How can I stay active in academia from an industry position? Places like the old Bell Labs and Genentech gRED have an environment where the scientists publish quite a lot. Suppose I wanted to build my research R&D departments to have strong academic ties. What would I need to have in place to keep in touch with academia?

People tend to do whatever gets rewarded.  So if you want your department to establish strong academic ties, then find ways to formally reward that.  In addition, people do stuff that they like to do when they don't have to cut through red tape.  In particular, you should

Make it easy for your researchers to attend conferences
Establish a culture of seminars, and make it easy to bring external visitors


Can I publish a single page research paper? I wanted to publish a research paper which has less relevant stuff compacted and would be more focused on important and relevant items.

Also, I have failed to find a guide to publish small compact research papers.

Yes, if your ideas can be expressed concisely enough. For example if you were to find a counterexample to the Beal Conjecture, then you can write two paragraphs and be done. Watson and Crick's 1953 paper describing the structure of DNA was one page long, and won the Nobel Prize. Some other examples of very short papers (admittedly, some of these are jokes) are here.


Is it possible to change email on published paper? My paper was published two weeks ago. I have just noticed that I have provided the wrong email. Is it possible to change the email after the paper was published?

You could do the following things in this situation. But, it depends on (1) whether it is a journal paper or a conference paper?, (2) whether it is already published as offprint?

Politely ask the publisher about it (as it is a mistake done on your part). (credit: @Dirk)
E-mail the editor of the journal (if journal paper) and request to publish an Erratum on your behalf. (credit: @PsySp)
Publish an erratum on your personal web page or blog.


What is the difference between IEEE transactions, magazines, conferences and journals IEEE Repository has various types of documents including transactions, magazines, conferences and journals.
What is the difference between the above four?

IEEE Transactions and Journals publish essentially the same thing: peer-reviewed papers, some shorter (e.g., briefs), some longer.

IEEE Magazine articles are most often written at a less technical level than Transaction and Journal papers (though, there are exceptions).

Conference papers are those presented at various IEEE-sponsored conference venues, and published as part of the conference proceedings.


PhD - Well known professor or well known school? What is more valuable broadly speaking (assuming all else equal):

A PhD from a decent school (top ~100) with a very well respected (but not famous) professor; say for example the head of department
A PhD from a top school (top ~5) with a young academic or substantially less reputable professor compared to the other school

In my case both are funded, both projects are good, and I can see myself working with either academic. Is there a broad brush-stroke "rule" as to which degree is more valuable for my career?

I can't see how either would be preferable to the other. What matters more to your career is what you do with the opportunities you have.

And note that disasters can happen even at the most prestigious levels.

Do good work. Make lots of professional contacts.


Is it acceptable that a teacher assistant encourage students to read his authored materials too? During my leisure time, I used to prepare some pamphlets in the topic of courses I always wanted to teach. Each, full of examples and solved problems which I designed and solved myself, not photocopying from books and papers; that are so helpful to the engineering students.

If one day, I have the chance to teach in a TA class, is it ethical to ask the students to read my prepared materials too? Or the teaching assistant should only solve the problems of the reference book which is told by the professor of the course?

Your role as a teaching assistant is to further the educational goals of the course (as determined by the instructor and/or the department).

If encouraging your students to read these materials furthers the educational goals of the course, then you should do so. If not, then you shouldn't.

Since the instructor and/or the department determines what the educational goals of the class are, you should check with them first, and use your extra material only with their approval. (Besides for the issue of making sure your material is consistent with the goals of the course, it also makes sense for them to be aware of what is going on.)


Is there an equivalent to journal impact factor for scholarly book publishers? I am considering writing a monograph or editing a multi-authored book. Before proceeding further, I would like to pick a suitable publisher to show them the book proposal.

To choose, I would like to see a quantitative estimate of scholarly success. I am thus wondering whether there is an equivalent to journal impact factor for scholarly book publishers?

Thomson Reuters offers the Book Citation Index.

Interesting side note: I just found this publication by Kayvan Kousha and Mike Thelwall (2014) (posprint for free on ResearchGade) stating that Google Books is a good source for Book Citations, "despite  its  lack  of  a  public  citation index."


Market research & consulting: perception and acdemic career perspectives Those of you, who had a chance to read some of my questions on this site, are likely aware of my ongoing job search, which I am doing on both academia and industry fronts. Since, naturally, I am leaning toward research-focused work, recently I ran across some additional industry positions, which are also research-focused. Yes, you guessed it right: I'm talking about market research or research-intensive consulting jobs. With that in mind, I became curious about the following aspects in the context of long-term academic career perspectives:

What is the perception toward market research jobs (including a research & consulting mix positions, such as ones at Gartner, for example) and their temporary holders within the academia community?
If the perception is negative, is it to extent that it might prevent or significantly jeopardize one's career options (research & teaching) upon return to academia from stints at one or more of market research or "Big N" IT consulting companies?
Would negative perception, if any, and the corresponding career impact be decreased, depending on the organizational "brand" (i.e., Gartner vs. smaller market research firm)?

It is important to note that my discipline (Information Systems) is a multidisciplinary field of study, which combines various aspects from hard sciences, such as computer science, and ones from soft (social) sciences, such as management science (which market research as well as business and IT consulting are actually part of). Therefore, IMHO there is no significant disconnect between academia and industry in terms of knowledge domains and research streams. I thought that this information will clarify the situation and, potentially, will improve the above-mentioned perception.

I can't speak for the IS field, but I think that there's a strong chance that your time in industry would be considered as a break from doing research relevant to academia. Unless you are regularly publishing papers in the relevant journals or conferences, your time working outside of the academy will be perceived as time idle.

Now, that being said, market research is a field frequently included in Business Schools. I don't know where your IS degree is from (Communications? Business? somewhere else), but I think that Business Schools are much more likely than other departments to value time spent in industry when hiring professors. So, there are probably different standards for evaluating your output during your time in industry. Published reports about the state of a market might be more acceptable as a valued contribution to the literature, and therefore less likely to paint you as having been out of touch with the academic literature.


In Canada, Is it more likely for faculty members to allocate funds for a PhD applicant than a master's applicant? I am currently applying to a Masters degree in neuroscience (McGill, in Canada). In order to get in, I have to contact an advisor that is willing to fund my studies. If I fail to do so, I cannot enter the program. (This is apparently common in Canada.)

I have already contacted two possible advisors but neither of them responded positively, arguing they had no positions available.

Speaking with a friend researcher, he told me that it is less likely to get an advisor (and funding) for a Masters degree (even though the university is asking me to do so) and that I should better apply for the PhD program because researchers are not interested in investing money in a Master student.

Is this true? Do researchers reject master's degree prospective students because they do not want to invest money in them?

Thank you.

You friend might be right as well as the advisors you have contacted with.

It is true that a master's student is less likely to be productive (in terms of publications) compared to a PhD student.
Therefore, even if you are an above-the-average applicant, the advisor would not want to allocate funds for you. This is because when your time for productivity comes, you will finish your master's, you might go to another university for PhD. Therefore, allocating funds for a PhD student is more likely.

The advisors that you have contacted with might really have insufficient funds.

However, the solution for this problem, I think, is not applying for a PhD programme. Rather, you may state that you intend to continue your PhD in the same university, in case they do not want to invest into a master's student.


Applying for different PhD position: letters of recommendation I'm a PhD student in my second year and strongly considering applying for a PhD position at a different university (see my previous question).

However, I'm not sure I want to bring this up with my advisor at the current moment (of maybe at all before I have secured another position, this seems to be the general advice over at workplace.SE).

For applying, though, I need to have two letters of recommendation, which will be hard to get not including my supervisor (because I have mostly worked with him so far, so there aren't many others I would consider asking) or maybe even excluding people who know him and would tell him that I am applying elsewhere.

What can I do in this situation?

Have you ever tried discussing your concerns with your supervisor? It isn't very clear from your previous post and this one. As you mentioned in your previous post that you are quite indispensable to his lab, hence, communicating your problems might make him want to fix them. I had a friend who was on the verge of a burn-out while doing his PhD. Like you, he was also handling multiple projects at the same time. One day he walked upto his supervisor's office and told her that he would like to leave the lab because of certain issues and would like her to support her PhD applications elsewhere. She thanked him for bringing up the issues and did provide letters of recommendations in a timely manner. At the end he continued working in the same lab but the supervisor was much more accommodating of his requests.

Now this might/might not happen with you but making your supervisor aware of the issues seems to be the best approach in my opinion. Especially when your field is interdisciplinary and it may be difficult to change departments without bumping into one of his acquaintances. It would save you from a lot of headache and mess if you just tell your supervisor that you are considering changing labs and want to explore a different (positive and motivating) environment for your PhD. Make a draft of what/how you want to say it. It will take some time but will be worthwhile in the long-run. And if you think he might say something and change his mind later on, it might be best to communicate via email. This will serve as a reference to explain your situation to your potential supervisor/grad school.

All the best!


Is there a UK PhD scholarship for international students that pays as much as a particular city's average annual salary? After checking out PhD stipends offered by various UK universities, I've come to the conclusion that they are way below the average annual salary.

I realize now that this is normal. At Durham, for instance, the most competitive studentship is valued only at GBP 14,000+ annually.

Are there scholarships in the UK that pays as much as a particular city's average annual salary?

Are there scholarships that are as generous as Vanier (CAD 50,000 annually) and Trillium (CAD 40,000 annually) in Canada?

Among many studentships provided by Universities in the UK and major research councils (through Centers for Doctoral Training), most programs will only cover student fees and some moderate living expenses which may not be comparable with the median salary in the region. However, you should bear in mind, that the stipends are usually tax-free, and there are significant discounts for students (e.g. train tickets, council tax) helping to reduce the expenses.

To answer your question formally, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions PhD Funding provides about €3,110 per month for living expenses, which will exceed the median salary in almost every county in the UK, expect the greater London perhaps.


How to use results/ideas from a paper I reviewed? I recently reviewed a paper (general applied mathematics context). During the review, I realized that the fairly general ideas introduced in the paper can potentially be applied to a specific problem in a similar context. The authors did not mention this application in their paper, so I suggested to add a short comment about it in my review.

I later started thinking about the application in more detail and tried out some things, which actually seem to work quite well for this application. Now, the paper is still in the review process and might take some time until it gets published. What is the proper way how to proceed here in order to use the ideas and results which I in my exclusive position as a reviewer saw? How can I refer to the paper that is still under review? How can I best discuss the ideas with my co-workers (and potential co-authors) without disclosing that I reviewed the paper?

The paper under review is not available online on any preprint servers such as arXiv etc

You can't ethically do anything based on ideas from this paper until it is made public (by the authors as a preprint, or by the publisher).  In particular, before that point you can't refer to the paper, you can't use the ideas without referring to it, you can't publish or otherwise disseminate results based on it, and you can't discuss it with other people, including your collaborators.  It can be really frustrating to know something important and be unable to tell anyone else for the time being, but there's no way around it ethically.

The reason is that submitting a paper for publication is not considered to release it for other use or dissemination until it is actually published.  The people involved in processing and evaluating it (most notably the editors and reviewers) have an ethical obligation to keep all information about the submission strictly confidential and not to use it to gain any personal advantage.  Once it is published of course it can be treated the same as any other paper, and in the meantime the authors can choose to make information publicly available via preprints or talks (in which case others can follow up on this information as appropriate), but nobody else is authorized to release any information before publication beyond what the authors have chosen to share, or to use it for any purpose other than reviewing the paper.  Otherwise it has the same ethical status as using material you stole off the authors' desks.

There's no reason why the research community has to work this way in principle, but it's the system that has evolved over time.  (Note that as recently as the 1930's, famous physicists were not all in agreement as to how peer review should work.)  It's possible that in the future we will move to systems such as submitting for publication only after releasing a preprint.  That seems to be the trend in some fields, but we haven't yet made a full transition if we ever will, and the community's ethical principles still offer protection to authors who choose not to distribute their paper before publication.

Nobody signs a non-disclosure agreement when reviewing a paper, but the ethical principles are well established.  Deliberately violating them would be a serious form of misconduct, which could easily be career-ending if it was more than a minor or technical violation.

Pete L. Clark asks in the comments whether referees are allowed to prepare follow-up papers, as long as they don't distribute them before the original paper becomes public.  I.e., does the "you can't ethically do anything based on ideas from this paper" really mean you can't do anything, or just that you can't disseminate anything yet?  (Let's assume it's a single-authored paper that is not discussed with anyone else in advance.)  My interpretation is that nobody can stop you from thinking a little, and you may not even be able to stop yourself, but actively working on and writing a paper of your own would be abusing your position as referee.  There probably isn't a consensus as to exactly where the line is for what's strictly forbidden, but either side of the line could still look terrible.  If you want to publish work you began thinking about as a referee, I'd strongly recommend against doing it so quickly that's it clear you had to have known about the original paper in advance.


Is excluding a co-author from a proposal considered academic misconduct or just an ethical issue? I worked on a proposal together with a coworker. The idea for the proposals came from industry and we all discussed this. There were 2 project and we all have inputs.  My project was accepted and his was not.  We all contributed ideas back and forth with the 2 projects.

I did put his name on the first draft proposal but left his name off the final version and put myself as sole PI.  I did ask him for further corrections but his reply was that there was none.  I simply forgot and left his name off without asking his permission.  It was an oversight.

Now he saw this proposal and wants to report me for misconduct.

Is he right that he can report me for academic misconduct?  Is this an ethical issue and not academic misconduct?

Your question as I understand it is: is it considered misconduct to exclude a co-author from a proposal, or is it some other ethical issue?

Certainly "research misconduct" can broadly be defined as "ethically problematic behaviors in research" - in which case there is no difference. However, let us assume a narrower definition of "misconduct."

The specific definition of "misconduct" may depend on where you are. In the United States, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) defines "research misconduct" as follows:

  Research misconduct means fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.

and "plagiarism" is further defined as

  the appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.

(Individual institutions may, and often do, extend this definition as a matter of internal policy. However, the ORI policy represents the least inclusive definition of misconduct in the United States.)

According to this definition, it seems that using your coworker's ideas, processes, results, or words in your research proposal without giving him credit is academic misconduct.

Having said that, the ORI also says this on plagiarism:

  Many allegations of plagiarism involve disputes among former collaborators who participated jointly in the development or conduct of a research project, but who subsequently went their separate ways and made independent use of the jointly developed concepts, methods, descriptive language, or other product of the joint effort. The ownership of the intellectual property in many such situations is seldom clear, and the collaborative history among the scientists often supports a presumption of implied consent to use the products of the collaboration by any of the former collaborators.

  For this reason, ORI considers many such disputes to be authorship or credit disputes rather than plagiarism. Such disputes are referred to PHS agencies and extramural institutions for resolution.

From your description, however, it seems that this is not the case in your scenario - you and your coworker did not "go separate ways." There is no "implied consent" to use his ideas. He fully expected to be a co-author, and you yourself admit that he should have been a co-author, except that you somehow left him off.

(Even if this is considered an "authorship dispute" and not "plagiarism," it's not up to you to make that determination - it's up to the investigative body, who will look into the matter if your coworker chooses to report this.)

Finally, "honest error" is not considered misconduct according to the ORI. However, your coworker is not required to take your word for it that your exclusion of him from the proposal was an honest error. This is a determination that a third-party investigative body will typically make.

In summary: Your coworker is well within his rights to report you for misconduct. If he does so, you are free to try and persuade the investigators that this was an honest mistake.


What open access textbook publishing initiatives are around? I am wondering how open access textbook publishing platform is viewed in regard to publication turnover i.e. how quickly can one get published through it, compared to (say) traditional publishing?

There are several open access models and I am aware of Open Suny which describes itself as follows:

Open SUNY Textbooks is an open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants. This pilot initiative publishes high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.

This is a peer-reviewed platform (so it is different from self publishing).

I maintain an online catalog of books whose authors have intentionally made them free (as opposed to what Project Gutenberg does with old public domain books). Probably a majority of these are textbooks.

In my experience, nearly all free textbooks are simply written by their authors without working through any organization. Often professors write up lecture notes, and the lecture notes gradually become more and more elaborate and evolve into a book. During the ~14 years that I've been paying attention, I've seen many initiatives, consortia, and for-profit companies come and go. Most have had very little impact. A good example of a zero-impact initiative was California Governor Schwarzenegger's Free Digital Textbook Initiative, which was announced with great fanfare and accomplished absolutely nothing. (There is a newer initiative called the California Open Education Resources Council.)

A couple of organizations that have done good work are merlot.org and OpenStax.

Your quote from the Open SUNY project's description says:

  This pilot initiative publishes high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.

As with a lot of these initiatives, this seems to be ill-conceived and stuck in 20th-century models of technology. For digital distribution, you don't need a publisher. For print distribution, there are services like lulu. What traditional publishers do that is still important is a lot of stuff that is just expensive to do. E.g., for a mechanical engineering textbook they would hire a professional artist to do the illustrations.


Etiquette for contacting potential advisors after submitting application I have applied to a bunch of PhD programs in computer science but have not heard back from several of them, and my top choices are among those schools. I am thinking about contacting a few professors at those institutions about their progress in the graduate admissions process, as I already have other questions that I want to ask them (questions about their papers, current projects, etc.)

Is it OK if I ask them about the status of my application and/or the admissions timeline after I ask my real question? Will the answer differ if I do/don't know them in person? Or is it best for me to just refrain from asking such questions in any case?

In addition, if I mention offers that I have already received in the email, will that be considered rude?

So, questions about their current papers etc are not the same as asking about your admission progress.

Yes, ask the about the papers and projects but not about your admission status.

You should address questions about your admission status to the admissions department and, they may have already published a link, or email, for such contact.

As for mentioning other offers, if you are border-line case for them and they know you have other offers that may help their decision...


IEEE templates for Transaction journals I am trying to figure out which template to use for the journals

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

and

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia

Both are journals published by IEEE comsoc, but both also are transactions.

On the IEEE template info page I find separate template for both of them:

http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/authors/author_templates.html

If you downoload the templates for Communications Society Journals and open the README, you will find the following note

  This package contains the IEEE Communications Society subset of the full
  IEEEtran package and is intended for use with IEEE Communications Society
  publications. The included version of the IEEEtran_HOWTO.pdf has been
  specially formatted in IEEE Communications Society (comsoc) journal mode.

and the disclaimer

  NOTE: Take care not to confuse the "comsoc" and "compsoc" class options/modes as they are very different:

  comsoc  ==> IEEE Communications Society

  compsoc ==> IEEE Computer
  Society

The IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence is not published by the IEEE Communications Society but by the IEEE Computer Society (compsoc). Thus, I think that for this you should use the templates for Computer Society Journals.

The IEEE Transactions on Multimedia seems to be published by both societies and by others too. The IEEE Transactions on Multimedia home page links at the information for authors page which further links to the author digital tools page, but saying (bold mine):

  The style files are available on the web at the IEEE Author Digital
  Toolbox (link is external) under "Template for all Transactions."
  (LaTeX and MS Word).


Inventors on patent regarding research results In our research institute, advisors give phd students a lot of freedom and sometimes are not so much involved in the research. This was also the case for my latest research project. I gave him some demos every now and then to show my progress and another phd student helped me out a bit with making some examples and nice figures. However, I came up with the initial idea and step by step made the necessary decissions to come to the point where we are now. We are now in a phase where my advisor and the university want to patent my research and we are discussing all the possibilities with people from the legal departement. However, in all documents the other phd student + my advisor are also mentioned as "inventors". Wheras I'm quite sure that according to the laws related to being an inventor on a patent, they are officially not an inventor of this research project. The research that I did is quite applied so there is some chance that we can make some money with it in the future (selling it or starting a company). The university states that the inventors get 30% of all the profit that comes from the patent. This means that I would only get 10% since we are with 3 co-inventers. Also when I would start a company that does something with these results I would still have to give them some of the profit whereas they did not do something significant in the end.

When I look at researchers at other universities, I notice that it is quite common that all the authors on a paper are also the inventors of the patent that is associated with it. I can imagine that for most of these cases all the people involved at some innovative contribution which makes them a legitimate inventor. On the other hand it is also quite hard to say to your advisor that they should not be an inventor on the patent...

Is this an unspoken rule at many universities that advisors and co-workers are also inventors on a patent (similar to authors on a paper)? Is someone having experience a similar situation? How should I bring this up to my advisor and co-worker or would it bring me into more trouble when I would start this discussion?

First of all, your legislation is what counts. Patent law differs substantially between legislations. The remainder of my answer is based on the situation in Germany - but similar rules may exist for your legislation.

  Is this an unspoken rule at many universities that advisors and co-workers are also inventors on a patent

IANAL, and I'm not even totally sure about the situation in Germany, but I'd look for spelled out rules in

the "employee invention law" (Arbeitnehmererfindungsgesetz)
if you are employee as well as PhD student: your work contract or the relevant collective wage agreement
you may have signed a contract for your PhD that has relevant clauses, e.g. stating that any invention you invent is treated as "academic invention" regardless of whether you are also employee of the university or not.
If you are PhD student but not employee (e.g. paid by a scholarship), things may be totally different.
If you are in a research institute which is not part of a university, rules again can be different (industrial invention rules instead of academic invention could apply)

I found a web site dedicated to "inventor's compensation" (in German and for Germany).
They explain rules to estimate how much the invention the inventor's own invention and how much the company contributed (influenced e.g. by whether you used the university lab + instruments, and by your profession: how much of an inventor you are expected to be due to your profession and job).
This website explains that for you as well as for your (supposed) co-inventors, a point value (according more or less to a check list plus some common sense) should be calculated, and the percentages of co-inventorship are then calculated as percentages of the sum of all co-inventors' point values.


Should I submit a conference paper (extended abstract) to this chemical engineering conference? The deadline for uploading conference papers (extended abstracts) for presentations at the AICHE conference (http://www.aiche.org/conferences/aiche-annual-meeting/2013) is tonight.  I have already been accepted to present on the basis of my abstracts submitted a while ago.  (I wasn't invited to this conference; it requires registration and submission of material).

I emailed the event organizer and received the reply: "We strongly encourage a paper (synonymous with extended abstract) submission. However, it is not a requirement to present."

I can submit something today, but I would prefer not to.  For one thing, some of the material needs a little more polish.  And for another, I'd rather not reveal research results before the presentation date in November.  I meant to ask my advisor his opinion earlier when I met with him today, but it slipped my mind.  I've just started year two of grad school and this will be my first conference presentation.

Is there a good reason to go ahead and submit anyway?  Having no conference experience, I am not even sure what/who these papers/extended abstracts are for.  Am I skipping something that I really should be doing?

Thanks

EDIT: Checking the online presentations, it appears that most people have not uploaded an extended abstract.  Not sure if that makes a difference...

As a chemical engineer, I would recommend against submitting an extended abstract. The primary reason for this is that, unlike proceedings of the Materials Research Society, the extended abstracts of the AIChE annual meeting are not peer-reviewed. Therefore, any such publication will automatically be of lower weight than something that has been published in a venue that provides peer review.

In addition, because the work has effectively been "published," you will find it harder to secure publication for fuller versions of this work later on, as many journals could view the extended abstract as a "prior publication" and reject a paper on those grounds.

Moreover, as David Ketcheson suggests in his answer, the dissemination of your research will be greatly hampered by the relatively low circulation of the extended abstracts.

So, for this conference in particular, and more generally for any conference whose proceedings are not peer-reviewed, I would avoid submitting extended abstracts and conference proceedings.


Ontario College Advanced Diploma (OCAD) what is equivalent in US? I have 3 year Advanced Diploma form Ontario want to ask what is equivalent in US ?

First, it is important to recognize that there is often no such thing as "equivalent" between different nations.  That said, this sounds like it might be considered as somewhere between an Associates Degree and a Bachelor's Degree in the US system.

My recommendation is that you should expect people in the US to not know what the degree is, and to include a sentence or two in your CV / resume that explains its nature and what it means about your education.


How to reply to a potential PhD supervisor who asks if I have my own funding? I have a Master in Computer Science and I am applying to some Canadian Universities for a PhD...
After contacting to a supervisor, I got a positive reply, however he asked me:
"Do you have your own funding to support your PhD study?

What and how should I reply? On one hand having some financial support is quite vital to me, but on the other hand I don't want to lose this opportunity (I may work in order to support some of the costs!)

Just answer the question honestly.
If you have your own funding, say so.
If you do not have your own funding, say so.

If you do have your own funding, there is really no problem.
If you don't have your own funding, it may be possible to arrange some for you.


What kind of questions can I expect to see on a qualifying exam? In mathematics, there are certain open questions which are the subject of current research (think of the newest papers in the top journals).  I have also heard that some graduate programs ask questions such as these on their qualifying exam.  How common is this practice?  What kinds of questions can I expect to see on a qualifying exam?  I know that a qualifying exam typically tests the knowledge gained in graduate school, but I'm not sure to what extent this knowledge is tested?  How "advanced" should I expect these questions to be?

I think you shouldn't believe everything you hear.  Mathematicians like to tell stories about posing various famous open problems to certain brilliant young students, the idea being that these students don't have the respect and fear for these problems that an adult mathematician would and that maybe, just maybe, they will innocently work on them and even solve them.  And it seems to be true that every once in a great while a student solves a serious open problem this way.  The vast majority of the time they don't, of course: a problem that the experts in the field want to solve but can't is not going to be accessible to a young student, however brilliant, 99.99% of the time.

So maybe every once in a while a faculty member decides to put a "ringer" problem on an exam.  What do you think is going to happen?  With probability very close to one, no one will solve the problem, and the writer will have to own up to the fact that the question was not an appropriate one and make sure the students were not in any way penalized by its appearance on the exam.  How many times have I seen this happen on exams I have taken, written, or otherwise encountered?  Zero.

In fact qualifying exams test a standard syllabus; they certainly do not test research level mathematics.  Every department does their exams at least a little differently (a very few departments, like Princeton, don't even have written qualifying exams!) so I don't think there's much point in preparing / worrying about quals until you enroll in a specific graduate program.

Conversely, when you arrive in a graduate program, you should start asking for information about the qualifying exams.  And you'll get it: most programs have posted syllabi for quals.  Many programs, including those I've personally been involved with, have years and years of old quals for you to page through.  Nowadays a lot of these are freely available online: in fact, please see Ohio State's webpage: not only do they do they have posted all of their own qualifying exams going back at least ten years, they helpfully post links to qualifying exams at almost 20 different departments.

Thus the way to study for and pass quals is to go through old quals learning the material and techniques that come up again and again until you can do most of the problems on a given qual in a reasonable amount of time.  It's not really any more mysterious or romantic than that...


Unethical procedure in methods I am currently reviewing a paper for a journal and there's a section in the 'Methods' that may raise a questionable ethical concern on animal handling. The paper has a potential contribution to the field, however, there's this procedure that harms the animal in the study. I am thinking of rejecting the paper and raise a correspondence with the authors. Will the rejection decision a good decision for the paper?

You said, "MAY raise a questionable ethical concern". So, you might possibly misunderstand what they did, perhaps because they might have explained things poorly. I think that you should give the authors the benefit of doubt and let them defend themselves: recommend a major revision, acknowledging the potential value of their study, but make it clear that you insist that they document that they have followed ethical procedures in the method of concern. If they cannot provide satisfactory evidence of ethical methods, then you would be justified to reject the article for ethical problems.

And, as many other comments indicate, you should clearly explain your concerns to the editor.


Is it moral to contact a questionnaire participant because of alarming response? For a study, we sent out a questionnaire to members of the general public. The questionnaire was containing items related to well-being and happiness, among other items that are completely related to my field (computer science).

One respondent wrote about having suicidal thoughts because of personal issues. No signs of seeking treatment in the reply.

The participant left their e-mail address in the field "contact me back for the results and/or further clarifications".

What is my role here as a researcher? My first thought was to contact the participant and pointing them to seeking help (maybe also providing links to their national suicide prevention programs).

I know I've read something in a research textbook about unexpected ethics problems, but I don't remember where or what it said.

I think you need to contact your ethics committee (or equivalent), preferably quickly, for guidance. If there were enough questions about welfare on the questionnaire to be likely to bring up some sort of similar response, you should probably think about pre-empting it next time and automatically including links to suitable resources. It may be that now you can send out details to all participants (those who left email addresses, or perhaps the original distribution list, depending on how participants were recruited), as a way of offering help without singling them out. If the wording of the email address field requires it (I can't quite make sense of it), you could perhaps do so together with the results of the research, or a preliminary summary of the results...


Why don't papers have their titles as a filename? Often(basically always but I'm not 100% sure) when I download papers from any journal they have random letters and numbers as their title, this is quite annoying and I have to rename the document to have a descriptive name. Why do this files have these random filenames instead of the titles of the papers?

The filename is some sort of encoding that is compatible with the database in which they keep the papers, it might have a real world meaning or not. It is optimized for their own processing. I seriously doubt that they use a flat file system to store the documents.

But in general, trying to use a paper's title as a file name won't work anyway, since some characters that might occur in a title aren't accepted in filenames on every operating system. Colon and slash, for example, are problematic. There is also the problem that a paper might need to go into the database during the acceptance/review process in which the title of the paper isn't finalized.

In addition, while we like the titles of papers to be unique, that isn't always the case. So, some disambiguation needs to be done.

What you have, actually, is a reference to the paper that represents its "identity". This is similar to a pointer or reference in a programming language. The thing referenced can change arbitrarily, but its identity doesn't. This help guarantee that they don't lose it.


Asking for Recommendation Letters for Multiple Grad School Applications I would like to apply for many math PhD programs in order to maximize my chance of success.

My main question is how should I ask for recommendation letters. In particular, should I ask for a generic letter (in the sense that it's addressed to "the admission committee") to use for all my applications? Or should I ask for multiple letters from the same person for every university I want to apply to (presumably the letters have the same content, except maybe in who it is addressed to)?

Also, most PhD application deadlines are in December. But I finished undergrad at the end of last year. Should I ask for these letters now so as to not increase the time between when the professors know me and when they write the letter (this may mean I'm sending a letter dated February in November), or should I ask closer to the deadline around November this year?

I'm going to give an answer based on my experience in the US, so it may not be applicable in other countries but:

Whether your recommenders use a generic letter is not a decision you get to make. You tell them where to send the letter, but at least in the US, you do not get to see it, and all you know about it's content is what they tell you.  I would let them use their judgement about how to personalize it, though if there is something you think would particularly important at one school vs. another, it's a good idea to mention this to them.
Similarly, when they write the letter is not something you have control over.  In all grad school applications I've seen, the application is electronic and the recommender directly submits via a link that's generated when you fill out your application.  They'll know when the deadline is, and will probably be annoyed if you try to insist that they write their letter months before the deadline.  If you're applying to a place that still uses paper, submitting the application months before the deadline when your paper application isn't there is just asking for trouble.

What does make sense is to write your recommenders now, and say "I wanted to let you know that I'll be applying for graduate school in November, and I was hoping you would be willing to write me a recommendation.  I wanted to let you know relatively early since I know that by fall it will have been a while since I graduated." Don't hesitate to remind them about interactions you've had, or about anything you think would look good in the letter.  Professors often have to write many such letters, and if you put your good qualities at their fingertips, they're more likely to end up in the letter.

EDIT: Looking this over, I think I could have been a little more concise.  Providing your recommenders with info is a very good idea; that's why I suggest that you do email them now.  They can write a better letter if they know what you plan to do and if you remind/tell them about your accomplishments, etc. But when you ask someone for a recommendation, you can't really micromanage.  You need to say where the letter needs to go and when the deadline is, but there's not much else you have control over.  It is unfortunate that memories fade (though they'll fade less if you give a reminder of your existence now), but that's how it goes.  That's just the price you pay if you don't apply to a Ph.D. right as you finish your degree.


Switching to philosophy after a PhD in mathematics I'm currently finishing a PhD in mathematics from a university in Europe ranked top 10 in the world. I've always been torn between philosophy and mathematics, and I'd like to give philosophy a chance (now that I have the "safety net" of a PhD in mathematics). Also, for personal reasons, I'd like to move to the US.
It turns out, at least according to the various admissions webpages, that doing a second undergraduate degree in the US is not as easy as I thought it'd be (even disregarding issues about funding, etc). Hence, my questions are:

  1) Why are top US Philosophy departments (e.g. Harvard, UC Berkeley, ...) reticent to admit students already holding an undergrad degree in a different subject? In general, is the rule "no admission for students already holding a degree" as strict as it sounds, or can there be exceptions, depending on the context?

  2) In said top US institutions, how common is "by-passing" the second undergrad degree and being admitted directly to a graduate program in philosophy?

Maybe you do not know what an undergraduate degree at an American university means.  You do not study, say, philosophy, you "major" in it.  Depending on the university and your own choices, you may take anywhere between 1/3 and 2/3 of your courses in the area.  You will also be taking basic courses on writing, social sciences, very broad courses in the sciences, and so forth, that to many well educated Europeans would feel like high school all over again.  The idea of getting a PhD and then coming back for an undergraduate degree would be regarded as crazy by most American universities.  I agree.

In general, yes, a PhD in subject X should get you out of having to do an undergraduate degree in Y and you should be thinking of enrolling directly in a PhD program in Y.  But forgive me while I pick apart your question a bit.

  I've always been torn between philosophy and mathematics, and I'd like to give philosophy a chance (now that I have the "safety net" of a PhD in mathematics).

The idea that someone regards a PhD in mathematics as a safety net is very amusing (or bemusing?) to me.  If you have always been torn between mathematics and philosophy and got a PhD in mathematics, surely you must have devoted some serious study to philosophy, right?  If the answer is "no" then I don't really understand the situation.  If the answer is "yes" then I hope you have been exploring the connections between mathematics and philosophy, which is something appropriate for someone considering doing multiple PhDs.

If you want to study an area of philosophy with connections to mathematics (most obviously, philosophy of mathematics, but there are many other areas of modern philosophy which draw upon mathematics), then having a PhD in mathematics at a "world top 10 university" should be a tremendous advantage.  The level of mathematical expertise you bring will probably be superior to that of some of the faculty you would be working with.  Thus at the very least you should be looking for some kind of specially worked out, accelerated graduate program.  I would encourage you to also look for postdoctoral and other temporary faculty positions: these can be places to transition from one field to another.

The desire to start up an undergraduate program after having received a PhD at a top place is frankly a bit worrisome to me.  You've probably spent your entire adult life as a student, roughly 10 years of it.  You now want to turn around and spend another roughly more 10 years as a student?  That's about a third of your adult life.  Don't you have other things that you want to do?

Added: Although I do not think you should consider enrolling in an undergraduate degree program, if you really haven't taken any courses in philosophy at the undergrad level [by the way, in the US it would be really screwy for someone to have a lifelong interest in X and Y, do a PhD in X and never take an undergraduate course in Y; but maybe less so in Europe] then I think you should enroll in -- or audit, or whatever -- at least one or two as a non-degree student.  You just need some amount of assurance that academic philosophy is anything like what you think it is.


Would it be beneficial for one to mention schools that already accepted him/her when applying for MSc programs? I am planning to apply for the same MSc program at different schools. As of now I have only completed a single application, and that school has accepted my application. Would it be good for me to mention in my subsequent applications that I have been accepted to another school for the same program?

I doubt that it would do you any good in most cases and it might do you harm. There may be some upside, but consider the down. People might decide that you aren't very interested in them if you mention another school. People might decide you are gaming them. But even the best case is that people might decide that you already have options so they would want to give similar options to others. A "better" school might wonder why you applied to a "worse" one. A "worse" school might conclude you won't accept an offer from them.

It just seems too risky to me.

Focus your application on what you have done, on your interests, and on those things that make you a candidate for success in the program you are applying to. If you are a strong candidate it will be assumed that others will evaluate you similarly. You aren't desperate, so don't sound as if you are.

On the other hand, I don't think you need to actively hide your other acceptances. If asked, explain why you would prefer the new institution.


How to appeal against an unfair decision - conference paper My papers were rejected from a top conference venue in computer science due to laughably fallacious arguments. The reject decisions were based upon the following comments:

The one's complement checksum of an all zero bit sequence is zero!
O(n2) can be more efficient than O(n), because for n = 0.9, 0.92 < 0.9 !

What should I do now?

What you need to do is to understand why your paper was rejected. I'm pretty sure your paper was not rejected from what you describe as "a top CS conference" for such obviously false reasons. Reviewers don't decide whether the paper is accepted or rejected: they advise the programme committee. The programme committee evaluates the reviews before coming to a decision and a review containing such obviously nonsensical comments will carry very little weight. If your paper was rejected because of the reviews, it was the other reviews, not this one.

Note also that, at top conferences, many papers are rejected simply due to bad luck. Usually, there are many papers that are a good enough quality to be accepted but the conference isn't big enough to take all of them. The actual reason for rejection may just be "We liked your paper and it's of essentially the same quality as papers we accepted, but there just wasn't room for yours and we liked these other ones just slightly more."


Msc in popular field in less reputed university or not so popular field but in well recognized school Suppose someone can decide between:

doing a Master in a university that has low rank but has one very active Prof in Machine Learning for example where there are good number of PhD positions to apply for.

or

Attending a good rank school with multiple Profs doing research in almost all fields of Computer Architecture where there are not so many PhD positions available for.

If the goal is to apply for PhD in a good school after finishing Msc (in US or Canada), which one of these choices can help applicant's application better.
Just to make a question more general, for applying PhD in computer science which factor is more important, reputation of the previously attended university Or research done (quality and number of published papers) not considering the school?

A Master's should demonstrate a broad understanding, which goes beyond Machine Learning / Computer Vision. You need multiple Profs, not just one.
Rankings are subjective, but a well-ranked university is likely better than a low-ranked one.
So, (2) is better than (1), IMO.
That said, these surely aren't your only options: Perhaps look for a leading institute with excellent professors.


Should I omit some of my qualifications in my application materials to "surprise" with during an interview? I am applying for a fellowship so that I can pursue a PhD in the US. The selection process includes an interview for shortlisted candidates.

I like  to save the best for the last in order to surprise the audience. I think surprise, wherever it is used, has a good effect. I have a poster based on my undergraduate dissertation, which is said to be very attractive. It is inspired by the poster of Michael Barton, which is introduced by the Better Poster blog. I think I can use it to surprise the fellowship selection committee.

Now, should I apply this strategy to the interviewers? That means I will keep the information of what I've done in the SOP as minimal as possible, just enough to pass the first selection round to get to the face-to-face round. At this round, I will show them my poster and hope they will be favorably impressed.

Should I use this strategy?

I think I should quote my comment on Hans Adler's answer here:

  I just take my A0 size poster in to the interview room. During the interview, professors will test my knowledge, ask me what I've done and judge that if I'm adequate to the fellowship. In the room it will have a white board for you to outline what I've done, and this is what is poster born for. Instead of drawing figure or chart by myself, I just need to open the poster and show what's what.

No.

How will you know exactly what's "just enough to pass the first selection round"? You won't. You can't.
Don't "surprise" by withholding helpful information. I believe most people find it annoying and inconsiderate when someone deliberately withholds information that they need in order to do their job (which is what you are proposing to do to the selection committee).
It's harder to change someone's opinion of you than it is to confirm it. Even if you manage to get an interview using this strategy, convincing the interviewer that the candidate he thought was mediocre is really exceptional is more difficult than making him think, "This student is just as exceptional in person as I thought he would be!" (Also see: confirmation bias)
Presenting yourself badly on paper can lead the committee to think that you don't know how to present yourself well, or didn't bother to find out how, or didn't care enough to put effort into your application. These are not qualities that people look for in an applicant.


What should I do if I hate engineering, but my parents want me to become an engineer? I really love physics, and I told my parents about my interest. They want me to become an engineer, but I hate engineering (too practical, too far from physics), and I don't enjoy fixing things. What should I do?

I hate engineering (too practical, too far from physics)

This in an unfortunately common misconception, which can bring nonsense answers like this one on Meta Physics SE, where it is said:

  If I pose this question to an electrical engineer, I will likely get design rules, possibly in the form of immediately useful formulae. If I pose it to a physicist, I may learn something about the physics of electromagnetic fields near dielectric boundaries, diverging fields at conductor corners, and maybe even something about conformal mapping.

As an electronic engineer who specialized a long time ago in engineering electromagnetics, I can tell you that, yes, I've studied all of the theory above and much more than design rules. And I have also studied Langrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics, chaotic dynamical systems, quantum mechanics, quantum optics, statistical mechanics, relativity. Indeed, with an engineering flavour, which I have actually come to appreciate along the years.

Said another way, engineering can be as theoretical as you wish it to be.

  I don't enjoy fixing things

Most engineers don't fix things.

  What should I do?

Some thirty-odd years ago I was somehow in your exact situation: I wanted to study physics, but my parents wanted me to do engineering because they felt that there were more job opportunities.

I studied engineering, but I chose my curriculum to have a good blend of electronics and physics and, now, I cannot be happier than this about my education.


Alternatives to big-name proprietary remote-lecturing tools As in many other universities, due to the coronavirus outbreak now we are supposed to do our teaching online in videoconference style. Our university suggests using either Microsoft Teams or Google Meet, but I am not so keen on using a service run by one of these data-collecting behemoths where "you are the product".

Which alternatives exist to these two big players for videoconferencing with a large number of students?

For my lectures, I would like to share my desktop's content (livestream) and my voice on microphone. Students should hopefully also have a way to give feedback and ask questions. You may assume ca. 100-200 students.

My university used to have an internal videoconferencing service but they discontinued it.

I would prefer something open source, in theory: I understand that bandwidth does not grow on trees, but that seems like a problem that could be solved using p2p, at least in theory. Otherwise, I am open to considering other commercial services that are a bit more privacy-preserving; for instance, something run by a company less focused on advertising and monetizing user data. Apple looks slightly better, and so does Amazon (Twitch -- it has ads, but I don't know how intrusive they are).

In the past I used to publish my in-class lecture videos, but I realize that by doing so without a class I would lose all interactivity.

BigBlueButton is software designed for remote teaching. It makes it possible to teach using videos, share slides, annotate them, do breakout rooms, etc., and can be integrated with Moodle. It is open-source and can be self-hosted.

It is apparently not easy to set up, but can be done, and can scale to dozens of participants provided they don't all have their webcam set up (e.g., only the instructor and a few people asking questions share the webcam).


May I include results from a collaboration in my PhD thesis? As a Ph.D. student, I am curious about the following: if you collaborate with a researcher(not necessarily your advisor) while being a student, should you write in your dissertation the work of the other collaborator?

Assume that while being a student, you collaborate with Prof. X, and you write a paper together. In this paper, the work was split 50-50, so that half of the results belong to Prof. X.

What should you do when writing your dissertation? Most probably, omitting the results of Prof. X will result in a significant gap in the thesis. I am particularly interested in the case of mathematics: if I cite the result, should I give a proof?

I had a similar situation in my thesis, in math. The third chapter was based on a work that was jointly done with another researcher, a professor from another university. (In the end the paper we published was even with two other researchers, as we decided to join our efforts.)

I had to ask the researcher for permission to include our joint results. This is a no-brainer (though of course he was happy to let me do it). When I sent out the thesis to my committee (of which he was part), I also sent him a copy beforehand and asked him if he was okay with what I had written, as they were his results too and he might want to check that I didn't mangle them before releasing them into the wild. My advisor also was on board from the start, but I imagine that you have to ask for permission if this isn't the case.
I had to include acknowledgments for this in my thesis. Basically, I wrote a paragraph at the beginning of the chapter, stating "this chapter is based on joint work with [...]". Again, this is a no-brainer. I cannot claim all the results are due to me if they aren't. However, I didn't say anything of the sort "I did X% of the work and the other researcher did (100-X)% of the work", this isn't how it works, and it would have been in rather poor taste. At least in mathematics, it's expected that co-authors contribute roughly the same amount of work to a joint paper, but it's not an exact "50-50" (or 33-33-33, or 25-25-25-25...) distribution.
The whole thesis had to be written by me, in my own words, including the results and the proofs that were actually due to the other professor. Moreover, I obviously had to perfectly understand, and be able to explain, and defend, all the results, as if they were mine.

All of this was explained to me by my advisor. It's possible that regulations in your university say something different. The essential part, I believe, which is only hinted at in the steps above, is to ask your advisor what to do exactly.


What should I read or know before I prepare my bachelor's thesis? I am about to start planning my bachelor's thesis in computational linguistics, and I'm looking into how I can make the process as smooth as possible. So far, I've found that using some sort of version control system for keeping track of one's changes seems like a good idea. I've also started collecting papers using Zotero for easily exporting to BibLaTeX and keeping notes.

But those are only tools. What I'm most uncertain about is the actual writing process, especially since my native language isn't English. Is there a collection of common mistakes I could benefit from reading, or other every day tips and tricks? Anything, really!

This is a pretty broad question, but if you are looking for a general guide on how to write there have been a number of books suggested to me.

Writing for Computer Science (Zobel) This is a decent book on explaining the principles on why and how you should write computer science articles. It's very computer science specific, with a bit more emphasis toward databases and operating systems, but I think it's applicable to most technical fields (of which computational linguistics should fall into).

I like this one because it's a general guide to writing that outlines the process and the structure.

Elements of Style (Strunk and White) A commonly-recommended book that a lot of people swear by but I found it a bit too low-level for my liking and actually had a hard time finishing it. A professor described it as "too prescriptive".

Bugs in Writing (Dupre) This is an okay book as a reference manual for improving your prose, but isn't a good guide for figuring out the writing process. There's good advice in this book (and it's actually rather fun to flip through just to learn about various style points) but can be difficult to use as an actual guide.

Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Williams) I've gotten through a few parts of this book and it gives very specific advice on how to proceed on improving your writing, especially explaining specifically how to introduce ideas in paragraphs, how to flow them together to create longer manuscripts, and how to restructure and correct text so the main ideas come through. As I surmised, it is in fact very analytical and detailed and does describe the rationales behind its recommendations. I think this book is a great resource for those who have some words written, who know they have to make their writing "flow better" or "more clear" but aren't really sure how to do it. It appears to be an especially valuable book for the "second pass" through anything, where you have written down your initial ideas in part-writing, part bullets, and are trying to convert it into a real readable piece of work. (Previously, I wrote: This book was JUST recommended to me and I haven't read it, but it is apparently very analytical and detailed, and outlines the rationales behind why one should write in the way it discusses. In fact, I think there a jab at the Elements of Style in this book where the author laments that "Be clear" is GREAT advice. We all KNOW that. The real problem is, "How is it that I can actually implement 'be clear' in my writing?" However, I haven't gotten far enough to comment on it yet.)

So there's a little about what to read. As for what you should know? Well, that's a more difficult question :)


Why does or did Elsevier make PDFs grey and therefore unfit for printing? My university subscribes to various online journals. Sometimes I print off articles that I know I will read over and over again. (I'm all for saving paper, but some things I do prefer reading on paper. I print on recycled paper and I bind the articles, so they will last a lifetime.)

Now I tried to print an article from Advances in Mathematics (published by Elsevier) and it took me a while to figure out why part of the text was blurry: The PDF has seemingly random snippets that are not black (#000000), but in a dark grey (#231F20). On screen the difference is hardly noticeable

especially if it is text:

However, when trying to print it, the printer is trying to make it less than black, which results in blurry text:

As most other publishers manage to produce pure black PDFs, I must assume that this is intentional (it's not just "all italic text" or "all math mode symbols", the colour changes mid-sentence). The question is just why?

I doubt that this is an anti-piracy measure: surely there must be a less intrusive way of marking a PDF file digitally to record the IP from which a particular copy was downloaded. (Some journals add text like "downloaded from [this IP], [university name]", which I don't like, but at least the text itself is not blurry.)

I also doubt that it is to promote their offprint sales: Elsevier sells offprints of their articles, but only 25 copies or more and only to the original authors of the article (or someone acting on their behalf). In other words, it's not to "encourage" me to buy "quality" offprints of a single article of which I am not the author.

(Of course, it can't be to encourage purchasing of physical volumes/issues of the journal. It is entirely unreasonable to assume that researchers buy an actual volume/issue of the journal just for one article, if only because a single issue contains so many unrelated articles and researchers typically live in small offices.)

What benefit do publishers have from mutilating their PDF files?

Making a printable (= pure black) PDF would also have benefits: I'd be convinced that Elsevier is a great publishing company, publishing high-quality research papers in a good format for everyone's benefit and, as an author, would be more likely to consider publishing in Advances in Mathematics.

This also makes me wonder:

Just to check, I am allowed to print PDF files (for use in research) of online journals, right?
Am I allowed to open the PDF in some other software, modifying the file so that it prints in pure black?
Am I allowed to use another method of getting a pure black printout of the PDF (e.g. by loading a special printer colour profile that treats the dark grey as black¹)?

¹ Unfortunately, I haven't found out if this is actually possible.

Note. I have not tried to investigate this issue systematically, but I observed this in 3 articles from Advances in Mathematics (Elsevier) from around 2005–2006.

This often happens when a document uses the CMYK color space and the black is set as (0,0,0,100).

When you go print in a monochrome environment, the document's color information is converted to grayscale first. Because black ink on white paper can't actually create gray, a halftoning process is applied, where the shades of gray are hinted at by using a circular-like pattern.

Because CMYK (0,0,0,100) black isn't seen as being as black as it gets, in the conversion process, it gets turned into something more like 90% dark gray, and the halftone pattern appears.

Probably somewhere along the production process, someone got their blacks mixed up, and if it's consistent with all their PDFs it could be in the scripted part of the process, there's an issue either between color spaces (CMYK vs RGB) or a conflict between the source documents and the imported parts.


How much work is preparing a MOOC-ish course I have been offered the chance  to prepare and deliver 4 undergraduate courses. There are to be forty 15 minute videos per course all to be written and presented by me.  It seems they will in the first instance use the video for their current undergraduates but may then  roll them out as part of some future MOOC-ish course.

My question is, does anyone with experience of producing this sort of material have any suggestions for how much work it is likely to be? I know how much work preparing a normal lecture course is of course but I don't have a good feeling for how much more work making the video lectures is. Ultimately the university wants me to say how much money I would accept to make the courses.

This related question from 2013 is sadly without any concrete answers but maybe there is more information available these day?

I have a couple of strong opinions on this:

Just because many MOOCs are built around video does not make them a good idea. See this article by Lorena Barba for one example. It is hard to use recorded material well, as I've found from my own experience.
Preparing high quality videos is a job for an expert. If you don't know enough about producing the material to estimate how long it will take, the answer is too long.

I have worked on MOOC-like courses in the past and my experience is that they're considerably more time and resource intensive than standard in-person courses. I also believe that the idea that you'll save time through re-use is generally wrong, if you want good engagement with students. I think there is a lot you can learn about pedagogy, presentation and your field by working on and collaborating with a MOOC, but you've got to put in lots of time - my estimate is that setting up a MOOC style course is more than twice the effort of a standard course, and if you're recording video to a decent standard I'd raise that multiplier considerably.


Should I notify competing researchers that I am working on the same problem? Say I am working on some specific research question, and during the course of my research I discover that some other group of researchers are working on the exact same problem (in my case I learned this because the authors of a paper had my research problem listed in their future work section). My questions are:

Should I notify the other researchers that I am working on the same problem? It seems unethical to let them continue on their way without knowing that they may be wasting their time and money.
If I do notify them, is best practice generally to start collaborating on the problem, or should we continue separately knowing that we're "racing" towards a result? Theoretically the goal of academic research is to expand the realm of human knowledge, so it seems counter-productive to knowingly avoid sharing information that would probably lead to a deeper result (and more quickly).

Full disclosure: I found myself in this position last year and did not notify the other researchers. Luckily, I suppose, I ended up publishing my results first. I have heard some horror stories from other researchers about months of research being wasted because of this exact scenario, so I am curious as to what I should do in the future should this happen again.

Norms on this probably vary between fields (not to mention between individuals in a given field). In my corner of theoretical physics it's not uncommon for people who know that another group is working on a similar problem to check in with each other on the status of the project and, if they are at similar stages, to coordinate posting papers on arXiv simultaneously so that no one scoops the other. This also has the advantage of helping to publicize the result--if someone skimming new articles notices that two or even three groups have put out papers on the same topic at the same time, it can attract more attention than the papers may have if they were spread out.

It has also been my experience that even when two groups are doing roughly the same thing at the same time, and even when the results have some overlap, they typically end up with different perspectives and some amount of complementarity. Sometimes the results even have no direct overlap but, taken together, build a stronger case. So I would generally not stop working on something just because someone else is, even if I know or suspect that they're farther along.


What should be emphasised in a statement of purpose when applying for STEM PhD programs in the United States? This question might be more suitable for they who are or were application reviewers of STEM ph.D. programs in U.S. universities.

I want to know what kinds of s.o.p. do catch reviewers' attention? Should I emphasize more at biography or more at research experience and intention or more at introducing past works? May I make my s.o.p. concentrated solely on research?

As the name implies, a statement of purpose should be forward-looking as much as possible. The "biographical" element of a statement of purpose should be included only to the extent that it helps to explain what you want to do as a graduate student. You most certainly do not want to start off with recollections of early childhood and the first time you realized you want to be a researcher.

Instead, spend your efforts explaining why you want to be a graduate student in the department to which you're applying. You should make specific reference to how your research will fit into the department's interests. (For instance, don't propose a project in area X if the department doesn't have a specialist in X.)

If you're in a field where the advisor selection is made after matriculation, then you likely want to present a somewhat broader profile. If you show interest in only one professor's work, then you are dependent on the decision of that single advisor (who may or may not be on the admissions committee!).


Is it good to buy health insurance for time period between the date of entry into US and the date on which university insurance coverage starts? I will be soon joining a PhD program in US on an F-1 student visa. I will be entering US about 20 days before the university academic session starts. The university will be providing health insurance to me, and coverage will start with the academic session itself. So I will not be covered by university insurance for my first 20 days in US. I would like to know if it is a good idea to buy a short term health insurance policy for these first 20 days in US ? Is it very risky to not buy this short-term insurance ? FYI, I do not have any chronic diseases or other things.

Since US healthcare system is very different from everywhere I have been to (some European and Asian countries), I am in utter confusion regarding this whole health insurance stuff. Any answers would be really appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Travel insurance is generally pretty cheap, especially if you exclude high risk activities like skiing and parasailing. My UK bank provides travel insurance for free and some credit cards provide travel insurance for free if you book your flights with them. If you were taking a three week vacation to the US, you should be able get insured for well under $100.

The issue is that you are not taking a vacation. You are entering the US on a F-1 student visa and possibly do not have a return ticket. While many travel insurance providers will happily sell you insurance and tell you you are covered, they will also direct you to pages and pages of terms and conditions. The key to insurance is making sure you meet all the terms and conditions, otherwise they will not pay out when you need them.

Assuming you can find reasonably priced insurance, the question becomes do you need it. Travel insurance generally only reimburses you for expenses and does not pay the bill up front. This means the benefits are often limited by how much you can afford to pay up front. There also things you can do to reduce the need to see a doctor (e.g., getting a round of general antibiotics from your doctor before you leave). Overall the answer is highly personal and depends on how you would pay a huge medical bill.


experience/ability in teaching and securing external funds for getting professorship I'm a postdoc in Engineering. I am aiming for a tenure-track professorship in research-oriented universities.
But most of the posts require 'demonstrated ability to secure external funds and teach undergraduate/graduate level'.
I feel there is barely a way to gain such experience as a postdoc.
Postdoc fellowships are the only external funds I (as an early-career postdoc) can secure. Teaching opportunity is also limited.
How can I demonstrate/develop such abilities during the postdoc phase?
I found some people have been hired without the evidence of securing funds and teaching experience. So I assume the experience is not limited to actually securing funds and giving lectures.
Are there other ways to advertise(?) the ability in securing funds and teaching, in, say, research statement and teaching statement?
I'm helping my PI write proposals and advise Masters' students. These are usual tasks for postdocs, so I wonder if these suffice.
Does a publication of a tutorial-like book chapter count?
Thank you.

Your question is based on a few statements which I believe are misunderstanding or over-generalisations.

  Postdoc fellowships are only the external funds I (as an early-career postdoc) can secure.

A fellowship is definitely the most significant external funding a postdoc can typically secure. If you manage to get such a fellowship, you most likely will tick a "funding" box on your tenure-track application in most places. However, this is not the only type of funding postdocs can go for. You can bid for funds to attend conferences, you can often bid for smaller pots of money to organise workshops, conferences, and share knowledge in science fairs, exhibitions,  outreach events. You can also engage in knowledge transfer and get funding from industries or other end-users of your research. And of course you can collaborate with established professors and get your name as a Co-Investigator or sometimes second PI on the grants they submit.

  Teaching opportunity is also limited.

This is true, in principle: postdocs' main aim is to do research and they normally are not expected to teach more than 20% of load. However, although there is a time restriction, it does not limit one's ability to engage fully with various ways teaching is or can be done. If you only do marking for 20% of your time, that does not tick the "teaching" box so well. But if you also conduct tutorials, occasionally deliver a lecture or two, design a (part of) the assessment, contribute a bit to designing the teaching materials, it presents you much better as a well-rounded person who can be put in front of students and trusted with a course. If you also have or start work towards a recognised teaching qualification - even better.


Are all Elsevier journals legitimate I have seen a lot of negative reviews and even boycotts of some Elsevier journals. I do not want to jeopardize the future of my academic career by publishing in illegitimate journals. Am I correct in assuming that the journals on Elsevier are considered "legit" but just "very pricey," and this is the source of the negative reviews? Would it be safe to publish on any journal of Elsevier?

They're generally legitimate. The negative reviews and boycotts aren't about the quality of the journal, but are because of Elsevier's alleged high prices (see The Cost of Knowledge). Elsevier publishes some of the best journals in some fields, e.g. The Lancet and Cell.

Having said that Elsevier gives their editorial boards some leeway on what to do with their journals, and to my knowledge up until recently that included not conducting peer review if they don't think it's necessary or appropriate. This journal Medical Hypotheses was an example. That journal published a paper denying that AIDS is caused by HIV, there was a backlash, and Elsevier replaced the editor-in-chief. Although you should be fine in general if you publish with Elsevier, to be sure, you'll have to research the journal in question.


Unfair co-first authorship I am a PhD student in chemistry and my funding is specific for a certain project. This funding also funds another PhD student, a biochemist, with a different advisor (both our advisors are very well-respected). We're both in the 3rd year of our PhDs.

The project is now in its sixth year. The distribution of work is as follows:

Some post-docs had done the first 4 years of this work
The other student provides the animal samples and some biochemical test
I do the "novel test". This test is labour-intensive and time consuming. I very often work on holidays, while the other student doesn't even answer mail after hours, despite having a technician to help her.

The problem is the papers. We are now going to start our third sub-project on this work:

Paper #1 [last year] was primarily the post-docs work, with authoring PostDoc*, OtherStudent* (where * denotes equal contribution)
Paper #2 [last year] was mostly my work, with authoring me*, OtherStudent*. I was extremely heart-broken and wanted to quit, but my advisor assured me that this would not happen again
Paper #3 [this year] is the problem. The other student sent a new batch of samples in for a new paper. My advisor said that it is very likely that the other group will ask a paper co-first authored as: OtherStudent*, Me*, since the other student had not been in the first position of the co-first-authorship yet.

I believe it is unfair that I have fewer papers than this other student despite doing much more work. Indeed, this other student has time to work on other things and get still more papers published, where I am working flat-out on this effort.

My advisor and I argued and I told him that I want to switch to a different project, but he said I can't because my funding is specific to this project. I'm thinking to quit and apply for a new PhD somewhere else but I have spent 2 years and 2 months in my PhD and I believe I will also have problems in the new place (hopefully not as bad).

Am I right to be angry? How should I approach this situation?
How do people in academia actually look at co-first authorship? Is the order important?

Maybe a workaround would be to explicitly assign credit in the paper. This seems to be used in some disciplines and I think it makes a lot of sense, especially in an interdisciplinary project where customs about authors order might differ.

It simply consists in a footnote at the beginning of the paper or a section at the end where all the authors are listed and their contribution is summarized, e.g.:

A conducted experiment X
B collected Z for experiments X and Y, prepared Z and conducted experiment Y
C proposed the approach and designed experiments X and Z
D proofread the paper
...

In my domain I'm not very familiar with this usage, but I've seen it in a couple of papers (in medicine as far as I remember).

This could be a way for you to avoid a serious conflict in the project, while making clear to any reader which author did what.


Who writes Nature’s “News & Views”? Nature’s “News and Views” articles summarize high-impact research published recently in other journals. The News & Views articles are typically not written by the authors of the research paper, but by other researchers in the same field.

However, the topic of News & Views articles are not covered at all in Nature’s information for authors. So, how are people writing the News & Views chosen? Is it only by invitation of the editor? And who chooses the articles written about in the first place?

From the Nature guide on Other Submitted Material:

  News & Views
  These articles inform nonspecialist readers about new scientific advances, as reported in recently published papers (in Nature and elsewhere). This is a commission-only section.

So the articles are selected and commissioned by Nature editorial staff, and written by invited authors. A quick look through recent News & Views articles finds contributions from scientists and science writers (including former Nature writing / editorial staff).


Difference between "2-year community or junior colleges" and "4 year undergraduate program" in USA I am confused about the USA education system.
I looked up the Wikipedia page about K-12. In particular, the figure on the right of that page.
Let's supposed I have just finished high school and I want a MSc in Computer Science.

It's pretty clear from the figure that I can apply to a MSc after a "4-year undergraduate program". My question here is: would this program award me a BSc?

It is unclear to me how the other path, the "2-year community or junior college" would work out. My questions here are:
a. What kind of title would a "2-year community or junior college" would award me? A BSc?
b. Can I apply for a MSc after a "2-year community or junior college"?
c. As I interpret the figure, I think that, after a "2-year community or junior college", I would still have to obtain a "4-year undergraduate program" before applying for a "Master's degree study". Here is my big question here: if that is the case, why I should apply to a "2-year community or junior college", and having to pursue a "4-year undergraduate program" nonetheless, instead of applying directly to a "4-year undergraduate program" after high school? Stated otherwise, why should a person enroll in a "2-year community or junior college" and then pursue a "4-year undergraduate program", instead of pursuing the "4-year undergraduate program" directly?

Two-year degrees in the US often award either an "associates degree" or some technical certification/profession-specific degree.
These degrees are not typically part of the "bachelors -> masters -> PhD" pipeline or more generic "bachelors -> professional degree".
Some students may start taking courses at a 2-year school and then transfer to a 4-year school (with or without actually completing a 2-year degree, and hoping to have as many of their 2-year credits count/transfer towards their 4-year degree), because 2-year schools are both less expensive and less selective. 2-year programs rarely have any sort of on-site housing ("dorms") and limited "student life" opportunities (clubs, social facilities, athletics).
Not all 2-year schools are appropriate for this track. Some are specifically designed as technical degrees to get students into a specific career, and do not provide the "general education" credits (basic math, science, social studies courses) that are useful for transferring to a 4-year program.

If you wanted a MSc in the US, starting from high school you would either:
A) Enroll at a 4-year program, and then
B) Apply to Masters programs*
or
A) Enroll in a 2-year program,
B) Transfer to a 4-year program (bringing with you some or all of the credits you already earned), and then
C) Apply to Masters programs*
If you plan for the "ABC" pipeline it is definitely worth exploring the requirements of the 4-year institution(s) you plan to attend so that you know which courses you take will transfer (some 4-year schools have explicit relationships with particular 2-year schools to define classes that will count for transfer credit). Most students who would follow this path instead of the "AB" path would be doing so either for financial reasons or because the student does not feel academically prepared for a 4-year school (the quality of high school education varies quite a bit in the US, and even a very good student at a disadvantaged high school might have trouble with the jump to a 4-year school).
There is no particular advantage to completing a 2-year degree program before starting a fresh 4-year degree - the only reason to start at a 2-year program if your goal is a MSc would be if you can transfer credits from the 2-year to 4-year program.
(* - it's possible, though not particularly common in the US, that you enroll directly for a combined bachelors+masters program)


What to do about a student who missed multiple assignments and claims illness? I am the professor in charge of a first-year course for undergraduates.
Recently, I received an e-mail from a student,
the general meaning of which is the following:

  Dear professor,

  I am sorry for missing the last few lectures and assignments.
  During the last few weeks, I was really sick with the flu.
  Could you please help me to get right on track with the class?

How should I respond to this e-mail?
Should I give the student an opportunity
to "make up" the missed assignments,
or should I give the student zeros for the missed assignments?

First, there may very well be policies in place to handle this, so I would check those first, in case your hands are tied in some way.

Generally speaking however, I'm fairly permissive with medical absences and helping students catch up, if (as it seems from your email) the desire is actually for them to catch up. In your case, for example, I'd schedule a meeting for the student to try and figure out a path forward.

I'm aware that this leaves me open to being exploited by the occasional student who has decided to fake an illness, but I'm far more concerned with make sure those students who do have major medical or life-related issues have the chance to do well in my classes, and I'd rather the occasional student get away with an undeserved extension than have someone who genuinely needed my help not get it.


Potential Postdoc advisor giving exams (assignment) as part of hiring process I will be graduating with a PhD from a US institution in computational sciences. I have published 10+ papers in peer reviewed journals in the field I am applying for jobs.
I have been interviewed by some PIs, and after interview, I have been asked to submit a few hours of tasks for further evaluation. I was wondering if it is normal these days in hiring process to assign some work/test to evaluate the candidates on top of interview presentation. Anyway, I found the assignment interesting and have decided to work on it.

It is highly unusual. As you note, the PI has plenty of "standard" information (publications, recommendation letter, CV, etc.) that can be used to assess your potential as a collaborator and independent scientist. This is what most PIs will use in the hiring process. Some will ask you to give a seminar or do an interview by phone, video, or in person.

How the PI evaluates you as a candidate will reflect how the PI evaluates you once you are an advisee. This is especially true if they ask you to do something unusual, which is certainly the case here.

You are being told that the work you have done in the past, the good credit that you have earned with your previous advisor, your attendance and interaction at seminars... these are unimportant factors compared to whatever skills this "exam" is testing. It sounds like you do not agree with that attitude. That is reasonable, and if true, I suggest that you and this advisor may not be a good match.


How much research experience or publications are required to get into a good PhD program in USA I am an international student(south Asia) who has recently completed his 4th semester in CS.

My current CGPA is 3.2 (social science courses in my freshmen year messed it up)  and Major GPA of 3.6.
I am expecting my CGPA to be around 3.5 by the time I graduate.

I do not have any research experience and I am worried that I might not get into any good program.

My question is that How much research experience or publications are required to get into a good PhD program in US? or that How much experience does an average accepted candidate has? Phrased in a different way:

What kind of experience should I aim to get by the time I apply to grad school that I get accepted into a good program.

I am not talking Stanford, MIT etc but may be among the top 30-40.

I think you should focus more on the quality and focus of your research than the amount. If you are researching a concrete topic, and have 1-2 solid works dealing with it, then you are golden. Make sure you explain the value of these works in your research statement/essay. That would be more or just as important as the resume, because it is an expression of you as an individual.

Other people will tell to go down the bullshit path and sprout several pieces that milk the same research but add little to the field. Some schools will buy that, but others will not differentiate you from the rest of students. You can also try this approach, but it may be even more time-consuming than the first.

Reading your question again, it is better that you engage in research before applying. Perhaps you can contact a professor and work with him, or a PhD student at your university, or find a research institute in which you can put in some time.


I'm very concerned about the mental health of my co-worker: how can I help them? So I was working with someone from a different University on a project and I have started to become very concerned about their mental and physical well-being.
The messages which they sent me a day before came across as paranoid, saying that he believed that one of his colleagues had hacked his laptop and was following all his activities, just for the purpose of knowing whether they had secretly been getting guidance from someone else to help him write his papers in order to bully him and harass him.
Today he stated that he was no longer able to continue working with me on the project because of this harassment from colleagues.  Again, the messages were quite concerning: for example, talk of not having been able to sleep for 36 hours and fear of dying in 'terrible suffering', but furthermore that one of his colleagues is poisoning his food so that he is unable to sleep and that he is really scared of dying because of not being able to sleep.
My first thought was to write to his graduate school where he works as a postdoc and state that I am concerned about his mental health and make a suggestion that his workload be lightened and that he be given the opportunity to speak with a mental health professional.  Also, that perhaps there could be some words had about the culture of 'banter' and 'jokes', since he obviously takes these jokes very badly although perhaps they are not intended to be harmful (to be clear, I am a student and have no power in enforcing this, it's just a suggestion I want to make).
However, I am not sure how best to phrase this email (or even exactly what I should say) without 'getting them into trouble' or making it look like 'I am telling on them' or giving away confidential information.  Also, who should the email be sent to?  Again, I don't want to make things worse, but I feel like this is genuinely concerning and that someone should say something to prevent the situation escalating.

The first step is to work to convince them to seek professional help, both for their emotional state and for any perceived improper actions of others. Tell them that the "fear of dying" suggests that they should visit a counselor, perhaps at the university, and work through the issue.
Don't start, however, with notifying other authorities yourself (caveat below) as you don't know what that might trigger at their university. You might be making their problems worse.
The caveat is the situation in which they suggest they might harm another person. Then you need to contact that person, if possible, or some authority. As I understand it, that is the same sort of action that a professional would be required to take.
I don't have advice, unfortunately, for the case in which they say they will harm themself. A trained counselor will have a solution I think. I don't know the ethics of contacting authorities in that situation.
But start with them. Don't try to counsel them yourself, as you don't have the training. But try to get them to seek the help they need themselves.