Upset by male classmates openly comparing female students according to physical appearance I'm a female student studying computer science (CS). Some of the male CS students have given me a physical ranking compared to other female CS students, and it has me really upset, but I don’t know what to do about it.

One of the students in particular enjoys telling me when he finds another girl in the vicinity more attractive than me. For example, a girl friend of mine told me I looked pretty today; and the one male student then jumped in and said I wasn’t as beautiful as the actress on the TV show we were watching. Another time, an attractive girl walked in to the computer lab, and he said: “And you thought you were the hottest girl in the lab!”

He’s not the only one. When we are in other settings (not male-heavy, CS classes), I often hear that I now have “competition” since there are other pretty girls.

I’m not sure what to do. I am friends with some of these men (or so I thought) and have committed to working on software projects with them that I can’t back out of. In addition, the school is very small so I can’t avoid them.

What do I say? How do I explain that I’m very upset by this, and not because I’m jealous of the other women? The men I’ve told have said not to worry because they think I'm pretty – they don’t seem to get it. I’m not sure I’m explaining it right.

Please help. I am starting to cry during class.

You don't say where you're going to school but if it's here in the US, I would report the problem to the university and demand they do whatever is necessary to fix it.  Title IX requires them to provide an inclusive environment free of sexual harassment.  If you are unsatisfied by their response, I would report the school to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.  You'll find additional helpful advice here at equalrights.org.

Added:  Several comments express concern that reporting the harassment might result in retaliation.  But it's worth noting that retaliation for filing a harassment complaint is also against the law and cause for a new complaint.  The school has to do whatever it takes to fix this, even if means expelling the perpetrators.  It is not sufficient for them to claim they did the best they could.

Still more:  Having conducted some other disciplinary actions, even if not any that were exactly like the one described here, I would expect the result of complaining to the university is that the Title IX conduct officer will call the students to a meeting that might go something like this:  You start by asking the students if they know why they're there.  After the usual squirmy they-can't-think-of-anything denials, you describe their offensive behavior and ask if the reason they can't remember any of this is because they think it's such completely ordinary behavior.  You point out that in a workplace, it would get them fired and might subject the company to a lawsuit and an expensive settlement.  You explain that university has an obligation under Title IX to maintain an inclusive environment free of sexual harassment.

You then ask, "Do you think you should be allowed to stay at the university?"  Typically, the students' lives flash before their eyes as they realize the seriousness of the stakes and they decide they will never do this again.  There are lots of ways to make this even more, ahem, memorable, e.g., by asking if they have a backup career in mind if this computer science thing doesn't work out or by making them wait a few extra days to hear the disposition of their case (especially if you expect to let them off lightly).  It may seem a little like pulling the wings off flies, but trust me, the problem behavior will end, hopefully for the entire rest of their lives, in which case they will have learned something far more valuable than yet another algorithm.


Is it ethical for a journal to request substantial payment for publishing a paper? A while ago, I spoke with a colleague of mine who advised me to beware of journals that require you to pay to publish your work, as they may be predatory.  Today, I spoke with my advisor who informed me that even some reputable journals require payment to publish... even upwards of thousands of dollars!  Is this really ethical?  I can understand requiring a nominaly insignificant membership fee of some sort to keep the journal running, but such an exhorbitant amount?  Shouldn't all who have significant work to publish in a field have the ability to diseminate in reputable journals without being super rich?

Well someone's got to pay. If it's the reader, then howls go up about Open Access. So that leaves the authors.

The costs of publishing

A high-quality journal needs high-quality editors.  An awful lot of literature still gets printed and distributed around the world and that's expensive. Remember, reading this, we are the ones who are most active online, and so our paper-reading habits are much more likely to be skewed towards predominantly (or even exclusively) online access, so are not fully representative. High-quality journals often also get involved in conference sponsorship, publicity, and so on. The peer-reviews get co-ordinated; there is often some vetting of suitable reviewers; their responses need to be interpreted correctly; special issues get co-ordinated; someone ensures a good balance of articles covering the journal's remit.

So, there's a lot of costs, and someone's got to cover them.  If we want to publish at almost-zero overheads, we write a blog.  A journal is much much more than a blog - and some of the things that make it much more than a blog, cost money.

Not necessarily an efficient market

That's not to say that in certain sectors, there isn't a market failure: some sectors do have suspiciously high profit margins. And market regulators should be looking at removing barriers to entry.  Those barriers certainly aren't insurmountable, as notable new scientific publishers have emerged recently, with new business models: PLOS being an obvious example, founded in 2000 to support Open Access, and becoming a publisher in its own right in 2003; and now a serious player, using the author-pays model.

Author beware

There are also plenty of scammers using the author-pays model. So be careful out there. Talk to colleagues about who's reputable and who's not. Read the journals. And there are lists online of the disreputable publishers. Read more about that on this site at How do you judge the quality of a journal?


Does the Portuguese higher education system follow Humboldt's model? According to the other question on Academia SE, the Polish higher education system closely resembles the German one:

Which country or countries inspired the post-communism Polish higher education system?

Polish higher education follows Humboldt's model so does German education. I personally hate Humboldt's model as it is a time-hog in the case of undergraduate and masters levels.
Does the Portuguese higher education system follow Humbolt's model?
If No, which model do they follow?

Yes, Portugal's basic education system does follow Humboldt's model. In university, it mostly depends on the institution you choose to study on. I don't know what kind of degree you're thinking about pursuing, but investigate the various universities that offer that degree and it's culture / philosophy.


What is 'Diamond' Open Access? I have heard of 'green' (self-archiving in a repository) and 'gold' open access (immediate open access in a journal), but what is 'diamond' open access? How does this differ from green or gold open access?

Diamond open access is like gold, in that the article is immediately open access in the journal, and nobody has to pay to read it.  However, in gold open access, the author (or their institution or funding agency) normally has to pay a publication fee to get the article published.  In diamond open access, they don't have to pay, so the process is completely free of charges to both authors and readers.

See http://www.jasonmkelly.com/2013/01/27/green-gold-and-diamond-a-short-primer-on-open-access/


Who should the authors of a corrigendum be? I have discovered an error in my paper published in a journal. I am a PhD student and the original paper was published with my advisor and two other researchers from different universities. The correction of the error, which was a significant amount of work, but luckily ultimately did not change any of the conclusions, was done in collaboration with my advisor, but without almost any interaction from the two external coauthors of the original paper. They know about it, though, and agreed with the changes I made.

So my question is: Should the authors of a corrigendum always be the same as the ones for the original paper? If this matters, my field is numerical mathematics/scientific computing.

I can think about a few arguments to include all original authors as authors of the corrigendum.

 They actually work on the corrigendum by reading your manuscript and making comments;
 The corrigendum has no "primary" value without the original paper, it can be considered as an extra chapter. It does not really matter that you worked on this chapter more than they, since they probably contributed to other parts of the paper;
How would it look if you publish corrigendum without them? A little bit like "These senior guys screw it up, but luckily I able to fix it", isn't it? Do you really think this is an impression you want to make considering their contribution?


Respected researchers giving imprecise or misleading explanations in casual conversations I have attended quite a few large conferences in mathematics where experts from different fields participate. Naturally I talked to some people and asked them a very basic question: what they are working on. In some cases the answers were not very precise and even rather misleading. I had the feeling that these people tried to make an impression that they work in one field while they work in another one.

One of the worst examples of such discussions was as follows. The person said that he works in interplay of random series and quantum fields. I never heard that there is a connection between the two subjects and asked to elaborate.  His explanations were chaotic: he started to explain on random series without any mention of quantum fields. I asked again how it is related to the latter. He said something about quantum field without mention of random series. After a couple more questions he continued to jump between the two subjects without explaining the relation. The funny thing is that after this discussion I found his list of publications and realized that all his publications belong to a third area which has apparently nothing to do with the two above topics. To my greater surprise, this person is actually a respected mathematician from a good math department.

  My impression is that the situations as above are not exceptional. Am I wrong? How typical they are? Is there any rational explanation of such a behavior?

My question might be non-appropriate for this site, sorry about that.   Personally I find the situations I have been in quite strange, and I would like to have any comment if it is something typical in academia (at least in mathematics) or not.

There is nothing strange about this. Not everyone is good at translating the very technical problems they are working on, without advance preparation, on demand and at a moment’s notice, into a polished speech that a random person they encounter (mathematician or not) will find understandable. I think the correlation between what you observed and the quality of this person’s work is essentially zero.

As for the fact that you found his description “misleading” because his papers suggest he usually works on other topics: well, he may be trying to do new work in an area he hasn’t worked on before. This is often my situation, and my own answer when people ask me what I’m working on (especially if the question is posed in the present tense as in your description) will occasionally have little or nothing to do with anything I’ve published.


Reviewing Manuscript Which Misinterprets My Own Work I am reviewing a manuscript which cites a study I published (yay!), but appears to misinterpret the results (rats!). This misinterpretation does not invalidate the manuscript under review, which is otherwise quite good - it occurs in the discussion section as somewhat of an aside, and does not seem to be an intentional misrepresentation. However, I'd prefer that my work is properly represented to avoid confusion on the parts of those who read this new paper.

I would like to know if anyone has good techniques to correct a mistake like this without making it quite obvious that you are the reviewer and inadvertently revealing your identity. (I am not necessarily opposed to revealing my identity since my review will be positive overall, just curious about ways to do this)

Give the corrections, referring to yourself in the third person where needed.  You don't need to impersonate someone uninvolved, you just need to depersonalize your corrections.  For example,

  In the introduction, the author is speaking of bla-bla; s/he motivates bla-bla by citing such-and-so.

Make sure you focus your corrections on errors that are relevant to the paper you are reviewing.  That may mean that your list of corrections will not be a complete one.

For all the author of the paper you're reviewing knows, you might be an advisor or close collaborator of the author of the paper that was mis-cited.  That's okay.

Note, if the author of the paper you're reviewing forms a conjecture that the reviewer is actually the author of the mis-cited paper... that's okay.  Maybe someday you'll meet each other at a conference and enjoy a moment of mutual recognition.

I am basing this advice on my own experience writing reams of legal documents about a family member, whom I got in the habit of not naming in my writing, to protect his privacy.  I also wrote about myself in the third person in those documents.  I found out that with a little practice it becomes second nature.


Is it appropriate for a student to have an advisor who is also a family member? We know that family can have a lot of impact on academic direction of a student, but is it appropriate for a student to have a supervisor/advisor who is also a family member? For example, a dad might supervise their son. What would make this more or less appropriate? What conditions might be required to make this appropriate?

I'm sure that such cases might happen (and frequently do for earlier education, like elementary school), but they should not happen at the graduate student level.

All of the usual concerns of nepotism and coercion apply, just as for any other professional relationship.  Moreover, at the graduate level, there are so many different options available and an emphasis placed on intellectual "cross-fertilization" that means most institutions strongly prefer to send their students elsewhere for future positions.  I cannot then see how a graduate student supervised by their own parent would be anything but a rather dubious relationship at multiple levels.


Can ibid. be used under the Harvard referencing style? In other words, not the other styles (e.g. APA, Chicago, Oxford) that uses the author-date format but the plain (Australian?) Harvard style.

From the examples at the University of the West of England:

  Generally ibid. and op.cit. tend to be used more in the body text for the Harvard system, and more in the reference list for the numeric system, as you can see.

They also note:

  There is no single authority that defines the 'Harvard' referencing style. Please seek guidance on the preferred scheme of referencing from your home institution or the journal in which your study will appear.

So I'm going to say yes, there is no reason as to why you couldn't use ibid with the Harvard citation style.


Should I use a personal github account or a new one to publish academic code? When I want to publish academic code, should I use my personal account with a pseudonymous username or create a new one with a username based on my real name?

My current account uses a pseudonym as username and I write code where I use my real name in the commits and an e-mail address related to the pseudonym (e.g. to keep my personal mail address free from spam).
For university code, I use my real name and university e-mail address in the repositories, but the URLs of the projects still contain the username, so the pseudonym is quite visible.

My personal account contains a few non-university projects and forks of other projects (some for modifications used by my university codes, some unrelated to my university work) as well. There is nothing I would not want to be seen by others and some of the voluntary work may reflect positively on me.

Should I worry about the username being a pseudonym (nothing silly like "buffy_the vampire_slayer", but still unrelated to my name)?

When publishing code linked on the university website.
When publishing code with the URL linked in a paper.

Is it preferred to have an account for university codes only?

I do not think my university or department has any rules for this, so I need to decide it myself.

You should use your real name.

My lab has a private GitHub group for internal stuff, as well as a few open public-facing projects.

Everyone in our group uses their real names or some transparent abbreviation (like jsmith) or one that matches their university email/login ID.

I feel it should be immediately obvious who each person is. It would be mildly annoying if I had to remember who allo was every time, when everyone else has easy-to-read IDs.

If I was your mentor, I would probably ask you to change it.

It's fine if you do non-job-related development on that same GitHub account, for the reasons you mentioned.


Why are 31.8% of retracted papers not noted as retracted? I read on STEEN, RG. Retractions in the scientific literature: is the incidence of research fraud increasing?. Journal Of Medical Ethics. England, 37, 4, 249-253, Apr. 2011. ISSN: 1473-4257. that:

  Journals do not do a careful job of alerting the naïve reader to a
  retraction notice (table 2). The most common way to alert readers
  about a retraction is with a watermark on the pdf (41.1% of retracted
  papers). A total of 149 papers were given such a watermark and noted
  as retracted at the website as well. Among 305 watermarked papers,
  48.9% were also retracted at the website; of 248 papers retracted at the website,
  60.1% were also watermarked. However, 31.8% of retracted papers were not noted as retracted in any way at all so the naïve reader would not
  be alerted to the fact that retraction had happened.

How comes 31.8% of retracted papers are not noted as retracted?

The only reasonable answer I can think of is "laziness".

In particular, when journals existed only in print, the only thing a journal could do when it retracted an article was to print a notice in a new issue.  There was no way to modify or recall issues that had already been sent to subscribers.  Some journals may still have retraction policies from that era, which don't contemplate trying to actually do anything to the original article.

Note that the article you quote is almost four years old, so matters may have improved in the meantime.


Rejection because the paper is too specialised I submitted a manuscript into a (maths) journal a while ago. Today I received a decision e-mail saying that they have to reject my paper because it is too specialised for their journal. I belive this is fine after 1-2 weeks of receiving my submission, but I got this answer 3 months + 1 week after I submitted my paper. Is there anything I can do in such a situation or I just have to accept that perhaps someone forgot about my manuscript for a while?

You can send it elsewhere. What you can't do is force a journal to publish your paper. The time isn't especially significant. A year or so would be a problem.
But reviewers have other tasks in their workflow. I doubt that it was forgotten generally, but some reviewer might have been busy/sick/whatever.
There may even have been some discussion about the paper, not making the decision an easy one.


Ethics questions concerning a referee assignment Asking this question here as it was suggested in one of the comments from MO.
I recently refereed a paper that I returned to the author(s) for revision. The thrust of their argument relied on a claim whose justification I felt was lacking. I dutifully raised the issue in my report and, in addition, I corrected another portion of their proof. I also obtained partial results on this problem from another paper (I initially raised the problem they purport to prove).
The author(s) have yet to revise their work and, in the interim, I came up with a justification for their claim. I now have a proof of this result (which is important for another paper I'm working on) and would like to publish it (at least obtain some level of attributionfor the correct proof).

What are the ethics/options here? Do I need to provide them with the correct proof? May I submit the result as my own? If so, must I wait until their revision before I submit my own paper? Should I disentangle myself from any further involvement as the referee?

EDIT: I’d like to add a little context to one of the points made in a response below.
The conjecture they purport to prove is one that I made in a previous paper which included partial results on the conjecture. Thus, I have thought about the problem and the “ownership” of the problem belongs to me.
However, it is clear that I wouldn’t have come up with the proof without their submission.
It seems to me that a co-authorship of some sort would be the best for all parties, or I simply pass along the proof to the author(s).

Publishing this result independently is questionable from an ethical perspective, especially because it sounds like:

(1) you would not have been working on this problem without having read their manuscript as part of your refereeing duties;

(2) the result is your justification, but it is for their claim, which they thought of;

(3) you raised this issue in your referee report, and presumably the acceptance of their manuscript depends on addressing it (in other words, it is not just tangentially related to their work, but affects their publication in a significant way).

You clearly have not done anything unethical in thinking about the problem, and you should seek credit for solving it. However, their paper, and your interaction with them as an anonymous referee, cannot go unacknowledged. How would you feel if you submitted a paper, a revision was requested on the basis of XYZ issue, and while you are trying to figure out XYZ, you find the next week that a solution to XYZ has suddenly appeared in the literature?

As for the appropriate resolution, that may depend on field and even journal. I recommend you contact the editor and explain what your situation. A reasonable compromise might be to publish this result in a separate paper collaboratively with the original authors (which obviously requires you to reveal your identity).


Using one's middle name in place of their first name in academia Why do some people use middle name for their first name like attorneys?  And is this ok in the academic venue?

Why do some people use middle name for their first name like attorneys?

Perhaps they don't like their first name, or maybe there's already a well-known person in their field with the same name, so they need to distinguish themselves.

  And is this ok in the academic venue?

Yes.


What does "Publish or perish" really mean? In this site, I quite often see answers containing this "Publish or perish" sentence.

What does it really mean?  Is it limited to a particular academic system (i.e. U.S.) or it is the general case all over the world?

Lastly, is it possible to be a researcher without concerning about "Publish or perish"?

For graduate students, it means "Publish or you won't get an academic job."  In many parts of academia, not getting an academic job is considered equivalent to death.

For assistant professors, if means "Publish or you won't get tenure."  In many parts of academia, not getting tenure is considered equivalent to death.

  Lastly, is it possible to be a researcher without concerning about "Publish or perish"?

Sure, of course.

If you're publishing.


If I get selected for a diploma in Australia from a recognized University, can I use it to get an education visa? I am from Pakistan. I want to move to Australia. One way to get points is to have an Australian diploma. I want to know if I am selected for a diploma from a recognized University in Austrlia, are there chances that I will be eligible for a education visa?

Visa advise is tricky.  At least in the UK, the recommendation is to leave this to a qualified visa and immigration professional.

Factors might include whether you have paid all or some of your fees, the type and even subject of your course, the level of what you have studied before, whether you are studying full-time or part-time, where you are from etc.  And this will be dependent upon the laws of the region in which you intend to study.

Universities normally provide visa and immigration advice services, so I would suggest you ask the institution to which you have applied to see whether the course will support an education visa.

Needless to say, there is likely to be incomplete advice, at best, available from Stack Exchange.


Is this a good enough reason for not taking an educational loan? I have recently been accepted for a degree program in Economics at LSE and am currently applying for Financial Aid. The application form expects that I have already applied for an educational loan to fund my education, but honestly, I have not. I intend to enter academia and so I think that in the near future (up until I do my Ph.D.) I won't be able to repay the loan. Will this be good enough for the committee evaluating my application?

These are subtleties that could easily get your application dismissed on formal grounds. So the best thing you can do is talk to the appropriate department in the LSE directly. They may tell you it is ok, or they may point you to other options for taking educational loans. But they know (make) the rules, and we don't.


Getting a scientific article published with no qualifications to any scientific journal? I hope I have found the right website for my query. Would it be possible to get a psychological experiment that you carried out published to any journal, despite the fact that you are:

Only 17 (nearly 18) years old
Have no degree or qualification

I've got some really great ideas for psychological experiments that I haven't been able to find them done yet. I really just want to do science and get recognised for it. I was thinking Google Science fair, but that has ended. I'm just doing this for self-pursuit and interest. I am hoping exposure to a scientific audience can lead me to my future career path.

There are two different types of "no qualifications":

A person may be "unqualified" because they don't have the usual pieces of paper
A person may be "unqualified" because they are not familiar with the standards and practices of the field.

Don't worry about the first one.  Worry about the second one.  For example, one of the other comments raised the issue of getting human subject experiments approved.  Likewise, there are lots of subtle challenges in experimental design that have to be dealt with in order to  getting a valid psychological result.  But high school students and undergraduates do real scientific work all the time.  Consider, for example, the iGEM genetic engineering competition: students from around the world, both high school and undergraduate, get right out to the bleeding edge of science, and some of their work goes on to be published.  Or consider the Hackerspace/DIY movement, which is bubbling over with innovation and certainly knows no age barriers.

Now, what most of those folks have, and what it sounds like you don't currently, is mentors who know the ropes.   A good mentor might or might not be "qualified" in the sense of pieces of paper, but should have a good sense of the scientific method, and at least some ideas of who else to get involved if you start thinking you've got a unique result and want to figure out how to get from awesome science on the internet to a formal publication.

Don't worry about the uniqueness or publication part of it too much.  First, find some good peers and a mentor if you can, and just start doing some science.  Then see if you actually enjoy the thrill of the knowledge chase enough to overcome the frustrations of experiments that don't work and people who point out the problems in the ideas you have come to love.  If you fall in love, not just with the idea of science, but with the process, then as time goes by you can sort out which of the many science-related career paths ends up being a good one for you to pursue.

Maybe you'll end up published before you turn 20, and maybe you won't.  If that makes a big difference to you, then you're in it for the wrong reasons.


How likely is it for an international student to secure graduate funding for a subject like Psychology? I am international student who will be commencing an undergraduate degree in Psychology at a top-ranking university in the UK. I know it's a little bit early in my "academic" career, but I have been aspiring to become an academic for some time and due to personal circumstances, I have come to a crossroads where I have to decide whether this dream is worth pursuing, or if I should give this dream up permanently. One of my main concerns is finances, as due to the steep cost of my undergraduate degree, I will most likely be unable to continue onto graduate studies without funding.

It is my understanding that graduate funding for non-British and non-European students in the UK is rare. What is the profile of an international student who secures funding (particularly in Psychology or Neuroscience) in the UK, and is there anything I can do now or in the years ahead to improve my chances? At the same time, how likely can an international student with only a 3-year British undergraduate degree secure funding for graduate studies in other countries, such as the US, and again, is there anything I can do to improve my chances?

My former UK Psychology department ran a neuroscience program. At the PhD level we had funding from outside grants, school funding, and university funding. Typically only the school and university funding could be used for international students. Technically, this means maybe 1/3 of the available funding could go to international students, but the school funding was almost always ear marked for special cases (i.e., a new faculty member or a supplement for getting a grant, or a reward for doing extra teaching). More typically only about 10% of our funded PhD students were international.


Finding a field of interest for my PhD I'm a fifth year pure mathematics student and after this year I should get a Master degree (I'm from Europe). As you might know, this should be the time I decide (or at least seriously start thinking about) whether I should pursue a PhD or go work in the industry.

My main problem with pursuing a PhD is that I haven't found any topic particularly interesting or passionate about, and I think I have quite a wide mathematical education. I can easily get into some area when I'm studying for exams and such, but nothing more than that. I have to admit that I'm indifferent regarding most stuff in my life. While I was in high school, I had interests in number theory and prime distribution, but that has slowly gone away.

Having said all that, I did somewhat enjoy tutoring/helping younger students and explaining stuff to them. I'd also like to think that I would enjoy doing research in mathematics, but not sure.

So my question is:
How should I find out what is the field of my interest (and whether it exists at all)? Is my lack of interest a red flag for pursuing a PhD?

Is my lack of interest a red flag for pursuing a PhD?

Yes, I think so.  PhD programs are for people who are so passionate about an academic subject that they are willing to endure the certainty of a long, hard period of apprenticeship and training for the possibility of a secure, moderately well-paid lifelong career in that subject.

In some academic fields, there is a good shot at parlaying a PhD into a lucrative career in business or industry.  (In others, this is really not the case.)  However, in the current job market there are few if any fields in which a PhD is a guaranteed paycheck.  A student who knows that she wants to take her mathematical skills, for instance, to business/industry, would probably have an easier, more pleasant life by starting work with a bachelor's or a master's degree and building her career sooner rather than later.  There are exceptions, but they would be better planned in advance: e.g., if you have a specific job in mind for which you specifically know having a PhD would be necessary or beneficial.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with liking a subject and being good at it but not being passionate about it.  You should then find what it is that you are passionate about.  It need not be career-oriented: many, many people work to live rather than live to work.  Just because you have a master's degree in mathematics does not mean that you need to pursue a career in which you use mathematics in any way!  I hope you find your passion...whatever it is.

Finally: one option that you haven't mentioned is to teach mathematics at the pre-university level.  In the US, a master's degree in your subject area makes you competitive for very strong high school teaching jobs, e.g. at amazing public high schools in desirable cities or elite private institutions.  The difference that an excellent school teacher can make has got to be at least as much as most academics, business people or industrialists.  In the unlikely event that Europe has a glut of excellent high school teachers, please consider coming to the United States, as I assure you that we do not.


How to make lessons more concrete for undergraduate students when my institution lacks lab facilities? I have question related to teaching.

I don't have facilities for doing real time applications for my undergraduate students related to automatic control design (like inverted pendulum), and the devices that we have are black box.

I am using MATLAB/SIMULINK, but this doesn't make sense for them.

Any recommendation to make automatic control more tangible and concrete?

Why not make a more graphical simulated environment inside of a web browser? All sorts of dynamical systems problems are prettified up and turned into browser games these days, whether in flash or JavaScript on HTML5.

If you make a simplified system, like an inverted pendulum, in a browser, then it can be nicely visual. If you give a set of manual controls in the program, then students can get a feel for it. With appropriate piping, you should then be able to hook it up to Matlab for them to control as a real-time system from there. You can also inject noise and control errors to bring more realism and prevent unstable solutions from working.

In short: our computers are powerful enough these days that a satisfying virtual lab is quite within reach.


How to formalise the "extra-mile" work done by an academic? In my experience, academics are almost always expected to contribute some of their time to activities beyond their principal teaching or research roles. These extra tasks include, for example, attending open days, visit days, serving on one or more committees, acting as head of a student year group, admissions officer - the list is long.

Whether this should be the case is not in question here.

In one of my previous institutions, there was in place a "brownie-point" system which was supposed to keep a track of how much extra administrative/organisational/outreach or otherwise "extra-mile" work an academic had taken on.  When a new task required action, the academics could use their accumulated points to argue why they shouldn't (or indeed should, in some cases) be allocated the task. Setting the value of a task relative to all the others, as you might imagine, raised some difficulties.

My question is: has anyone experience of any other kind of formalised system of evaluating and allocating these "extra-mile" tasks?

At my university, we have this system for PhD students.

I am a PhD student. In my contract, I have "up to 20% department duties". When I get assigned tasks not related to my research — teaching, administrative tasks, presenting our institute to visitors, etc. — I write down the hours. At the end of the semester, I report to my boss how many hours I have worked on such duties. Then, a corresponding fraction of my salary is funded from a different pot of money. At the end of my PhD, this means I will have an equivalent amount of time extra to finish my research before my contract finishes.

I think the system is quite fair, although some tasks — most notably teaching — don't get the actual time assigned, but according to a certain formula. So in practice, I do lose research time by doing teaching, because teaching takes more time than the formula accounts for, certainly if it's a first time. However, it's still much better than a system with no accounting at all, such as I have understood to be common elsewhere in the world.


What is the maximum reviewer score for IEEE conference papers? I am wondering if conferences supported by IEEE follow the same score scale. I could not figure out if there is a scale from 1 to 10 or from 1 to 5.

IEEE conferences are allowed to organize their own reviewing system, so there is no uniform system between them.


How to professionally inform of my intention to quit my masters After long thought, I have decided to quit my master's program.
I fully understand the shame and failure that this is.

What is the professional way to leave, I do not wish to waste anyone's time but I feel just ducking out with an email would look bad.
Should I simply arrange a meeting with my thesis advisor and let them know then, and should I indicate my desire to quit within the email I send?

I know whatever happens, I will be viewed as a failure by them and will never get a reference from them.

First, there shouldn't be any shame involved. For some reason you have learned that what you are now doing isn't right for you. That is perfectly natural, even if you are struggling at the moment. But before you decide finally, make sure it is the right decision.

As to how to do it, a face to face meeting is the best way. But before you have the meeting, think about what your future plans are so that you can talk about them as well as about quitting. If you think you may want to return later, you can work that in. The academic life isn't for everyone, and it may be a good thing if that is the case for you and you learn it now.

Your advisor may even have options available that you haven't thought of, but face to face is best. If you want to give him/her a heads-up on your intentions, send an email asking for a meeting to discuss your future.

You don't say why you are considering quitting, and you need not. However, there are at least three common reasons. First, is just external pressures that need to be dealt with. Second is burn-out that is pretty common also, and can lead to health issues. That can be overcome in some cases with help.

But the third reason is one to consider. There is a condition called Imposter Syndrome that affects many students at a certain point. It is the deep feeling that you don't belong because you "aren't good enough." That is often a bit related to burn-out but it is also pretty often completely unjustified. One of the reasons for speaking to your advisor in person is that he/she might just reassure you that you are, in fact, good enough. I suggest that you investigate Imposter Syndrome online as a start if you think this resonates.


Moving to Europe and seeking research assistant work after undergrad / masters - best approaches? I have just finished an honours degree in Psychological science in Australia - this is a 3 year bachelors with an additional selective entry 4th year involving 50% coursework and research.  In addition to this I have about a year of research experience across a few different labs and areas.  I'd like to move to somewhere in central / western Europe (e.g. Berlin).  The aim is to eventually do a Phd there (although nobody there ever seems entirely certain whether my degree is eligible or if I need a masters), but ideally I'd like to get some involvement in a lab / institution first.

Does such an aim seem reasonable and achievable, or would I be generally expected to just pursue a Masters / Phd path?  What is the best way to go about finding such a position?

I am pursuing the networking angle, but don't have many contacts in that direction.  I have a sporadic collection of mailing lists and web sites I check, and will turn to 'cold emailing' academics of interest at some point.

From my experience, EU citizen and familiar with Australian degree system, you will have a hard time getting into a PhD program. The honors bachelor cannot be considered at the same level of the Masters degree. Regarding employment in a lab in Europe your first hurdle would be getting a working permit. This might be hard unless you already have someone who can sponsor you. I think you are better off trying to find some field technician or volunteer position to collaborate with some of the labs and then perhaps start networking from there.
Otherwise you could try and move to Germany with the tourist visa for 3/6 months and start network that way. However German professors seem quite reachable by e-mail, I would start contacting some of them for which you have an interest in their research and see what they suggest.


Is it ethical to copy a research idea? I am a high school senior. One of my friends did a research project in a certain field of Computer Science 2 years ago and it won a lot of awards. He is now at university. I read his paper and relevant work in the area and the research area looks really interesting. I want to do research that's closely related to this idea and I have a few ideas on how to extend the research. Is it ethical to do this project? My main concern is that he/other mutual friends will think that I just used the same idea so that I could win as well.

Yes, you can do this. You are not taking his ideas, you are using your own (note you wrote "I have a few ideas").
Basically, once a paper is published, all the ideas within becomes public knowledge and you are free to build on them. You should still cite the original paper if you are building on their ideas, but your extensions are yours and yours alone.
By the way, many authors will be quite flattered if you work on their ideas - it implies that you find their ideas interesting.


Can I still submit my work to a journal if a very similar paper was just posted on arXiv? I am from an engineering field (EE, specifically signal processing), and I have been working on a paper since March 2014.

Back then, I spent a significant amount of time reviewing the literature and didn't find any existing work that discussed my topic. I actually finished the bulk of the paper several months ago (Jan 2015), but since then I have been editing and reviewing it with my coauthors before we planned to submit to journals.

I recently, however, found a similar paper that was "published" or posted on arXiv in April 2015. I believe that it is extremely similar (~80% of the ideas). I am not sure how much of an issue this is, as I have heard that arXiv is not a "legitimate" domain (in my field, almost everyone just uses the IEEE searching engine).

My original plan was to submit my work to journals soon. Do you think I can still submit my paper to a journal? How should I acknowledge of otherwise handle the existence of this similar arXiv publication?

Sure, you can go ahead and submit your paper. Of course you are obligated to discuss the arXiv paper, and its relation to your work -- but it sounds like you can honestly describe it as independent work. It would be a good idea to also make your paper public at this point (perhaps by posting a preprint on arXiv).


Is this a favorable response from the professor? I am applying to a thesis-based Master's program where the professor hires the students in their research group. I've interviewed the professor on skype and we have emailed each other after the interview half a dozen times. Now, after a few months, I asked him when the admission decisions are sent and he wrote me:

Dear X, I am currently reviewing all the people who showed interest in my research group. The results will be announced after I am done with this in the next month. Thank you for your patience and understanding

So, does this mean I am still being considered for the research group or is this a polite rejection?

There is no hidden information in the message.


What are the current standards for plagiarism? At the first day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Melania Trump gave a speech including these words:

  "From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily lives. That is a lesson that I continue to pass along to our son. And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."

This seems strikingly similar to Michelle Obama's speech when her husband was nominated as the Presidential candidate about eight years earlier:

  "And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them.
  And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and to pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children -- and all children in this nation -- to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."

Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort characterized the possibility of plagiarism as "crazy" and "just really absurd," an attempt by Clinton to "demean [Melania Trump], and take her down."  Apparently "what she did was use words that are common words;" "these were common words and values."  Gov. Christie said "There's no way that Melania Trump was plagiarizing Michelle Obama's speech." After all, most of the speech was not the same as Obama's (or Astley's).  The speaker herself claimed, "I wrote it ... with (as) little help as possible."

The campaign could have said something like "Yeah, we copied those bits; so what? Our party will unite the country behind those values this November and we can see they've got proven electoral success.  We're going to be winning so much,..."  Instead, they chose not to do that and took a strong position that this kind of copying is not plagiarism and is so far from it that even the suggestion is absurd.

In a situation unsettlingly common for modern American politics, it seems like people with opposing views don't even understand why there's any question here.  On the one hand, widely respected voices say there's no way this could even possibly be plagiarism, while others taking a different perspective think there's no way it isn't.  I wouldn't be surprised if folks from both sides vote to close this under the reasoning that there isn't even a real question about this topic, since their own view is so obviously the only right one.

Maybe standards have diverged so much because plagiarism is usually handled quietly and it's rare to have any large-scale public discussion or catalyzing event that would prompt such a discussion.  Here is such an opportunity.

If it's now "crazy" or "just really absurd" to think that this might be plagiarism, what are the standards?

They've apparently shifted (or gotten on a plane and flown halfway around the world) quite a bit since I learned them.  If I'm going to be writing, reviewing, and grading work of politically diverse authors, I need to learn the modern standards, quickly.

So, what are the standards, especially around reusing "common words and values," tweaks to original phrasings, and percentages of a work that's mostly original?
Are they a lot different with an audience tens of millions strong than when it's a handful of specialists?  If so, how?

If we look at Wikipedia, these seem to be relevant parts here:

  Plagiarism is considered academic dishonesty and a breach of journalistic ethics.

For political speeches of the kind we're discussing, there are near zero expectations regarding academic correctness, or journalistic integrity (not to mention honesty and ethics, which are also part of the quoted sentence).

Any standards are valid only in their respective context. Academic plagiarism and journalistic plagiarism have vastly different standards and consequences. As far as I am aware, there is no standard for plagiarism in the context of political speeches.

and

  Plagiarism is not in itself a crime, but can constitute copyright infringement

Copyright (usually) allows derivative works, which seems to be what we're dealing with here.

In other words: You can't plagiarize a political speech.


How to get the most out of a period in another university during PhD? Many PhD programs envisage for every candidate a period (3, 6 months or more) in another university, in order to carry on research in another institution, acquire new skills and (maybe) lay the foundations for a postdoctoral fellowship.

The task could be useful, but involves some problems, too. Often the PhD student is not able to familiarize with the new scientific environment and start working efficiently with the new group. Also, it is often difficult to find a research group that suites one's scientific fields and projects.

More over, sometimes the supervisor from the hosting institution agrees in welcoming a PhD student from outside (also to get his/her lab more international), but he/she has no time to dedicate to him/her...

For all these reasons, and more, sometimes a period abroad for a PhD could be very useless and ineffectual.

What do you think makes a period abroad successful?

Do you have any advice for PhD students going to face this career phase?

I would like to answer this question by asking one myself: would you go to a three-star Michelin restaurant, with a respectable but established clientele, with posh and smart diners, who do not need to meet their cooks or maitre's but just enjoy the glamour of the settings? Or would you prefer to visit a 1-star, striving to get a second star, where you have the occasional tourist and the owner is more keen on explaining to you the philosophy of their recipes?

I have been visiting both types (restaurants and universities!) and I prefer the second one, but it's probably due to age. In the latter you have more flexibility and contact with the main person you're interested in. Also, the first period acts as a "showcase", and it's very likely that more will be possible in the future.

My main advice would be to be a good networker. That implies "work hard" but also being prepared to "party hard", if you see what I mean. You should not be afraid to "ask people out" as much as in asking to share some research: you're likely to be in touch more often with the "second tier" (the first being the professor and her peers), and they will be the next generation of professors, so it's good to have a number of relationships with the post-docs and researchers of any institutions, at your stage of career. So don't close yourself in a shell of hard work for six months: I have seen that happening, and it does not make a good impression (to me)


Personal advantages of being a referee once you quit science? I previously asked this question in the physics forum (tag soft-question), but was convinced that it better suits in the academia forum. So I deleted it and posted it here.

I was recently asked to review a paper for a well-established physical journal, but as I have a lot to do in the moment, I'm tempted to refuse it. This is even more the case since I quit my scientific carreer roughly a year ago.

Thus my question: particularly outside physics, what are the benefits of being a referee? [beside the idealistic attitude of "bringing on physics" -- this is a valuable point in principle, but in reality, I've been long enough in the business to know that this is hardly the case for most papers. In contrast, most papers originate due to the need to continuously publish, a thing which I consider to be wrong].

For people in science, I see a clear opportunity in being a referee.

First, it gives you a connection to the journal editors and contributes to your authority.
Second, by concentrating on the paper, you are forced to learn something on your topic which might help you later. Further, you might be able to add citations to your own work and thus increase your influence.
Third, from a global point of view, you have to do it since you also expect your own papers to be reviewed (although this point is somewhat of a social dilemma, since [neglecting the previous points] it would be better to review as few as possible and concentrate on your own research).

However, do you see any personal advantages once you have quit physics? Are there maybe some if one plans to return some day?

To me, refereeing papers in subject X is a non-negligible part of being a professional academic in subject X.  So the premise that you want to referee a physics paper having "quit science" seems moderately self-contradictory: using your expert level qualifications to evaluate a scientific work is being a scientist, isn't it?  I'm almost sure it is. :)

So I guess you haven't "quit science" completely, or -- and this may come to the same thing -- the physics community is not fully aware of this fact.  One thing I might do if I were you is to make sure that the editor who asked you to review the paper knows that you are no longer employed as a physicist.  If I were an editor, that would be useful information, and unless I knew you rather well and knew that you retained a special expertise in this particular area, I would probably select someone else.

I think it's clear that you no longer have any kind of ethical obligation or professional expectation of reviewing papers.  I also suspect that once the community understands that you really are doing something else now your referee requests will come rarely or cease altogether.  So this is probably a decision that you need to make more for any particular paper than as a general life decision.  I would say: if you feel just as qualified to referee the paper as before and if you want to referee the paper, then do it.  For instance, if you see something valuable in the paper that you think that some other qualified person might miss, then it might be a nice parting gift "to science" to speak out for the worth of this research.  On the other hand, if it's just business as usual (or worse, motivated by "the need to continuously publish"): well, you don't have to clean the bathrooms in the apartment that you're not renting anymore, do you?

If you have thoughts of breaking back into science later on, then I think you need to think seriously about how to keep your connections and your intellectual life, um, alive.  There are many aspects to this, and making sure that you continue to referee papers is not, so far as I can see, especially close to the top of the list.  If I'm looking at the CV of someone who left academia for a while and is trying to come back (and it does happen), I will look to the work they have done recently and their plans for work in the near future.  I don't really care whether they've refereed some papers in the meantime.


Seeking a permanent job during a postdoc in a different country/continent: official and moral responsibilities I'm going to refer two countries/continents as X and Y. I'm citizen of neither. A week back, I started my third year of postdoc in X (with no teaching duties), after living two years for my first two postdocs in Y. I did my Ph.D. in X, and realized/strongly felt that apart from work, there's really no connection between X and me, whereas there's definitely very much so with Y, and I'm happy in Y, unlike X(I'm not talking work here) . One can say happiness is a choice, but I just can't force myself to like X, which I tried during my Ph.D. days, all in vein. And I trust my feelings.

My postdoc advisor in X seems to be nice, and I already told him that I'd apply for permanent positions in Y after this postdoc, and he has no problem with that. What I didn't tell him is that I don't like even spending one more day in X and I'd like to take an offer from Y now if it comes, since saying something like that would prompt the question why I had accepted his offer in the first place. I'd not have accepted had I had any options in Y, where the postdoc funding eventually ran out, and I had to find another option.

To solve my problem practically, I'll start searching for permanent jobs in Y very soon and here're my questions if you could please answer:

1) My initial appointment in X is for a year (extendable). If I can secure a job in Y, and want to leave my postdoc before that or before any significant project is completed, will that necessarily be a problem? Will either the university or the postdoc mentor be able to sue me?

2) It's a harder question and I'm trying to deal with it. Is this morally wrong not to tell him that I'm looking for a job in Y now/pretty soon (he's clearly okay with afterwards)? I understand that for now, he wants me to focus on his project only and give him something back in return because he's paying me for that, but on the other hand, I trust my feelings and feel really not good living here in X.

Thank you very much!

Postdoc advisers understand that postdocs are temporary, and that their goal is to find a permanent position. If such a position comes along -- at times we cannot always predict -- then we're generally happy for our postdocs. At least that's the case for me.

In other words, I think it's ok if you mention that you are looking for jobs and may send out applications soon. You may want to re-assure your adviser that you have every intention to continue working on the project you're on until some position can be found, as well as finish any of the work you started even if you move somewhere else. It's a waste of an adviser's resources to pay someone for work that ultimately never gets finished, but it's an entirely different thing to pay someone for 6 months who will finish up the experiments, proofs, theorems, or the writing started earlier after they moved. In that case, as an adviser, I really only paid for 6 months, but get all of the work.


Is it an insult to my US university to not walk in graduation? I will be graduating with a degree in Software Engineering. I have a 4.0 GPA at this institution (not counting the 3.85 GPA I transferred in with). The institution is awarding me Outstanding Scholar for my degree program/campus/year.

I am seriously considering not walking in graduation. Being on stage in front of people is not my definition of celebration, and I am not a fan of tradition unless there is a logical reason behind it. (I'm an INTJ personality type.)

For the outstanding scholar award, they will be giving me a certificate and honor cords at an awards banquet that is before graduation. Does that imply they expect me to walk? Is it an insult to not do so when they are giving me an award?

Actual diplomas will be mailed sometime after the ceremony in the summer. The ceremony doesn't cost anything to be a part of (other than the cost of getting a degree :). There are about 20 people graduating this year in my major. I have a sister graduating the same day in a city 8 hours away (and only an hour from home), so most parents/relatives will be at the other graduation anyway. As an alternative to the ceremony, I am thinking of writing thank you cards to the teachers and mentors who were influential in helping me get to this point.

If attending a graduation ceremony is not your cup of tea, you don't need to go.  Better to stay away than to go and be uncomfortable!

It would be considerate to let your department know that you won't be attending.  Some universities make more of a thing of graduation than others, so depending on the vibes at your school, you might want to have some travel plans that conflict with graduation day.

By the way, congrats!


How prestigious are the meetings of the Optical Society of America (OSA)? Usually, and especially for the IEEE conferences, it is easy to know whether a conference is good or not. For example, top-tier, second-tier and third-tier conferences are known and agreed upon.

For example, the IEEE ICC (1st tier) conference is better than IEEE Globecom (2nd tier). My question is, how to define the tiers for the OSA meetings and conferences.

Is there anyone familiar with the OSA meetings and conferences who can shed the light on how to interpret the acceptance in an OSA conference? What tier does an OSA conference belong to? How to know it, etc....

Kindly note that I am not asking if the acceptance as a poster, or even a talk is prestigious. I am strictly interested in the classification of the meeting and conference.

I know that a poster acceptance is less than being accepted for a talk, and that it is merely for discussions and feedback on new or emerging research topics. However, I believe that a poster presentation in a top tier, is better than a poster presentation in a second tier, therefore, I am asking about the OSA meetings and conference classifications.

Thank you.

AFAIK for disciplines related to the Optical Society of America (which is a well-recognized organization), the most prestigious things are journals - either by it (for example, JOSA A, JOSA B, Optics Express) or not (e.g. general physics or general science journals). When it comes to conference, its importance is related only to speakers/participants (so there is no general rule).

In any case, a poster presentation is never prestigious, be it by OSA or not (usually almost everything gets accepted).

I would ask that not every field have well-defined tiers for conferences. For example in mine, there isn't. And if you care for prestige - if you can't tell the difference - the chances are people seeing you CV won't be able to tell the difference either.

Usually review of abstracts (especially if no feedback is given) is to decide which things are suitable for talks (the best), posters (almost all others), and which - neither (they make no sense, are on another topic, of very poor quality or are OK but there is limited space for posters for some reason).


Site with statistics of publications/citations per country? I'm looking for a site (other than Scimago) that presents statistics of published papers and/or citations per country. However, I need more detail than that presented in Scimago. Ideally, I would like to have a list of authors, or the list of papers per country (having all the statistics that Scimago shows is a plus).

Is there any site that provides such information?

I think what you are asking can be carried out using Web of Science. I used address == "Canada" for the past 5 years, and immediately had published records for 241, 711 articles! You can ask for a citation report, which provides the information that Scimago has at the top. I think the issue you'll face is the sheer volume of data you're asking for. Even limiting the category to "ecology" (my field) yields over 3000 articles.

Of course, this answer won't be much use if your university doesn't have access to WoS.

The other thought I had was using Harzing's Publish or Perish (http://www.harzing.com/index.htm) which uses Google Scholar data. I tried a direct google scholar search, but can't immediately see how to limit it to articles published by people in the country as opposed to being about the country.

I hadn't heard of Microsoft Academic Search (see comment by Gopi) - so I had a look. The short answer is yes, it will show you publications by geographic region, but you have to go in by institution. You can get a google scholar like list of papers - and export those in various formats, but I only found the export option at the level of individual author.
For example, Université du Burundi has 16 publications by 5 authors, with an H-index of 4.
Pretty cool map though.


Would showing up only for tests be frowned upon by most professors? Because of a personal situation, I'm currently unable to attend most lectures (lately none) of a particular math class. However, I have a friend in  my section who keeps me updated with the material covered, homework assignments, and exam dates.

I had previously spoken to the professor, explaining that I might be missing sessions throughout the semester, and she seemed understanding; lately, however, I stopped going altogether, and I've exclusively shown up for mid-term examinations (on which I do ok). To my surprise, I've been able to teach my self quite well, and, given that it saves me a considerable amount of time, I've been thinking of adopting this practice in the future.

My question is, given attendance isn't compulsory, would professors mind this, or develop any kind of resentment toward students who engage in this behavior? I'm a third year undergrad in a public university in Texas.

I'm not really sure whether this question is off-topic for this stack, so I apologize in advance if it is. Please feel free to change the tags as appropriate. Thank you

Depending on class size, most professors won't notice if students are missing or not. When I miss someone, then this person has been active before and then I would miss him/her, but if this happens, I usually ask them if there are problems.

The other view on it is: If attending the lecture gives no benefit, then the professor should ask himself/herself why they are teaching like this. For example, I have some of my lectures on video and students can freely decide to show up or watch the old videos. Still, most are showing up and they usually are having better grades then the ones which don't show up. But this is not because I dongrade the others, it's because they understand the topics more deeply thanks to the disussions in the lectures.


How can I pass my PhD thesis defense when nothing has been successful? For reasons I had very little influence on, most of the projects I participated in over the course of my PhD did not produce reasonable results. I managed to get involved in small side projects and publish at least something, but those are not very novel in itself and not "on the edge of knowledge".
The edge of knowledge I pushed is what could go wrong when you are a lone representative of a "service science" in a collaboration, who is asked for input in the beginning, but later overthrown. And in the end, we look at the data together and establish we can't do what we wanted with it. And part of the problem is in fact that my input was not that valued by decision makers.
This take-home message is more of a meta-topic and for sure not the main result of my thesis though.

In my thesis, I will (with a heavy heart) go through those projects and discuss them. Discuss what happened, what we did and what we should have done and could have done. This writing process is a very hard piece of work to do and is taking a toll on me right now. But I am doing it and trying to detach myself from the thoughts of how these failures could end up killing my dreams of an academic career.

In my defense, I am supposed to paint a picture-perfect representation of at least one major project. I don't have any options for this. I got caught in doing small "services" to help my collaborators and starting new projects ("we will do better this time") which always ran into a roadblock (mostly before I even got significantly involved).

I do not want to whine about science in my defense. I do not want to explain what went wrong, to the people who did it sitting in the room with a plan to cheer me through my presentation. But what can I do?
People usually find one "example" of what they did that worked out well and then "blow this up" to be the main point of their defense, while it might only be a small part of the work they did over the years. But I cannot find a single interesting topic with nice results. They are either trivial or failed.

Has anybody done a "fully failed" PhD defense ... and passed? How would one do this?

The specifics here are certainly best discussed with your advisor. They should know about your discipline, and how to frame results in a way that is suitable for the community.

  Has anybody done a "fully failed" PhD defense ... and passed? How would one do this?

For me, it does not sound at all like you "failed" in your PhD. A PhD is a research project, not a product. Ultimately, you (and your committee) should not evaluate your results based on whether they ended up being useful, but based on whether you had a reasonable thesis and a thorough scientific study of this thesis.

That is, if you proposed a novel approach, collected reasonable data, and thoroughly validated your initial thesis, your research was successful, independently of whether this approach then ended up being used in the larger project context. Sure, it would be nice to be able to say that your approach has then helped these other people to do A, B, C, and D, but the real world does not always work like that.

To me, it is mainly a question of mindset. If you yourself consider your PhD "failed" you will have a hard time selling it to a committee. You need to embrace the idea that you did good research, and not measure the success of your own work on factors outside of your control. In that sense, you should defend what you did and why. You can, and maybe should, discuss why it ended up not being used if there are interesting lessons learned, but stay away from political or interpersonal arguments (these can indeed sound whiney). Stay positive and focus on what you did, not on how much other people then liked the results.


Research database access friction Why is access to research databases (ebrary, EBSCO, JSTOR, LexisNexis, Project MUSE, Proquest, Sage, Science Direct, etc) – even when you’re a student or faculty member at an institution with a subscription - such a hassle, especially when off-campus or on a phone/tablet? Is there any way to solve this?

I’m also curious which database is least painful to deal with, and what a solution to this problem could be.  Who would be best positioned to fix this problem?  How should they fix it?

The fundamental reason for friction is that these are commercially licensed resources, and so the licensors have a strong motive to ensure that only people who've paid for it in some way have access to them. Without that requirement, there'd be no reason to throw up the barriers.

The exact ways in which this friction manifests vary a lot - my understanding is that different access methods can be preferred in different places. I'll try and be general here, and explain what's currently used.

There are two basic methods for authorisation.

Site verification.
Individual verification.

The first of these involves identifying that you, the user, are coming from a site which has access. This is pretty trivial if you are on-campus and that campus has a defined IP range - "oh, they're coming from 1.2.3.4, they must be at Wherever University, let them in". In these cases, it can be completely seamless - in fact, so seamless that one real problem is that users can believe the resources are public, and get frustrated when they go home and they're not there! It also allows for 'walk-in' access - many licenses explicitly provide that if you're physically using the library, even as a visitor, you can access these databases. I am guessing from your post that you normally use this approach.

The second, individual verification, relies on each user having a signin to the database. This can be an enormous headache for both institutions and users, especially when you have multiple systems you need to sign in to. IP authentication is thus more popular.

However, IP verification breaks down if your institution shares its IP ranges with someone else (this is more common outside the West). If two institutions have a shared IP range, there's no practical way to provide access to users from one but block them from the other. If most of a country shares an IP range... you can see where this is going.

A similar problem arises if you are at an institution that uses IP authentication and you go somewhere else - perhaps you're at a conference, perhaps you're working from home, but either way you're not on the right network. One approach to get around this is to provide a VPN system, which drives all your traffic back through the "right" IPs. This is a hassle for users (and for the provider), and may not always be available. Another approach is to use a proxy server, but this is again something of a hassle for users. Both can lead to long network delays, and you have the associated problems of actually getting into the VPN/proxy server.

A common approach is to fall back on individual authentication. Most major databases offer optional individual logins, which let you save papers, set your viewing preferences, etc. These can be repurposed as logins which 'remember' that you have access rights, and let you use the service when away from your home network. They'll usually stop providing access after a while (a few weeks or months?) if you haven't signed in to it from your home network at some point, in order to prevent them remaining active forever. However, this still has the too-many-names problem of individual verification - no-one wants to juggle a ScienceDirect account and a JSTOR account and a Lexis account etc etc etc.

The best solution to this is to use an identity management/single sign-on system. The most common of these at the moment (less common in the US, I believe) is Shibboleth. Shibboleth provides a single login screen for all participating services. A user selects their home institution, is taken to a page there, signs in (or is automatically authenticated), and returns to the database service with authorised access. If done effectively, this can even completely replace IP authentication - you can do the necessary authentication for people on a local network automatically.

In theory, a system like Shibboleth should reduce friction dramatically - it can provide a standard sign-on system for all databases, and only require a single username/password which the user already knows (usually because it gets them into their email...). Compare to, eg, the ubiquitous "sign in with Facebook/Twitter/Google" buttons on web services. However, the problem is that each individual provider service has to set it up. The big databases like ScienceDirect or JSTOR are usually happy to do this, but small journals or databases - especially if the majority of their customers are happy with IP authentication - may not be willing to go to the effort of setting it up.

In an ideal world, we'd all be standardising on something like this. Unfortunately, there's a lot of people who all have to pull in the same direction for it to happen, and what is most convenient for publishers is not always what's most convenient for libraries or for users.


Minor(?) error introduced during typesetting I recently had a paper accepted by a journal which doesn't provide author proofs. Unfortunately, a typographical error was introduced during typesetting, but I had no way to know this until the paper went in print. I'm trying to determine what is the line between a minor typo and an error which requires issuing a correction.

To get into some more specifics, a constant was left out of an equation. Although that sounds really bad on its face, the equation is very standard and everyone in the field already knows the correct form of the equation. I can't realistically conceive of anyone being misled by the error. In fact, I doubt most readers will even notice. But it's technically incorrect as it stands.

This is one of those instances where I feel damned if I do and damned if I don't. Issuing a correction looks bad, but leaving the mistake looks bad as well. I double checked the revised manuscript we submitted and confirmed the error was definitely introduced by the journal staff. What do I do here?

When you say that issuing a correction looks bad, I imagine that you mean issuing an Erratum/Corrigendum. Now, these really don't reflect that badly on you and your career in the first place, but the error honestly sounds so minor that an erratum would be rather overkill. Actually, I imagine many journals might even decline publishing an erratum for such a trivial case.

However, especially if the publication was quite recent, it might be possible to correct it anyway. At least some journals are willing to make small corrections to published articles, sometimes with a small notice, sometimes accompanied by something like a Publisher's note. In such cases it's quite common to see the journal accept responsibility for errors they've introduced in the notice. It might be worth checking if the journal would be willing to do that.


How many papers accepted in Special issue call For paper? I have a paper that I am working on . I found a special issue on the area I am working on.
My advisor told me special section have a good chance for acceptance.

What is good about special issue call for paper on journals ?

How many papers are usually accepted?

This may depend on your field of research. In my field, it is often considered easier to publish in special issues, because in general

all contributions are submitted to review en bloc, so there is a chance for weaker contributions to be 'kept afloat' by stronger ones
special issue editors have incentives to be lenient with rather negative reviews on individual papers, because they want their special issue to be published and therefore need a sufficient number of papers to survive
the competition for slots in a special issue may be lower than for slots in a regular issue, due to the narrower topic
papers whose general contribution may be questionable can still work in the context of a special issue with a more narrowly defined topic.

It is not possible to give a reliable estimate for acceptance rates, as this depends on many factors; however, it is likely higher for special issues compared to regular issues of a given journal.

As for the call for papers, the chance of your paper being accepted depends on whether the special issue editors seek to fill an empty slot in the proceedings of an earlier workshop, panel, etc., or whether this is an open call (and then of course on the quality and fit of your abstract/paper).


Science Ph.D. to a sociological post-doc? I am finishing up my phd, with a heavy climate change/plant physiology/molecular focus. Would it be possible to now enter a more sociological post-doc (e.g. connection between economic models and climate change, or gender vs. climate change, etc.)? How disparate can your phd and postdoc be when your phd is in a hard science?

My goal after my postdoc is a teaching position at a liberal arts college focusing both on hard science, and sociology if at all possible.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

The only issue is finding a post doc that will accept you. That is up to them, of course. You will need to sell yourself and whatever skills you have. Some department that is happy about cross-disciplinary studies would be a good place to look.

Another possibility is to use a more science-y post doc and use the time and contacts to develop more of the skills used in sociology, though I'd guess that you are pretty familiar with statistical based research already.

The next issue would be to find a liberal arts college that wants those skills. Again, one that values cross disciplinary studies would be good. Many top places will put value on that. Again, you could start heavily committed to one of your skill areas and gradually move to a wider base through your research and taking advantage of teaching opportunities.

In general, though, I'd say it is do-able, but will take both a wide search for positions and a good way to present yourself to advantage in each case.

Finally, develop a wide circle of collaborators who can help you meld and move between the areas.


Drifting away from the "boring" slide in the conference I am not a fan of heavy/text-infested slides and hope my audience also second my opinion. I did resort to the healthy image-text ratio in most of the slides and am relying on my speaking skills during my first presentation! In this context, how should he/she adapt himself to suit the interest of audience,dynamically? If I realize that a couple of sides have turned out to be cumbersome or "boring"**, how should I seamlessly switch over to the next section and regain the lost interest.

**boring = Many example slides are available as follows :

Example 1 :Slide which talks about the approach of simulation, when actually results of the simulation are the "meat" of the talk.
Example 2(The first few slides of the talk)

Hypothetical Talk : Thumbdrives have changed the world, Jan 2003
Motivation Slide, 1 : End of the road for Floppy Disks(3 Bullets)
Motivation Slide, 2 : The Storage Roadmap(Image), the arise of the
PenDrive(3 Bullets)
The News Slide,   3 : Ascend,ManDisk and Watergate 3 News Clippings + 3 Images
The Cool Feature, 4 : Pendrives = 1K X Floppy Disks, they are Reusable CDs
Paper Starts    , 5 : How I used the cool features efficiently to build something
even cooler?

In your talk, every slide tells a story.  That story can be as short or as long as you want.  Just like the overview slide tells the story of the whole talk in a single slide, each section of the talk and even each individual slide can be presented at multiple levels of resolution.
Familiarize yourself with the story you want to tell at these multiple different levels of resolution, and you can change the pacing to match the interest level of the audience.

For example, let's say you've got a slide explaining the details of how you performed a simulation.  You might present this same slide at three radically different levels of detail:

High detail: explain each of the parameters and why you chose it
Low detail: "To study this in simulation, we selected these parameters.  The important choices here are ..." [explain the critical choices]
Minimalist: "We studied this in simulation using these parameters, and ..." [move on to following results slide]

If you are concerned that you are boring your audience, you can shift to a lower detail presentation without actually disrupting your narrative.
This is also a good technique for managing your time, to ensure that you don't go over-time or badly under-time, and can help you customize your material for different audiences.


Should I choose the schools that I apply to, or should I ask my advisors to do that for me? I am applying to some PhD programs this year. If I just ask my advisors to choose the school for me, they might think I am lazy and have done no research. However if I do that on my own, I am afraid that maybe the advisors think I am arrogant for aiming for schools out of my reach. The problem is I don't know how strong my profile is and I think that my advisors should be better informed than I am. What should I do?

Fortunately, this isn't an either-or proposition!  I agree with your assessment that you shouldn't come to your advisors empty-handed and ask for some schools to apply to.  However, it would be perfectly reasonable for you come to them with a couple schools you like - probably spread out by competitiveness and such - and maybe some guidelines for what you want to focus on and where you would be willing to move to.
Ask their opinions on the schools you picked, and ask them if they have some others they would recommend, based on what they know about you.


"Working Plan" in PhD application I am currently writing my "research proposal" for my PhD in Statistics application, basically I am asked to provide:

Project description (activities, methodologies, expected results).
State of the Art.
Objectives.
References.
Working program.

I am not sure what a "working program" really is given that in practice I've described every aspect regarding my future research in the previous items.
I've contacted the PhD office but I didn't received an answer, I've contacted my advisor and he was as clueless as myself.

Hope you guys could shed some light over this.

Thanks in advance.

The work plan breaks down your project into operational steps, detailing when you will take on which task and for how long. A good work plan is feasible and complete. It signals to the committee that you are realistic and aware of the scope and practicalities of your project. It could look something like this:

Source


Do you agree that cheating on exams provides an unfair advantage? Do you think it is “okay” to tell on your peers? This is inspired by another persons question regarding weather or not it is okay to tell on your peers for cheating during exams.

Since I am new to the site, I am having difficulty responding to the question, so I’m making a question instead.

Some people commented to this question and said that you are not giving a cheater an unfair advantage because students are “not competing against one another.”
My question is how do you think this is true?
Students are responsible for their own learning, and as a result of that, are not directly affected by another persons cheating.
I beg to differ.

Other students cheating does affect other students, or we wouldn’t have to ask questions like this.

It IS an unfair advantage, in many ways, here is an example of just one:

Student A studied hard for his/her midterm. She/he arrived prepared with only 4 hours of sleep.
Student B hardly studied, with plans on passing by cheating off his/her friend that was sat next to them.
Student B and his/her helpful friend, let’s call him/her student C, are seated directly behind student A.

This is the way this plays out:
During the exam, student B and student C begin to whisper every time the prof makes his rounds to the other side of the room. It is a big lecture hall, and the professor can not hear them on the other side of the room.
But, all the other students around B and C sure can.
Student A is becoming frustrated.
The whispering is quite distracting to him/her, and dispite his/her delicate “shhh” every time B and C begin their routine, the whispering continues.
At one point, A even turns to B and C and asks “can you please stop talking. This is an exam- you shouldn’t be talking.”
B ans C continue to talk.
Student A, although successful with her studies and a good student in general, has a common problem: test anxiety. Now, she has become distracted.
She has a moral discontent as she does not want to “rat out” her fellow students during the exam.
However, she is now struggling with her answers, as her anxiety has been activated, and she is having a hard time concentrating.
As a result of this, Student A gets a much lower mark than she would have had she not been distracted during the exam. Student B gets a much higher mark due to Student C helping him/her during the test.

So, my question is this. How is this NOT an unfair advantage?

In fact, regardless of how a student may cheat (distracting or not distracting) HOW is this not an unfair advantage?

Students who study for their tests, and do not cheat, show up to the exam fully prepared. Often they are tired from the preparation, as studying for exams is 100% exhausting.
Students who cheat don’t have to commit so much time or resources to exams (or anything). They can get more sleep, enjoy their out of school activities, and still pass the exam due to cheating.
In some cases, the cheater may even score higher than someone who actually studied.
How is that fair?
Also, considering GPA and the advantages of having a high one for scholarship application, and job competition down the road, I fail to see how cheaters do not affect other students.
Another point worth mentioning, is the moral dilemma that the cheating student places on their peers.
To tell or not to tell?

If anyone has any other points regarding this, please feel free to share... and if you are a cheater- you should seriously consider applying yourself in a way that reflects your true intelligence.
Why put yourself at risk?

In answer to the original posting, and just to be clear, I do not think there is anything wrong with reporting your peers for cheating. Especially when it affects your own grade that you studied hard for.

I know of a case in the 80's where a workstudy was assigned to run off physics exams.  She was keeping copies for herself and selling them to students in the class.  On the day of the final exam, a student went up to the professor and handed him a copy of his final.  "Where did you get this?"  The student explained that copies of all his exams had been readily available for $50 all semester.

So the prof made up a new exam on the spot, wrote it on the blackboard and announced to the class that because of this cheating, the final exam would now be 80% (rather than 30%) of the grade for the course.

A certain student named Mike, who had not cheated all semester and was doing well in the class ended up kind of bombing the final.  If the final had counted only 30% of the grade, he'd have been fine.  But he ended up with a C because of the new weighting.  Mike had a "Regent's Scholarship" at this school, which was worth thousands of dollars (tuition, fees, dorm, meals all paid) and which was re-newable every year.  Because of this C, Mike lost his Regent's Scholarship.  The young lady selling exams for $50 a piece cost Mike $1000's of dollars plus a nasty hit of a C in physics for an engineering major.

This is a stark example of cheating affecting others.  But in general, when there is a "culture" of cheating, then this undermines academic standards.  In most cases, some student cheats, passes Calc I and then goes on to Calc II.  It seems like a victimless crime, but now the Calc II prof has a class that's just a bit less prepared for Calc II than it should have been.  It drags down the class a bit and everyone in the room ends up being just a bit less prepared for Calc III.

As to your question about whether you should rat out the cheaters:  Yes and no.  Yes, tell the prof that there is an unreasonable amount of blatant cheating going on and that you don't think you're being treated fairly when you study so hard and they bypass learning.  But naming names is another issue.  If you say, "Jimmy copies off Jenny on every test", there's nothing the prof can do, because he didn't see it.  You've alerted him to the problem and hopefully he'll keep a sharper eye out or make multiple versions of the exams or something else to squelch the cheating.

(The workstudy was, of course, found out and expelled.  IMO, she should have been prosecuted for fraud.)


Why don't many textbooks have electronic versions? I'm trying to find a way to buy Doug West's Introduction to Graph Theory but with an electronic edition. I can't find one. What's the barrier for these books being electronic?

tl;dr-  Many books aren't available in ebook form for money and pretentiousness.

Money can be impacted because it's really easy to pirate ebooks.

Pretentiousness is relevant because there seems to be a stereotype about printed books being more prestigious.

Worth noting that I'm obviously against this practice, as I see it to be contrary to the mission of spreading knowledge and making academia more broadly accessible.  I would encourage instructors to select texts with electronic formats available whenever possible.
1.  Ebook availability makes pirating easier
It's pretty easy to pirate an ebook.  A quick automated script can take screenshots that're easily enough pasted into a word processor and saved as a PDF.  Common ebook apps attempt to have defenses against this practice, though they tend to be fairly easily defeated (which I won't elaborate on for obvious reasons).
The same can be done with hardcopy books, e.g. as demonstrated by Google Books, though it's a lot harder and typically produces lower-quality results.
2.  Many feel that hardcopy books are more prestegious
I have to stress that I truly despise this point.  However, the one book that I've written isn't available in ebook form as I wrote it as the request of a PhD advisor who insisted that it not be available in electronic format.  I protested this on multiple occasions, so while I strongly disagree with their logic, here I'll explain it.
First, we wrote the book primarily due to the publish-or-perish regime that rules much of academia.  My advisor felt that, by writing the authoritative book on a topic, it would establish recognizable authority across the field.  Students would know our names because they had to buy the book, and academics in the field would need a hardcopy of it on their book shelves.  And, of course, publishing books looked good on their faculty activity report, an annual report to their supervisor (typically a department head, or the school's president for senior professors).
My advisor had also expressed the opinion that readers respect a book more if they can feel it in their hands, especially as a hard-cover book.  The formality and expense impressed upon the reader the stature of the topic and the writers.  We've recently seen an example of how some students can feel that electronic materials are less respectable in this post.
And while my advisor didn't say this, I think that it's important to note that, until recently, ebooks and the internet weren't a thing.  Many older folks completed their education using only hardcopies, and due to that background, they have a strong emotional association between hardcopies and legitimacy, while electronic copies can feel cheap by contrast.


How to make students learn prerequisites Throughout this year (at least some of) my students found it hard to follow the theory part of a computational physics course I thought. This was mostly because they lacked the mathematical foundations they should have learned already years ago.

Since I did not want to lower the course level to that of an introductory course in mathematics, I adjusted it only insofar that I tried hard to simplify the presentation.
In addition, I offered my help in consultation hours and the possibility to discuss selected exercises in detail during the lectures if I get detailed questions (which I almost never got). Finally, I tried to design exercises in a way which should make them learn basics as well. I also announced very early that knowledge of basics will be a strict requirement for the exam. The students already have a Bachelor degree and should in principle know how to learn from books by themselves. However, many of them preferred to stay idle throughout the year and to wait for the sample solutions I slowly and reluctantly handed out. They then tried to learn those (more or less by heart) instead of learning the methods behind. This happened even though I had announced that this would not be useful, especially because they are allowed to use all written/printed resources.

Now a relatively large number (1/4-1/3) opted out (did not hand in a solution) and will repeat the exam in 2 month. This apparently means that they want to use more time to prepare themselves. Others will speculate that the next exam will be similar (since I thought the course for the first time they did not have any old sample solutions).

For at least the first group of people the declared goal of making them learn the basics might therefore be reached. However, I would like to achieve this in a less forceful way such that the lectures become more enjoyable for them. So, how can I make them start to learn the the prerequisites early? In a sense I would like to change their general strategy to wait until the end and to solve the problem of completing the exam by learning by heart.

The problem is complicated a bit by the fact that the audience is mixed from different fields with different degrees.

The obvious solution to improve the teaching of their early math courses is unfortunately not something I can provide without a general strategy change by the University. Obviously I will always try to improve the quality of my own teaching but I do not want to reduce the level of the course to zero. My course already included a brief repetition of required basics.

I think you can't make students learn anything, and it would be especially difficult to make them learn something other than what you are teaching at the moment.  Still, I can think of some things to address the problem (many of which it sounds like you are already doing):

You can make sure that the unprepared students see early on that they are unprepared and liable to fail the course.  This might not motivate them to learn, but it is still a nice thing to do.
You can give exercises that require them to learn prerequisite notions incrementally, giving them hints on where to find information not covered in the lecture. Just don't expect them to learn more than they need for each problem.
At the end of the term, you can make sure not to pass the students who didn't learn the things you said they would need to know in order to pass.  (Otherwise you justify the very behavior that you complain about.)
You can pitch the course at a lower (but still nonzero) level.  In my opinion the only reason not to spend more time on the basics would be if there were a significant number of students who would be bored by this.  But maybe they would appreciate a review anyway.
Instead of changing the course, you could change the course description to try to deter more of the unprepared students.
If the students vary too widely in their backgrounds, you could try to create different versions of the course in future years.