feature to rearrange your blocks creating a great professional look for a structure diagram.
It can export diagrams in vetor graphics, which includes PDF, PS, EPS, SVG and so on.
It produces graphml as save file making it cross compatible with graphml coders
Most importantly, it is cross-platform compatable, be it Mac, Windows or Linux.


Deferring for non-academic reasons I applied to PhD programs for Fall 2018, and am currently evaluating my options. I have narrowed myself down to two options, both good choices with potential advisors who are a good fit, though I prefer one school slightly over the other.

The reason for my post is that I am interested in deferring my admission for a year. My understanding is that graduate schools typically let students do so when the student has a "good reason", i.e. those who want to spend time studying abroad, doing volunteer work, etc. The catch here is that I don't have any particular opportunities I want to pursue, I just want to take a break and work on some mental health issues I have before signing on for a 5-6 year commitment (really even longer considering the time afterwards spent in post-docs, trying to find tenure-track jobs, etc. if I want to try to stay in academia).

I haven't heard of any situations like this, and I'm not sure how the graduate schools will react if I ask. Is it possible that they'd revoke my offer? I've also already spoken to potential advisors, should I let them know? I'd be worried what they might think if they knew I wanted to defer graduate school for this reason.

As a university professor I supervise graduate students including international applicants. I'd say that the situation depends on a particular institution, but unless you want to know the regulations inside out, the best thing to do is to build trust with your future supervisor and ask his/her assistance to clarify the case with university administration.

Say, as a supervisor I don't really care whether a student comes this year, next year or in two years. As a human being, I might be curious about the reason, but in most cases it won't be an issue (a year-long break after enduring undergrad studies is a perfectly legit reason for me).

However, there is also bureaucracy. If you got a scholarship, it might be a serious trouble, as it is often tied to a particular academic year, especially if it you are dealing with an external funding organization. The school could initiate a certain formal process that might be difficult to postpone, but you won't find out the details without your supervisor's support.

Say, at our institution we typically have enough room for potential MSc/PhD applicants, and the real issue is their financial support. If a certain applicant is not funded by us and informes us in advance that we should expect him/her next year, it won't be an issue. However, formally we "reset" the selection process every year (so the results of the last year applicant are considered "stale"), so if there is a real competition among participants, it might become a trouble as well.

Sorry for not being very specific, but there are simply too many factors to evaluate, so an insider is your best bet, really.


Motivating myself to continue being a very good student? I have just obtained my Bachelor's in Computer Science (CS) at one of the better universities in Germany. Let me call it AM (Alma Mater). My results during these years were great, i.e. I impressed some professors and I graduated with the highest possible GPA. I decided to do my Master's in CS at the same institution. This was a somewhat forced decision: I did not want to go to the US, and the better universities in Europe (for CS) seem to be located either in the UK or in Switzerland, which are both too expensive for me. I was too focused on my study (and too lazy) to try to fight for a scholarship in either of these countries, so the natural choice was to remain at AM, where I already have a scholarship.
However, I am now realizing that I am not very happy with my situation. The truth is that my impression of AM is not very good. Whenever I discuss CS concepts with my friends/colleagues from AM, I can not help but notice that they are superficial and do not really understand the material. I often get this feeling even when I interact with the tutors (who are mostly Master's/PhD students, but also assistants). Sometimes, I even feel that some professors have embarrassing holes in their knowledge, although I must admit that most professors did not disappoint me. Don't get me wrong: I also met students that impressed me and that helped me stay modest, but it is frustrating to see how many of the AM (future) graduates are very shallow in their knowledge.
I think that most of my frustration is caused by the German system. It is almost trivial to be admitted to AM's CS program, and even though some filtering is done in the first study year, the pressure to produce many graduates clearly affects the quality of the teaching and of the... graduates. There are too many students. And, to be honest, it saddens me to see that many severely unqualified people get the same degree as I do. The only thing that officially separates me from them is the GPA, but I am not convinced that the GPA plays any serious long-term role.
Moreover, the fact that I only rarely came in contact with students that are "better" than me affects my motivation. All these years I only worked alone, and I am struggling hard to push myself to work constantly. My passion for the subject decreased. I became very good at perfecting the necessary work for the exam, and at perfecting the exam, but I feel that my creativity plummeted and that I am no longer as curious as I should be. I go through the concepts very thoroughly, but am not really interested to do more than that. I am working mostly because it's the thing that I am very used to do, but there is no longer any conscious will to do it. I am worried that it is only inertia that keeps me afloat. And now that my Master's at AM is about to begin, I am generally quite sad, which is ironic, because objectively my situation is not bad at all.
The truth is, I (maybe erroneously) fell under the impression that I deserve to be at a slightly better place than AM, and am now struggling to motivate myself to continue performing at AM. For me, Academia makes sense as a career option if I could do it at one of the top "teams", where truly influential research is carried out and where imposture is as low as possible. I know that such great "teams" can be found everywhere in the world, and am sure that AM also has strong departments, but I am still young enough to dream about going somewhere even better. And I struggle to see a clear path to get there.
I would be very grateful if any of you had the time to just comment what I wrote here. I do not really have a specific question, except "How should I assess my position?". I just want to hear the thoughts of someone that has a mature view on Academia.

Here's just an outside impression. It doesn't look good to me that your motivation, your love for your subject, is affected by the fact that most students around you are weaker. Actually this is a situation in which "the best" regularly are, just by being the best. And if they are really the best, it will not drag them down. Why do you even care whether some others who are not as good as you also can graduate? You have stated that actually there are students and lecturers from whom you can learn, so stick to them.
I think you should not assign responsibility for your lack of motivation to fellow students or your institution. You have to ask yourself seriously whether what you do is right for you, and if it is, how you can change in order to keep your motivation up. (Of course it may be true that there are better universities and top groups, but if you are really cut out for doing something good in the field, you should be able and motivated to start doing that as long as you are still in the place you are.)


Living standards for academic/postdocs I'm a PhD student that is finishing up, and I want to do a postdoc. Yesterday I went to a lecturer's house (he was above 60 years old) and I was really shocked because it is not what I expected.

Right now I live in student accommodation where I pay about £500 per month (without bills) and it is decent. But now I am really worried and sad because I don't want to be a poor academic having to live in some little awful house just to make ends meet... I want a nice house (though it does not need to be huge).

Am I worrying for no reason???

The standard of living you'll attain depends massively on where you are and what field you are in (note that my answer assumes tenure, rather than the horribly exploited condition of adjunct professors).

In the United States, for example, liberal arts professors are typically paid much less well than professors in science and engineering subjects, who are in turn paid much less well than law or medicine instructors.  Location makes a difference too: a big midwestern state university will probably pay less well than Harvard, but Ann Arbor is a lot cheaper to live in than Boston.  In general, though, you should expect that a professor can have a relatively comfortable (if not lavish) lifestyle.

In other countries, academics may have significantly higher or lower relative standards of living.

FYI: For many US public universities, their employees are considered government employees and thus subject to public disclosure of their salaries.  You can thus find the salary distribution of most positions directly yourself if you wish.  For example, searching this database of the University of Illinois system shows that University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign currently has 632 assistant professors: the highest paid make around $200K (at the business school), the lowest paid are visiting professors and clinical professors for whom the bulk of their income is clearly elsewhere, and the vast majority make in the range of $60K - $120K, with humanities at the low end and biomedical sciences at the high end.


Can I publish a source code containing potential copyright violations that someone gave me at a university (updated)? During my Ph.D. work at a university, I followed up on someone else's doctoral work (I am no longer associated with that university). This person provided me with the source code for his work. I subsequently discovered that this source code is a slightly modified copy of some publicly available sources, which have a GPL license. The modifications are mostly some instruction toggling/rebracketing and variable renaming. Just a few instructions contain slight modifications (that I personally do not find any more justifiable than the variable renaming). Moreover, in the versions that this person gave me, the authorship headers of the original authors are replaced by his own and the copyright mentions of the university in question are also added. The GPL license notice, which is present in the original sources, is removed from all but one package.
I had reported these observations to my supervisors (who also supervised the work of the person in question), but they sought to suppress the matter and warned me of legal actions if I reported this matter any further (hence I am not reporting it directly to the university, which by the way does not seem to have an ethics committee). I'll note that these observations in the source code are part of several issues that I observed in this person's work (that involves several publications and his doctoral dissertation; I'll probably ask for advice regarding that in separate questions).
Is it legally safe if I publicly share the source code provided by this person along with the links to the online available original sources? The code was transferred to me by this person through a sharing link that is no longer available. I can only prove that I reported my observations to my supervisors as well as to this person (he responded by reaffirming that the source code was developed at the university in question and refused any further communication). I'll note that an engineer at the university trans-coded some of the source code in question for use in a commercial product for which the university had a collaboration with a private firm.
Update:
I am also a co-author of this person in a couple of publications. This collaboration was supposed to be a sort of transition/continuation, at the beginning of my doctoral program and the end of his, of his reportedly high-functioning work. When I discovered several anomalies, I requested my supervisors to get these publications retracted. My detailed response is at the  PubPeer page of one of these publications. In my response, I have also shared some of my email exchanges with my co-authors. These exchanges lend support for raising the issue about the source code, without actually sharing it.
I was quite shocked when this person suggested that he not only did not have to acknowledge the use of the existing ideas/solutions but also considered their mere mention to be optional (his exact words: "You do not have to acknowledge but you can cite them"). Concerns about the acknowledgment of the sources, the soundness of ideas, and various peculiarities in results are raised on the PubPeer pages of his several publications.
Considering my question about the legal aspect, the comments about this being a legal question are right. However, I would also like to know if publishing this source code would be objectively helpful (a part of it was given to me with the GPL notice intact). Some comments on the above-mentioned PubPeer pages compare long extracts and a large number of equations from the publications to point out something that can be noticed in a glance by comparing the source codes.
Thanks for the discussion in response to my query! Depending on the input in the comments, I might post this part as a separate question.

With the caveat that I am not a lawyer, the answer is "no".

You have:

code A, which is GPL-licensed
code B, which is a derivative work of A and not GPL-licensed.

The GPL license requires that all derivative works are also GPL-licensed. As B does not carry the GPL license, it is a copyright violation and (depending on jurisdiction) it is probably illegal for you to distribute it.

If the changes needed are small, your simplest way forward would be to take code A, and modify it yourself as needed to make code C, while keeping it GPL-licensed, and release that.

EDIT: As noted in the comments, it is possible that A had two licenses: The GPL, and another license granted specifically to the author of B which permitted them to change the names and redistribute without GPL. This seems very unlikely, but you should consider the possibility if considering accusations of any sort.


What is/are the most important thing(s) you wish that you have known/done before considering to apply to a PhD I wonder what your thoughts are on the above subject

1) To know how bad/abusive/ morally evil/sexist supervisors/academics can be (and academia in general).

2) To know other (ex-)students from the target institution and talk to them. This really helps!

3) To know how unimportant good schools/doing much work is compared to things like family, friends, health etc. Indeed, I've often wished to have done less work during the PHD and to have spend more time with friends and hobbies.

I hope this helps, maybe more later!!!!


Applying for tenured positions while on sabbatical I plan to apply for a tenured position at school B.

I am currently on sabbatical at my school, school A, for the fall semester of 2015.  According to the rules of school A, I have to stay with school A for the whole year of 2016 (I heard that this is the case for most universities: you have to stay for at least six months or one year after you receive a sabbatical).

Therefore, if I get an offer from school B, the earliest time I could start working would be the spring of 2017.  School B is hiring for the tenured position starting in September of 2016. And I am afraid that school B will not have openings in future after this hiring.

So my question is: Should I apply to the position at school B and telling them: "I can only start working with you starting the spring of 2017"? Also, if I say this, will it affect my chance of getting the job? Or, would it be the case that I will not be considered and I should simply apply for academic jobs that advertise a start date of September of 2017?

Your sabbatical time may be able to be "bought out."

If you leave your job after your sabbatical, the school may just want reimbursement for your salary. It is possible that the new school will be willing to pay that in order to hire you.

One case of this happening, I believe, was when Matt Welsh left Harvard after getting tenure (although he left for a company).


What to do if I have seen an exam before I have taken it? Today I saw a photograph of an upcoming exam at my university. At first I thought it was last year's exam; so I took a closer look at it as I think it is okay to see last year's exams even if they aren’t officially published.
Anyway, later someone revealed to me that it was the upcoming exam which we’ll take in about three weeks.
It was taken by another student in my course, who took it while the teacher was on a break outside the room.

I feel bad and unethical about seeing it, as it seems to be cheating for me, and even more I’m worried about my further career if this ever comes out.
On one hand I don’t want to harm the other student who took the photo, on the other hand I don’t want to risk my career.

It is a semi difficult exam; I would say you should pass it quite well if you learned for it.
So what should I do? If I tell the university I’d probably have to reveal the identity of the person who took it, which I don’t want to do under any circumstances.

There have been some questions on how the pic was made: the prof brought the exam to a lesson to give a rough guideline on what to learn or not. During the break he went outside (as I and many others as well) to get a coffee and that's how the pic was made. I know for sure that it is the upcoming exam as it had a big heading with our course name and year.

For those who say it is also cheating to look at old exams:
I think you agree on that seeing an actual exam before you are going to take it is another dimension than seeing a year-old one.
Also this is very common where I study. It´s not like we are using really illegal copies, it is just that we often see pics of post-exam reviews. It is allowed to make them and there is no NDA on it (at least I never had to sign one), the exams just aren't published officially. I also bet every prof knows that this is going on here and tolerates it (some said so explicitly).

Also some said I should "rat" the guy who took it: I don't know the punishment for taking a photo of an exam, but I doubt it is modest, considering the - in my eyes negligent - prof. Also I don't want to be responsible for "destroying" the career of another, very young, student. Also it would probably come out who "ratted" him out, and I doubt that I would have much fun in the next two years then (I think you can say that in our course it is considered worse to "rat" somebody than to do to reveal something unethical, but I really doubt that this differs anywhere in the world).

Anyways: Today I have created a new Mail-Address and send the Prof a letter, including one question I remember as a proof, where I told him that the exam probably has been leaked. I asked him to keep the matter as private as possible and I also asked him not to write back to me what he decided to do or to ask any person-specific questions as I don't know any thing more than I told him already. For me the matter is therefore hopefully closed.

In a situation in which you would suffer no matter what you do, you can also work to protect yourself.

An anonymous note to the professor that the exam has been compromised and that there are photographs of it circulating comes close to resolving the issue. The person who took the photo likely deserves punishment, of course, so this solution doesn't resolve that. But at least academic integrity is preserved. The professor will need to provide a new exam, of course.

The professor may also announce to the class that there is a problem and ask that whoever sent the anonymous note inform him of their identity. You may have to deal with that.

Also, you may not be the only student struggling with this.

If you are friends with the person who took the photo, you could also confront him/her with a suggestion that they step forward. If they do this before an accusation is made, I would think any punishment would be less than otherwise.


How secure is it to receive an offer of post-doc position in email? I received an unofficial offer for a post-doctoral researcher position a few days ago from a well-known and respected professor in the field, and the institution is very well-ranked. At the same time, I already have an official offer from a different place, but not comparable in value. So, I need to know how certain the unofficial offer is to justify declining the official one.

Actually, after I received the first offer officially, I contacted the other places to which I had applied, and asked them to decide on my application, and set a deadline for them by when I had to decide about my already-issued offer. I received the second offer right before the deadline as an email in clear and strong words ('I am pleased to offer you ...') similar to what you see in an official offer letter. I quickly accepted the offer.

I think that since he knew I would have to decide about the other offer, he tried to be clear in the email, encouraging me to decline the other one. However, I'm not sure whether it would be wise to do so. More specifically, does such an email work as a legally binding document (e.g., capable to be held up at a court)? I'd say the difference between the values of the positions actually justifies 1%  risk. What do you suggest?

An unofficial offer is typically a notification of intent to make a formal offer, and I believe not legally binding.  This is not to say that an offer in email is not official and cannot be legally binding---but according to you the offer is unofficial.  Even if it is legally binding, having to take a university to court to secure a position does not sound like a productive way to start a postdoc.

Assuming the postdoc is completely funded from a grant on which this professor is the PI, in all likelihood the only way this would not turn into a formal offer is if the professor changes his mind or is somehow incapacitated.  Also, formality standards of offers can vary.  Anyway, if you are worried about it, I suggest you ask about the terms (if you have not received them) and when you can expect a formal offer.


On the originality of a master's thesis topic While choosing a master's thesis topic to write about, I usually find that it's pretty rare to find something 'totally original', I mean, is it a requirement?

I have decided what I want to write about and, while searching the net for something similar, it turned out that my topic isn't too original after all, however what makes mine 'new' is 1) a new country, 2) the chosen industry and 3) the chosen sample. Is this acceptable?

Usually, how common for one to come up with and write something totally original (e.g. That has never been done before in any context)?

EDIT: I also would like to add that, to make sure that my topic has never been done before in my chosen country and industry, I've heavily searched the net. Is this enough? I mean, I don't want to do a study and later on discover that some people have done it before exactly in the same manner as mine (country, industry, etc...) for either the study was done 1) at some obscure university or 2) simply was never published and kept in the library of a particular university. What do people usually do in such cases?

Short answers: it's a requirement of sorts, it's probably acceptable (with caveats), mostly, assuming you have covered major databases and/or Google Scholar.

Long answers: One of the requirements for academic research, particularly in the context of dissertations, is to contribute to existing research. This can mean coming up with a new approach to solve a particular problem, or a new theory or idea. But it can also mean looking at a topic from a slightly different angle, or focussing on a different aspect.

Not all research (#notallstudies) has to be new and exciting. Trying to replicate and thereby confirm existing research is entirely valid and acceptable. However, the current publication process favours developing new studies and approaches over replication studies. A perceived lack of originality may therefore hamper your publication chances, which is problematic in itself. Whether this is an issue for you depends on your future career plans and choices.

Whether your slightly adjusted topic will be accepted also depends on how plausible it is that a different region / industry / sample composition would bring different results than the original study. For example, if you're looking at topics that are likely to be influenced by cultural differences / class / education background / or similar, you can reasonably expect that looking at a different country or a different sector may yield new information. However, there will be other factors where it would seem implausible that region or industry would have any bearing on them, e.g. left-/right-handedness, general IQ, neuroticism scores etc.

In checking for existing research you should make sure to cover relevant journals and databases in the fields. You're not expected to research the library of any university, but to cover relevant publications.

Lastly, a few caveats:

Check your university's requirements. Whatever I and other people tell you will be based on our experiences in particular contexts and institutions. Your institution's guidelines may differ.
Answers to your questions may also differ between subjects. My answer is based on experiences in psychology / social science research, particularly work and employment.


Coauthor always postpones working on article At my previous job I wrote a small paper draft, which was funded by a non-profit foundation. In this draft I solved a small but existing scientific problem. So I elaborated this to make it close to a complete publication.

I put also the coworker who acquired the funds for the research as second coauthor, although his sole contributions to the publication were minor error corrections. He is also a full-time professor in a similar field and was excited about my findings. He said that there are a few points missing to make a full publication and we should work on this as soon as he will have time.

This was more than one and half year ago. Afterwards, I wrote him three times that we should continue on this and if he doesn't have time, then he should write me what is missing and I will finish the publication. He postponed the work always by half a year. My last email I sent him a couple months ago, he didn't answer at all.

I'm still interested in publishing the research even on myself. Hence, I would like to know how to proceed best in this situation.

Can I continue on myself and try to publish with his name on it?
Can I remove his name since he did not contribute anything beside small corrections (should be possible to verify afterwards on svn repository)
Third option, is it possible to just write a small article on my personal blog where I present the findings with new text and new code.
It is also possible to extend my idea to a more general case and use the special case just as an example. How can I proceed on this?
The last option would be to ask the last time with a fixed deadline. But I think he set it two times by postponing by half a year?
something else?

Thanks in advance

Not only you can remove his name, but you should remove it, if his contribution is limited to minor error correction. You can instead thank him profusely in the acknowledgements. And send the draft to him before submission, saying you will submit within a few days.

Your third option of a blog post is also good, if you do not care too much about your publication statistics.

Excerpt from Cambridge University's guidelines on authorship:

  Normally, an author is an individual judged to have made a substantial intellectual or practical contribution to a publication and who agrees to be accountable for that contribution. This would normally include anyone who has:

  made a significant contribution to the conception or design of the project or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND/OR
  drafted the work or reviewed/revised it critically for important intellectual content.

  This is general guidance only and may not apply to all disciplines or journals which may set different standards.

  Anyone listed as an author on a paper should approve the final version of the paper and accept responsibility for ensuring that he or she is familiar with its contents and can identify his or her contribution to it.

  Individuals who contributed to the work, but whose contributions were not of sufficient magnitude to be listed as authors should be properly acknowledged, usually in an acknowledgements section.


Google Scholar - how to make English profile name show same citations as Cyrillic alphabet search results? I am helping an academic client from Russia with his publications in English language and have created a profile for him in Google Scholar. He already has pages and pages of citations when you look for his name in Russian. I would like the citations to be the same for searches in both Russian (Cyrillic) and English spelling of his name.

I've created Google Profile in English and manually added some of his Russian articles there, two weeks later nothing changed. He now has existing profile on Google Scholar - Oleg Matveychev, but the results for English spelling name are the same as a month ago, no matter what I do. Russian spelling results change all the time, as he is cited often. Any advice?

just saw this question on Twitter by chance, and I think I can answer it. At the moment, Google Scholar search results are not affected by the fact the person you're searching has created a Google Scholar Citations account. The correct way to search for this Russian researcher on Google Scholar would be:

author:"[cyrillic spelling]" OR author:"[latin spelling]"

That way you would get both sets of citations.


Can asking for travel and equipment support hurt a grant application? If 2 proposals were similar, the first asks for travel and equipment and the second didn't. Would the second have a better chance of being funded?

I think you are looking at this from the wrong side. Funding agencies typically won't care so much what kind of costs your project accrues, but rather how large those costs are in the end. That is, if there are two scientifically comparable projects, but one is much more expensive than the other, this will make the cheaper project more attractive to fund than the expensive one. Whether this cost discrepancy is due to higher personnel costs, or due to other factors, won't be central to the decision.

However, multiple factors make your question whether you want to ask for equipment and travel less important than what you might think:

At the end of the day, the costs of equipment and travel are typically very small in comparison to personnel costs, so this is unlikely to make a big difference for most grant types.
The case that two projects are so similar in terms of scientific merit that relatively modest equipment and travel costs have an actual impact and the agency cannot fund both projects is not very common.
Many agencies (at least here in Europe) reserve the right to cut down on your budget if they think it is over the top. That is, if your project would be ok without equipment and travel, they may end up just funding the project but not granting the equipment and travel money. This is particularly common if your proposal does not make it clear enough how this money is essential to the execution of the project. At the end of the day, everything that kind of seems like a "nice to have" cost is very likely to not be granted.

Summary: worry about your proposal. Don't worry about equipment and travel costs.


Assistant professor position in the USA. Can any leftover startup money for equipment be used to pay students or my summer salary? I got an offer for a tenure-track assistant professor position in USA, Department of Engineering. The university national ranking is between 35th and 65th at the US News website. if I will have any left start-up money for equipment, could it be used to pay PhD students or my summer salary? Or are they two different accounts? Does it maybe depend from University and University?

This varies not only from university to university but from department to department. In some places it wouldn't be a problem, and in others it may even be impossible.

I recommend you get in touch with whoever your point of contact is (whoever extended you the offer) and ask them directly. It is important that they know you want to do this as this will naturally affect how much startup funds you are liable to need.


I'm unhappy with my Master's. Should I drop out? I know there are lots of other similar "Should I drop out?" threads, but I think my case is a bit different from what I've seen.

I'm currently a Master's degree student in Computer Science, about to start the second and final year (I've finished all required courses, now there's only research left to be done). My problem is that I'm unhappy with the program itself and my dissertation subject. I don't have any motivation to actually do research, I don't like scientific writing (My adviser says I write like a novelist, and I enjoy writing like that as I like literature, and I find scientific writing way too boring and soulless...).

The thing is that I started doing Masters because I've finished BSc with top marks on my final research project, and I had previously worked in industry and didn't have much of a pleasant experience, so I believed I would fit right in to academic life. Plus, I thought it would be an easier way to find a job or study opportunity abroad, and finally leave my hometown (I've no love for this city, there's nothing for me to do and I've got almost no friends here). As it turns out, however, I got frustrated from all the classes I had (even if I had good grades in all of them), and from what I've seen of my colleagues', adviser's and other professors' academic lives, it just isn't the kind of life for me. Even if it helps me get out of here, it's no use if I end up just as unhappy. I think to really enjoy academic life, your motivations should be academic, and I now realize that my motivations certainly aren't.

I've also been told that every grad student thinks about quitting at least once, and I know many others like that, but that doesn't make the situation better. Actually, it makes it worse for me, because it seems that nobody has any confidence in their work, and nobody is expected to have that confidence whatsoever. I find that extremely unhealthy and demotivating.

Summarizing, the problem with going on with masters is that it makes me unhappy, and it is destroying my self confidence (really, I hate myself when I'm doing it). I don't enjoy the things I do, and I can never appreciate the results I get. I don't see why I should finish a degree that I don't see myself using in the future, so to me it just seems like a waste of precious time. (I'm 24, by the way)
The problem with dropping out, however, is that I'm in a scholarship, so I'll have to return the money that I've received so far to cover for the program's fees. While I do have that money, it would be quite a setback considering that I intend to make a big trip soon. I thought about starting freelancing in software development so I could work from just about anywhere in the world, but I'm not sure how feasible that actually is. Even so, I'm not sure that's what I would like to do for the rest of my life. The upside in dropping out now is that I would gain a whole year to actually focus on my life, instead of focusing on some research I'm not willing to do just for the sake of not paying the scholarship back.

Does anyone have any advice or similar stories to share? I know the decision is mine to make, but I would like to know other people's opinions on my situation.

I think to really enjoy academic life, your motivations should be academic, and I now realize that my motivations certainly aren't.

No human being can -- or should -- have only academic motivations.  In this statement I find a kernel of truth: "An academic career is not a good one for those who are not motivated by a love for and a desire to work in their academic subject."  But also I find a kernel of falsity: "The only worthwhile reason to have degree X in subject Y is a love for and a desire to work in subject Y."  That's really not true: in modern life, degrees -- and increasingly, "advanced" degrees like master's and doctorates -- are necessary credentials in order to attain any of a variety of non-academic jobs.

If I understand your current situation, then:
(i) With one more year and with full financial support, you can complete a master's degree.
(ii) If you drop out now, then not only do you not get the degree but you will have to pay a financial penalty.  (So you say, anyway.  In the US, students who drop out of a degree program do not have to pay back their stipends.  It sounds like you are outside of the US.  It might be worth exploring -- carefully -- whether this is actually true in your program.)

In other words, looked at in non-academic terms you would be paying a nontrivial amount of money for the privilege of extricating yourself from a master's degree program and sparing yourself one year of doing something that you do not enjoy (but are doing well in; you seem not to doubt that you could get the degree with one more year of work).  Okay, if you drop out of the program right now, you will do....what??  If the answer is that you have a lucrative and long-term job lined up now, it would make sense to drop out (and try to put your degree on hold, if possible).  If you do not have something specifically positive lined up but are just looking to release yourself from the drudgery: I don't think that's a rational decision.  Ten or twenty years from now you may well look back and wish you had finished the degree.

I am not going to pick apart your entire message, but at several points your reasoning seems predicated on faulty assumptions.  Just a couple examples:

  I had previously worked in industry and didn't have much of a pleasant experience, so I believed I would fit right in to academic life.

That makes no sense to me.  For many values of X and Y, liking X is positively correlated with liking Y.  I have never heard anyone say, "If you don't like this, then I know you'll like..."  I have a friend who made the same mistake in the other direction: as an academic he found himself weighed down by his colleagues' and superiors' expectations of how he should spend his time and conduct himself: he found these expectations both too numerous and too nebulous.  So he switched to an industry job to correct it.  Suffice it to say, he didn't stay in that job for terribly long.  There are (at least) two problems with this reasoning: (i) There are more than two walks of life...many more.  The majority of human beings are not working in either academia or industry.  (ii) Not all forms of unhappiness can be cured by any change of location.  Some of them are more internal.

  The upside in dropping out now is that I would gain a whole year to actually focus on my life,

Not being a graduate student is neither a necessary or sufficient condition to actually focus on your life.  Try focusing on your life while completing your master's degree.  Yes, it's challenging...but worthwhile.

  I've also been told that every grad student thinks about quitting at least once, and I know many others like that, but that doesn't make the situation better. Actually, it makes it worse for me, because it seems that nobody has any confidence in their work, and nobody is expected to have that confidence whatsoever. I find that extremely unhealthy and demotivating.

Then I have good news for you: in five years of graduate school, I never thought about quitting -- not once.  I had my better and worse moments, and yes -- at times my confidence lagged -- but I was at all times completely confident that I was doing what I wanted to be doing with my life.  My graduate school cohort consisted of people who were amazingly (indeed, intimidatingly) competent, enthusiastic and successful: the vast majority of people around me reinforced my interest and inspired me to work harder.  You don't sound like you're in a very positive cohort.  If you did decide to stay in academia past your master's degree (which I am not recommending if you continue to feel the way you do now, but it is possible that you could have a change of heart), you should make it a priority to place yourself in a positive academic environment.  It makes a world of difference.

Good luck.