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36,839 |
<p>I had a meeting with my former teacher in my former school.
While we were enjoying our tea and pan cake, I saw Prof. Nickname, and we invited him to join us. An hour later, after the tea, Prof. Nickname left first and was walking back to his office. I ran after him and asked if he had time to write a recommendation letter for me, and he told me that he was busy with his teaching and could not write the letter for me. I could see on his face that he felt so sorry about it, and I wanted to comfort him but I did not know what I should say. Given that situation, how would you comfort your teacher who could not help you with a recommendation?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36841,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>\"Thank you, I understand.\" ... and then let the subject drop.</p>\n\n<p>Also, consider that the expression you say may not have been sadness that the professor did not have time, but discomfort with having to say no to a request in person. In addition to possibly being true, \"I don't have time\" is also often used as a standard face-saving code for \"No.\"</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36940,
"author": "Developer63",
"author_id": 26795,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26795",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Why do you assume it is YOUR responsibility to \"comfort\" this big boy over his \"emotional distress\" at declining to write the letter for you?</p>\n\n<p>I think it is more like jakebeal said, that his perceived discomfort was at having to refuse the request in person, rather than at not having the time to do it.</p>\n\n<p>In my experience, professors who feel very strongly about a candidate will MAKE time to write a recommendation for them.</p>\n\n<p>In the meantime, you should accept that:</p>\n\n<p>1) This professor, for whatever reason, did not feel strongly enough about you to make the time. He may simply have poor eyesight and couldn't remember who you were, did not successfully connect you in his mind with who you were as a student. When you ran to him after the meeting, he may have been embarrassed about it. Or he may simply have been deep in thought about a particular problem and distressed at having his thoughts interrupted.</p>\n\n<p>2) This professor does not require any comforting from you.</p>\n\n<p>On the positive side, your enthusiasm and confidence should serve you well, so keep your assumptions and move forward. You assume that the professor valued your work but didn't have the time; keep the assumption that your work was highly valuable, whether or not this professor realized it. Keep the assumption that the failure to recognize this is the professor's lack of awareness and is his problem.</p>\n\n<p>While it is wonderful that you want to comfort others, be careful not to overdo this in situations that do not call for it. Make sure you are fully using your attention and energy first to strengthen your own foundation, before giving this kind of energy away to others. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/15
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36839",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27408/"
] |
36,840 |
<p>I just wanted to know your opinion about an issue. I have contacted the supervisor of a research project for doctoral student position and I was encouraged to apply. By the way my experience really fits the position.</p>
<p>I applied through the online application platform and after that I didn't receive any mail regarding my status. Then the post for this research position was removed last week and I just saw that the position post is online again.
I think that they are not interested in me, because if they did I think they would have contacted me and not put the post again to search for applicants.
What do you think? Am I rejected?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36842,
"author": "silvado",
"author_id": 3890,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3890",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>If the project supervisor encouraged you to apply previously, it should be fair to inquire about the status of your application. Maybe just ask for a confirmation that they received it.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36846,
"author": "StrongBad",
"author_id": 929,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>Reposting a search does not mean that all the applications received so far are unsuitable. It often means that they have not received the volume of applications they expected/wanted and are worried, without having necessarily looked at the applications, that they might have missed qualified applicants.</p>\n\n<p>Given you applied on line and never got a status update, it is always reasonable to ask if everything is okay. Given the position has been reposted, it is worth asking if you need to resubmit your application. Sometimes HR and electronic systems do not carry applications over from one position to the next. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36868,
"author": "Sydney Everhart",
"author_id": 27867,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27867",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>If the professor is not responding, why not just give the professor a phone call or drop by their office to talk? It may be best to first set up an appointment for the phone call or office visit. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/15
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36840",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27852/"
] |
36,847 |
<p>I am re-doing a module that I have failed, My first assignment have some questions that are identical to the ones I answered last year, would I be violating any laws or academic practices by copying my own answers from last year and re-use them? </p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36848,
"author": "StrongBad",
"author_id": 929,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"pm_score": 7,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>This is a grey area and depends on both the nature of the questions and the specific academic misconduct policy of your university/department/instructor. If you wish to reuse your answers, I would ask the instructor in person if it is okay. If they say yes, I would suggest getting an email confirmation that it is acceptable. That said, while there are many reasons for failing a module, it is probably in your best interest to rework the initial assignments from scratch. If you failed because you were unable to grasp the later material, having a better foundation will help. If you failed because you did not put the effort into the module that it required, this is probably a good test to determine if you are now ready.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36852,
"author": "Him_Jalpert",
"author_id": 27857,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27857",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I once ran into this very situation with a course I was looking to upgrade the mark in, I <strong>asked the professor</strong> if I could just hand in my assignment from the last time around since it was the same as what he'd assigned. He told me that would be plagiarism, and said I should do the assignment again from scratch as it would be a better learning experience anyways.</p>\n\n<p>Some professors also keep an archive of work from the previous semester or two (at least some of them did at my school) for such occasions. They want to see if something a student has handed in is the same as their work from the previous year or the same assignment as one of their friends. It doesn't happen often but if the prof really wanted to look into it they could.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36865,
"author": "Zuryn",
"author_id": 27865,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27865",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In disciplines where answers are discrete and absolute (e.g., most math), if you were right before, your answer SHOULD be the same -- though you should show your work as usual. Where answers are subjective or personal, having the same answer is acceptable, though the result of the work should express any difference in opinion that has taken place over the last term. In cases where there are multiple solutions such as most programming, it may be useful to you (if not necessarily to your instructor) to explore a different method.</p>\n\n<p>Ultimately, there are two routes to go about this:</p>\n\n<p>1) Ask your instructor for their advice (and follow it). Your grade ultimately depends on their opinion, so they are the best source for this.</p>\n\n<p>2) Make your own assumption and stick with it. While it will almost never reflect poorly on you to provide a different answer to the same question (assuming your answer is equally correct), engaging your instructor in a philosophical debate over the objective of education (whether the objective of the course is to learn, or to simply demonstrate knowledge) may require you to appeal your grade if your opinions are not shared by your instructor.</p>\n\n<p>In real life, this question is unfortunately immaterial -- people (especially programmers) borrow work from themselves regularly, and from the standpoint of productivity metrics, generally come out ahead for doing it. Because this relates to the academic environment, this question is best answered by the most direct authority, your instructor.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36869,
"author": "Notiophilus",
"author_id": 27869,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27869",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I had to retake a module and its main practical. According to the rules for my university, on <em>no</em> account may you resubmit previously submitted work, as this constitutes self-plagiarism. As I wasn't keen on taking the same bloody practical twice, especially not if I'd have to rewrite, I asked my module organiser: she said carry on, the data will be different, don't worry about the words. </p>\n\n<p>In the end, I used my report from the previous year as a template - the data and some of my conclusions had changed, but I used bits and pieces of my old report (e.g. in the table descriptions). If the answers you would be re-using require very little creativity, then you may not need to edit them very much. </p>\n\n<p>Check the rules and practices for your own university. If you can't find an explicit answer, get in touch with your academic support team or whoever is closest; but unless your work is going to go through plagiarism software (e.g. Turnitin) I shouldn't worry too much about a complete rewrite. You might want to make sure that the person correcting your work is aware that you are retaking the module -- corral them after a lecture if you can, it's usually best. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36897,
"author": "user3658874",
"author_id": 16189,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/16189",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I sat on a disciplinary board for a student who was in this exact situation a while ago. The student ended up being subject to disciplinary action; the fact that the plagiarized material was their own did not make a difference. </p>\n\n<p>Of course this is also going to be up to the teacher reporting it, and the school's judicial board to decide to uphold or overturn the decision. </p>\n\n<p>Better safe than sorry, ask the professor first, and get an answer IN WRITING.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36899,
"author": "yldm",
"author_id": 27894,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27894",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>My university's guidelines actually describe self-plagiarism, <a href=\"https://workspace.imperial.ac.uk/registry/Public/Procedures%20and%20Regulations/Policies%20and%20Procedures/Examination%20and%20Assessment%20Academic%20Integrity.pdf\" rel=\"nofollow\">here</a>. I think the point would be to go through the whole thinking process of your assignment again and most likely you will come up with a different answer. Sure, it would be fine if it is not completely different but the point would be to not copy it, but rather understand it fully.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 41387,
"author": "Nate Eldredge",
"author_id": 1010,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Just to add another reference, here is an excerpt from the <a href=\"http://cuinfo.cornell.edu/aic.cfm\" rel=\"nofollow\">Code of Academic Integrity</a> at Cornell University, saying this is forbidden by default.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Work submitted by a student and used by a faculty member in the determination of a grade in a course may not be submitted by that student in a second course, unless such submission is approved in advance by the faculty member in the second course. If a student is submitting all or part of the same work simultaneously for the determination of a grade in two or more different courses, all faculty members in the courses involved must approve such submissions. </p>\n</blockquote>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/15
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36847",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20546/"
] |
36,856 |
<p>A question purely out of interest (and a bit of importance, since I'm enrolling in a research master program next month): </p>
<p>I wondered whether it is always necessary to include a research question in the introduction of a paper. For example, an introduction can also contain a description related to the purpose of writing the paper, right? </p>
<p>To give my question more context: suppose that you had to carry out a literature study on a specific subject in the field of software engineering for school, where you have to investigate a few methods (how they work and how they are related to one another). In this case, an introduction that explains why the paper will be written and an outline of what methods will be described would be sufficient, right? Or am I wrong? I mean, I don't really see the need to set up a research question, since the paper is more descriptive by its nature in this situation.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36859,
"author": "Peter Jansson",
"author_id": 4394,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4394",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>If you are writing a research paper it is quite difficult not to have a question in some form. The purpose of the introduction is to set your study (question/gap of knowledge or what have you) in perspective, to narrow the focus down from a slightly bigger picture to the gap you are trying to fill or narrow even further with your study. Even if your paper is a review, you are doing a review for some specific purpose.</p>\n\n<p>So, you may be thinking too narrowly if you think of a question as a sentence with a question mark, the focus of your paper will be your research question, usually a gap in knowledge where you through your study takes our knowledge beyond the current limits.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36862,
"author": "Bill Barth",
"author_id": 11600,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11600",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>To amplify on what Peter has written, if the best research question you can think of about the work you have done is:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Can we [prove|design|implement] ...?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>or </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>How do you [prove|design|implement] ...?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>then you a probably better off going without an explicit question and simply leading your reader through a narrative description of your work. The answers to these questions tend to be the trivial \"Yes, and here's how...\" since you wouldn't have written the paper if you hadn't answered the question already. These questions can be a little more compelling to the reader when the answer is contrary to what an expert in the field might have guessed or the question is widely asked (e.g. \"P=NP?\").</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/15
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36856",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27855/"
] |
36,858 |
<p>I am applying to a course in Quantitative Finance in a prestigious university in Europe.</p>
<p>I am wondering if it may be the case to block my facebook account; I don't want the commission to look at my profile or to gather information on me that I am not willing to give them directly.</p>
<p>I know that there are probably rules so that you can't discriminate based on age, sex, religion and stuff, but facebook accounts contain far more than that.</p>
<p>So I guess my questions are: Is it common for university to look at candidate's profile before accepting them? If it is, how much does this influence the decision?
Can my reluctance to give away some (personal) information be perceived negatively?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36860,
"author": "Anonymous Mathematician",
"author_id": 612,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/612",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>I don't think it really matters for admissions purposes whether you block your account. If you have anything on your social media accounts that would be unusually damaging in a professional context, then it's probably a good idea to adjust your privacy settings (and/or posting habits) now rather than waiting for it to become a problem in the future, but ordinary Facebook usage is not likely to be an issue. In my admissions committee experience, I've never heard anyone refer to an applicant's Facebook profile and I've never looked at one myself. I've occasionally searched for information about an applicant online, for example to find a research paper that wasn't included in the application or to get more information about an award that was mentioned but not explained. If I run across something else that seems academically substantive (such as a math blog or mathoverflow account) I'll look into it, but I wouldn't bother to look at Facebook since I don't expect it would include anything relevant.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Can my reluctance to give away some (personal) information be perceived negatively?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Under ordinary circumstances, I don't think anyone cares at all. For all the admissions committee knows, you never post to Facebook, and they wouldn't be interested in any case. It would come across as suspicious if it looks like you are actively hiding something scandalous (for example, if there are rumors going around about terribly offensive things you've said on Twitter, and now your account is private), but that's presumably not the case here.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36866,
"author": "Sydney Everhart",
"author_id": 27867,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27867",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It would be best if you made your account private, especially if you are applying to work with a certain professor. People involved in hiring are often recommended to perform a Google search on a potential finalist for a position. If they uncover some poor quality social behavior on social media, it may affect their decision.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/15
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36858",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15995/"
] |
36,867 |
<p><strong>TL;DR</strong>: How hard would it be to finish out a Ph.D. and have an effective early career (as a pure mathematician) after my adviser has unexpectedly passed away? My department does not have any tenure-track faculty able to take on students in my field at the time, but two postdocs in my field have offered to help, and the department has offered to fly me to visit researchers in my field. I am currently in my fourth year at a U.S. university.</p>
<p>I read <a href="https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/11607/advisor-dies-suddenly-advice-needed-for-research-students">this similar question</a>, but it seemed to address practical plans for going forward more than the costs and benefits of doing so. What I'm looking for is advice on how difficult it would be to have a successful career and/or finish the Ph.D. in a reasonable amount of time, in addition to talking about what options I have.</p>
<p>I am a pure mathematics Ph.D. student in my fourth year. My adviser recently passed away unexpectedly, and my department does not have anyone else in his field who is able to take on students. He was a great loss to all of us, as he was a deeply intuitive mentor as well as an excellent researcher. Before my adviser's passing, I had anticipated 1.5 to 2.5 more years to Ph.D.</p>
<p>In the next six months or so, my department has offered me the option of working with a couple of postdocs (in my field) at my current institution, as well as flying out to occasionally meet with more senior mathematicians at different institutions. It is unclear whether the department will hire another researcher in my field anytime soon, especially one who is not fresh out of a postdoc. The department is currently uncertain if there will be tenure-track faculty there who could advise me anytime before I graduate. The department tends to offer at least 6 years of funding to Ph.D. students.</p>
<p>I currently have enough material for roughly one paper, but I feel that I still need guidance to finish my Ph.D., and I felt like I was really benefiting from weekly/biweekly meetings with a single adviser. My adviser helped keep me confident and excited, as well as explaining difficult techniques and offering new approaches to proofs or counterexamples.</p>
<p>I have heard some people advise on transferring institutions at this point, though my department does not recommend that. In addition, some people have pointed out to me that an adviser is an important early-career research collaborator, to the extent that it is difficult to do good research early in a career without having them to collaborate with or ask questions of.</p>
<p>If my time to Ph.D. is going to be lengthened significantly, I would like to know that going forward, as it would help me make decisions about whether to transfer, etc. So my question is: how hard would it be to finish out a Ph.D. and have an effective early career without an adviser in the traditional sense?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36870,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In academia, as everywhere, life happens.\nFortunately, a lot of people understand this.</p>\n\n<p>It will definitely be harder to succeed when your advisor has passed away than if your advisor had lived. I suspect, however, that it will be much easier than if you had a falling out with your advisor, which has been addressed in a number of different questions on this site.</p>\n\n<p>It sounds like your institution is doing the best it can to offer you options for getting new advising, and that those options are not so bad. It is also the case that you are reaching the point in your program where you would in any case need to start reaching out to build strong relationships outside of your home institution. Where your advisor might once have helped bootstrap your connections, you have instead your institution's offer to help you meet with other mathematicians. This is a big juncture in your life and career, and everything changes. Despite the fact that <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_%22crisis%22\">the original quote is false</a>, a crisis really is both danger and opportunity.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Also, make sure to take care of <em>yourself</em>.</strong> You just had somebody close to you die, and that might affect you in a lot of ways, including interfering with your ability to work. If you aren't already doing so, I would suggest proactively starting to see a counselor to help you navigate any psychological challenges that may come up: even if you don't feel you are having troubles now, they may start and it is better to catch them early, rather than having troubles that you might attribute to your new advising and then realizing six months down the road that it was actually your reaction to the death.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36874,
"author": "Community",
"author_id": -1,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/-1",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It's an unfortunate situation, but it sounds like your department is trying to do what it can to accommodate you. If one of the postdocs is willing and able to take on the role of advisor, that might be the best solution. Of course, a lot depends on factors that we can't know from this distance.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36875,
"author": "StrongBad",
"author_id": 929,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It is definitely a setback, but should not be disastrous if your are flexible. I see two major issues. If you follow the path they are setting you on with postdocs providing your primary supervision a infrequent meetings with a more senior person, I would worry that you will not get the support you need and will result in a serious setback. My guess is that at 4 years in and having a paper worth of results, that finding a new supervisor at another university might be possible. This would set you back in you would need to physically move and change research directions a bit, but apart from the lost time, my guess is your thesis might actually come out stronger.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36876,
"author": "Pete L. Clark",
"author_id": 938,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>The unexpected death of someone close to you is a tough situation; more than that, it is one of the archetypical tough situations throughout human history. The obvious -- but not easy -- general answer is that you need to either become more self-reliant, find other people to satisfy the needs and desires that were being met by the departed party, or some of both: some of both sounds healthy to me.</p>\n\n<p>It sounds like your department is trying to work with you to meet your needs, which is great. My first comment is that's an ongoing process, not a one-time decision or fix. How are you supposed to know right now what accommodations are needed or optimal? You can't. You should identify specific departmental personnel and make clear that you will be checking in with them periodically about the situation.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I have heard some people advise on transferring institutions at this point, though my department does not recommend that.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Whether they recommend it or not, you can leave at any time, and -- with a deceased thesis advisor -- an absolutely clear conscience. So if you know of a faculty member at another institution that you think would be an ideal advisor, feel free to explore that right away. It sounds to me like you don't, and I'll continue under that assumption.</p>\n\n<p>Your department's recommendation may well be reasonable....but do you understand why they're making it? I would hope that by saying this to you they have some degree of planning for your successful completion of a PhD. You say a little bit about this, but not enough: they offered for you to work with postdocs, but you say that there are no faculty in your field. That's a bit ambiguous: are these postdocs in your field, enough to help you finish your thesis? I'm guessing they must be at least close, because if not you could get a tenure-track faculty member who is not in your field. </p>\n\n<p>I think you should talk to these postdocs and get a sense of whether they could help you finish your thesis. If so, that sounds like a good option for your situation: basically they become your new thesis advisor, and the fact that they are not tenure-track at that institution is not so directly relevant, so long as they will stay there until you graduate. (Look into that!) </p>\n\n<p>For the majority of students in pure mathematics that are not in the home stretch of their program, being without a designated advisor at their home institution would leave them terribly adrift: a few plane trips here and there will not cut it. Recently I was on the committee of a student whose advisor left the department soon after she started working in earnest on her thesis topic. They kept in close contact through weekly skype appointments <em>and</em> a faculty member in a related field stepped up to become her official thesis advisor. I watched this happen and would say that it set her back a full year. In the end she did graduate, get a good visiting position, and now seems to be doing extremely well. The moral is that ultimately it is all about the student: this was a real test of her character, and she passed with flying colors, but gosh it was hard, even hard for me to watch. (And I must tip my hat to my departed colleague as well: he was still closely involved with the student the whole time, infinitely more so than he was obliged to be.) </p>\n\n<p>I would say that you in particular sound like you really need a new advisor. Don't stick around at your home institution without someone stepping up to that role. (And certainly don't wait around for them to hire someone else! Unless they can tell you right now who they want to hire next year, in which case you should ask to spend the intervening time at the present institution of this person.)</p>\n\n<p>You ask about how academia works without having an advisor to mentor you post-PhD. To be frank: by asking for a quantification of the marginal difficulty of the deceased advisor and in other ways as well, your question is telegraphing that you have an uncertain commitment to a post-PhD academic career. </p>\n\n<p>An academic career in pure mathematics is hard for everyone, and thinking that the key to success is close post-PhD contact with your advisor sounds closer to wrong than right to me. I will admit that I had a fairly extreme situation: <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Mazur\">my former PhD advisor</a> is one of the great mathematical luminaries of our time. He gave me the help and guidance I needed as a PhD student. But I have never collaborated with him, and since graduation I haven't asked him any mathematical questions. We remain on perfectly good terms (I have his phone number) and have professional interactions like two mathematicians in the same field, but once I got my PhD he became my <strong>former</strong> advisor (though that is still a critical role: e.g. it involved writing a lot of letters on my behalf!), if you take my meaning. One of my oldest friends got a math PhD. A few years later, <a href=\"https://math.dartmouth.edu/archive/kpbogart/public_html/\">his advisor</a> died in a tragic bicycle accident. So that meant the end of the mentorship, and I remember discussing the awkardness of the situation with him for several years after. My friend is now the chair of the math department at his university. Again: <strong>ultimately it is all about the student</strong>.</p>\n\n<p>To sum up: as others have said, this may well be a traumatic situation for you. Take it as such, give yourself some time to grieve and to let things sink in. While you're doing that, involve your department in your plans to complete your PhD there or elsewhere and to find at least one new mentor. When you do find a new mentor, see if you can regain mojo you might have lost during this tough setback. But if you really think of mathematical research as something that you need someone else's guidance and energy to pull off, I would recommend that you complete your PhD and then look elsewhere for a career: either a teaching-intensive job or something else entirely. The main benefit of a research career in mathematics is that mathematics is frickin' awesome and spending your life doing it makes you a rock star. There are other benefits, but none that stack up against the sizable costs.</p>\n\n<p><b>Added</b>: You speak as if you might not even finish your PhD. For someone who's four years into a math PhD program and already has enough results for a paper, I think not finishing the degree ought not even to be an option on the table. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if your natural emotional reaction to your advisor's death is playing a role in your thinking. Trust me on this: <em>everyone</em> wants you to finish your PhD. It's a cliche to say \"That's what your advisor would have wanted\", but it's probably true, right?</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36894,
"author": "Orion",
"author_id": 19732,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19732",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>First off, I am so sorry for your loss. </p>\n\n<p>Disclaimer, my field is not mathematics. </p>\n\n<p>That being said, adviser plays a dual role, expert and mentor. In their technical expert role, he or she works closely with you to guide you through the difficult problems. In their mentoring role, they take care of you being motivated, dealing with the stress, advise on how to be a member of research community, how to present yourself etc... Ideally, and most often, one person full-fills both roles. But not always.</p>\n\n<p>So, maybe the postdocs plus an external expert, can fulfill the technical advisement role. But then also, ask the department for a faculty mentor. This person might not be as familiar with your work, but can offer you general and close support. Huge part of being a successful researcher is to be able to explain your work to someone not very familiar with your area. The sooner you start practicing that, the better. This is also a time of opportunity for your personal growth, on taking more responsibilities under unfortunate circumstances. </p>\n\n<p>As far as your future goes, remember that the postdocs will become more experienced, and will be able to give you letters or references, along with the your mentor. All of them witnessing your resilience in overcoming this major setback at this hard time will speak volumes of you, and how you tackle problems. </p>\n\n<p>But then, my field is not mathematics.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36896,
"author": "Brian Borchers",
"author_id": 4453,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4453",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The first question that I would ask of the department (in particular the head of the graduate program or the department chair) is whether or not there is some faculty member who would be willing to act as your formal supervisor (perhaps in conjunction with another research advisor from outside the university) on your current topic. It may take some time (weeks) to get an answer. </p>\n\n<p>If the answer is something like \"Yes, professor X has volunteered to take you on.\", then you should talk to professor X to see how it would work. Professor X might be willing to do his best to advise you on this topic even though it's outside of his area of expertise, and that would be a very fair offer. Of course you would have to decide whether you'd be willing to work with an advisor who wasn't as well qualified as your previous advisor. If professor X is only willing to advise you as you start over on a topic in his area of interest that would be a very different situation and you would have to decide whether to change topics or move to a different program. If the department has difficulty finding a faculty member willing to act as your advisor, then I'd say that it's definitely time to move on. </p>\n\n<p>Our department had a similar situation a few years ago with a faculty member who was supervising an MS student in cryptography. The student was only a few months from completing his MS thesis when the faculty member died. Although this was far outside of my area of expertise, I stepped in and together with the other committee members, we got the student through. It was hard for both me and the student but the student was clearly better off finishing the thesis in this way than picking a new topic and starting over from scratch. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/15
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36867",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7380/"
] |
36,877 |
<p>Prof. Z has taught thousands of students in my former school since 2010. In the Biology course that he taught, there were two students (A and B) with similar full names and nicknames, but their academic results were totally different.
Prof. Z liked student A but hated student B because student B used to be very naughty in Prof. Z's courses and got very bad grades.</p>
<p>On January 4th, Prof. Z received student B's email for a letter of recommendation. Prof. Z agreed to do so and arranged a time to meet student B. On the day when they met, Prof. Z knew he had made a big mistake, and he refused to do anything for student B.
Given that situation, what would you do if this happened to you (as student B)? This really happened recently in my former school, and student B was very angry and made a complaint to the head of Prof. Z's department.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36878,
"author": "Ben Bitdiddle",
"author_id": 24384,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24384",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>As Student B, I would be pretty mad about this, even more than if he had declined to write me a letter in the first place. But I would also recognize that it was for the best (if he hadn't done this, he would have written me a bad letter).</p>\n\n<p>Also, I would never have gone to the department head about this because</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>It's not something that merits a formal complaint</li>\n<li>It's not something I'd want to be known for, especially among other professors who may be writing my letters of recommendation.</li>\n</ol>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36898,
"author": "paul garrett",
"author_id": 980,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The questions-not-asked include asking about the basis for student B's actions. As @BenBitdiddle comments after his answer, perhaps student B was \"advised\" to ask the most famous professor, etc.</p>\n\n<p>My blanket reaction to this is that this advice should not have come from any professionally competent \"advisor\", but probably from peers, or peer-based information. Abstractly, there's certainly nothing wrong with getting the opinions of one's friends and peers. However, it is exactly in such situations that the critical weakness in asking people who don't know much about a given thing is instantiated. How to know that this would be a problem? Difficult, for many understandable reasons, but that does not resolve the issue! </p>\n\n<p>That is, younger people would benefit from appreciating the palpable fact that important decisions affecting their lives are made by people (often older) who need not share their viewpoint, nor their same-age friends' viewpoint.</p>\n\n<p>While it is true that some people who \"have power\" abuse it, this is not a universal, and it is not wise to postulate that all experienced/older people are oppressive or selfish. Genuine experience, as opposed to conjecture, is hard to replace. Thus, ideally, letter-of-recommendation writers are sufficiently experienced to have been through (and succeeded in) the endeavor for which they're writing a letter. Perhaps also experience (and successful in) appraising the likely future success of people in those endeavors. From this comes the value of letters of recommendation.</p>\n\n<p>Yes, unfortunately, even a pretty-darn-good performance in a routine course doesn't give a letter writer much to work with. Many people hit that mark, etc. </p>\n\n<p>What's a student to do who has trashed all those bridges, before they realized that it'd matter? Probably spend extra time proving exactly that they'd caught on, and have moved to a different plateau. But there'd need to be tangible evidence, not just a promise.</p>\n\n<p>So, in effect, \"tell your friends not to hope for letters from faculty in whose courses they'd done badly\"... And, if people discover themselves in the position that there's no alternative, then they need to get as close to a \"do-over\" as they can, because otherwise they've sealed their own fate, in any conventional avenue.</p>\n\n<p>Yes, it is indeed unfortunate that this \"appraisal\" period comes during a period of peoples' lives where many things are in turmoil... </p>\n\n<p>So, again, people who become aware of this mechanism should \"tell their friends\" to work hard to avoid finding themselves in such a situation. If one does, then it is almost surely better to allocate considerable time to repair the damage, rather than somehow \"fake it\" and limp along with fatally bad letters of recommendation.</p>\n\n<p>By the way, part of the \"currency\" that faculty have to spend (or not) is their word/reputation, so they are very, very hesitant to blow it on bogus not-so-bad recommendations. Faculty who'll give glowing recommendations to nearly anyone will have debased that currency to an extent that it is nearly worthless... so you'd not gain from a letter from them <em>anyway</em>.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36906,
"author": "Daniel Wessel",
"author_id": 26614,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26614",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Semi-serious answer:</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p><strong>As student B:</strong> Next time, claim a family emergency and ask whether the prof can please send you the letter of recommendation. As much as you liked to see him in person, you're at home caring for your dying grandmother (again). (And drop this case, you're getting an even worse reputation.)</p>\n\n<p><strong>As better student B:</strong> Don't ask for a letter of recommendation from a prof if you did show abysmal behavior and performance in class. It's a letter of recommendation, not cronyism, there should be something to recommend.</p>\n\n<p><strong>As an even better student B:</strong> Behave better in class and learn to learn (and to perform). University isn't school and you're supposed to be an adult by now -- you actually have a job: to learn the material, to understand it, and to learn how to think. And BTW, there's a place for naughty behavior in class -- <em>if it's smart</em>. But that requires understanding the material, which according to the grades B did not.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p><strong>As prof Z:</strong> Apologize that you have written the wrong letter of recommendation, which was a honest mistake. Ask the student whether s/he really wants a letter of recommendation which essentially states that s/he was in class, disrupted it and got bad grades (if it's legally possible to write about negative events)</p>\n\n<p><strong>As a better prof Z:</strong> Never write a letter of recommendation without checking first for whom you are writing the letter of recommendation. Ask for the identifying information that differentiated between the students when it came to assigning their grades. If students failed to understand their job, they might fail to understand what is involved in getting a letter of recommendation.</p>\n\n<p><strong>As an even better prof Z:</strong> If you have a student B in your class, try to inform this person about the consequences of his/her behavior. And that in earlier schools, everyone might have been a winner, but here good grades require knowledge/skills/performance. Also inform administration that you have a student apparently riding on the coattails of another student. Every prof who had both students in their class should get this information.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p><strong>As student A:</strong> Never give student B your diplomas.</p>\n\n<p><strong>As a better student A:</strong> Ask prof Z. for that letter of recommendation.</p>\n\n<p><strong>As an even better student A:</strong> Legally change (add to) your name.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/15
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36877",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27408/"
] |
36,887 |
<p><strong>Disclaimer:</strong> This question is probably on the brink of off-topicness; maybe, it is also opinion-based and I don't exclude it is way too broad. Nonetheless, I'm asking this out of curiosity: so, if you close this question, I won't complain; but if you answer, I'll appreciate. </p>
<p>To try to stay on track, let me state clearly the rules of the game. </p>
<p>First, I'm interested in the following bilingual settings or situations:</p>
<ol>
<li>Courses which are taught in a language which is not the local language (e.g. a course taught in English at a German university).</li>
<li>Courses which are taught in the local language that adopt textbooks written in a different language.</li>
<li>Students, researchers and professors who collaborate with people speaking different native languages.</li>
</ol>
<p>Second, here is the question:</p>
<p><strong>Have you got any example of technical terminology or symbology (from whatever field) which has been, in your experience, cause of confusion, misunderstandings or mistakes in the above given situations?</strong></p>
<p>Let me give you a few examples I've come across:</p>
<ul>
<li>In English, the term <em>voltage</em> denotes a common electrical quantity. The Italian term for voltage is <em>tensione</em>. Many Italian students who have been exposed to English classes, however, instead of using the correct term when speaking in Italian, use the mistranslated term <em>voltaggio</em>, which looks similar to the English term, but is incorrect.</li>
<li>In German and in several East European countries, the symbol used to denote voltages is U instead of the more common V. But this wouldn't cause much trouble were it not for the fact that the symbology employed to indicate the polarity of a voltage is opposite to that employed in US or in many other European countries. It took me a while to realize this, but now, if I have a technical discussion with someone from those countries, it's the first thing I point out to avoid many headaches to everybody.</li>
<li>A Czech researcher told me that the common low-pass or high-pass filters are actually called high-reject and low-reject filters in the Czech technical literature, and this was a major source of confusion when he started reading the English technical literature. </li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> I'm not interested in common words that can sound awkward or rude or offensive in another language, just technical terminology which can cause confusion.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36888,
"author": "Wrzlprmft",
"author_id": 7734,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7734",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The German word for <em>torque</em> is <em>Drehmoment,</em> which is a composite of <em>Dreh (turning)</em> and <em>Moment.</em> Thus a very literal translation of <em>Drehmoment</em> would be <em>turning momentum.</em> This leads to confusion with the English <em>angular momentum,</em> which is <em>Drehimpuls</em> in German, but which one might easily accidentally translate as <em>Drehmoment.</em></p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36890,
"author": "aeismail",
"author_id": 53,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Actually, I think one of the biggest issues that we have to deal with as scientists is the use of writing conventions. For instance:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>The \"decimal point\" in Europe is normally written as a <em>comma</em>. So a German would see that \"a mile is 1,760 yards\" might not know if a mile should be 5280 feet or 5.28 feet! (This can cause confusion when translating back and forth.)</p></li>\n<li><p>Similarly, I have to be very careful with my handwriting, lest my audience think my \"7\" is a \"1.\" </p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>A lot of what you're talking about, though, I think falls either under the header of \"false cognates\" (or <em>faux amis</em>, as they're known in French), or of words with multiple definitions. As examples of the latter, for instance, <em>Benzin</em> in German can mean both \"benzene\" as well as \"gasoline,\" while <em>Neigung</em> can mean both \"slope\" and \"gradient.\"</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/15
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36887",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058/"
] |
36,900 |
<p>What is the recommended way to reply to an academic interview invitation? And would there be a difference in response if the invitation was sent by a faculty or a staff? Should it be very short or should the applicant express his interest again in the position, maybe provide more details of his qualifications etc?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36907,
"author": "StrongBad",
"author_id": 929,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>If they call you and you answer, be excited and happy and keep the conversation really short. The person who called you does not really want to talk to you, they just want to tell you that you got an interview and possibly to dump some information on you. Your side of the conversation could be:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>This is so great and I am really excited to come for the interview. I have to run to a meeting/teach (doesn't matter if it is true or not) can we set up a time to talk in more detail later today or tomorrow?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>At that point the person calling will either setup a time or tell you they will email you the information they need to tell you.</p>\n\n<p>If they leave a voice mail, you can either call them back or send them an email, unless they tell you to do one or the other. If they email you, you should probably only reply with an email, unless they tell you to call.</p>\n\n<p>In the follow up conversation/email there are things you need to know, which search committees often forget about. You should of course express how excited you are to come visit and tell them about your work and learn more about them and their cool work, but you do not need to directly sell yourself at this point (or really during the interview itself). What you do need to do is:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Setup a date for the visit. You should tell them when you are available.</li>\n<li>Alert them to anyone you want to meet during your visit.</li>\n<li>Find out how travel is paid for and arranged.</li>\n<li>What the interview consists of and who will be at those events.</li>\n<li>If they need a title and/or abstract, and if so when, for the job talk.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>The reason you need to know what the interview consists of is that a campus visit may include one-on-one meetings/interviews, a panel interview, a research seminar on your past work, a teaching demo, and a \"chalk\" talk on your future work. If they want you to teach an hour lecture of an actual calculus 101 class, you really need to know that beforehand. Alternatively, they might want you to talk through a syllabus of a graduate class you would teach. A 10 minute research talk aimed at the search committee is very different than an hour long seminar with undergraduates present.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36912,
"author": "jobucks",
"author_id": 4313,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4313",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>PS Start gathering the email addresses of everyone you will meet now. You will be tired after your interview/talk so get your draft thankyou emails lined up ready to send.</p>\n\n<p>And <em>don't</em> forget to thank all the secretaries, drivers, students who also do small tasks for you. First, they appreciate that and will remember when you return. Second, good schools find out whether you did. The general staff have a say in your appointment.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/16
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36900",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24823/"
] |
36,910 |
<p>Let's say you are passionate, I mean really passionate, about your field.
However, whenever you try to share the pleasure induced by your findings or further understanding or even acknowledged works with those you love and who love you, could be your family members or lover or spouse, you always get a response such as "Oh yeah, that might make a lot of money."</p>
<p>What do you do if you are uncomfortable with such a response but do not know how to properly express yourself in this context without hurting them?
What would you do to make yourself more comfortable?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36911,
"author": "jobucks",
"author_id": 4313,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4313",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>How about this - taken from Donald Schön (.. on top of the o) <em>Reflective Practitioner</em></p>\n\n<p>The response you are getting surprises you. It is often in the nature of skilled professional work that circumstances surprise us. And at that moment, we begin to work.</p>\n\n<p>Stop yourself. Brake. And ask yourself, \"What surprises me? and what would I like to know more about?\" </p>\n\n<p>If you can understand and articulate what surprises you in their response and how you can learn more, then you move from being irritated (and closing down) to being curious and opening out.</p>\n\n<p>Does this help?</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36916,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>Let's pretend that it's not an academic field that you are passionate about, but instead something like <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railfan#Trainspotting\">train spotting</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_football_(American)\">fantasy football</a> or <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button_collecting\">competitive button collecting</a>. Seriously, pretend that when you are talking with non-practitioners, that every technical word that comes out of your mouth is replaced with something like \"'Jaques Israel' Pink Latticino Swirl\" or \"1820 Georgian British Livery button.\" </p>\n\n<p><em>Would you feel upset by their disinterest then?</em> Depending on the answer to this question, I think that there are two ways to approach the issue:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>If you would still feel upset, then it's not so much that you want the people close to you to be button enthusiasts too, but that you want them to be excited for you and supportive of your enthusiasm. A way that you can address this in your relationships is by talking less about the subject that you care about, and more about your little triumphs and setbacks in pursuing it. For example, if you are elated because you have just figured out a difficult problem, tell about your struggle and your joy, or about how it can affect your relationship with your fellow button collectors, but don't try to explain the problem or the solution.</p></li>\n<li><p>If you would not still feel upset, then it seems that you feel there is something important about your field that means that non-practitioners should care about what is going on in it. In this case, you again need to drop the technical vocabulary, but instead talk about how the ideas that you encounter may come to affect the world that we all live in or our understanding of it. A personal example: some of my synthetic biology work focuses on the study of <em>translational regulation of Sindbis replicons via calibrated flow cytometry</em> (\"1851 Goodyear Patriotic Lady Liberty Button\"), but I talk about it with non-practitioners in terms of the ways it could make vaccination easier, safer, and more accessible.</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>I either case, in my personal experience, the core of the solution is to drop the technical language and talk about whichever <em>human</em> dimensions it is that you really want the other person to engage with.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36926,
"author": "Ben Bitdiddle",
"author_id": 24384,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24384",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Some things you could try:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Get really good at selling your work, and develop an elevator pitch that most laymen would find interesting and relevant.</li>\n<li>If your topic is very esoteric, you could try selling your field as a whole before moving to your specific research topic (answering the question \"what is math?\" rather than \"what is algebraic number theory?\"). This will generally be easier for laymen to relate to, and if you give them a good introduction, you may be able to steer the conversation towards the specific things that <em>you</em> find interesting about your field (rather than \"it could make money\"). As a bonus, this will remind you of the broader impact of your work, and the things that make your problems fundamentally interesting to other people.</li>\n<li>If that fails, you can find different people to talk to about your research.</li>\n</ol>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/16
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36910",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/18107/"
] |
36,914 |
<p>I saw that some friends know who are the search committee members before their interviews. So would it be fine to ask the department who are they? And if it was fine, why the department didn't mention their names since the beginning? Could asking about their names be taken as negative thing?! A strong applicant could say that she doesn't care who are finalizing the list or interviewing her. </p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36930,
"author": "Anonymous",
"author_id": 11565,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11565",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>In general, I would recommend against asking who the search committee is. It might give the impression that you are trying to \"game the system\" rather than simply put your best foot forward for everyone. That said, I don't think this is a serious faux pas.</p>\n\n<p>Some departments, including my own, post a list of committee assignments on their department homepages -- mostly out of convenience for their own faculty. So you might be able to answer your question without asking.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 42044,
"author": "Sander Heinsalu",
"author_id": 6313,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6313",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Depends on the culture of the field. In economics, the placement officer told all candidates from our PhD program to ask who the interview committee members were when receiving a call or email offering an interview. \nSometimes the question was not answered or the answer was delayed, sometimes the committee was on the website of the hiring department.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/16
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36914",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24823/"
] |
36,917 |
<p>Our School Research Ethics Committee requires when designing an online survey that each question is optional for the participants. These rules were devised before the era of crowdsourcing when researchers had to rely on the goodwill of others to gather the necessary responses.</p>
<p>However as I am paying each participant to complete this survey (using Amazon Mechanical Turk) do you think I have a case to argue that I should be able to make some, or even all, questions mandatory?</p>
<p>I have not approached the Research Ethics Committee about this yet, I just wanted to see what the norm is in other countries and institutions.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36919,
"author": "StrongBad",
"author_id": 929,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>Mandatory is a difficult concept. I think it is ethically questionable to not allow a participant to withdraw from a study at any time. There may be edge cases, for example drug studies, where further follow up treatment is required, but even here I think that treatment would not be considered part of the study. When a participant withdraws from a study we still need to provide them with whatever inconvenience allowance was agreed. We are not even allowed to prorate the inconvenience allowance, however, we break our longer studies into hour long segments and pay an hourly inconvenience allowance. It is perfectly reasonable to use a \"forced choice\" response system where participants are required to give a response in order to continue with the study. Using the Mechanical Turk, I think ethically you should provide an easy means of dropping out that is constantly available that will not penalize the participants. When it is so easy to withdraw, forcing them to answer a question which is not inherently necessary, seems silly. If they do not want to answer it and they have no other option, they will just withdraw.</p>\n\n<p>Consider two experiments that consist of two questions. In the first experiment you either show either a circle or a square that is either red or blue. If for whatever reason the participant does not want to tell you what shape they saw, you can still get meaningful information about the color and therefore it would make no sense to force them to answer the first question. In the second experiment you show them a face and ask if it is a man or a women and based on that response you ask them if it was either Alice or Carol or Bob or Dave. For this experiment they need to answer the first question.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36923,
"author": "Brian Borchers",
"author_id": 4453,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4453",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The IRB that I serve on would never approve of a paid participation survey in which the participants would be denied the compensation if they didn't complete the survey. Furthermore, if someone decides that they don't want to complete their participation in the study it would be unethical to make use of any partial responses that you'd already gotten from that participant. </p>\n\n<p>In short, the answer to your question is \"no.\"</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36924,
"author": "BrianH",
"author_id": 6787,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6787",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>While this will definitely vary by review board, my personal experience has been that it's a standard that you are explicitly required to inform participants at an appropriate point (disclosures, usually) that they are allowed to refuse to answer any question they want by leaving it blank or marking it in some fashion. Sometimes this even means that, if they leave any question off, you have to throw out their whole set of responses because it's useless to you, but they must still be paid/credited for their participation even if it makes it useless to you.</p>\n\n<p>The question is both ethical and practical - if you require an answer you may also be encouraging dishonesty, and possibly invalidating the usefulness of your survey anyway. \"I'm not answering that\" is better than \"I'm not comfortable answering that truthfully, so I'll just put down nonsense.\" And this set of rules actually goes far beyond just the idea of unpaid volunteers, as it applies to things like medical patients, paid employees, etc. </p>\n\n<p>Now, <em>this is not to say you can't do it</em> - ethics review boards have approved electrocuting and burning people based upon appropriate balancing factors, so it's up to the board and how you design and present your study.</p>\n\n<p>But setting form fields as \"required\" will require appropriate disclosure to the participants and review board, and will likely be considered a negative that must be appropriately justified and handled. You will have to show that autonomy, right to withdraw, informed consent, non-coercion, and ethical payment are all handled appropriately. You will be making things hard on yourself, so if you don't have to do it this way, you probably shouldn't.</p>\n\n<p>You are generally welcomed to pro-rate payment, so if a person refuses to answer all items you only have to pay them for the items they did answer - and you must put this in the informed consent forms and present this to the review board. Whether or not the particular online payment system or setup you use will support such a method might restrict your realistic study design, but that hardship is probably not something the review board will be particularly concerned about.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/16
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36917",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27877/"
] |
36,920 |
<p>I am writing a dissertation for my PhD in Romance Languages. I focus on Spanish literature and use primary sources all in Spanish and secondary sources in Spanish and English, but I am writing in English. Do I need to translate the Spanish quotes I use from my primary and secondary sources into English for my dissertation? I am using MLA style and I could not find a rule about this issue.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36919,
"author": "StrongBad",
"author_id": 929,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>Mandatory is a difficult concept. I think it is ethically questionable to not allow a participant to withdraw from a study at any time. There may be edge cases, for example drug studies, where further follow up treatment is required, but even here I think that treatment would not be considered part of the study. When a participant withdraws from a study we still need to provide them with whatever inconvenience allowance was agreed. We are not even allowed to prorate the inconvenience allowance, however, we break our longer studies into hour long segments and pay an hourly inconvenience allowance. It is perfectly reasonable to use a \"forced choice\" response system where participants are required to give a response in order to continue with the study. Using the Mechanical Turk, I think ethically you should provide an easy means of dropping out that is constantly available that will not penalize the participants. When it is so easy to withdraw, forcing them to answer a question which is not inherently necessary, seems silly. If they do not want to answer it and they have no other option, they will just withdraw.</p>\n\n<p>Consider two experiments that consist of two questions. In the first experiment you either show either a circle or a square that is either red or blue. If for whatever reason the participant does not want to tell you what shape they saw, you can still get meaningful information about the color and therefore it would make no sense to force them to answer the first question. In the second experiment you show them a face and ask if it is a man or a women and based on that response you ask them if it was either Alice or Carol or Bob or Dave. For this experiment they need to answer the first question.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36923,
"author": "Brian Borchers",
"author_id": 4453,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4453",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The IRB that I serve on would never approve of a paid participation survey in which the participants would be denied the compensation if they didn't complete the survey. Furthermore, if someone decides that they don't want to complete their participation in the study it would be unethical to make use of any partial responses that you'd already gotten from that participant. </p>\n\n<p>In short, the answer to your question is \"no.\"</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36924,
"author": "BrianH",
"author_id": 6787,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6787",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>While this will definitely vary by review board, my personal experience has been that it's a standard that you are explicitly required to inform participants at an appropriate point (disclosures, usually) that they are allowed to refuse to answer any question they want by leaving it blank or marking it in some fashion. Sometimes this even means that, if they leave any question off, you have to throw out their whole set of responses because it's useless to you, but they must still be paid/credited for their participation even if it makes it useless to you.</p>\n\n<p>The question is both ethical and practical - if you require an answer you may also be encouraging dishonesty, and possibly invalidating the usefulness of your survey anyway. \"I'm not answering that\" is better than \"I'm not comfortable answering that truthfully, so I'll just put down nonsense.\" And this set of rules actually goes far beyond just the idea of unpaid volunteers, as it applies to things like medical patients, paid employees, etc. </p>\n\n<p>Now, <em>this is not to say you can't do it</em> - ethics review boards have approved electrocuting and burning people based upon appropriate balancing factors, so it's up to the board and how you design and present your study.</p>\n\n<p>But setting form fields as \"required\" will require appropriate disclosure to the participants and review board, and will likely be considered a negative that must be appropriately justified and handled. You will have to show that autonomy, right to withdraw, informed consent, non-coercion, and ethical payment are all handled appropriately. You will be making things hard on yourself, so if you don't have to do it this way, you probably shouldn't.</p>\n\n<p>You are generally welcomed to pro-rate payment, so if a person refuses to answer all items you only have to pay them for the items they did answer - and you must put this in the informed consent forms and present this to the review board. Whether or not the particular online payment system or setup you use will support such a method might restrict your realistic study design, but that hardship is probably not something the review board will be particularly concerned about.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/16
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36920",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27916/"
] |
36,927 |
<p>Ten days ago I contacted a professor who conducts research in a field I am deeply interested in, to ask about PhD positions. He replied very politely that he had no funding available to hire a new person in his research group.</p>
<p>Today, the university announced that there is funding available for PhD positions and they welcome applications. In the application I am supposed to choose from a list of supervisors and try to convince them via a motivation letter and without directly contacting them.</p>
<p>Should I put the name of that professor or is it not a good idea? Wouldn't he know that there is some funding coming up soon, to suggest to me to wait a bit or is it possible he didn't know about it? Was he trying to politely say that he is not interested in me? If so, would it be a better idea to choose another supervisor or be persistent?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36928,
"author": "Davidmh",
"author_id": 12587,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12587",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Maybe he meant that he didn't have funding to hire you directly. Or perhaps the university funding details are not known to everybody outside of the corresponding committee until they are out. Or even he was just oblivious to the existence of this.</p>\n\n<p>There is no way to know without specifics, and there is little risk in just applying.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36929,
"author": "Ben Bitdiddle",
"author_id": 24384,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24384",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Well, there are two possibilities:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>The professor has no funding available to hire a new person in his research group</li>\n<li>The professor is trying to politely say that he is not interested in you</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>It seems like in either of those cases, you should choose another supervisor. It sounds like he doesn't want you, so if you apply to the university intending to work with him, you'll probably get rejected.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36938,
"author": "Developer63",
"author_id": 26795,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26795",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You should list that professor on your letter and at least go down with your guns blazing. He at least knows your name and has interacted with you enough that he would choose to look more closely at your application now.</p>\n\n<p>You can only take his earlier statements about lack of funding at face value. Also remember that not all of us are fortunate enough to charm the socks off every person we meet upon first meeting them. This professor may be someone who needs to warm up to people. At the very least, he is likely to respect you for your persistence in reaching out to him again in this way.</p>\n\n<p>What is relevant here is that this professor conducts research in a field you said you are DEEPLY INTERESTED in. List this professor as your desired supervisor.</p>\n\n<p>There may also be the possibility this professor may decline to be your supervisor, for reasons that have little to do with you, and may instead refer your application to another professor, who winds up becoming your supervisor. If he did such a thing, it would probably be based on his expert knowledge of the situation, and that would be a good thing for you.</p>\n\n<p>Faint heart never won fair lady. Forget the overthinking, analytical stuff here and if you are going to go down, going after something you want, make sure it is with both guns blazing. List this professor as your desired supervisor.</p>\n\n<p>Good Luck.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/16
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36927",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27923/"
] |
36,932 |
<p>Psychology at universities in Germany is either in the natural sciences or in philosophy, depending on the university. This affects the kind of academic title you get. People doing their doctoral thesis either get the doctor in natural sciences (Dr. rer. nat.) or the doctor in philosophy (Dr. phil.).</p>
<p>If I am not mistaken, most doctors in psychology (internationally) are Ph.D.s. So my question is, how would you refer to your title internationally? As a doctor of natural sciences? As a Ph.D. (even if you have a Dr. rer. nat.)? Are there legal requirements? I am thinking about a website that is generally understood internationally and -- perhaps -- about business cards.</p>
<p>(And yup, personally, I think -- and act if -- psychology is closer to natural sciences than philosophy.)</p>
<p>(I'm sorry if I can't specify the question more closely. There's a similar question (<a href="https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3522/choosing-a-title-to-hold-upon-completion-of-a-doctoral-degree-dr-vs-ph-d/">Choosing a title to hold upon completion of a doctoral degree: “Dr.” vs. “Ph.D.” [duplicate]</a>) but I don't think it really covers this issue.)</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36934,
"author": "Bill Barth",
"author_id": 11600,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11600",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>In the US, most doctorates in science and engineering are also a PhD even though our degrees aren't in philosophy. While other degrees exist, they are less common. I would suggest translating your degree as a PhD since most international audiences will understand that you mean an academic doctorate. </p>\n\n<p>That being said, I was able to get what Dr. rer. nat. meant, too, so you might decide to put that and not worry about it. Most people have the ability to search the internet when they are confused.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36950,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I would say that for business cards and websites you don't need to translate your degree title. Many people will already know what it means (German titles are unusual, but reasonably well known), and most will be able to basically figure it out, since it's got \"Dr.\" as part of it. If you are feeling particularly concerned about misunderstanding, you can put a footnote to the effect of \"German doctorate similar to a Ph.D,\" but it's probably better to let the other person look up a translation.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37008,
"author": "Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson",
"author_id": 519,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/519",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I translate my own Dr.rer.nat. as PhD when I feel like a translation is required, and state it as Dr.rer.nat. otherwise. Since it says Dr. right there in the title, it is seldom if ever misunderstood.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/16
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36932",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26614/"
] |
36,933 |
<p><sub><em>I apologize in advance if this question is too broad, or too subjective - I couldn't think of a better place to ask it.</em></sub></p>
<p><strong>Summary</strong>: does mathematical aptitude impose an upper boundary on how well one can do in research areas where life sciences intersect with engineering and computer science? I.e., is an ideal researcher in such fields either an experimentalist or an applied mathematician/physicist?</p>
<hr>
<p>I'm a computer science graduate thinking about pursuing a PhD in an interdisciplinary life science field; specifically systems biology, synthetic biology, bioinformatics, genomics or cognitive (neuro)science. Characteristic of all these disciplines is that they seem to - ideally - require one of the following <strong>two profiles</strong>:</p>
<ul>
<li>someone with great <strong>experimental</strong>/domain skills (e.g. molecular
biology, neuroscience methods etc.), </li>
<li>someone with great <strong>quantitative</strong> skills (math/physics).</li>
</ul>
<p>By virtue of my undergrad background, I'm likely closer to the second profile, even though I have <em>some</em> domain knowledge. However, here's where my self-doubts begin. People of this profile seem to be - in the long term at least - <strong>expected to produce new theoretical knowledge primarily by employing advanced math</strong>. Top research papers seem to be full of it. I'm concerned about this for the following reasons:</p>
<ul>
<li>my mathematical skills and aptitude in the context of this profile are average, or a bit above average at best. Sure, I can handle ordinary differential equations and numerical integration, but once it gets to the postdoc level and above, I'm competing with people who are elite talents and have backgrounds in math or physics from top schools. I don't believe I posses anywhere near the math talent that they have, and I simply wouldn't be able to do the job as good as them - and I don't want to be producing subpar research. Furthermore, I spent a significant amount of time studying things that don't seem applicable to this type of research, like CPU architecture or OS internals. Because I'm targeting programs in Europe - where a PhD is normally 3 years - I can't in this short time develop my math skills enough to close the gap, especially considering my less-than-elite talent (funny as it may sound, I believe I have a much greater talent for the humanities/philosophy, but the amount of positions there is close to zero). </li>
<li>by far my strongest actual skill is <strong>coding/programming</strong>, and I could probably get some kind of position based on that. I believe I could do
well enough to produce some tools and maybe even get a (likely mediocre) PhD eventually, but
after this step - when an independent research path is expected - it
seems to me I would be at a disadvantage and heading for the
industry, because implementation skills are simply not enough, i.e.
they seem to have merely a supporting role in academia (since they alone cannot generate new knowledge, the main objective of research). Permanent faculty positions seem
to go out at much higher rates to math-inclined
individuals, who are at an advantage when it comes to formulating a
unique theoretical research statement. At least, this is my
observation.</li>
</ul>
<p>Should I choose something else if I'm not a top math talent and thus can't evolve into any of the two profiles mentioned?</p>
<p>Or is such categorization of researcher profiles in fact a false dilemma and there are more options, i.e. not everything required to perform well in these fields can be reduced to mathematical aptitude?</p>
<p>For what it's worth, I did undergraduate research in computational biology that lead to published papers, and sure I could handle math at that level, but it just seems to me that to make it as a top full-time researcher, I would either have to become an applied mathematician or an experimentalist.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36937,
"author": "Developer63",
"author_id": 26795,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26795",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It seems to me you are making excuses and \"failing yourself\", i.e., declaring your own failure in advance, for reasons that may or may not even wind up being relevant. I read in your question that you do in fact actually WANT to go for this, but you are afraid of failing in the end. So, the real question becomes, how do you define your own \"success\" or \"failure\" in this endeavor? If you wind up getting a PhD at the end of the day, will that in itself constitute success? If you pursue this path, but do not obtain a PhD, or do not obtain a permanent faculty position, will one of those unequivocally constitute \"failure\" in your own eyes? Is it still a failure if you wind up obtaining well-paid employment doing work you are passionate about, with brilliant people you love working with?</p>\n\n<p>Are you trying so hard to have everything \"perfect\" according to the limits of what you currently know, that you are keeping yourself from even pursuing something you appear to want?</p>\n\n<p>It seems there are a range of possible outcomes here.</p>\n\n<p>1) You don't even get selected to start in the PhD program, and the whole issue is moot.</p>\n\n<p>2) You enter the PhD program, and in the course of your studies, discover some other, related area you are passionate about and particularly good at, and change your studies and degree program to focus on that previously unknown area.</p>\n\n<p>3) You enter the PhD program, do not enjoy it, do not complete it, and discover other areas of life you wish to devote your energies to.</p>\n\n<p>4) You enter the PhD program, and complete it, but not at the full level of distinction you wish, and at the end, wind up having less ideal choices than you would like to have, though one or two of the choices are reasonably appealing.</p>\n\n<p>5) You enter the PhD program, and complete it, in the process gaining all the advanced math skills you truly need, bringing your own unique skills to bear, and completing the degree with distinction, and have numerous appealing options to choose from at the end, </p>\n\n<p>This is of course an artificial, limited list of the range of possible outcomes. Which of these would be success? Which would be failure? It seems to me entirely possible, almost likely, that you would have research partners with the math skills you desire, who would be interested in collaborating with you precisely because of your computer programming skills, and the ability to automate the creation of research models, and in the process, tackle even more challenging and interesting kinds of problems as a team than either could succeed at individually. Does all the ultra-advanced math have to come from uniquely you? Or is it sufficient to come from a research collaborator, as long as you fully understand it?</p>\n\n<p>So yes, I personally believe you are creating a false dilemma for yourself. I think it would be helpful for you to consider, to the point of writing them out in much more detail than I did above, a RANGE of outcomes that could occur from pursuing this PhD program, and then decide which outcomes constitute \"success\", for YOU, and which outcomes would constitute \"failure\". Then, estimate the chances of each outcome coming to pass, 30%, 80%, and so forth. If there are one or more \"success\" outcomes with likelihood above 50%, then I believe you have your answer. Or, at the least, you are now clear about the question. Do you need \"slam dunk\" odds of success? or is 50% chance of success good enough for you to get started, confident that you can improve your own odds by hard work and passion?</p>\n\n<p>The other question you musk ask yourself, is \"what are the other options\", and are any of them as well developed and appealing to you as this one? Because you don't mention them, I can only conclude they are not as well developed or appealing, and that you have put your energies into the option you are asking us about.</p>\n\n<p>The other risk here, is having a well-developed option like you present here, choosing not to pursue it, and then later regretting your lack of action. Picturing yourself five years from now, what will you wish you had done?</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36945,
"author": "Developer63",
"author_id": 26795,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26795",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>From your question and comments, it seems you view “success” as being involved in original research, in a long term position where you can focus passionately on your research.</p>\n\n<p>You are less concerned about success in completing the PhD program, and more concerned about “10 years down the road” from that, about the research, about being involved in compelling original research, on an ongoing basis, being in the thick of exciting things that are being worked on.</p>\n\n<p>You are concerned that a wrong choice NOW would lead to a poor outcome, where you would wind up doing less-interesting research, a career, a life, of frustration, preventable by a better choice up front. (Can’t say I blame you)</p>\n\n<p>You have observed two types of profiles that succeed in this field:\n1) Someone with great experimental/domain skills (e.g. molecular biology),\n2) Someone with great quantitative skills.\nOf these, it seems you pretty much write off 1), apparently due to lack of background, and focus on 2), with the observation that you have limits in this area. So something closer to the great quantitative skills is how you feel you’d make your mark.</p>\n\n<p>You feel your current advanced mathematics skills may limit you. I also infer that you do not wish to fully give your mind over to the advanced mathematics area, as it does not excite you as much as other areas.</p>\n\n<p>So you are looking for an answer that says, \"Yes, you can make this work, and here's how, and here are examples of people who have done this.\" </p>\n\n<p>You mentioned your concern about matching up to the mathematicians, competing with them. “I'm competing with people who are elite talents and have backgrounds in math or physics from top schools. I don't believe I possess anywhere near the math talent that they have, and I simply wouldn't be able to do the job as good as them - and I don't want to be producing subpar research.”</p>\n\n<p>I challenge your assumption that you are inherently and always competing with these people. Why don’t you focus on collaborating with them instead, certainly at least at first? Why not see if you can provide all the key skills around this area so they can collaborate and plug in with their terrific skills, their 10%, in service of your great experiment design? In the process, you will see how they think, your mirror neurons will get busy helping you learn rapidly, and you can decide if you want to learn to do what they do, or if you are just as happy to let them do that while you address parts of the problem that feel more creative and interesting to you.</p>\n\n<p>I suggest that a good next action step is to start by looking again at some of those many papers you mentioned that contain large quantities of advanced mathematics, and then check the author list, and use your own research skills to ascertain which co-authors were responsible for which parts of the paper. </p>\n\n<p>If possible, contact some of them and ask--how did they divide up the mathematics portions of the paper? Do some of the collaborators even possibly have (gasp) a similar level of mathematical skill to what you currently possess, but great skills and creativity in other areas that were critical to success? You might also make some terrific contacts and have some amazing conversations in this process.</p>\n\n<p>I think the answer is to go back to the papers that had the advanced mathematics that looked intimidating, and do some data-gathering fact-checking on which authors really did what, and use them to get a more accurate, and likely more diverse, profile of the types of people who can be successful in this field, and with any luck at all, potentially find a few models you can identify with, and inspire you to take the plunge. (Who knows, maybe in the process you will discover <em>other</em> papers that are equally interesting to you, with less reliance on the advanced mathematics.)</p>\n\n<p>P.S. If, in the process, you don't find ANY models that inspire you, give you confidence, then DON'T DO IT!! Run Forrest, Run!!</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36949,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Speaking as a computer scientist who works with life sciences: <strong>there is a lot more use for computer science than just modeling</strong>.</p>\n\n<p>Consider:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Who makes and maintains the instruments?</li>\n<li>Who handles <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_information_management_system\">LIMS</a> development and deployment?</li>\n<li>Who develops automation systems and precision protocols?</li>\n<li>Who develops the control mechanisms that actually implement biomedical intervention concepts?</li>\n<li>Who develops taxonomies, interchange standards, and data representations?</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>This just scratches the surface of computer science opportunities in the biomedical \nUnfortunately, the view that you hold of \"you're either an experimentalist or a modeler\" is far too prevalent in biomedical culture, and computer scientists often get little respect for their contributions. That culture is starting to shift however, and especially in younger and more engineering-centric subfields like synthetic biology... and especially in some of the <a href=\"http://2014.igem.org/Team:Aachen\">awesome things</a> the younger practitioners are doing.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37131,
"author": "Inquisitive",
"author_id": 27985,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27985",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>If you want to do something in life, you should try it. Try it for a short time defined as less than 5 years.</p>\n\n<p>One of the primary indicators it isn't working out for you is that you'll probably feel great stress if you are barely keeping up with your peers.</p>\n\n<p>Please realize as well that different disciplines focus on different mathematical concepts. For example, if you are interested in becoming a PhD electrical engineer, you probably won't spend any time worrying about number theory or General Relativity. In other words, you don't have to learn ALL mathematics known to mankind in order to succeed in a field that requires skill at some form of advanced mathematics.</p>\n\n<p>Here's something pretty funny for you to absorb. I actually had a professor speak the following paraphrased words in my university philosophy class:</p>\n\n<p><strong>\"Most of the research produced at colleges/universities is garbage.\"</strong></p>\n\n<p>From my own experience at a university I can tell you that there are many dissertations sitting on shelves in back rooms that are doing nothing more than collecting dust. People aren't necessarily as brilliant as you think they are.</p>\n\n<p>Judging by what you've talked about here, I'm laying my money on the notion that you are going to succeed in life.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 44425,
"author": "user3780968",
"author_id": 32158,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32158",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>This question doesn't seem to be active anymore, but I just came across it and there's one thing that nobody has talked about: big data.</p>\n\n<p>Data is everywhere in the \"wet science\" nowadays, and it really is changing the way people do research. I would say data analysis skills are at least as important as pure math skills, and these skills are a mixture of intuition, good programming skills, understanding of data management, statistics, machine learning, and perhaps more. </p>\n\n<p>Good programming skills are also not very common in the wet sciences.\nMy friend who's a glaciologist struggled with that in his PhD, doing experiments over and over because he didn't trust the code he wrote, and when they hired a programmer, the programmer didn't understand the domain, so he was pretty useless.</p>\n\n<p>The opportunities of applying good data analysis skills are huge, even in the humanities. There's a major international challenge called \"digging into data\" shared by the US, Canada, the UK and the Netherlands that really recognized that (<a href=\"http://diggingintodata.org/\" rel=\"nofollow\">http://diggingintodata.org/</a>).</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/16
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36933",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17810/"
] |
36,941 |
<p>I recently made some changes to a piece of (proprietary) code that my group uses which has made it two orders of magnitude faster. The code I updated wasn't mine and the original algorithm IP was published a few decades ago so I can't claim I did anything other than some clever refactoring/parallelizing (which somehow everyone else said wasn't possible). The impact of this update is such that work that would have taken months can now, in principle, be done in under a week (or from hours to minutes).</p>
<p>Unfortunately academia doesn't really reward 'enablers' for improving software so I'm not really sure what I can gain from this beyond some ideas in my own PhD that were not possible previously.</p>
<p>The critical point, compared to other questions I've seen on this topic, is that the code is now commercially viable. Understandably my supervisor is very happy and wants to keep things under wraps for the time being.</p>
<p>I'm aware that the university probably owns every line of code I just wrote. Do I have any ground to request compensation if the software starts being licensed? I don't want to sour the relationship I have with my supervisor which has up until now been very good (and I've just earned a lot of respect for this work).</p>
<p>If I was working in industry this is about the time I'd be going to my line manager and at asking for a salary bump or a promotion. In academia it seems like this sort of work is relegated to a pat on the back and a footnote. I suspect I'm being sour, but is this just the way it goes?</p>
<p>Am I allowed to ask that people cite the software even if it's not a publication (not that we have a website!)? For instance one can cite R, Numpy, etc.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36958,
"author": "Alexandros",
"author_id": 10042,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10042",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>As a software developer it is hard to believe that improving a piece of (proprietary) code can made it two orders of magnitude faster. Although parallelization can make it 2-5 times faster on a modern workstation of 6-8 cores, unless the original code was notoriously bad it is hard to imagine that it can really be faster by two orders of magnitude (~100 times faster) just by improvement, without changing the original algorithm. So, are you 100% sure that the acceleration you get is legit? Sometimes (especially with parallelization) when things are too good to be true, there is some subtle condition which usually breaks by parallelization. So, first make 100% sure (compare results produced for a wide range of input data) by the two versions of the software (the old and your version). I assume you use some version of version control system (who does not?), so you still have the old version somewhere. It does not matter if this experiment takes a few days - 1-2 weeks it has to be done to be 100% sure that something did not break and you do get identical results between the two versions of the software <strong>for a wide range of input data</strong> and not just by a small test case.</p>\n\n<p>If you are 100% sure that you really improved the software without breaking anything, the main question is did you actually improved the original algorithm or not. Simply adding an OpenMP directive and parallelizing a code which was parallelizable all along, is not a publishable result. In this case, your improvements do not merit a publication and therefore <strong>no publication => no citation</strong>, since you did not create the original software. On the other hand, if you did more than refactoring / parallelizing the software and your contribution is significant you must publish these results on a technical-focused CS conference. Then everyone using your version of the software could cite this work and additionally could cite the online version of the software if it is publicly available. </p>\n\n<p>On the legal version of your story, I really do not have the expertise to answer. In this case, I would search the IP policy of the university as @NateEldredge suggests and ask an experienced lawyer who knows about software patents. I do not think anyone of us here are really entitled here to give legal advice. Of course if your version of the software starts getting money for the university, you are probably entitled to a share and you must protect your rights as good as you can. It is just that right now, we do not know if this software is going to actually become a product for sale. </p>\n\n<p>Also about your paragraph:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>If I was working in industry this is about the time I'd be going to my\n line manager and at asking for a salary bump or a promotion. In\n academia it seems like this sort of work is relegated to a pat on the\n back and a footnote. I suspect I'm being sour, but is this just the\n way it goes?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I do not know how much experience you have in the software industry, but be rest assured that you do not get a raise everytime you do a good job. After all, this is expected from you and it is a prerequisite for you <strong>keeping your job</strong> for a long time. You can always ask for a raise, but that does not mean you will get one. </p>\n\n<p>On the other hand as I mentioned earlier, either you changed the software's algorithm and implementation so much that you deserve a separate publication or you bug-fixed a crappy code (which you will use on your PHD) which does not really say that much. Either case, this is probably the only credit you will get.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36967,
"author": "choener",
"author_id": 8826,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8826",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The most simple solution is to publish these new results. The question to this answer can be found here:\n<a href=\"http://www.software.ac.uk/resources/guides/which-journals-should-i-publish-my-software\" rel=\"nofollow\">In which journals should I publish my software?</a>.\nThis is the most appropriate thing to do. Some journals also have something like the ``OUP Bioinformatics Application Notes''. Check, together with your advisor, if you can find something like this.</p>\n\n<p>The possibility of monetary compensation of some form is probably low. Not only because you are in academia, also because you most likely work as some form of public servant. Details are different for all countries and work places, however.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/17
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36941",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27934/"
] |
36,947 |
<p>Suppose that an undergraduate student is preparing for interviews for Ph.D. positions in natural sciences. Is it common/acceptable to ask a professor with relevant expertise and familiarity with the student's educational background and research ability to conduct a mock interview with the student as a way to ascertain problems in the student's preparation? Or will such requests be viewed as unnecessary or "asking for too much"?</p>
<p>I'm primarily interested in the acceptability of such requests in US colleges.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36980,
"author": "user141592",
"author_id": 27327,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27327",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>It depends on the professor. If it's someone who knows you well and has the time, then they would probably be happy to help. Most of the professors I came across during my undergrad were more than happy to help preparing me for grad school interviews. Just make sure you ask well in advance, so they have time find an appropriate time, and don't take it personally if they say no: professors are really busy. </p>\n\n<p>EDIT: Make sure you ask professors that have been through the graduate application process in the same country you are applying, if possible. Ones who received their PhD elsewhere, or say 50 years ago, will probably turn you down simply because they don't feel familiar enough with the process (unless they are directly involved in admissions for your school's graduate program).</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37018,
"author": "RoboKaren",
"author_id": 14885,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14885",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Yes! We welcome such invitations. It's good for the entire department -- for both younger students to look at, as well as your peers so make it a big event.</p>\n\n<p>Not all faculty can go but the good thing is that these tend to be self-selecting -- that the faculty who are the most helpful are the ones who come.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/17
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36947",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/16049/"
] |
36,948 |
<p>Mostly for fun, I've been working on an exposition about some ideas in my area of math (algebraic geometry). As far as I know there isn't any elementary introduction to this particular topic already out there. It's at an early undergrad level. I'd like to make it available, but I'm just not sure how best to proceed.</p>
<p>What are my options for disseminating it, and what are the pros/cons of each? I'm especially interested in what sorts of articles are suitable expository journals, vs what usually lands on a math blog. (I could also just put it on my site, but I hope someone and than my own students (and my parents) will actually read it.)</p>
<p>Other relevant info: I'm currently a postdoc at a research-intensive place. I'd like to be competitive for teaching jobs at good liberal arts colleges when I'm done in a couple years -- if any of these options would help with that, it's a point in favor.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37913,
"author": "Aaron Brick",
"author_id": 14140,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14140",
"pm_score": -1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>you sound like you want to publish the paper. when you take the time to identify what journals it could plausibly appear in, you'll also find out your top choices. make the piece as neat and appealing as possible - have your peers go through it - and see where you can get it published.</p>\n\n<p>as i see it the second best thing to a journal would be submitting it to a conference; next best after that is a working paper; after that a blog post. certainly the higher up this \"value chain\" that you can publish will support your job search.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 44650,
"author": "paul garrett",
"author_id": 980,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>(Upon jakebeal's request:)</p>\n\n<p>Seconding @Kimball's recommendation, the \"Monthly\" (for all its problems...) is seen by undergrads, and also \"College M.J.\". Small consolation, but, indeed, it's hard to reach people who don't know the keyword to \"google-upon\". Conceivably, your enveloping HTML page could include more-naive keywords, or even nearly-hype-ish keywords, hubris-acknowledged, that would give g-hits.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 44664,
"author": "GEdgar",
"author_id": 4484,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4484",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I doubt the <em>Monthly</em> is the place for it. If you decide to publish, see <a href=\"https://mathoverflow.net/q/15366/454\">THIS</a> mathoverflow question.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/17
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36948",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23399/"
] |
36,951 |
<p>Question that is really bothering me is what are the important factors for admission to top five engineering graduate school? I searched in different forums and saw people got accepted to PhD program at prestigious school with GPA 3.40 GRE Quantitative of 165 and no publication. However I also saw people could not get in to even master program with 4.0 GPA ,good GRE score.
I am starting to think that GPA ,GRE and even research experience are not determining factor. Can anyone please clarify this for me?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36966,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>To get into a top graduate program, you typically need:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>No red flags that will cause your application to be discarded.</li>\n<li>Something that causes you to stand out from the vast crowd of good applicants with no red flags.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>A lot of people seem to think that having an extremely high GPA, GRE, class rank, etc. will help, but it does not. The problem is that such standardized evaluations address only category #1. There are a lot of good students out there, and graduate programs aren't really interested in whether you are the <em>best</em> student. Instead, they are interested in whether you have problems as a student that would prevent you from succeeding in graduate school.</p>\n\n<p>The honest truth is that there is a huge amount of unpredictability in satisfying criteria #2. and you can only do so much to control it. There are many useful things you can do to help make yourself stand out, like participating in research projects, but ultimately there are no guarantees, because you never know how many other excellent candidates might also be applying to that program in that year, and what exactly it is that will make one person's application resonate with the particular faculty member who reads it.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36974,
"author": "Brian Borchers",
"author_id": 4453,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4453",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>An important factor is where the student did their undergraduate work. The admissions committee will be familiar with many undergraduate institutions that have good reputations and some that have bad reputations. If you come from an undergraduate college that has a bad reputation or that the committee is simply unfamiliar with, then this will make admitting you a risky choice. If there are plenty of strong applicants from well known good undergraduate programs, then the easiest thing to do is to select from those students. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36979,
"author": "sevensevens",
"author_id": 14754,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14754",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I applied to, and was accepted at well know university after attending a small regional state school. While I have no proof of this, I sincerely believe the quality of the letters of recommendation is what made the difference.</p>\n\n<p>I had a 3.5 GPA and good, but not great GRE scores, and no papers. I was heavily involved in the ACM (computer science professional organization), and signed up for several grad level classes. I made sure my letter writers would have more to say then \"is a good student.\" Show that you are truly passionate about your field of study. That will be reflected in recommendations.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36982,
"author": "lastuser",
"author_id": 27926,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27926",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Is it usual that an undergraduate student in USA has published by the time he gets his degree BSc.? I really doubt it. 3 - 4 years is quite a short time for a student to equip himself enough to write anything meaningful. In Europa, a 5-year Master program (3 + 2 years) may probably last 6 - 7 years, because the Master thesis is a relative heavy project. People may even need a year to plan, set up and conduct experiments in the laboratories. After that they could spend several months on writing thesis, rarely one has publication.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/17
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36951",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20608/"
] |
36,953 |
<p>Is it or is it not good practice to make an author the subject of sentences in a paper? When should their name be central, discreet, or absent in the sentence? Here are five variations showing different approaches, four of which include the author’s name. Are there particular identifiable use cases for these styles?</p>
<ol>
<li>Johnson argued that this will never work.</li>
<li>Per Johnson, this will never work.</li>
<li>The argument was advanced by Johnson that this will never work.</li>
<li>This will never work (Johnson).</li>
<li>This will never work [42].</li>
</ol>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36954,
"author": "Corvus",
"author_id": 27900,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27900",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Version 2 seems stilted; 3 is an unnecessarily verbose use of the passive voice. The choice between 4 and 5 is really a matter of the journal's style guidelines rather than an active decision you will get to make as the author. </p>\n\n<p>So the real choice here is between 1 or 4/5. The key thing to note is that you sentence draws attention to an actor and an action through your choice of subject and verb. (See Joseph Williams, <em>Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace</em> for a superb discussion of this and many related principles)</p>\n\n<p>In 1, the actor is \"Johnson\" and the action is \"argued\". In 4/5, the action is \"This\" and the action is \"will not work\". Thus if your intent is to draw attention to the fact that Johnson made this claim, as you would e.g. if discussing a history of ideas, version 1 might be preferred. If instead your intent is to draw attention to the claim itself, and the reference to Johnson is simply a matter of good scholarship, 4/5 will be preferred. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36955,
"author": "Pete L. Clark",
"author_id": 938,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>There is more here than style: the first and third options <em>mean</em> something quite different from the fourth and fifth. In the former cases, what you are asserting is that someone else argued for X. In the latter cases, <em>you</em> are asserting X and using the citation as evidence/support/proof. (That I can't quite tell where the second one fits into this dichotomy is a strike against it.) In an academic paper, that is a not so subtle difference.</p>\n\n<p>I find the style question less critical. It is a matter of general good writing rather than anything specifically academic <em>or</em> it is specific to the journal at hand (so we need not discuss it here). </p>\n\n<p>Of course you can use an author's name as a subject of a sentence: you can write what you want, you know! As a matter of style, to my ear the first option sounds good, the second option sounds weird, and the third option sounds weaker and wordier than the first, but maybe the surrounding text gives you a good reason to write it that way.</p>\n\n<p>The difference between options 4 and 5 is just a difference in citation style. First that is very field dependent; in my field (mathematics), we would do 5 rather than 4; in much of the humanities it would be the other way around. Second, unless your choice is so so strange that it prevents your readers from finding the references in your bibliography, the whole issue can probably wait until your paper gets accepted, in which case they'll either do it for you, tell you exactly what to do, or tell you that you did it wrong (and ask you to fix it).</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36972,
"author": "paul garrett",
"author_id": 980,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In addition to other good points made, there is the question of whether <em>you</em> wish to assert a thing, or only assert that someone else asserts it. That is, if you write \"Johnson asserts X.\" then (from that sentence alone) it is not clear whether you agree, disagree, or are neutral. If, instead, you write something like \"One might consider X. For example, see [Johnson].\" then you are at least tentatively asserting X, with Johnson for corroboration. This distinction might matter more than style... although I'd agree that avoiding circumlocutions and verbosity is generally good (=more readable).</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36988,
"author": "Hagen von Eitzen",
"author_id": 20647,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20647",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>To me, formulation 1 would appear useable only in special contexts, such as</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Johnson argued that this will never work ([Jo97]), but later Miller found a way to get rid of the obstacles in many important cases ([Mi04] and [Mi04a]).</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>In other words, you want to express Johnson's opinion without sharing it (and of course you back this up with citations). In general, 4 or 5 seems to be preferred (e.g., [Corvus])</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/17
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36953",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14140/"
] |
36,959 |
<p>I'm a PhD student in pure maths at a university in Europe. For reasons that I won't go into, my research interests do not coincide with my supervisor's ones. This means that, although she gives me good general advice, she can't give me more "technical" feedback on my work. I've now written a complete first draft of my first paper, and I'd like to get some external feedback before thinking of submitting it to a journal. My question is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What is the best way to approach the experts in my field (for whom I am a complete stranger) to politely ask if they can read my paper and give some feedback on it?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Emailing, of course, would be the preferred means of communication, so suggestions on how to structure a potential email to send to the experts are very welcomed. </p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36964,
"author": "Massimo Ortolano",
"author_id": 20058,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Asking just for feedback on a specific paper is not, I think, a good approach. It would be definitely better to set up a collaboration, which can become a long-standing one and which can be more rewarding for both parties.</p>\n\n<p>Many PhD programs in Europe allow, and sometimes require, students to spend a period abroad. If your PhD program allows this and your advisor agrees, you can think of searching a research group working in your favourite field and spending from a few weeks to a few months or a year with them. You can then discuss your paper directly with them and possibly you can think of new works to be done in collaboration. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36968,
"author": "Anonymous",
"author_id": 11565,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11565",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Generally it's considered okay to e-mail researchers who you don't know and share your work with them. This is especially true if you are a student.</p>\n\n<p>Be conservative about it -- pick only a few people whose research interests align closely with the paper you're writing. (For example, whose work are you citing?) <em>Don't</em> e-mail famous people just because they're famous.</p>\n\n<p>That said, I think that asking for detailed feedback might be seen as presumptuous. Rather, just tell them that you would like to share your work with them, describe it very briefly, and say something like \"If you have any comments I would be grateful to hear them.\"</p>\n\n<p>Probably most people will ignore your message. (They have no obligation whatsoever to read your message or respond.) Maybe one or two will write back with general feedback or suggestions, and if you are very lucky you might get some detailed feedback. What you might realistically hope for is a response along the lines of \"Thanks, this looks interesting, you might be interested in X, Y, and Z\" which at least gives you some related works to check out.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36975,
"author": "Miguel",
"author_id": 14695,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14695",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I will add my answer in the form of two examples coming from experience, given that there are already other answers that might be more generally useful.</p>\n\n<p>The first example is regarding how I (a non famous recently graduated postdoc) handle this kind of enquiries. From my perspective, interaction with people interested in my work leads to, besides learning more about what I do, a potential gain in citations and contacts. Both are vital to me at this early stage in my career. I therefore tend to be very keen to address emails promptly and in detail, given they are reasonable (i.e. discard spam article invitations and random applications immediately).</p>\n\n<p>For the other example I'm at the opposite side of the rope, contacting other people regarding my interest in their work. Here are three cases with different outcomes:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>If it's regarding a specific paper I try contacting the corresponding author (that's the purpose of it after all!). Once I contacted a famous guy this way who failed to produce any response at all.</p></li>\n<li><p>After changing topics, a world leading author in my new area happened to be a former collaborator of my PhD supervisor, so I got the latter to \"introduce\" me to the other, which was done in the form of a phone call between the two followed by an email by me. The expert replied politely but very briefly, clearly shutting down any door to further interaction - he was clearly not interested.</p></li>\n<li><p>A more successful story is with regards to contacting a guy on a paper he had coauthored with a quite famous guy. After I didn't get a reply from him I tried with the famous dude, who did not only reply but also copied the less famous guy thus triggering his reaction and cooperation.</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>In every case I was very polite and as brief as possible in my emails.</p>\n\n<p>The bottom line is that getting a reply from different people will vary depending on practical matters such as how busy they are, but will also wildly depend on their personal character. To increase your chances always try clear polite emails directly to the point, hope you get a reply but don't expect too much.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36986,
"author": "Pete L. Clark",
"author_id": 938,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<blockquote>\n <p>What is the best way to approach the experts in my field (for whom I am a complete stranger) to politely ask if they can read my paper and give some feedback on it?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>For a student who is not very senior -- let's say \"very senior\" means they already have a draft of their thesis -- I think that (probably: as usual on this site, a literal universal quantifier will get me in trouble) the best way to do this is with your advisor as an intermediary. </p>\n\n<p>Don't misunderstand: you ask whether it is frowned upon for you to directly contact experts and ask for feedback and the answer is a resounding <strong>no</strong>: you can contact whomever you wish, and they may or may not respond. However, they are much more likely to respond -- and to respond more deeply and usefully -- to someone that they already know, at least by reputation, especially if that person is at roughly their level of seniority (and, yes, even more if that person is more senior). </p>\n\n<p>When I was a PhD student, I didn't have the best luck \"cold-contacting\" people. I remember in particular trying to contact one guy who was a former student of my advisor and whose thesis I was reading. He was a professor in New York but he didn't have a webpage. I left a longish, awkwardish <em>phone message</em> for him at one point and never heard back from him. (Did he even get the message? Who knows??) I emailed a famous French mathematician and did hear back from him....four months later, which is like forever when you're in your 20s. I was so clueless back then: if I had been serious about it, I would have gone through my advisor, and they would have responded. Well, of course I knew that intellectually, but still somehow decided that it would be better if I did it on my own. (There were a lot of things that I did and didn't do as a graduate student that were directly motivated both by a desire for independence -- good -- and a lack of confidence -- bad -- intertwined in such a complicated way that it is hard for me to pull them apart even now.) It's not that people don't want to be helpful. It's that their time is at such a premium that they have to prioritize helping people that they already know. </p>\n\n<p>If your advisor cannot direct you to those who have the research expertise you need, then I would say that she is not really your advisor and you need to find someone else who can fulfill that role. </p>\n\n<p>Anyway:</p>\n\n<p>1) As others have suggested, if you have completed drafts of papers -- even if not in as polished a form as you would want in order to submit to a journal -- then putting them on the arxiv is a great idea. You'll get some small (in most cases) positive (in my experience) number of \"cold emails\" just from them, and these can be priceless: in my case, more than once I got connected with the one other person on the planet who really deeply understood and cared about what I was doing. </p>\n\n<p>2) A lot of times you <em>will</em> still send an email. It's just that your advisor will have greased the wheels for you by ensuring the recipient's, um, receptivity in advance. Let me give a little advice on that:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Introduce yourself politely but don't make a big deal out of it. </li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>You don't need to be overly obsequious or solicitous about their personal life and such. Something like \"Dear Professor X, Hello there. I am a student at University A working on Subject B. Though we have not corresponded before, I think you know my advisor, Professor Y. She encouraged me to contact you about my work on C.\" That's plenty of introduction; you could get away with less.</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Try to write an initial email that the recipient can and will read completely as soon as they open it. </li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Thus you want it to be quite short, but not so short that it doesn't say anything. </p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>Don't describe your work at length in the email. Instead, include files (of a reasonable length) and/or links to files or webpages. (If you have a webpage, you should put a link to it somewhere in your email!)</p></li>\n<li><p>Make a clear request. Better: ask a math question.</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>If you include a 30 page paper and say \"I'd be grateful for any comments you have\": well, that's the sort of thing that I do to my good friends, and when I run into them the following year they politely apologize for not having finished it. Mathematicians like questions and -- here's a little psychological secret -- seem to regard a question mark as being much more compulsory of some sort of answer than most other people. (I am always amazed at how I can have a phone conversation or an email exchange with some non-academic type, ask a question, and their response completely ignores the fact that I asked them anything. To my eyes that is some kind of Jedi mind trick.) If you want to know whether X is true, ask them directly and right away whether X is true. </p>\n\n<p>In fact, if you're not clear enough about what you want, it could go wrong in the other direction: some samaritan savant could reply with several typed pages that answer your question all too well and leave you without a thesis problem. (This is another good reason for getting help from your advisor.)</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/17
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36959",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27937/"
] |
36,963 |
<p>As background, many of my students fall into the "un-prepared" for university category. This has introduced many challenges. Some challenges are easily handled when a student is sincerely interested in learning (they want to know what to read and I guide them appropriately).</p>
<p>More challenging is that these students are not native-speakers of English yet they are studying in English. Again, those who work hard do well. Those who do not work hard, do poorly.</p>
<p>I am looking for a way to <strong>encourage ALL students to spend more time outside of class studying.</strong> To this end, I am considering composing some videos (a significant time commitment on my part) which will teach material that I do not cover in class. </p>
<p><a href="https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/30513/2692">This question</a> discusses how to identify the reason students are not doing home work and <a href="https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/11294/2692">this questions</a> discusses how to make best use of videos as homework. However, I am asking something different.</p>
<p>I have done some surveying of students and many of them <em>say</em> that they prefer watching videos over reading. What I really want to know is whether <strong>anyone has seen or has researched the increased likelihood that a student will actually follow the homework because it is a video as opposed to in a textual format.</strong></p>
<p><strong>I do not want to get into the issues of punishment here.</strong> The students generally know that less homework = lower scores but they think they can still pass and that is all they care about. Sadly, I care more about their education than they do.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37525,
"author": "PALADIN 458S",
"author_id": 28383,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28383",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>As a student, I would like to throw in my two cents...</p>\n\n<p>Videos are incredibly useful and I think that more professors would be wise to create/use them. When studying or working on a project, I often cruise right on over to YouTube and begin searching for videos on the particular topics that I need to know about. Specifically, I like to use lecture videos. If I have a mid-term coming up and my professor had videos available...my study time would be cut and my retention would be better. It is a very efficient use of time on our end. </p>\n\n<p>Why are they so great? Because I can pause at any time I need some time to write something down and I can watch any part or the whole thing as many times as I want to until the information I want really sinks in.</p>\n\n<p>To support this, all I need to do is point to Khan Academy. Nearly all of my classmates know what Khan Academy is and most of them actively use the site to help them with math. I've actually watched most of the Khan Academy videos for personal development completely unrelated to anything that I was studying in school. They're fun to watch and, yes, there is a lot of learning going on for me.</p>\n\n<p>Concerning video vs. text, I have recently taken to learning the Java programming language. I bought the most recommended books and started to get going. I've come a long way and I am starting to get the language down. The booster for this, though, was the innumerable videos on YouTube explaining the Java language for beginners. The books are great, but I really got my best impact from the videos. My learning curve was far steeper from the videos than the books.</p>\n\n<p>Videos...very effective teaching tools!!</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37528,
"author": "blankip",
"author_id": 11420,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11420",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In my current position I create mini-LMS (Learning Management Systems) solutions for our large company. Breaking these up by topics and groups much like SE does. My systems hold almost anything - videos, pdfs, spreadsheets, elearning, quizzes, games, online content (like SE). </p>\n\n<p>I am also a stat head and track everything that goes on all the way down to the time a person takes to answer a question - and if they are in the same browser what sites they visited during that question.</p>\n\n<p>Some things that may help you:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>For long elearnings people generally skipped to the quiz at the end and kept taking quiz until they passed.</p></li>\n<li><p>People don't watch long videos. Anything over 15 minutes have super high drop rates. Those under 7 minutes are generally watched. </p></li>\n<li><p>People generally don't read through long documents unless they are told to. We get way more hits on web content then we get people opening up docs. This flipped about 5-6 years ago and is getting worse. To the point were we may do away with documents.</p></li>\n<li><p>If you want people to <em>really</em> look at something there are three keys: <strong>fear</strong> (that they may get a bad score, not pass, look bad, whatever), <strong>entertainment</strong> (lack of professionalism and boring stuff), and <strong>interaction</strong> (have users do something every once in a while other than read/listen).</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>What learning on my systems do the best. Unequivocally it is blended web learning. An example page may contain a few paragraphs of explanation, a video, few more paragraphs, a video, a few more paragraphs, and a couple of questions. Don't make the questions \"homework\" questions. They should be easy to answer if the read the page and watched the videos. The 2-3 questions should take 30 seconds.</p>\n\n<p>If you don't have a system that can accomplish this I am available for hire. Just kidding. Just get your content and video on a page and give them the quiz from somewhere else (a link maybe) or even on paper. Your goal should be to mix 4-7 minute videos with graphics and information. Keeping the videos shorter also makes it easier to change things up if something changes whether it be the info in the video or the curriculum.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 43758,
"author": "gvenugopal",
"author_id": 33279,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/33279",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I am currently involved in a research project that is associated with the study of the influence of LMS in a blended learning environment. I also use LMS to teach courses. <br/>\nEvery student has a different learning style. Visual learners will prefer video over text. But to engage the other students, you may think of activities that could be performed outside the class, if you are using an LMS. E.g. you could give them 2 minute quizzes they could solve from home, or create educational games.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 43781,
"author": "Szabolcs",
"author_id": 11907,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11907",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It's been a while since I was a student, but I think it's still worth saying this:</p>\n\n<p>I find it <em>easier</em> (as in less effort) to <em>just sit through</em> a video than read a book. </p>\n\n<p><strong>But:</strong> If I actually want to learn something or I have a specific task to solve, I find the linear format of videos extremely constraining, and I find them frustratingly slow. Like most people, I read much faster than normal talking speed. I can also <em>skim</em> texts easily, and find the relevant part, or go back and check a formula again. This is not possible with videos. There's a reason for taking notes in class instead of just recording it: a recording is not going to be useful for preparing for the exam.</p>\n\n<p>You mentioned that many of your students are not native speakers of English. This is a big reason to avoid videos in favour of written material. I am not a native speaker either, and even though for the past few years English was the language I used the most, I still prefer watching English-speaking films with English subtitles. When watching videos there will <em>always, always</em> be at least a few words I can't catch or I can only comprehend with a few seconds' delay. Listening is simply more work for my brain than reading, and makes it <em>just a little bit harder</em> to pay attention to the content.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>My personal opinion on the matter (no more than an opinion!) is that <em>some</em> students are indeed more likely to watch videos than read texts. But that's only because it feels like less effort to them. In reality videos are going to be less efficient at communicating information. They will require significantly more time commitment from you and they will require more time commitment from motivated students as well, who would be able to learn faster from written material. But yes: I do think unmotivated students are more likely to watch a video than to read a text.</p>\n\n<p>Personally I find it very frustrating when the <em>only</em> material available is a video because it just slows me down and forces me to take notes I wouldn't need to take if I already had written material ...</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 43806,
"author": "proth63",
"author_id": 33320,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/33320",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I totaly agree, that videos should be short, 5 minutes is a maximum.\nIt is not possible to keep students involved in the learning process, if videos are longer.\nI think that the best is to create a blended learning environment, refering to a text and including activities to reinforce learning. Videos should be part of it.\nMoodle or Google Classroom could be used for this. Activities and videos could be then embedded into pages and show/hide when needed. Also, Quizlet is a very good tool to help learning.\nAn other advantage of using a such environment, is that the learning material is always available, even from student smartphones or tablets...\nHope this helps a bit :o) Phil</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/17
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36963",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2692/"
] |
36,969 |
<p>Suppose Jackson and Kim wrote a paper in 2014. When I cite this paper, should it be</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Jackson and Kim (2014) show that ...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>or</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Jackson and Kim (2014) shows that ...</p>
</blockquote>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36971,
"author": "Andrew",
"author_id": 27825,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27825",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>This is a special case of a more general problem about 'plural' names for specific organisations/groups, which often comes up (and is different in the UK and US, to complicate things) - for example, <a href=\"https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/138238/are-vs-is-for-proper-nouns-which-sound-plural-such-as-band-names\">https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/138238/are-vs-is-for-proper-nouns-which-sound-plural-such-as-band-names</a> </p>\n\n<p>Generally speaking, either is legitimate - it depends in part whether you think of \"Jackson and Kim\" as the name of a single entity, the paper, or as referring to two individual researchers who happen to be mentioned together. You can also avoid this entirely by using the past tense - \"Jackson and Kim (2014) showed that...\" is the same whether you think of J&K as one entity or two. (Ditto for \"found\", \"proved\", \"refuted\", etc). This would be my personal preference.</p>\n\n<p>Ultimately, though, all questions of style in academic writing can be answered with \"have a look at what other papers in the field use; if you're thinking about a specific journal, have a look at what's common there.\" If they all use \"show\" for multiple authors, you probably want to use \"show\"</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36994,
"author": "Corvus",
"author_id": 27900,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27900",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>As a matter of basic writing style, this comes down to whether you intend the authors, or the paper, to be the actor in your sentence.</p>\n\n<p>If you are writing about the actions of the authors, you should use the plural:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><em>Watson and Crick (1953) use only two pages to describe the structure of DNA.</em></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>If you are writing about the action of the paper, use the singular:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><em>Watson and Crick (1953) serves as an example of how a breakthrough paper can launch its authors to academic stardom.</em> </li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Usually the issue is not so clear cut, because usually we are simply describing the results from the paper rather talking explicitly about its authors or about it as a document. In this most common case, the usual convention is to treat the authors, not the paper, as the actors and thus use the plural.</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><em>Watson and Crick (1953) demonstrate the double-helical structure of DNA.</em> </li>\n</ul>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/17
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36969",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/-1/"
] |
36,976 |
<p>One of my slides of my presentation at a technical conference includes a timing diagram. I have to explain the functionality of the read/write operation with the help of this figure. I have maximized the diagram and am planning to explain each signal assertion.
This slide is one of the many slides and I am concerned about the time needed to be allotted for the timing diagram. I feel it is rather important as it explains the functionality of the proposed model.<br>
Please suggest how I should go about formatting the diagram as well as explain the timing diagram.
Edit1 : A timing diagram is used to trace a set of signals to explain the behavior of a particular system. More details <a href="https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/105182/help-me-understand-this-shift-register-timing-diagram">here</a></p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36971,
"author": "Andrew",
"author_id": 27825,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27825",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>This is a special case of a more general problem about 'plural' names for specific organisations/groups, which often comes up (and is different in the UK and US, to complicate things) - for example, <a href=\"https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/138238/are-vs-is-for-proper-nouns-which-sound-plural-such-as-band-names\">https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/138238/are-vs-is-for-proper-nouns-which-sound-plural-such-as-band-names</a> </p>\n\n<p>Generally speaking, either is legitimate - it depends in part whether you think of \"Jackson and Kim\" as the name of a single entity, the paper, or as referring to two individual researchers who happen to be mentioned together. You can also avoid this entirely by using the past tense - \"Jackson and Kim (2014) showed that...\" is the same whether you think of J&K as one entity or two. (Ditto for \"found\", \"proved\", \"refuted\", etc). This would be my personal preference.</p>\n\n<p>Ultimately, though, all questions of style in academic writing can be answered with \"have a look at what other papers in the field use; if you're thinking about a specific journal, have a look at what's common there.\" If they all use \"show\" for multiple authors, you probably want to use \"show\"</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36994,
"author": "Corvus",
"author_id": 27900,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27900",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>As a matter of basic writing style, this comes down to whether you intend the authors, or the paper, to be the actor in your sentence.</p>\n\n<p>If you are writing about the actions of the authors, you should use the plural:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><em>Watson and Crick (1953) use only two pages to describe the structure of DNA.</em></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>If you are writing about the action of the paper, use the singular:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><em>Watson and Crick (1953) serves as an example of how a breakthrough paper can launch its authors to academic stardom.</em> </li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Usually the issue is not so clear cut, because usually we are simply describing the results from the paper rather talking explicitly about its authors or about it as a document. In this most common case, the usual convention is to treat the authors, not the paper, as the actors and thus use the plural.</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><em>Watson and Crick (1953) demonstrate the double-helical structure of DNA.</em> </li>\n</ul>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/17
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36976",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26638/"
] |
36,989 |
<p>In the old days, software was shipped, then used, and eventually replaced or uninstalled. Academic publications are roughly the same: they get published, read and cited, and (for the most part) eventually replaced by newer results. However, while the way we create software has changed to where it now evolves, being updated regularly without uninstalling or fully replacing, publications have not. If you want to publish new results on a line of research you need to publish a new paper, even in cases where 80% of the theory or methodology behind it have stayed the same.</p>
<p>So I'm asking the question: does anyone know of a model where publications evolve over time, perhaps by being hosted and versioned on github or similar; where revisions can still get reviewed, but the authors can later change and extend their publication? Given the Internet, a model like that seems more appropriate to me. Publications could evolve over time from early position papers, to preliminary results papers, to conference style papers, to longer journal style reference papers, to books. Over the same time, the list of contributors could change and in particular, hopefully, grow.</p>
<p>Does anyone know of a publication model like that, either discussed in the library science literature or implemented in practice? I've looked at what some of the open journals do, but haven't found any model where publications can evolve.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36990,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p><a href=\"http://arxiv.org/help/versions\">Versioning of articles is supported by arXiv</a> for exactly the reasons that you mention. Each version of the article remains accessible and has a unique identifier, so when citing an arXiv document, it is best to use the version identifier. A person following the link, however, can see that there have been updates since the referenced version, and use the updated information.</p>\n\n<p>I'm not sure if any other publication venue offers this, though. I <em>think</em> that <a href=\"http://biorxiv.org/\">bioRxiv</a> does, but it doesn't make it clear the way that arXiv does, and talks about replacing an article with a link to the final published version. It's pretty new, though, and its policies may well be in flux.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 53967,
"author": "John Inglis",
"author_id": 40757,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/40757",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>If a manuscript evolves over time, and is posted to bioRxiv during that period, its progress can be tracked. Previous versions of preprints are linked under the Info/History tab underneath the abstract view of a posted manuscript. About 30% of all posted manuscripts have been updated so far. The previous respondent is incorrect about replacing articles: that does not happen. All versions of a preprint are archived. If a manuscript is published in a final form by a journal, a link to that paper is inserted under the abstract of the preprint and is seen in all its versions. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/17
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36989",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9763/"
] |
36,991 |
<p><a href="https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21979/can-students-finish-much-of-their-phd-thesis-before-applying-to-a-phd-program">This question</a> addresses why it's a bad idea to try to do a lot of independent work before PhD in the hope of finishing PhD quickly.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, are there famous examples of people who have done so much work before PhD that they get a PhD pretty much automatically (say, 1-2 years or less)?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36992,
"author": "JeffE",
"author_id": 65,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>The closest example I can think of is <a href=\"http://people.csail.mit.edu/mip/\">Mihai Pătraşcu</a>. After publishing several <em>extremely</em> strong results as an undergraduate, Mihai earned an MS in one year and then a PhD in one year, all in computer science at MIT.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36996,
"author": "James T",
"author_id": 13203,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13203",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Ludwig Wittgenstein was awarded his PhD from Cambridge in June 1929, having enrolled as a student in January of the same year. The PhD thesis was an English translation of his <em>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</em>, which had been published in German in 1921 (under the title <em>Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung</em>). </p>\n\n<p>Wittgenstein circumvented the usual rule on terms of residence, because he had previously been resident as an undergraduate student in 1911-1913; he left Cambridge in the summer of 1913 without proceeding to a degree. Further, the reason for his being awarded the PhD at all was in order to make him formally eligible to teach at the university: there was no doubt as to his abilities.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37030,
"author": "Flyto",
"author_id": 8394,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8394",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>This happens, not often from super-gifted young researchers (although such do exist as outlined in other answers) but from people who are already professional researchers but do not have doctorates. </p>\n\n<p>Some universities in the UK allow people like this to obtain a \"PhD by publication\", where a body of existing work - perhaps 3-5 high quality papers - is linked together by a (sometimes lengthy) narrative and submitted. Typically a doctorate by this route must be completed in one year rather than three. (some universities also now offer a three year \"by publication\" route for new researchers, but that has a different intent) </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37035,
"author": "user28375028",
"author_id": 21694,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21694",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig\">George Dantzig</a> solved two previously unsolved statistics problems while in graduate school (without realizing it). His advisor told him that he would accept his papers as his thesis (though I'm unable to confirm that he actually did this).</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37045,
"author": "angarg12",
"author_id": 27993,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27993",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In several countries in Europe (I can confirm by personal experience Spain, Austria and Sweden) there is the concept of \"PhD by papers\". </p>\n\n<p>This means that the PhD Dissertation is a set of papers put together with a unified introduction (motivation, state of the art). Although some of these papers can be extended, they are pretty much the published version.</p>\n\n<p>If you already have the papers, the whole process can take as little as 3 months.</p>\n\n<p>Also I can't help to mention <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_degree\">Honoris Causa</a> doctorates, which are awarded by universities to people who have accomplished outstanding contributions to some field of knowledge. These are the only ones who are awarded \"automatically\" to somebody.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37047,
"author": "astaines",
"author_id": 27999,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27999",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>There are several types of PhD - one which is, in effect, a book, one which is, in effect, a series of papers, and one which is, in effect, a single giant paper.</p>\n\n<p>The first form is common in arts and social sciences here in Ireland, and many of theses end up being published as books.</p>\n\n<p>The third format was the usual format here, both in physical and biological sciences, and was often laid out as 'Introduction', 'Materials and Methods', 'Results' (usually more than one chapter), and 'Discussion'. This is falling out of favour, because it is too hard to produce papers from it.</p>\n\n<p>We are moving, slowly, to the second form, which is the norm in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Finland ( and may be in other places too). This is a short introduction, a series of papers, or chapters in paper format, some of which have been published, possibly a linking narrative between chapters, and a final discussion section.</p>\n\n<p>I've supervised one person, whose PhD was ten papers, eight published, and two or so, in draft. He was (and is) a capable and prolific researcher, who had just never got around to a PhD, and was applying for a chair. Needless to add, he got the PhD and the chair :-)</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37068,
"author": "Srivatsa Badariprasad",
"author_id": 28015,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28015",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Apparently Lars Onsager (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1968) did not have a PhD when he was admitted to the faculty of Yale's Chemistry Department. Thus he was informed that he could merely submit one of his previous publications, as a formality, in order to satisfy the requirements of a doctorate. However Onsager did some original research anyway on Mathieu functions and was subsequently admitted to the doctorate.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37076,
"author": "aniztar",
"author_id": 28020,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28020",
"pm_score": -1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Schmitt found the Schmitt trigger circuit as a part of a project in his bachelors. He got a PhD for that.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37192,
"author": "user28105",
"author_id": 28105,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28105",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>My father got his PhD in Theoretical Physics <em>instead</em> of a diploma in Munich: they counted his diploma thesis as a PhD thesis and his defense was accordingly quite longer and with a different setup (and the relatives waiting outside the examination room were rather worried at first because he took so much longer than anybody else and then floored as he had not bothered to clue anybody in in case it did not work out). However, this must have been about 1964 or so and the respective examination regulations do no longer permit this kind of shortcut and have not done so for a long time.</p>\n\n<p>So this is not more than a historical anecdote.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/17
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36991",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27545/"
] |
36,995 |
<p>I am having trouble keeping organized the files for the computational component of my research project. In brief, I have written computer code which I use to run computational experiments. For each experiment, I get a set of output files, from which I generate output such as plots and tables.</p>
<p>The trouble stems from the fact that I have multiple experiments (say exp1, exp2 and exp3) and each experiment has multiple output files (say a.txt, b.txt, c.txt). This is further complicated by the fact that I have multiple versions of each experiment (say exp1 2014-01-02, exp1 2014-05-06, etc).</p>
<p>How should I organize the code and the output in a systematic way?
The system should satisfy the following key requirements:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>It has to be easy to rerun version X of experiment Y.</strong>
I occasionally have to rerun earlier versions of the experiments in order to check the results or to make slight modifications.</li>
<li><strong>It has to record the output for each version of each experiment.</strong>
I often have to run many slight variants of a single experiment
to tweak some small aspect of the results,
so it is essential to record the output for each run.</li>
</ul>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 36997,
"author": "user141592",
"author_id": 27327,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27327",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>While there is no right answer: a nested system of folders: the first one is called <strong>Experiments</strong>, with subfolders called <strong>exp1</strong>, <strong>exp2</strong> and so on. Each <strong>expX</strong> contains folders for the versions, and the version folders contains (if necessary) folders for <strong>code</strong>, <strong>input</strong>, <strong>raw data</strong>, <strong>graphs</strong>, and whatever else you can think of. That's how I would do it at least.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36998,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>Funny you should ask, because I'm currently answering this question as I take breather from a project involving just such a family of experiments and variations.</p>\n\n<p>In my own self-organization, I typically distinguish two types of such variants.\nIf some variants are \"dead\" and would only be referred to on rare occasions for historical purposes, then they get checked into version control and deleted from my working set---they can be exhumed by the powers of SVN/git/Mercurial when needed.</p>\n\n<p>For the \"live\" versions, some experiments get grouped thematically and some chronologically. </p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Thematic is for when I'm it's a purely computer-based experiment (which can be re-run arbitrarily), e.g., \"overlay-network\", \"random-network\", \"unit-disc-network\"</li>\n<li>Chronologically is for when my computer-based runs are based on real data from a physical system that can't be regenerated, but only replicated, e.g., \"2013-05-09 Alphavirus\", \"2013-06-09 Alphavirus run #3\", \"2013-07-02 Repeats of Failed Samples\"</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>I maintain a strong distinction between several types of files, which must never mix:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Core code: there is precisely <em>one</em> version of any core code system, maintained by version control. If I need to maintain variants, they have to be set by option flags, not by forking the codebase (that way lies madness).</li>\n<li>Each thematic/dated directory gets a README file, whatever notes are neecessary and (typically) two subdirectories: experiments and analysis</li>\n<li>Experiment scripts for a thematic cluster live in the experiments directory</li>\n<li>Each batch of experimental data lives in its own subdirectory of the experiments directory where its script lives.</li>\n<li>Analysis contains scripts to process the experimental data. Often there are two layers: one to process raw data into results, and another to plot the results. This is because extracting results is often time intensive and figures are frequently tweaked. If there are a lot of results files, they get their own subdirectory too.</li>\n<li>Plots, living in a subdirectory of the analytical scripts directory</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>I also typically maintain a few master scripts which allow me to re-run large swaths of experiment / analysis when the core code is improved or a bug is found, which happens more frequently than one would like.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 36999,
"author": "Ben Bitdiddle",
"author_id": 24384,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24384",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Every time I run a script, I pass it two arguments:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>A file label that gives a name to my experiment</li>\n<li>A short blurb of text that automatically gets put into a README file. (This precisely documents the conditions of the experiment so I remember what I did.)</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>At the start of my script, I create a folder inside my \"output\" directory for the results of my experiment (and the README file) and I name the folder <code>$timestamp_$file_label</code>. All output gets generated inside that folder, and every time I want to change/rerun the script I just change the file label and the new output gets sent to a different folder. (Or I can use the same file label; it doesn't matter since the experiments will have different timestamps).</p>\n\n<p>I also use <a href=\"http://git-scm.com/\" rel=\"nofollow\">git</a> for version control so I can easily go back to old versions of my code or take the code in a substantially different direction without erasing what I did earlier.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37072,
"author": "Flyto",
"author_id": 8394,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8394",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I have a substantially similar situation, although most of the time it's not about my own code so much as input files for a third-party model. My approach is as follows:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>input files go in a revision control system (I use git). Each time I run the model, that version of the input files is given a tag with a run number (eg \"Run_37\").</p></li>\n<li><p>each time the model is run, output files go in a new folder that is named for the run number. </p></li>\n<li><p>I also keep a spreadsheet linking the two with some other information such as the date, a brief description of what I was testing, and so forth. </p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Where matlab scripts or similar are used to programmatically generate input files, those scripts also get tagged in a similar way so that it is always clear which version of the script was used for each model run. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/18
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36995",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8802/"
] |
37,000 |
<p>I'm an undergraduate computer science major with a specialization in networks and communication looking at a masters in molecular genetics. In addition to a GRE biochemistry and molecular biology subject test score, I'm interested in MOOCs to enhance my resume.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37001,
"author": "Anonymous Physicist",
"author_id": 13240,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13240",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>No, because many people still do not know what MOOCs are (though they have been in the press a lot). Those who know what they are may not be sure if they are effective.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37002,
"author": "Roger Fan",
"author_id": 20375,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20375",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>There are several issues with MOOCs, all of which make them a poor substitute for actual classes for admissions.</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Poor penetration. There is more widespread knowledge of them than a couple years ago, but they are still fairly unknown. Chances are high at at least someone reading your application won't know about or understand them.</li>\n<li>No grades. Few MOOCs offer anything more than a certificate of completion, and many don't even offer that. Even if they offered grades, verification of identity is a problem.</li>\n<li>Wildly varying quality. College classes are generally of a certain quality/difficulty, and knowledge of the quality/difficulty levels for certain field-specific classes across schools is something that application committees will use to judge candidates against each other. MOOCs are much more of an unknown.</li>\n</ul>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37007,
"author": "Sol Infinus",
"author_id": 27966,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27966",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It is difficult to say as it differs from university to university. But an MOOC course cannot act as a substitute to an actual course in a college because the depth of the subject is simply not enough in an MOOC. Hope this helps.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/18
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37000",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27929/"
] |
37,012 |
<p>I am going do do my thesis defense next week.
I am not nervous.
On the contrary, I am so over-relaxed that my instincts tell me this will cause a problem during my defense.</p>
<p>I am not sure when to take questions, though:</p>
<ol>
<li>Should I accept the questions during the presentation or should I say that I will answer the questions at the end?</li>
<li>I am thinking of going with the second option, answers at the end. However, what if a jury member asks me a question during the presentation?</li>
</ol>
<p><strong>Edit:</strong> My thesis is on computer science. I'm going to defend it in English.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37013,
"author": "Koldito",
"author_id": 12314,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12314",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>The following is written from my perspective and it reflects my biases. </p>\n\n<p>If someone feels the need to ask a question <em>during</em> your presentation, chances are it is because you failed to explain something properly and they don't want to get lost. I, for one, hate it when a speaker just barrels through difficult material and I have to struggle to keep up (one time, the speaker pulled up a slide full of long lines of lambda calculi and went \"as we can <em>clearly</em> see here...\"; avoid that). Go through your talk plan carefully, identify the tricky issues, and make sure that you don't have hidden assumptions lurking anywhere. If in doubt, assume that the audience won't be able to follow you unless you explain things carefully. This much should ensure that all the questions come at the end and, more importantly, that they are substantial (i.e., none of this \"I didn't quite catch your definition of blah, can you repeat it please?\").</p>\n\n<p>As for thanking your advisors, it's appropriate if you keep it short (like 20-seconds-tops short). You already have the acknowledgements of your dissertation to wax poetic all you want.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37032,
"author": "Daniel Wessel",
"author_id": 26614,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26614",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Do's and don't of a thesis defense is hard to answer, but you seem to have two specific questions.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Questions during or after:</strong> Adding to Koldito (and I've just seen that Szabolcs also mentioned it), what are the regulations of your defense? My defense was highly regulated -- 30 minutes presentation, 30-45 minutes (or an hour? no idea anymore) for discussion. Under these conditions we practiced to give the talk in 30 minutes and did not plan for many questions, as it was understood that the questions will be asked after the presentation. So if in doubt, go for what is already established in your discipline at your university. I think it's more important to focus on the issues that your talk is a) understandable and b) within the time-frame. If you are asked a question anyway you can either answer it directly if it is necessary for understanding, or -- if possible -- say that you'd like to answer the question in the question period (if you have one). Same with any presentation, some questions divert and are not central, and they're best answered later.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Thanking advisers:</strong> Unless an adviser is narcissistic, I think it's enough to say in the beginning who your advisers were. The focus is on your work -- not you, not your advisers -- but what you did. Also you are not doing the presentation for the advisers, but address everyone in the audience. But if in doubt, do what comes natural to you.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37070,
"author": "Nate Eldredge",
"author_id": 1010,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>A thesis defense is really a type of oral examination, and your advisor and committee are the examiners. They can ask questions whenever they want! And it would behoove you to answer them as best you can. As such, it would be wise to prepare your talk with some flexibility, so that even if some time is taken up by questions you can still talk about everything essential, and if there are no questions you don't run out of things to say.</p>\n\n<p>If local custom is that questions be saved until the end, that's fine - but let your advisor/committee enforce that on themselves. If they choose to ask questions in the middle anyway, answer them.</p>\n\n<p>If a question (or line of questions) becomes long and involved, and you are becoming sidetracked, then you could politely suggest resuming the discussion at the end. But let your advisor/committee decide whether they want to do that, or continue discussing that question right then.</p>\n\n<p>If people other than your advisor/committee are present, and you get questions from them, you can answer them briefly if possible; but I would avoid spending a lot of time on their questions. For those folks, you can offer to talk to them further afterwards.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 175356,
"author": "Jonnovitic Ismaelov",
"author_id": 146768,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/146768",
"pm_score": -1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Ok good ideas.\nadvisor/committee are present, and you get questions from them, you can answer them briefly if possible; but I would avoid spending a lot of time on their questions. For those folks, you can offer to talk to them further afterwards.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/18
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37012",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15949/"
] |
37,021 |
<p>I hear a lot from the experts that citation count is a bad idea as a measure of judging a paper. This seems simply counter-intuitive to me. I would like to know if any study has been done in this direction?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37022,
"author": "Peter Jansson",
"author_id": 4394,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4394",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>First off, don't trust generalizations too much. The number of citations is not a perfect measure by far. First, more citations take time to accumulate, once could possibly look at citations per year or something similar. Second, it is possible to cite your own work so without filtering out so-called <em>self-citations</em> you may see inflated values. Self-citation, in itself is not necessarily an evil either, there are many reasons why one must reference ones own earlier work. One obvious reason is that later work often builds on earlier work and part of that is usually earlier work by the same person. Third, the number of citations are field dependent and in bibliometrics methods exist to remove such bias. Hence an article in a hot topic with much research will receive more hits than an article, no matter how excellent, in a small field.</p>\n\n<p>So, when judging an article from its citations, it is useful to keep the problems in mind and not over-interpret. This is essentially not different from any normal approach to any data set.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37023,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Citation count is a good example of a phenomenon subject to the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect\">Matthew Effect</a>: a feedback process in which privileged individuals become more privileged as a result of their privilege. Quality, of course, does have a significant correlation with a paper drawing citations. Its citations are also strongly affected, however, by the fame of its authors, the fame of its venue, and also simply by the fact that other people cite the paper (thus making people like yourself judge it as \"higher quality\" and therefore more likely to cite it). Likewise, the mere fact that a paper is obscure does not mean that it is bad. Mostly, it simply means that nobody is paying attention to it. Finally, the fact that people are happy with a result doesn't necessarily make it true, as any number of scientific shifts in thinking (not to mention scandals) can attest; a paper may even draw citations precisely because other people are criticizing it.</p>\n\n<p>Citation count is still a good way of getting a good first impression of which papers <em>other</em> people consider important, but you really need to judge the quality yourself, as a scientist.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37024,
"author": "O. R. Mapper",
"author_id": 14017,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14017",
"pm_score": 7,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I do not know of any study in this field, but I have a hunch that the following points apply (without any particular order, just numbered for convenience in the case of comments/replies):</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li><strong>Opportunity for citation:</strong> A paper that presents the ultimate answer to a problem is probably more valuable than a paper that presents just an unfinished attempt at solving the same problem. Yet, the latter is much easier to build upon (because it still leaves obvious extension points) and thus might be cited much more frequently.</li>\n<li><strong>Meaning of citations:</strong> There is no rule that a paper needs to be cited positively. If a paper has an obvious flaw, this may give rise to a number of other papers that just cite the flawed paper to point out what they are about to prove wrong or do better.</li>\n<li><strong>Citation scope:</strong> Referencing a paper does not mean referencing the whole paper, or its core finding. A reference to a paper might mean that the whole paper is pointed out as related work, or it could just mean that the second half of a particular statement in the introduction section is pointed out as related. A citation can well point out a remark <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4984/someone-cited-my-paper-in-an-irrelevant-manner\">that is completely marginal to the referenced paper</a>, but that the citing author deemed to explain the fact in question particularly well, or that made a particularly recent mention of an old topic (to show the topic is still of interest).</li>\n<li><strong>Not all citations are equal:</strong> The question whether something is or is not cited hinges on its relative relevance compared to other citations, based on the available space left in the current paper format, not on the global importance of the work.</li>\n<li><strong>Citation habits differ:</strong> Even within one (sub-)field, citation habits differ wildly between conferences and authors. This is in part due to different paper formats and length restrictions (see previous point), but also simply because some authors are much more willing to throw in citations every now and then than others. Such habits can even vary for a single author, based on \"strategic\" considerations for the intended final target audience of the paper.</li>\n<li><strong>Citations can be transitive:</strong> Authors occasionally face situations where they can either list several examples of related work, or cite a single overview paper (e.g. a state of the art report), to give an overview over some basics or otherwise related topic. The latter case is clearly more space-efficient and possibly more helpful (as the overview paper is designed to give an overview while at the same time conveying the information somewhat in-depth, which often cannot be done in a single sentence of a related work section), but does not increase the citation count of the works referenced in the overview paper.</li>\n<li><strong>Papers are not atomic:</strong> There is no \"natural\" clustering of research questions, solutions, works and experiments. How many or how few findings go into/are allowed in a single published work is mostly a matter of style and personal preference of authors and program chairs. With that in mind, any particular finding may be presented in a single paper (which gets N citations), or split up into N papers (each of which may get only one citation). Thus, while the number of citations in this example may give a hint about the importance of each of the single <em>written documents</em>, it does not say much about the importance of the actual set of research questions.</li>\n<li><strong>Citation count is not normalized by field/community:</strong> As correctly pointed out by <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14204/cephalopod\">Cephalopod</a>, '\"What constitutes many depends on the field\". Groundbreaking work in a narrow field might never get many citations.' Likewise, fields where publishing small bite-sized papers at a high frequency is common naturally amass a much larger total amount of citations than fields where publications are very seldom and, when they occur, cover a large amount of progress, discussion and findings.</li>\n<li><strong>Citation tweaking:</strong> As any metric, defining such a single factor for measuring performance, citation count is prone to abuse. If an author suspects citation count to be beneficial, there is an incentive to self-cite (or cyclically cite each other within an institute), and possibly even break up publications into smaller parts (related to the practice of <em>salami slicing</em>) to have more opportunities for those extra citations. As it can be assumed that some authors are already doing that, this renders citation count even less reliable as a quality indicator, as the \"training data set\" that would be used for comparison is already skewed.</li>\n<li><strong>Citation count ≠ citation count:</strong> The citation count itself is not a reliable measure to start with, as different sources will provide different citation counts, depending on what citations (and what kinds of documents that contain citations) are counted:\n\n<ul>\n<li>Citations in a book can be counted by chapter (point in favour of this: If each chapter is written by a different (group of) author(s), every chapter has its individual list of citations), or for the whole book (point in favour of this: A book tends to have a certain focused topic, and - more so than e.g. conference proceedings - all chapters tend to follow a common \"narrative\", so some central works are likely to be referenced in various chapters).</li>\n<li>If possibly predatory journals are included, a variant of item 9 can ensue in which <a href=\"http://scholarlyoa.com/2015/01/20/did-a-romanian-researcher-successfully-game-google-scholar-to-raise-his-citation-count/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">citations in less reputable sources (that are counted nonetheless) are bought</a>, as pointed out by <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365/ff524\">ff524</a>.</li>\n<li>Citation counts can include citations from totally legitimate works, which are nonetheless of a vastly different status compared to peer-reviewed publications. For example, Google Scholar sometimes seems to count student Bachelor and Master theses and other documents created while studying <em>if</em> the university's digital library that provides a copy of every such submitted document happens to be crawled by Google.</li>\n</ul></li>\n<li><strong>External factors influence selection of cited works:</strong> If there is one particular finding in one particular work that is appropriate to cite, there is no question that that particular paper will be cited. However, often enough, things are much more vague - there are various eligible papers that allude to the same statement in different ways, and it is not at all clear which one is preferrable to cite. At this point, external factors that are rather arbitrary can directly influence whether or not a work is cited. For instance, the older paper might be cited to show the original finding ... but the more recent paper might also be cited instead to show that the topic in question is still of interest in recent works. The older paper might be chosen because it is the original reference, or the more recent paper at the more highly-valued venue might be chosen to make the reference stronger, or yet another paper might be chosen because it contains the more comprehensible explanation. Lastly, depending on the citation style, even space may be an issue - if an author is fighting for the last few lines to stay within the allowable page limit, at least in APA style, a paper by <em>Li et al.</em> has an inherent advantage over one by <em>Miller and Bowman</em>, one by <em>Miller and Bowman</em> has an advantage over one by <em>Erdenebileg and Papadopoulos</em>, and one by <em>Erdenebileg and Papadopoulos</em> has an inherent advantage over a paper by <em>Russell-Rodriguez and Pennington-Kiesewetter</em>.</li>\n</ol>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37028,
"author": "Inquisitive",
"author_id": 27985,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27985",
"pm_score": -1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Human beings, regardless of intelligence level, generally tend to subscribe to the \"herd mentality\". I guess it's because we, as animals like any other animal, want to conserve energy. For example, if everyone believes Stephen Hawking or Lisa Randall is rarely wrong, then it's in my best interest to focus on what he/she has to say. It will save me the energy of exploring other sources and finding answers for myself.</p>\n\n<p>At someone's request I will try to clarify my answer.</p>\n\n<p>Let's say I'm writing a paper about black holes. Obviously, I want to write the best possible paper but I'm not the best physicist on planet Earth. The best physicists on planet Earth will probably have the most citations on the subject matter. Does having the most citations about a subject mean that the highly cited individual is always correct concerning the subject? No. I have to realize that if I'm referencing that person's work. Assuming that Stephen Hawking is right all the time about black holes or even assuming that he is right most of the time is a huge and dangerous assumption.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37033,
"author": "Stephen Gourlay",
"author_id": 27987,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27987",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The reason citation counts are not good for judging paper quality is that there are a great many reaons (15, 28, 26 - depending on the study) for citing, and citation practice vary between disciplines. See:</p>\n\n<p>Case, D O & Higgins, G M 2000 <em>How Can We Investigate Citation Behavior? A Study of Reasons for Citing Literature in Communication.</em> JASIS 51(7) 635-645 </p>\n\n<p>for references to earlier studies, and report of a study in the discipline of communication.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37201,
"author": "Cape Code",
"author_id": 10643,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10643",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<h2>tl;dr.</h2>\n\n<p>It only works under certain conditions.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>There is actually a whole field of study that explores the scientific process via publication metrics, it's called <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliometrics\"><em>bibliometrics</em></a>. It is true that citation count <strong>within a field</strong> is sometimes used as a proxy to estimate an article's quality. See for example this recently published study about peer review:</p>\n\n<p>Siler K, Lee K, Bero L (2015) <em>Measuring the effectiveness of scientific gatekeeping</em> PNAS Jan 13;112(2):360-5. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1418218112</p>\n\n<p>From which the highlighted paragraphs below are copied. </p>\n\n<h2>Arguments in favor</h2>\n\n<p>First, the reasons given to consider citation count as a measure of quality (I edited the references to match the ones given at the bottom of this post):</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Scientists cite work for a myriad of reasons (1, 2). However, the\n vast majority of citations are either positive or neutral in nature\n (3). We worked with the assumption that scientists prefer to build\n upon other quality research with their own work. As Latour and Woolgar\n (4) suggested, citation is an act of deference, as well as the means\n by which intellectual credit and content flows in science. Relatedly,\n we also assumed that most scientists want to produce quality work and\n will seldom attempt to garner credit and attention by blatantly doing\n bad work. Thus, on the whole, the attention and impact associated with\n citations provides a reasonable measure of quality. Citations provide\n an objective and quantitative measure of credit and attention flows in\n science.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<h2>Arguments against</h2>\n\n<p>They also discuss the limitations of using citations as a measure of quality, <strong>the logarithmic distribution of citations</strong>:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Because citations are often distributed exponentially, with a few\n articles garnering disproportionate attention (5), we also used the\n logarithm of citation counts as a dependent variable to diminish the\n potential influence of a few highly cited outlier articles</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>And the <strong>'social status' effect</strong>:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>scientists often rely on heuristics to judge quality; status of\n scholars, institutions, and journals are common means of doing so (6,\n 7). Unsurprisingly, citations received by manuscripts were positively\n correlated with the impact factor of the journal in which it was\n eventually published.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>In short, comparing citation count of articles published in journals with a very different impact factor is a bad idea.</p>\n\n<p>Pages 46 and 47 of reference number 3 give an exhaustive list of limitations of citation count as a proxy for quality (I edited the list for the sake of brevity): </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ul>\n <li><strong>Time-dependent factors</strong> Due to the exponential increase in scientific output,\n citations become more probable from year to year. </li>\n <li><strong>Field-dependent factors</strong> Citation practices vary between science and social\n sciences fields [...] and even within different areas (or clusters) within a single subfield [...], small fields attract far fewer citations than more\n general fields [..].</li>\n <li><strong>Journal-dependent factors</strong> [...] journal accessibility, visibility, and\n internationality [...] as well as the impact, quality, or prestige of the journal may influence the probability of citations.</li>\n <li><p><strong>Article-dependent factors</strong> [...] There is also a positive correlation\n between the citation frequency of publications and the number of co-authors of\n the work [...]. And, as longer articles have more content that can be cited than\n shorter articles do, the sheer size of an article influences whether it is cited [...].</p></li>\n <li><p><strong>Author/reader-dependent factors</strong> The language a paper is written in [...] influence the probability of citations. [...] citations are affected by social networks: authors cite primarily works by authors with whom they are personally\n acquainted. [...] men receive substantially more citations to their work than women do.</p></li>\n </ul>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Many regular users of this site will love that one:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ul>\n <li><strong>Availability of publications</strong> Physical accessibility [...], free online\n availability of publications [...], and the publishing media [...] influence the probability of citations.</li>\n </ul>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>And lastly: </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ul>\n <li><strong>Technical problems</strong> [...] The incorrect citing of sources is\n unfortunately far from uncommon: Evans et al. (1990) checked the references in papers in three medical journals and determined that 48 percent were incorrect:\n “The data support the hypothesis that authors do not check their references or\n may not even read them” [...] In a similar investigation,\n Eichorn and Yankauer (1987) found that “thirty-one percent of the 150 references\n had citation errors, one out of 10 being a major error (reference not locatable)” [...] Additionally, problems stemming from homographs and synonyms can arise\n when researching publications and deriving citations from citation databases\n using authors’ names.</li>\n </ul>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>All these are linked to plentiful citations that you can find in the original document available for download <a href=\"http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:1758962:1/component/escidoc:1758961/BornmannLutzCitingBehavior.pdf\">here</a>.</p>\n\n<h2>References</h2>\n\n<ol>\n<li><p>Lynn FB (2014) <em>Diffusing through disciplines: Insiders, outsiders and socially\ninfluenced citation behavior.</em> Soc Forces 93(1):355–382. </p></li>\n<li><p>Hargens LL (2000) <em>Using the literature: Reference networks, reference contexts, and the social structure of scholarship.</em> Am Sociol Rev 65(6):846–865.</p></li>\n<li><p>Bornmann L, Daniel H-D (2008) <em>What do citation counts measure: A review of studies on citing behavior.</em> J Doc 64(1):45–80. </p></li>\n<li><p>Latour B, Woolgar S (1979) <em>Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts</em> (Sage, Los Angeles).</p></li>\n<li><p>Lotka AJ (1926) <em>The frequency distribution of scientific productivity.</em> J Wash Acad Sci 16:317–323.</p></li>\n<li><p>Long JS, Fox MF (1995) <em>Scientific careers: Universalism and particularism.</em> Annu Rev Sociol 24:45–71.</p></li>\n<li><p>Lee CJ, Sugimoto CR, Zhang G, Cronin B (2013) <em>Bias in peer review.</em> JASIST 64(1):2–17. </p></li>\n</ol>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37303,
"author": "Yasha",
"author_id": 28181,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28181",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Others have mentioned, but it bears repeating - citations are not necessarily positive. Plenty of papers use faulty methodologies and are cited as examples of <em>what not to do</em>.</p>\n\n<p>Also, at least within the social sciences, citation is correlated with age and 'first mover advantage'. Because any academic paper worth its salt is going to cite previous work on the topic in the literature review, older papers will naturally garner higher citation counts, all else held equal. This has very little to do with the quality of those papers.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 55090,
"author": "rul30",
"author_id": 41693,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/41693",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I think it boils down to the question:</p>\n\n<p>Do you use citations as a <strong>measure</strong> <em>or</em> as a <strong>metric</strong>.</p>\n\n<p>A <strong>measure</strong> is a value you get by <em>measuring</em> a quantity (e.g. miles, seconds, citations, words). A measure is a mostly objective attribute. A <em>measure</em> does not have any meaning, it is only a quantisation.</p>\n\n<p>A <strong>metric</strong> uses usually multiple <em>measurements</em> and combines them. After the combination the <em>metric</em> can be used and compared to a set of rules or other <em>metered</em> objects in order to sort or value them. The combination of measurements is the step were a) meaning and b) subjectivity enters the whole process.</p>\n\n<p>It is therefore absolutely understandable to use citations as a measure but you will most likely never use it as a metric itself. When the number of citations is used as a metric for paper-quality, assumptions need to be made which cannot be proven (except by measuring something else as well).</p>\n\n<p>Only because one can measure something does not mean that the measurement contains any information. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 76012,
"author": "Cliff AB",
"author_id": 47192,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/47192",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>First of all, what does it mean to <em>better</em>? </p>\n\n<p>I know this may sound like nitpicking, but I can provide an example that gives a strong <strong>negative</strong> correlation between citations and a certain measure of <em>better</em>. I typically write algorithms for my research. Generally speaking, you don't get to publish unless your algorithm is an improvement in some meaningful way over previous algorithms. But you certainly need to cite previously published algorithms! Thus, for a given problem, the early algorithms will have a very large number of citations, while the later algorithms will have a much smaller number of citations. </p>\n\n<p>So if your definition of \"better\" is that the algorithm is faster (a very reasonable definition), then the papers with large numbers of citations are likely to be the worst in the literature (since they are the oldest). </p>\n\n<p>As an anecdote, I just published a paper on an algorithm that I have reason to believe will close the book on optimization for that particular problem (partly because it's really fast, and partly because it's not a very hot topic). As such, I don't expect that paper to get many citations, even when compared with previous algorithms on that same problem. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 76035,
"author": "Jeromy Anglim",
"author_id": 62,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p><em>There have been many good answers to this question, but I wanted to frame what I see as the most important points.</em></p>\n\n<p><strong>Citation counts measure impact not quality:</strong>\nThe citation count of an article is a measure of research impact, and not quality. Even as a measure of research impact, it has issues, but in general, \"research impact\" is closer to what it represents. A high quality new paper will have minimal citations, because it has had minimal time to have an impact. Similarly, the quality of a paper is only loosely related to research impact. Some high quality papers are difficult for the literature to digest. Some low quality papers evolve into standard publications that are commonly cited in a given context. Entire literatures may use questionable methods but build a whole ecosystem of mutually reinforcing citations.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Citation count is confounded by time since publication</strong>: One of the biggest points is that:\n<code>\ncitation_count = average_citations_per_year x years_since_publication\n</code></p>\n\n<p>Time since publication is unrelated to quality, yet it is one of the main drivers of article citation count. Thus, even if you did see citations as an index of quality, average citations per year would be a better index than total citations. Even there, it gets complex because articles in a given field tend to have a general distribution of citations over time where for example, citations per year typically tends to peak early and then gradually declines over time. So if you were trying to get a pure measure of quality based on citations, you would probably try to estimate the expected citation count after 30 or more years based on how many years has passed and known citation distribution characteristics. </p>\n\n<p><strong>Assorted other points</strong>:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Fields differ in citation practices</strong>: Some fields have short citation half-lives so that more of the total citations an article will receive typically accrue in a shorter period of time (e.g., 5 years versus 15 years). Some fields include more references and therefore there is a greater sum of citations in the system. In general, this is more of an issue if citations are being used to do comparisons across disciplines. If you operate in a particular field, then this is less of an issue. And if you are aware that STEM fields tend to have shorter citation half lives and more references relative to social sciences, then you can incorporate this into your perspectives.</li>\n<li><strong>Self-citations can be removed</strong>: Many systems like Scopus allow for the removal of self-citations. This can be useful where you suspect such gaming is occurring (or generally where there is an academic that publishes a lot and self-cites a lot without getting citation traction with other academics).</li>\n</ul>\n\n<h3>Using article citation count as an index of quality</h3>\n\n<p>While most answers here point out the problems with citation counts, it is worth taking a balanced perspective.\nAfter five or ten years after publication, average citations per year provides some information regarding the quality of a publication. Actually, it is a measure of impact potential as indexed by achieved impact over a finite period of time.\nIt's not definitive, but it is a useful bit of information. If you want to assess quality, either you or someone suitably skilled needs to read the article and appraise it. </p>\n\n<p>In particular, if after five or ten years, an article has almost no citations, then this is a bit of a red flag for the quality of the paper. Likewise, if an article has hundred of citations per year, this suggests that it is likely to be an important piece of work. None of this is definitive, but it is suggestive and useful information.</p>\n\n<h3>General points on how to use citation counts</h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Citation counts are a measure of impact, not quality</li>\n<li>Average citations per year is a better measure of the \"impact potential\" of a paper than total citations</li>\n<li>Citation counts become more informative as more time since publication accrues. As a rough rule of thumb, five years post publication is probably a rough minimum to get a somewhat accurate sense of citation potential.</li>\n</ul>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 106777,
"author": "Community",
"author_id": -1,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/-1",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>There was a paper published in 1994 in a medicine journal entitled <em>A mathematical model for the determination of total area under glucose tolerance and other metabolic curves</em> which describes a method for computing the area under a curve, dubbed \"Tai's method\". This paper got 311 citations according to Google Scholar, which isn't too bad for medicine papers apparently (although some can rake in literally 1,000 citations...).</p>\n\n<p>This method is the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapezoidal_rule\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">trapezoidal rule</a> and according to Wikipedia, it was known to ancient Babylonians in 50 BC. Every undergrad with a vague math education, perhaps advanced high school students, or someone who reads a pop math blogs, knows about it.</p>\n\n<p>You wouldn't know this insanity from just looking at the citations of the paper. There are many good arguments in the other answers, but if this isn't damning enough to make you look at citation counts with some circumspection, I don't know what will.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 125791,
"author": "einpoklum",
"author_id": 7319,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7319",
"pm_score": -1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Doe, Umanskaya, Milton and Bennt suggest in [DUMB 1999] that it is indeed acceptable to evaluate papers based on their citation count, and that paper of theirs has over 5,000 citations, so we can probably take their word for it.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 125842,
"author": "user159517",
"author_id": 66417,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/66417",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>On top of all the other good points made already, there is also Goodhart's law to consider: </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>A measure ceases to be a good measure once it becomes a target. </p>\n</blockquote>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/18
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37021",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27978/"
] |
37,034 |
<p>Suppose that paper A has a lemma called Lemma A, along with its proof.</p>
<p>I want to use this lemma in another paper B. However, in the scope of my paper, I have to change it slightly, but without losing the general idea.</p>
<p>For instance, the original lemma might read as follows:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Lemma A: The intersection of two straight lines in the plane is either empty, a single point, or a straight line. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Suppose I need the following variant in paper B:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Lemma B: The intersection of two planes in 3-space is either empty, a single line, or a plane. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Also, the proofs for both lemmas are very similar.
Therefore, I have two questions:</p>
<ol>
<li>Can I use the same methodology and same terminology with similar words to prove my own lemmas? </li>
<li>If I can, is citing paper A in my lemma confusing? If I cannot, can I just specify the lemma in paper A and say that this lemma and proof can also be used etc.?</li>
</ol>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37040,
"author": "J Fabian Meier",
"author_id": 27442,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27442",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Although many people do it, it is bad style and confusing to cite a lemma and restate it in a way that is not equivalent to the original one. I would suggest to state the lemma you need, and, instead of proving the whole lemma, explain in the proof that your lemma is very similar to the lemma A.1 and that the proof can be reused making the changes ... .</p>\n\n<p>If, though, you just steal an idea, it might be better to completely prove your lemma in your version.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37041,
"author": "Nate Eldredge",
"author_id": 1010,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1010",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>You should certainly cite paper A in any case.</p>\n\n<p>One way this is commonly handled: state your Lemma B.1 and give the complete proof. At the beginning of the proof, write something like \"This closely follows the proof of Lemma A.1 from [A].\" Now your paper is self-contained and you have given appropriate credit. It is fine if your proof is similar in structure to theirs; in some ways this is better, because a reader who looks at both will more easily be able to see the similarities and differences. But do not simply copy and paste their proof and change the necessary words. Your proof should be your words, even if it is from their ideas.</p>\n\n<p>Or, state your Lemma B.1, but instead of giving a complete proof, say \"The proof is very similar to that of Lemma A.1 from [A]\". This saves space but will be more annoying to the reader, who in order to check your result will have to find the paper [A] and read through the proof, adapting it to prove B.1 instead of A.1. (The referee may be similarly annoyed.)</p>\n\n<p>Some people would omit the statement of Lemma B.1 altogether, and when they need to use it, would say \"By a slight modification of the proof of Lemma A.1 from [A], we have blah blah blah...\". This is even more annoying.</p>\n\n<p>Worst of all is to just say \"By Lemma A.1 from [A], we have blah blah blah\" where Lemma A.1 claims something different from (and not obviously implying) the statement you want.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37042,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In your example, those are not equivalent mathematical assertions, and so they are not identical lemmas. What I have done in similar cases is to say something along the lines of: </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Lemma X is closely based on Lemma Y in [cite], and follows a similar proof structure.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This way you give appropriate credit to the original source, while still making your new assertion as you need.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/18
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37034",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15949/"
] |
37,037 |
<p>My former teacher, who had done her PhD in a top-10 university in the UK in 2009, is an assistant professor in my former school.
On the day when I visited my former school, I saw her at the school canteen unexpectedly. I smiled and nodded to her before I said "Good afternoon, Professor Aiko." We were talking for a few minutes before she went back to her office. When I was sitting on a subway train on my way home, however, I was wondering
if it was impolite for me to call her that.
Can I call an assistant professor a professor, and say "Hello Prof. Nickname"?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37038,
"author": "aeismail",
"author_id": 53,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Yes, you can call an assistant or associate professor \"Professor.\" That's completely normal practice. The only time it might be inappropriate is if you are writing them in a formal context. \"Prof. Smith\" is always OK, but saying \"Mary Smith, Professor of Unusual Studies\" isn't really appropriate if Smith is an assistant or associate professor. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37039,
"author": "Pete L. Clark",
"author_id": 938,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Yes, you can call any kind of professor a professor, and you should. Addressing someone as \"assistant professor\" or \"associate professor\" would be...well, it's simply not done, so I can't say if it would be rude or just weird.</p>\n\n<p>It is similar to military protocol, actually: e.g. if someone is a rear or vice admiral, you call them admiral. In contrast to the above example, I'm sure some knowledgeable party could be specific about what bad thing could happen to you if you screw that up!</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37046,
"author": "Chris Leary",
"author_id": 11905,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11905",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>This is not an answer but an anecdote about my current university. For whatever reason, someone decided that the faculty with Ph.D.'s should be addressed as Dr., whereas those with only a masters degree should be called Professor. There are some Ph.D.'s on the faculty who are offended if you call them Professor, despite the fact that they hold the rank of Professor. To me, this is much ado about nothing. I always caution my own students to be aware of our peculiar situation. However, I tell them to call me Mr., Professor, or Dr., whichever they feel most comfortable with.</p>\n\n<p>(I had experience with two graduate schools in the US. In one the facuty were all addressed as Dr., in the other, all were addressed as Professor. Local norms and customs are hard to figure out!)</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37051,
"author": "zoli",
"author_id": 28006,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28006",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In Hungarian, we address only full professors as \"professor\". [Professzor úr! /Professzor asszony!]</p>\n\n<p>\"Mister/Ms teacher\" would be the universal addressing for educators. [Tanár úr! / Tanárnő!]</p>\n\n<p>(The exclamation mark goes with addressing in writing in Hungarian.)</p>\n\n<p>\"Mister Assistant Professor\" would be awkward. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37053,
"author": "Inquisitive",
"author_id": 27985,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27985",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>Yes you can.</p>\n\n<p>The \"Assistant Professor\" still teaches. The word Assistant is there to denote the rank within the academic system. Some have taught longer and are more accomplished and are rewarded accordingly.</p>\n\n<p>Actually, calling the person \"Assistant Professor Jones\" would be very awkward and cumbersome. It should be avoided.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37055,
"author": "Andreas Blass",
"author_id": 14506,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14506",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>My impression is that, when someone is a professor and holds a doctorate, it's appropriate to use the \"higher\" of the two titles when addressing him or her. Which title that is depends on the institution. At some institutions, the people with doctorates are a proper subset of the professors; there \"doctor\" is the higher title. At other institutions, all the professors and some other people as well have doctorates; there \"professor\" is the higher title. </p>\n\n<p>Of course, to follow this advice, you have to know who has a doctorate, and you have to know people's ranks, and you have to know what sort of institution is involved. In the absence of that knowledge, just use a title that seems appropriate. As Chris said, some people can be offended if you guess wrong, but I expect that those people are not very numerous. And, as far as I'm concerned, their being offended is their problem, not yours.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37159,
"author": "blankip",
"author_id": 11420,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11420",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I would just go to the sports analogy. You have head coaches (professors) and assistant coaches (assistant professors). I can't imagine calling any assistant coach who has coached me \"assistant coach\". Just saying it is a bit demeaning and basically reminding them that they are just an assistant. I think at best if used you would seem a bit naive and at worst a jerk.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37167,
"author": "enthu",
"author_id": 15723,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15723",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<h2>Yes, You can.</h2>\n\n<p><strong>Hello Professor Nickname</strong> and <strong>Hello Assistant Professor Nickname</strong>: Simply compare these two and you will see that the first one seems more polite and normal. (However, culture of calling people and it's etiquette may vary in different countries and universities.)</p>\n\n<p>However, I think that <strong>Hello Doctor Nickname</strong> or <strong>Hello Mrs./Mr. Nickname</strong> are good choices if you are in doubt about the politeness/correctness of using a specific title.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>PS: This may be too pessimistic (and not so true) but I afraid, using <strong>Hello Assistant Professor Nickname</strong> may cause the person to feel that the student wants to remind that professor her level of profession (something like: you are an assistant professor not a professor) and this may cause her to be annoyed.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 66063,
"author": "helpful",
"author_id": 51612,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/51612",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I am a visiting professor and this is not my primary role. I have asked the human resources department at the university how I should be addressed. They suggested that the verbal title professor is appropriate. However, when written, I should state that I am a visiting professor ie Professor Nickname, Primary role details, Visiting professor, University details. Actually I always invite people to use my first name anyway!</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 97982,
"author": "Levon",
"author_id": 1452,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1452",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Yes, being a Professor is a profession, the Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor just denotes rank.</p>\n\n<p>At my school students also address lecturers as Professor in recognition of their role (and a sign of respect) which is perfectly fine and appropriate.</p>\n\n<p>I'm in the US, and a professor (with rank of Associate).</p>\n\n<p><strong>The best thing is to just ask the person in question</strong>, some of my colleagues are rather informal, my cultural background is more formal. Consequently, different people will feel differently - you can't go wrong if you ask.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 98214,
"author": "henning",
"author_id": 31917,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31917",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Another quirk: Here at a large Austrian university, my official German job title is \"Universitätsassistent (postdoc)\", which directly translates to \"University Assistant (postdoc)\". The official translation, however, is \"Assistant Professor\". And yet I don't have the rank of an Austrian Professor (neither \"ordinary\" nor \"extraordinary\"), and so German speakers would in fact be <em>wrong</em> to address me as \"Professor so-and-so\".</p>\n\n<p><sub>This is of course not only confusing to me. Since I also have a somewhat foreign name, students address me in all kinds of ways. I just got use to it as a fact of life.</sub></p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 120830,
"author": "Jaired",
"author_id": 101292,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/101292",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In our country, Prof holds a higher value when you are in the academe.\nWe have many PhDs but only few becomes a full Professor. And nobody calls you a Prof until you become a Full Professor. You are not even considered a Prof if you are an associate or an assistant Prof. Come to think of it, You can earn your PhD by completing a program (4-5yrs) but to become a full Professor, you need decades and decades (minimum # of researh, min # of Publications in ISI journal, Min Number of Community Work, Min # of teaching experience, Min Number of presentationa, etc). Its very difficult to become a Full Professor that it holds more value than any position in the academe. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 120847,
"author": "Ben",
"author_id": 87026,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/87026",
"pm_score": -1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In Australia the convention seems to be the opposite of that described in most of these answers --- it is usual here to reserve the title of \"Professor\" only to someone who is a fully professor. It is certainly not offensive to call someone \"Professor\" if they are at a lower level, but it might feel unearned to the recipient.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/5bkKd.png\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/5bkKd.png\" alt=\"enter image description here\"></a></p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 120867,
"author": "starless",
"author_id": 64543,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/64543",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In Finland, in most fields, anyone would be immensely confused by any titles beside their names, usually their first name or a nickname, outside some extraordinarily official circumstances. Just to give further indication of how country-dependent this really is. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/18
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37037",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27408/"
] |
37,043 |
<p>Courses taken and GPA can matter quite significantly for undergraduates, both for applying to graduate school and applying for jobs. What about courses taken and GPA during PhD? Do they matter at all for postdoc/professorship application? <strong>Do postdoc/professorship application usually ask for a transcript?</strong> What about for industry positions? Are there positions that would care about "good grades" or "advanced courses taken" during PhD?</p>
<p>I would guess the answer is largely negative, but I'm willing to hear other opinions.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37044,
"author": "Brian Borchers",
"author_id": 4453,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4453",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>In my experience on many search committees I've never looked in detail at the coursework or grades of an applicant. We have however required transcripts as proof of the academic degrees that the applicants claim. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37302,
"author": "Yasha",
"author_id": 28181,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28181",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Yes, applying for academic jobs and post-docs will require your transcripts. How seriously they view the grades will vary from institution to institution. I would suggest, however, that while low grades may not exclude you from consideration, they certainly don't help. Coursework during a PhD is essentially training. You are being <em>trained</em> for your work as an academic. How well you fare in that training reflect something about you.</p>\n\n<p>If you have a stellar publication record, fantastic references, and a killer dissertation, grades are likely not very important. But just remember, you're going to be competing against hundreds of other applicants for a job. Do you really want your transcript to be full of Bs? In a pool of candidates with 4.0 GPAs, you don't want to be the guy with a 3.0.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37308,
"author": "Corvus",
"author_id": 27900,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27900",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>For what it's worth, I've served on dozens of faculty hiring committees at an R1 institution and I have never had a transcript made available to me as part of the application materials. So not only do we not care, even if we did care we wouldn't have the ability to do anything about it. It's true that competition is intense and any relevant edge helps--but grades aren't even part of the contest. </p>\n\n<p>Perhaps things are different in industry or possibly even at teaching institutions, though in the latter case I doubt it. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/18
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37043",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27545/"
] |
37,052 |
<p>I'm a recently hired assistant professor at a small teaching
university. The department head has been successful in dramatically
increasing student enrollment, such that our department is viewed
almost as keeping the faculty and university afloat (and the
department head is VERY highly regarded on campus). The department
head is close to the office admin (he treats her like a daughter
and she acts like a quasi assistant department head - approving new
classes and setting the schedule, for example).</p>
<p>When I was newly arrived I foolishly agreed to a scheme proposed by
the office admin where an instructor would develop a course that I
would teach next term. After not hearing anything for quite some
time, I checked up on the course progress and it turned out the
instructor didn't intend to give me anything related to the course
until the first day of class (when I was suppose to be teaching it
that day). There was some back and forth and eventually the
instructor committed to me that they would get me the course by the
end of November. The end of November came and went, and when I asked
about it I was assured I'd get it Friday. Friday came and went and on
Monday I was assured I'd get it the next day, which I didn't. When I
saw what she had made available to me on Tuesday, it turned out she
had barely started working on the course.</p>
<p>I went to talk to the office admin (who had set the whole thing up and
been acting as an intermediary) and told her the course wasn't near
completion and at this point I wouldn't be able to teach it. She told
me to talk to the department head. Previously I had wanted to involve
him and she had told me repeatedly not to. As I left she began
heckling me (telling me the instructor had been very busy with other
projects), when I tried to respond to her, she cut me off and told me
to talk about it with the department head. Again, as I turned to leave,
she started heckling me (asking me why I expected the course so
early) and told me I hadn't treated the instructor fairly.</p>
<p>I told her that I felt she and the instructor hadn't treated me
fairly, and that they had thrown me under the bus as a newly arrived
member of the department. She went NUTS. She started screaming,
saying she didn't appreciate being accused of throwing someone under
the bus and that I'd thrown her under the bus. She said she wouldn't accept being talked to that way and she would be complaining to the department head and her staff supervisor (which I found out later she did) and she slammed her door on me (I began walking away when she started screaming).</p>
<p>The department head came to my office and told me I wouldn't have to teach the
course and that I'd be assigned another section of a class I'd already
taught (which was fine with me and one of the solutions I'd previously tried to suggest). He didn't seem to want to hear anything else and just wanted
it wrapped up as quickly as possible. I had written up my understanding
of what had happened, which I gave him a hardcopy of (he didn't want to take it) and sent to him via e-mail. In the e-mail I asked to have another member of the faculty present at any meeting on the issue.</p>
<p>I think the existence of an e-mailed copy of the incident caught the department head's attention, as he then (later in the day) wanted to set up another meeting (but made it very clear no other faculty members could participate). At the meeting he again seemed very eager to brush things under the rug. I said that I wanted to be sure this didn't happen again, which he said he had no control over. I also said that I felt this shouldn't have happened and I wanted it to be treated seriously if it happened again, which he agreed to. I told him that the office admin had threatened to make complaints against me (which he said I didn't have to worry about). I asked him if I should be going on record about what had happen to HR and he told me not to. He told me that if I couldn't resolve things with him, the Dean was the next person to talk to and that under no circumstances would he involve other faculty members in meetings of this nature.</p>
<p>I talked to one of the senior faculty members and he told me that the department head has deliberately concentrated authority with himself and delegates things to the admin (so that another faculty member doesn't have control over them). He also said that he definitely didn't chastise the admin (and probably didn't even say anything to her).</p>
<p>I've thought about this situation and how unpleasant things will be in the department going forward. Since the new term has started I've been receiving dirty looks from the office admin whenever I've been forced into contact with her (I've been avoiding it as much as possible). I'm basically at the point where being in this department for the next 5 years leading up to tenure is pretty depressing (to say nothing of the idea of spending the rest of my career there) and am planning to set up another meeting with the department head.</p>
<p>Basically, I want to express that I think there's still a problem and I'm prepared to resign if that's the only solution. I obviously will make my resignation effective at the end of the school year (I won't leave them in the lurch). I'll tell him I wanted to give him another chance to solve the problem (and also feel that I should talk to the dean and HR before I tender my resignation so that they aren't blindsided - I want to let my department head know I'll be talking to them so he isn't surprised).</p>
<p>I'd be willing to stay if it was clearly expressed to the office admin that her actions were inappropriate. At this point I think that would require something along the lines of an official rebuke that would be put in her employment file. </p>
<p>For what it's worth, my teaching evaluations (from the one term I've been here) are very high and my research profile is probably the best in the department. I have a large number of other options for employment (which will probably be outside of academia). I don't need references or anything, so while I realize I'm "burning a bridge", that won't cause me any problems.</p>
<p>Does anyone have any advice on how I should move forward? I'd certainly understand anyone who thought I was "making a mountain out of a molehill", but this is still bothering me more than a month after the fact.</p>
<p>Sorry for the length, I thought it was important to include all relevant details.</p>
<p>EDIT: A moderator asked me below what I want from people who respond. I'm hoping for tactical advice (the best way to achieve an official rebuke, if it's impossible, advice on how to move past it). I'd also appreciate opinions on whether or not I'm justified being upset by the situation.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37061,
"author": "gnometorule",
"author_id": 4384,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4384",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I can't tell you what is the 'best' solution to your situation, but I can share with you how I would approach it. If you allow, a few words about my background. After a Ph.D., I went to Wall Street. In my second job, a person who was senior to most people in my group was universally despised (the mere fact to be assigned to work with him made a female analyst begin to cry. Another time she had to be talked out of quitting because of how he had treated her.). While generally well-liked, I had a vendetta with this person for the entirety of my job with this firm, which was detrimental both to my and the other guy's standing.</p>\n\n<p>This is meant to be an obvious analogy. You, as I did, appear to believe to be entirely in the right (and in your case, it's fairly obvious that you probably are); but morality, and success and happiness at work are not the same. While you seem to have the academic side of your career under control (you mention being well-regarded in your department for your research, etc.), I think you should spend some time working on the softer social side of your job...which will be part of <em>any</em> job you might have. What happened to you here, could easily happen again if you go through with quitting, and run into a similarly entitled admin at your next job. So instead of running at the first obstacle, tackle it head on. </p>\n\n<p>And for this, I would warmly recommend to de-emphasize due process, and to swallow your pride. Get some chocolates, and ask the admin to sit down with you in private - just you two. Tell her that you regret that you started off on the wrong foot, and for your part (even if you don't see a part at all, say it), you'd like to apologize; then hand her the chocolates. She let you down this time, but you can make her (and most) admins an ally. This doesn't always work. Some people simply cannot be worked with, but before you conclude that, work on your relationship with her. If you manage to make up, it will also reflect well on you with other department members, or at least your department head. If she's tardy in the future, remind her with a smile, and talk to your boss (in person), asking him to give her a nudge (which you could formulate along the lines of \"She's probably crowded, but I really need X urgently. Could you have a word with her and give her a friendly reminder?\")</p>\n\n<p>Minus the chocolates, this is what I would do now were I again in my old situation.</p>\n\n<p>It's your choice, but I'd value not hating going to work every day, over feeling that I've been slighted; and it's clearly better than remembering having \"had\" to leave your first job. And really, what you describe here is work 101: you'll have that one admin in most jobs you'll have in your life. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37065,
"author": "smci",
"author_id": 12050,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12050",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I retitled this <strong><em>\"untouchable administrative member of department\"</em></strong> since that seems to be the crux of the issue:\nthe department head is in general excellent, however for reasons unknown [*] he has elevated the office admin beyond her competence and she is untouchable; you didn't sense this early enough and now you've walked into a landmine. Your issue is the political setup, not the particular issue with the new course not being ready; doesn't matter much and clearly she's out of line (although evidently she's also very insecure, and maybe if you'd privately managed to resolve it with her before it became a huge problem, this might have been avoidable; seems like she was genuinely afraid of getting the head involved, regardless whether he gives her a public rebuke or not; some would say it was a little naive to not have detected her untouchable status early enough; anyway it's too late now).</p>\n\n<p>So it comes down to pragmatism vs principle; only you can weigh the following:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>How many other people has the admin tangled with? Is she widely despised? Is she likely to leave/retire/get replaced(/promoted out)? You haven't supplied any context to us, we really need to know if you can muster the leverage to get her dealt with or not. Do some discreet asking around.</li>\n<li>How long do you intend to stay there? How uncomfortable is it likely to get?</li>\n<li>You can't get an official rebuke without at very least getting the dean involved (try that), threatening to resign, or maybe HR, which is burned-bridge territory.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>[*] As to the dept head and admin's unorthodox setup, there may well be more than meets the eye, maybe he will protect her, or turn a blind eye to her excesses, or she has the goods on him. Again, try to ask around before you make a decision.</p>\n\n<p>After you supply the missing information, it comes down to four options:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>You don't have the muscle to rectify this. Either a) resign quietly, b) resign to the dean and/or make a formal complaint, or c) stay and have to eat shit for a while until it blows over. Only you can determine what is the best career option. Put your pride and ego aside, admittedly hard to swallow.</li>\n<li>You do have the muscle, or she has made too many enemies. Palace coup time. Try not to alienate the dept head though. He is protecting her.\nIn general what they advise about conflict: only start a battle if you're pretty confident you can overwhelmingly win it. Seems doubtful based on what you've said.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>You haven't told us enough to advise.\nThe only actionable thing I can say is to develop better radar for strange political setups like that, and the moment you do, discreetly figure out what their deal is, and don't cross insecure dangerous people needlessly.\nBoth academia and large organizations are stuffed with incompetent insecure people capable of being vicious who are nearly impossible to dislodge and flaunt it; the longer they're there the more intractable they get. The art is to flatter/ charm/ keep them sweet and working for you instead of against you. Strictly, this one shouldn't have been your battle.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37093,
"author": "user28032",
"author_id": 28032,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28032",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I'm probably going to get rated through the floor for this one, but there are two obvious things sticking out to me I consider worth pointing out.</p>\n\n<p>First the possible resolutions you list and want to decide between appear equally ridiculous to me. Basically it sounds like you want to have St Peter descend from heaven with the book of good and bad deeds, get the scores added up and paid out, everybody shakes hands and then life can continue.</p>\n\n<p>Life doesn't work that way. There is no compensation for past losses, and particularly life is not a zero-sum game: if shit happened to you that does not mean that somebody else profited equally from it, or that he or she had planned for that to happen.</p>\n\n<p>For another, I think that the office admin appears to be doing an excellent job. She has been set up as the fall girl, and she works pretty well for that: an academic was supposed to provide you with course material in time and did not follow through. Obviously <em>that</em> is the person who actually let you down and who should have known what was needed by you when and provide it. Now it is hard to guess whether there is <em>another</em> story behind that (writing course material for someone else from scratch does not sound like something that should usually happen or be a good idea): if stuff is misorganized, a whole lot of negative consequences can accumulate all over the place without St Peter having anybody chalked up for malice.</p>\n\n<p>But let's keep at this end of the story: whatever the reason, your course material provider did not come through, and you want the office admin on the hook for that. Are you surprised that she's not enamored with you?</p>\n\n<p>Now how did she get to be responsible for someone else in that manner? The way your office setup sounds, some people think they are doing her a favor by pushing responsibilities on her which she has a problem handling, responsibilities that are outside her area of expertise. She'll probably get paid more than usual because of handling more than usual, but likely not as much as a proper handler would get. And she's not been wise enough to refuse those favors of trust and responsibility.</p>\n\n<p>Now she's in a situation where she has to improvise and guesstimate a lot, and in that situation of getting more shoved onto her than she can competently dispatch, stuff went wrong. And mostly because somebody else did not carry the weight that she was told he would be lifting. She wasn't smart enough to just connect you and step out, so now she's being painted as the bad guy by you and you want her disciplined. And likely could have some chance of getting this accomplished. And you did try this via the department head already and she likely knows this. And you wonder why she's not all smiles at you.</p>\n\n<p>Now if you get her fired, the department will need to get another fall girl that the department head can load with the stuff he does not want to deal with himself but for which he does not seem to have the funds to hire somebody with more than administrational capabilities. It would be a fresh chance, sure, but one starting from scratch.</p>\n\n<p>Do you want to be the guy responsible for changing the department? Do you consider yourself sufficiently skilled in HR to make that decision?</p>\n\n<p>I'd rather suggest that you try rebooting your relation. Try getting out of the \"threat to her position and career\" role since you won't improve your standing with either her or the department in that manner. Avoid situations where she is responsible for stuff she has no clue about and that should not be part of her job in the first place.</p>\n\n<p>Try to avoid helping to set her up for failure. I don't know whether she has a chance to grow into the job that is expected from her, but it is not your basic task to fix that. If you can manage that she does not perceive you as a threat, you'll likely see much of what irks you now abate eventually.</p>\n\n<p>Most importantly: get rid of your notion of justice: when things go bad, you cannot pin all the badness to one bad person's score. Often there is minimal cause for large effect. Intrigants enjoy working with minimal cause for large effect, but you don't make it sound as though the office assistant is <em>enjoying</em> what she is doing. Nor do you make it sound like she is subtle. She is rather reacting like a frightened child.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37132,
"author": "Faheem Mitha",
"author_id": 285,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/285",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>\"I foolishly agreed to a scheme proposed by the office admin...\". This was indeed foolish, and extremely unusual. I have to wonder what you were thinking. To a large extent, the whole situation grew out of that. Don't let office staff make your decisions for you. They're not qualified, for one thing. I'm also unclear how someone else can \"develop\" a course for you. What does that even mean?</p>\n\n<p>I agree with the general message of the other answers in that there is no point targeting the office admin. You should recognise that you made a mistake taking advice/suggestions from someone you should not have been taking advice from (and who isn't qualified to give it). Learn from your mistakes. The world is full of people giving bad advice. Just like the world is full of germs. You can't do anything about it, so develop better defenses. You probably have already have a filter for bad advice. So develop a better one.</p>\n\n<p>Yes, it sounds like other people screwed up and behaved in less than ideal ways, but forcing them to confront their screwups isn't going to do you any good. You're not their father. And these people aren't criminals. They're your colleagues. Or department staff. Don't treat them like criminals or naughty children. I suggest you talk to the office admin, and basically say that you got off on the wrong foot, that there were some misunderstandings, and that you'd like to let byegones be byegones and get a fresh start.</p>\n\n<p>I agree with others that resigning would be a gross overreaction, unless of course, you are seriously dissatisfied with the job for professional reasons.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37161,
"author": "blankip",
"author_id": 11420,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11420",
"pm_score": -1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>A lot of the answers are really good if you really <em>needed</em> the job. I think by your post, you don't.</p>\n\n<p>I found myself in a position almost exactly like yours at an old job. I was a manager of a tech desk, I had a lot of credentials and found a job in a day. </p>\n\n<p>The head project manager, chewed me out, belittled me, complained all the way up to senior VPs... a lot of drama. Because I wanted to change technology (and this would involve a few of her projects being squashed). It was my job to upgrade technology and I found it insulting that someone who didn't even understand what an IP address was, was telling me what we should use.</p>\n\n<p>To make my story short, it basically turned out exactly as yours. Bosses told me she shouldn't have done it, she had no business even having the conversation, then tried to sweep it under the rug. </p>\n\n<p>How did I deal with it?</p>\n\n<p>I was ultra open about it. I was new and didn't want people talking behind my back or thinking I was some kind of doormat. </p>\n\n<p>I have many examples. One of the first was her giving me dirty looks. I simply waited until she was talking to one of our directors and they seemed to be having a good chat. I walked by to get a coffee and said something to the effect, \"I am glad you can smile at work, I thought the dirty looks were a constant.\"</p>\n\n<p>In a meeting she butted in loudly while I was talking a couple months in. I simply said, \"Excuse me I am talking. I appreciated that you can be loud and slam doors but you need to wait your turn for that.\" [almost everyone in the room was laughing but it was a little mean]</p>\n\n<p>She promptly left the room and went to HR. Which was funny because our HR had to write her up for her previous outburst and put her on anger management watch - if she had one more issue she would have been required to go to a class. </p>\n\n<p>She left a couple months later. I didn't try to stay away from her, ignore her, or anything like that. I simply completely acknowledged the situation and handled it with a bit of humor. </p>\n\n<p>I noticed quickly that my reaction really helped with my reputation in our offices. First, I didn't run to HR and file a complaint. Really this gets you nowhere and makes you look like a tattle-tale (also it is very easy for the person to just lie and act like it never happened or that you did something inappropriate). Second, the higher-ups saw that I would not let a person railroad me or (my ideas) because they had been there 10 years and I just started. Third, I didn't go talk behind her back and bad mouth her. Everything I said about her was to answer a direct question from a higher up or with her in the conversation.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37163,
"author": "Nobody",
"author_id": 546,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>My reaction after finishing reading this long question is: a \"<em><strong>Storm in a teapot</strong></em>\" with the office admin, but a bigger problem is in the department.</p>\n\n<p>Quit an academic job (assistant professor) because of some problem with an office admin? I think you are over-reacted. The person responsible really should be that instructor and the department head shares some of the responsibilities. The office admin is only the messenger.</p>\n\n<p>If you really want to start a fight. Please fight against that instructor and the department head because they didn't do their jobs. Please don't target that office admin. If you get that office admin fired, do you really think the problem is solved? It won't happen again? </p>\n\n<p>And I would like to say something for the students of that university. Please finish that scheme proposal for that course before you quit (if you ever quit that job) because you promised you would do it and it will be good for the students. You are a Professor in a teaching university. Please don't forget you have your responsibilities.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37170,
"author": "RoboKaren",
"author_id": 14885,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14885",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>There are a couple of unspoken truths about academia:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Administrative people can make your life hell. From misplacing your grant applications to not ordering new toner for your printer, it entirely behooves you to be on their good side. This is triply the case for department heads -- I'm currently a program chair and I am deathly afraid of pissing off my staff.</li>\n<li>Toxic departments are very common. There is no guarantee that your next job will be better. It may be, or it may be worse in different ways. </li>\n<li>Being unemployed really sucks. Being underemployed (adjuncting) also sucks. Both are likely possibilities given the vagaries of the job market.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>You're currently spending a great deal of emotional energy on this. I would try to clear the books as quickly as possible (chocolates help) and get back to focusing on your research. There's just one currency that's universally exchangeable on the job market, and that is research publications. </p>\n\n<p>If your situation sucks, keep your head down and quietly apply to other places. But don't quit until you have a job offer in hand. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37254,
"author": "user28150",
"author_id": 28150,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28150",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Just picking out one tidbit from a comment of yourself on your question:</p>\n<blockquote>\nI'd also appreciate opinions on whether or not I'm justified being upset by the situation.\n</blockquote>\n<p>That, in a nutshell, is your problem. Feelings are caused, not "justified". They are no currency which you can cash in for action if they are not counterfeit.</p>\n<p>You are willing to escalate the situation as far as it will go since you are convinced that the feelings you have in your hand beat hers. "I take your complaint to your supervisor and raise you an official rebuke." And you ask for advice whether you should go "all in" and put your job on the table.</p>\n<p>But this is a game that has no winner: the house takes all anyway. Don't worry about whether you are more righteously upset than the office admin. The question is how you are supposed to get along while you are there and you have not seriously attempted figuring that out. Your solution is that you want to have a permanent record on her file and then you both will get along fine and neither will be upset anymore to the degree where it would disturb the other.</p>\n<p>You are a smart guy. That bet has lousy odds.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 103897,
"author": "Zeal",
"author_id": 87580,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/87580",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Almost all of these answers involve some form of manipulation, political maneuvering, or else tongue-holding. These sorts of solutions ignore the fact that everyone involved is human, and as such, possess some level of humanity.</p>\n\n<p>The issue here (as in all human conflict) is communication. The admin behaved very poorly. We can agree on that. But it seems clear to me that she was communicating fear. She is afraid of the department head, but more basically afraid that it will be revealed that she is in some way incompetent. Her fear led to an outburst which, of course, made her appear to be incompetent.</p>\n\n<p>Now she is living with her worst fear. You know she is incompetent, and you are raising it as an issue with the people from whom she most craves respect. How terrifying!</p>\n\n<p>You are afraid as well. You fear that the admin will continue to make you feel uncomfortable, negatively affect your work life, and possibly involve you in another traumatic confrontation. Valid fears if nothing changes.</p>\n\n<p>As long as she believes you view her as incompetent and are attempting to convince others to view her likewise, she is likely to make all your fears a reality. So the solution is simple: convince her that you do not view her as incompetent, and that you are not attempting to persuade others.</p>\n\n<p>Communicate to her the following:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>You <strong>respect</strong> the amount of responsibility she has, and the volume\nof work she is able to successfully organize and manage.</li>\n<li>You <strong>understand why</strong> she was upset at you. She has a lot on her\nplate and she probably felt it was unfair to hold her responsible for\nthe actions of another. (Avoid discussing whether her actions were\njustified, including her attempts to belittle your concerns.)</li>\n<li>You <strong>regret</strong> the confrontation you shared, and the actions you took\nfollowing it. You were attempting to prevent another conflict through\nmediation, but you realize now that neither of you desire conflict.</li>\n<li><strong>You are afraid</strong> that your relationship may not recover, which may result in the failure to work together effectively.</li>\n<li>You <strong>hope</strong> that after communicating you can develop an\nunderstanding of each other to produce a relationship in which mutual\nrespect can survive whatever minor point of contention may arise.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Your goal is to alleviate her fear of losing respect. She needs to <strong>know beyond a shadow of a doubt</strong> that you respect her. Then you can have completely acceptable interactions in which her fear does not overcome her self-control.</p>\n\n<p>Most of these answers are about getting what you want, but I would recommend considering that what you want might just include relationships filled with bidirectional trust and respect.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/19
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37052",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7894/"
] |
37,054 |
<p>Now, I understand that European PhDs are far from monolithic in format, and that most quals in my field (physics) can fall into two general formats, as far as North American PhD programs are concerned:</p>
<ol>
<li>A set of tests covering the fundamental areas of undergraduate-level education in your discipline (I know MIT and Princeton can be quite nasty in this regard for physics, but UChicago phased quals out due in part to student health concerns</li>
<li>A review of the literature in your research topic and the relevant fundamental notions underlying it, which must be explained in front of a jury that will ask questions as well</li>
</ol>
<p>My question is: are quals present in European PhD programs and, if yes, what are formats commonly in use for that purpose?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37071,
"author": "Sumyrda - remember Monica",
"author_id": 13138,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13138",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>As far as I'm aware (Germany, sciences), we don't have quals here. If you're admitted, at least one professor considers you good enough and that's it. Your next exam will be handing in your thesis and defending it.</p>\n\n<p>A Master of science degree or equivalent is usually required though - maybe that's why we have no extra quals.</p>\n\n<p>Plus, the defense can include an oral exam on the general field of your thesis.</p>\n\n<p>However, do read the relevant documents of your target university and program (in Germany look for Promotionsordnung). </p>\n\n<p>With the advent of structured PhD programs, things like having to take classes for credits and minimum grades have started to come up at some universities.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37073,
"author": "xLeitix",
"author_id": 10094,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>Most central European universities don't traditionally have QEs. However, it seems to me as if it is getting more popular to have <em>something</em> after the first one or two years of your programme. Two data points:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>In my current university, PhD students need to defend their thesis proposal after (maximum) two years. This includes writing their proposal, receiving written comments by two other (i.e., not their advisor) professors of the faculty, and presenting and defending their proposal in front of the entire faculty (our faculty is pretty small). Questions are asked in this defense, but not typically about material that is not directly linked to the proposal. In theory students can fail at this step, but is is very uncommon. The goal is rather to force students (and advisors) to have a clear goal of where the thesis is going early on, something that was historically a bit of a problem.</li>\n<li>When I did my PhD, we did not really have any sort of entry exam or defense in my alma mater. However, since then, they have switched to a model not unlike what I explained above. The main difference is that proposals are only presented (there is no written document), and that only a small committee is responsible for giving feedback on the proposal (not the entire faculty). This defense has to be taken one year after start of the PhD. Failing this defense is again <em>very</em> uncommon.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p><strong>Summary</strong>: the places I am well aware of don't have stressful QEs. Instead, we traditionally had pretty much nothing. Nowadays, many places have a proposal defense instead of a QE, but this is not a step that students typically have to be stressed out about.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37087,
"author": "BPND",
"author_id": 17639,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17639",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>For some german universities (like the one I am doing my PhD at), PhD studies are supervised by grad schools that often have their own entry exam, e.g., in the form of a presentation in front of an admission committee. This presentation has to cover your future project in terms of background, methodology and aims of your study and sometimes also a short part regarding your past work for your diploma or master degree.</p>\n\n<p>At my university, the admission mostly happens after you are already employed by your group leader (and by that, already have a contract). If you indeed fail (or just do not want) the admission to this graduation school, you can still (or also) apply to a more basic grad school that has no entry exam of any kind, but is also regarded as being of a lower quality (in terms of courses, funding options, renown, etc.) than the \"excellent\" grad school.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37089,
"author": "Moriarty",
"author_id": 8562,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8562",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>As an expat, maybe a native Dutch person here can confirm this, but as far as I know there are no quals here in the Netherlands either.</p>\n\n<p>It's generally expected that you have a Master's degree (3 year BSc + 2 year MSc), but I know of people who have been admitted as PhD candidates with an Honours degree (3 year BSc + 1 year of intensive postgrad study).</p>\n\n<p>Many PhD projects here are run like job applications. A professor has gained funding for a specific purpose, and the department advertises the position.</p>\n\n<p>After a year of working as a PhD candidate you might have to justify how you can achieve your research goals to finish the PhD in time, but that's nothing like having to put in a whole lot of work for a PhD proposal before having even been accepted.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37094,
"author": "Davidmh",
"author_id": 12587,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12587",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In Sweden there are no quals per se, but we may have something related. When you have completed 50% of the aims of your PhD (when exactly this happens is decided in conjunction with your supervisor and the Department's PhD program head), you have to write a short version of the thesis, and get a title, \"Licenciate\", and a raise.</p>\n\n<p>The exact requirements depend with the department. At Stockholm University Physics, there is only a defence with a local opponent. In Biophysics and Biochemistry, there is also an oral exam. The topic is to be decided between the student and an examiner, and has to be related to the research at hand. For example, a colleague of mine, Biotechnologist working on statistical data analysis, was examined on a book on Machine Learning.</p>\n\n<p>In any case, they are never as stressful as the US Quals. Probably because firing a student is rather hard, and no one would take that threat seriously.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/19
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37054",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15996/"
] |
37,082 |
<p>Could any one recommend some comprehensive guide (online version preferred) for writing a Ph.D. thesis in Mathematics?</p>
<p>I did some google search but there are too many results and it is difficult to decide which one to read. Here I am not asking anyone to write such a guide for me (otherwise this question will be too broad and thus not suitable here); instead, I would appreciate if anyone could make some recommendations of those existing references.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 38924,
"author": "padawan",
"author_id": 15949,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15949",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p><a href=\"http://people.bath.ac.uk/mamamf/talks/awayday2012.pdf\" rel=\"nofollow\">This</a> is the best guide I have ever encountered.</p>\n\n<p>It is neither too broad nor too narrow as a guide.\nMoreover, it does not contain the policies of a specific university (you should number the figures that way and write equations this way etc.) </p>\n\n<p>The persentation explains how should the overall <em>feeling</em> of a thesis be, and nothing more.</p>\n\n<p>I also find <a href=\"http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/stefan/thesis-writing.pdf\" rel=\"nofollow\">this</a> manuscript very useful. However, some subsections are incomplete and marked as <em>[todo]</em>.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 38932,
"author": "just-learning",
"author_id": 10483,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10483",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It could also be helpful to check <a href=\"http://maths.york.ac.uk/www/ResearchWriting\" rel=\"nofollow\">this</a> and <a href=\"http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~jason/advice/how-to-write-a-thesis.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">this</a> short guides and the books by Steven G. Krantz, in particular </p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.ams.org/bookstore-getitem/item=GSCM\" rel=\"nofollow\">A Mathematician's Survival Guide: Graduate School and Early Career Development</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.ams.org/bookstore-getitem/item=pmw\" rel=\"nofollow\">A Primer of Mathematical Writing</a></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>The first one contains subsection 4.6 which deals specifically with writing a thesis, the second one is on mathematical writing in general but it does not really deal with the theses <em>per se</em>. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/19
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37082",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24832/"
] |
37,084 |
<p>According to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation#Styles" rel="nofollow">Wikipedia</a>, the most pertinent styles are Chicago and APSA, which is a variant of Chicago. But I could not find stronger references about this.</p>
<p>EDIT. The purpose of my question is the following. I am trying to build a quick help-sheet for scholars and students about the "citation" topic. Political science seems to be a discipline not very careful about the citation styles issue (compared to the STM fields), so I can't find clear information about the practice of its community.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37107,
"author": "aeismail",
"author_id": 53,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The best way to figure this out is to look at the \"instructions to authors\" provided by different political science journals on their home pages. (As an example, the <a href=\"http://www.helvidius.org/submit/faq/\" rel=\"nofollow\"><em>Journal of Politics and Society</em></a> expects authors to use the <em>Chicago Manual of Style</em> for citations. In general, for writing in the humanities, the <em>Chicago</em> guide is often a good starting point. </p>\n\n<p>However, the better recommendation would be to use <em>bibliographic software</em> which will be able to reformat references into whatever style you need. Note that you don't need to have a subscription to the journals to access this information; it should be freely available on the website <em>outside</em> of any paywall the journal publisher may have.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37299,
"author": "Yasha",
"author_id": 28181,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28181",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Political Scientist here. @aeismail is correct - different journals use different citation styles, as do different academic publishers. The best way around this is to use a reference manager (such as Mendeley or Papers) to not only manage your academic articles, but cite directly into your publications. These software packages are capable of formatting your citations in whichever style necessary.</p>\n\n<p>With that said, my experience is that, generally, APSR's citation style is broadly accepted, with minor variation.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 45101,
"author": "Nick Cain",
"author_id": 34266,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/34266",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>This is hard to generalize because it depends on the type of journal your are submitting to and/or your department's requirements. Because I work in the public policy realm, APA is by far the most common style requested for journal articles. However, if you are writing a political philosophy piece or for a book chapter, Chicago is more common.</p>\n\n<p>In your guide, you could say something like: \"Because citation styles vary according to the type of publication, please search online for the journal name and 'author instructions' before you begin writing, or consult the editor or principal investigator of your project. You may also consider using a bibliography manager such as RefWorks, EndNote or Zotero to track your sources. These programs allow you to output references lists in different formats with minimal extra work.\"</p>\n\n<p>Additional information on citation styles can be found:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http://gsrc.ucla.edu/gwc/resources/citation-styles.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">http://gsrc.ucla.edu/gwc/resources/citation-styles.html</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/585/2/\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/585/2/</a></li>\n</ul>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/19
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37084",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27499/"
] |
37,095 |
<p>This has been puzzling me for a long time, I have seen professors and other academic people hang up their research papers on their doors. What is the purpose of this?</p>
<p>My first guess was they were announcing some important papers related to a class they are lecturing, so students can look at them without disturbing professor. This doesn't feel right because there are not many papers studied in a typical class and there is internet to announce these things.</p>
<p>As the time passed I started thinking it is a way of advertising. But, this also doesn't make sense because web pages exists to serve this purpose and few people come to visit the office physically.</p>
<p>Maybe this practice is limited to my country, but any answer is appreciated.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37096,
"author": "Peter Jansson",
"author_id": 4394,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4394",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>If you have worked hard on a specific research question and finally have your peers approve of your work through a review process, would you not want to display the result? Basically, it is one way in which to show any passer-by that, yes, something is actually accomplished within the walls of the office. I have seen many variants on the topic. I have seen a world map with journal article title and abstract tied with a string to a point on the map where the work was done.</p>\n\n<p>Essentially, it is an analog analogue to a web page or site such as ResearchGate where you highlight your recent publications, in this case, of course, to students and peers in the department rather than a wider audience. The main purpose is, as you also point out, better served by a web site. But, if you end up waiting to for an audience with the professor, you may actually look at the posted paper and get to know something you would not necessarily otherwise check out. So, I think the main purpose now is \"just\" to display something that has taken time and effort with some pride.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37098,
"author": "FraEnrico",
"author_id": 27499,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27499",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>For the same reason that a house has pictures of the family living it, or a photographer who has some of its fine prints in his studio. Everyone is proud of what accomplished, so he/she displays it. Also, office walls need decoration as any other human living environment, so why not hanging the papers or the posters? They can also function as \"wall of memory\" or as \"talking bibliography\" of an academic's career.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37101,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 7,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>In addition to the reasons mentioned by others, I think there may be something of the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_hunting\">big-game trophy hunter</a> about the practice: \"Behold, visitor, I am a mighty scientist, capable of hunting the fearsome [prestigious journal]!\"</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37103,
"author": "Henry",
"author_id": 8,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>There's often a good reason to post <em>something</em> on an office door: many academic buildings have long corridors of similar looking office doors, so posting something on it helps an office stand out. It doesn't really matter what; once your students (or colleagues!) have found your office, it's easier for them to find it again, because it's easier for most people to spot visual cues like the paper titles and even just the arrangement of papers rather than the door number or remembering it's the third door.</p>\n\n<p>As for why papers, I assume a combination of being proud of the accomplishment and hoping one might catch the eye of a passerby, student or colleague. The audience who sees it is quite different from the people likely to look at the list of papers on a website.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37138,
"author": "Inquisitive",
"author_id": 27985,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27985",
"pm_score": -1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I agree. It sounds somewhat ridiculous and archaic. My first attempt at an answer would be pride/arrogance or desire to impress.</p>\n\n<p>You know what I would do? If I were a professor on the same cell-block as the other professors, I'd deliberately not hang anything up on my door except my business card with my own personal web site address where all my papers are located.</p>\n\n<p>My door would look more orderly and professional because of that.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37188,
"author": "pocketlizard",
"author_id": 21458,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21458",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I used to see this all the time in my undergraduate university, so I know just where you're coming from. While I never asked specifically about them, I may have an answer based purely on my experiences.</p>\n\n<p>Whenever I had a meeting with one of my professors, I would usually arrive a couple minutes early and the professor would usually be finishing up their previous meeting with student/colleague/phone conversation. Obviously I wouldn't want to intrude until they were finished but I did want to be able to go in as soon as they were done, so I would loiter outside their office until I could go in. If the professor had some of their research papers up on or next to their door, I could scan the titles and quickly learn about some of the topics they were interested in and what work they had done recently. This wasn't something that I would look up on their website, it was just something I could quickly learn about them in two minutes and file away for later. If they've published on something I was interested in, I could mention it in our meeting. If I was utterly confused and had no interest, no harm done. I always thought of it as a way for professors to market themselves to students who don't see them very often and are more acquaintances to the professor or department. Or perhaps like magazines that medical offices put in the waiting room - they're not supposed to send a message, they're there to pass the time and if you're in the mood for it you can learn something.</p>\n\n<p>So in short, I think the papers are there to reach out to the audience that wouldn't look at your website and doesn't know a lot about your field, but may be interested either in your work or in learning something new about your field of study.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37191,
"author": "mikeagg",
"author_id": 28104,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28104",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Who can say for sure but the professors in question? It may simply be a cheap and considerate way of letting interested colleagues or students have access to a hard copy, avoiding both the inconvenience of continually being asked to provide one or the awkwardness and waste that comes with offering a copy to one who doesn't wish to read it. A habit retained from a pre-digital age, perhaps.</p>\n\n<p>A long time ago in an Oxford college far away, the majority of my peers attempted to confine academic work to a couple of busy hours mid-morning, leaving the rest of the day free for the usual business of undergrads (traditionally smoking, drinking or various means of working up a sweat). The hours 9-12 were when most of the undergraduate assignments were handed in, new ones were handed out, lectures were attended and tutorials were grimly endured by all parties. To avoid constant interruption during these busy hours when they were frequently tutoring, several tutors would keep the doors to their rooms firmly shut and only communicate with the wider world via the envelopes pinned thereon. Assignments for students to collect, student essays awaiting appraisal, reading lists and wotnot, would all pass through the vertical mailbox system on the outside of the tutor's door.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37206,
"author": "dsfgsho",
"author_id": 17804,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17804",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>My experience is that this is mostly done to <strong>communicate</strong> new publications and general scientific progress to the rest of the <strong>department</strong>. </p>\n\n<p>Specially in larger departments that cover different sub fields, this is a way to externalize what everyone is doing. Posting the abstract/first page of a published paper in the communal area was encouraged and widely adopted in my previous Computer Science department. </p>\n\n<p>Although most researches also post newly published papers to their website, having these new papers on their door or in a communal area (kitchen or water cooler) is a nice way to share what is going on in the department. I rarely check my colleagues' websites, but I enjoy reading abstracts or the first page of their papers when I encounter them.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37301,
"author": "smci",
"author_id": 12050,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12050",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In addition to the other good answers, four good reasons noone's mentioned yet:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li><p><strong>Not every student/research partner/ visitor will have an academic login or online access to journals/JSTOR/proceedings/whatever, or in that discipline</strong>. That stuff costs big bucks. </p></li>\n<li><p>Especially <strong>people from industry, prospective students, auditing students, people from other departments/disciplines [1], high school students, visitors, journalists, friends and family of any of the above.</strong></p></li>\n<li><p><strong>Even if they have online access, they may not know the keywords to search or their correspondence across different disciplines.</strong> Huge example: the terminology in data science machine learning vs statistics is seriously not standardized. Ditto EE/CS.</p></li>\n<li><p><strong>Or be aware of developments in related fields</strong>, e.g. Neural Nets, SVM, HMM, clustering.</p></li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>[1] For example EE and CS academics [in Europe] almost live in different universes, which is sad because they miss a lot of valuable stuff from each other. Ditto, mathematicians, statisticians.</p>\n\n<p>Anyway this practice seems perfectly fine unless the degree of self-citation gets excessive/ silly/ petty/ vain. Also, it's customary not to just display your own, but your grad students'/ co-researchers'/ other key papers.\nIt beats the usual Calvin and Hobbes.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/19
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37095",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/59/"
] |
37,097 |
<p>When browsing their web sites, I noticed that apart from those listed academic requirements by different universities, they all require at least two reference letters from applicants, but they did not officially state that who should write those recommendation letters.<br>Although I have collected several recommendation letters from my former teachers, I found it was quite hard to reach my former teachers whom I had not contacted for many years.<br>It almost took me two months from the day I sent out my first email to the day I got enough recommendation letters from my former teachers.<br>
It has been puzzling me why the recommendation letters should be written by school lecturers or professors.<br>The people who know you best are business partners, your close friends, family members like your parents, siblings, why they are not qualified to write the recommendation letters for me?<br><br></p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37100,
"author": "ff524",
"author_id": 11365,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": false,
"text": "<ol>\n<li>Because they cannot be objective.</li>\n<li>Because they do not have firsthand knowledge of your academic abilities. </li>\n<li>Because they do not have the background necessary to compare you to other graduate school applicants.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>Also see <a href=\"http://psychology.unl.edu/psichi/Graduate_School_Application_Kisses_of_Death.pdf\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Kisses of Death in the Graduate School Application Process</a>, page 2, \"Harmful letters of recommendation,\" subsection \"Inappropriate sources,\" and <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/32938/protocol-for-writing-a-recommendation-letter-for-someone-you-only-know-on-a-pers\">Protocol for writing a recommendation letter for someone you only know on a personal basis</a>.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37108,
"author": "Anthony",
"author_id": 23518,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23518",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>one of the links referenced above by @ff524 was actually asked by myself. The two main reasons are the following:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Lack of objectivity / inherent bias in favor of applicant</li>\n<li>Lack of knowledge of academic discipline where candidate wants to apply.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>The dilemma I faced that led me to asking the question, I was able to solve by brainstorming with my friend for other more appropriate resources to aid her. Even if the candidate is poorly qualified for the program which he or she has chosen to apply for, very few family / close friends would be willing to disclose this fact because as family, they have an inherent interest in seeing a relative succeed. </p>\n\n<p>A major part of a recommendation is to assess the professional characteristics and prerequisite knowledge an applicant needs to have to be successful in the program, knowledge that family and close friends are unlikely to accurately have and objectively evaluate.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37147,
"author": "Paul",
"author_id": 28064,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28064",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>I myself applied to graduate school quite a few years after getting my B.S. It was not easy to get recommendations from faculty who had taught me, as they had mostly retired and some had in fact died over the years. I did get one academic recommendation, but the professor admitted to me that he did not remember me and had to write his letter more or less based only on my transcript.</p>\n\n<p>In my opinion, a good admissions committee should realize that situations like these occur, and be flexible about what sorts of letters they require. (I was fortunate that the admissions committee where I was applying was flexible and I did get admitted.)</p>\n\n<p>That said, I would consider a lack of academic recommendations for someone who has recently been in school to be a red flag. Someone who is applying to grad school should have been a good enough student as an undergrad to have made a positive impression on at least a couple of professors. Unless you have the excuse of having been away from academia for a number of years, you should definitely have academic references. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/19
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37097",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27408/"
] |
37,102 |
<p>Many conferences offer some form of financial assistance, covering travel, registration, accommodation, or combinations thereof.</p>
<p>My university will only pay for one conference travel expenses over the course of my PhD.</p>
<p>While I live in a first-world country, I am not financially well-off. I can't easily afford to fly to conferences in my own country, let alone some of the more exciting international conferences.</p>
<p>A lot of conferences I am really interested in are of side-note to my research -- things like <a href="http://conference.scipy.org/" rel="nofollow">SciPy</a>. Or conferences from related fields.</p>
<p><strong>Is it worth me applying for financial assistance in these cases?</strong>
Or is financial assistance restricted to people from developing nations,
or to people researching the primary area of the conference,
or to people who are submitting papers to the conference?</p>
<p><strong>Is the paperwork involved generally long and complex?</strong>
it is not worth the time to spend a week filling out forms, for a 1% chance of getting to go the a conference -- I could be spending that time on actual research.</p>
<p><strong>Are these awards highly competitive?</strong></p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37104,
"author": "ff524",
"author_id": 11365,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<blockquote>\n <p>Is it worth me applying for financial assistance in these cases? Or is financial assistance restricted to people from developing nations, or to people researching the primary area of the conference, or to people who are submitting papers to the conference?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Every conference has its own specifications for what kind of applicants (if anyone) is given preference for travel grants. Sometimes paper authors are given preferences, sometimes they are de-prioritized. Sometimes participants from underrepresented groups (whether in an academic, racial, geographic, etc. sense) are prioritized and sometimes only US citizens are eligible. Refer to the conference website for details.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Is the paperwork involved generally long and complex? it is not worth the time to spend a week filling out forms, for a 1% chance of getting to go the a conference -- I could be spending that time on actual research.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>No, it's not usually long and complex. Generally it involves some or all of the following: a statement from you on why they should give you a grant, a letter from your advisor indicating that your attendance will be to your benefit and the conferences' benefit, and an estimate of your expenses.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Are places highly competitive?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Depends on the conference. Conferences that many people want to go to tend to be more competitive. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37196,
"author": "bsg",
"author_id": 12222,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12222",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Another option is to get external funding for conferences. There are some programs for funding student travel to conferences, particularly (or mostly) for underrepresented minorities (including women). For instance, in Computer Science, the ACM-W offers conference scholarships to female students, for any conference. If you are a woman or minority, try searching a bit to see if you can turn up a scholarship in your field whose criteria you fit, and/or ask your advisor and other students in the department if they know of any. Even if you're not a minority, you can search a bit to see if you can find anything. These are often somewhat competitive, but the chances are usually much greater than 1%, and there isn't that much effort involved. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/19
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37102",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8513/"
] |
37,109 |
<p>When writing an abstract for a talk on a topic that I have collaborated on with others, should I be using the plural form, such as </p>
<blockquote>
<p>"<strong>We</strong> have shown this and that ..." </p>
</blockquote>
<p>or is it better to write it as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"I will discuss this and that ..."</p>
</blockquote>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37125,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>Use \"we\", because although only one person will be giving the talk, you are representing the work of multiple people.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37130,
"author": "Florian D'Souza",
"author_id": 26958,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26958",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In general, I agree with jakebeal for the reason he gave. However, one of my colleagues was recently criticized for not using \"I\" in an abstract he submitted for a postdoc position. Apparently, some people like to see \"I\" as a way of differentiating between what was contributed by the person vs. what was done as a group (e.g., \"I built the apparatus. We gathered data and analyzed it.\"). From your question, it's not clear in what environment your talk will be given, but in case it is indeed a job talk, you may consider using \"I\" at least once. Otherwise, I think \"we\" is appropriate.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37143,
"author": "Kimball",
"author_id": 19607,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19607",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The subject of course depends on the sentence, and in math either type of sentence is fine. If the subject is who is talking, use first person singular (you do not need to use the royal \"we\"). If the subject is who did the work, use the plural. Often I will vary the sentence structure so both \"I\" and \"we\" appear in the abstract.</p>\n\n<p>Of course, you should certainly say who the work is joint with (if it does not automatically appear in the speaker info). E.g., \"I will discuss joint work with Charles Xavier, where we...\" Or just add a sentence to the end \"This is joint work with Charles Xavier.\"</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/19
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37109",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24769/"
] |
37,110 |
<p>I've always loved maths but for numerous reasons I bounced along in general/non-profit admin/management. After maternity leave I have found myself at the bottom again and seriously thinking how can I get back on track. I'm 37 and I graduated in 2000 with a UK BSc in Math 2:1. Anyone I chat to (non-mathematicians) always say, "it will come back to you," "go for it," etc. but what do they know? What do those working in maths think? I was especially drawn to discrete maths, logic and computability. Where are the doors?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37111,
"author": "Community",
"author_id": -1,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/-1",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Sarah, why not just register to an MSc? It will give you an opportunity to refresh your memory and your skills and to test yourself. Also, if you'll do well, you should be able to get support letters and might even open the door to a PhD in the same place. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37112,
"author": "Community",
"author_id": -1,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/-1",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I think this depends very much on whether you want / need to earn money with\ndoing mathematics or not. If you don't need to earn money with it, just go ahead and\nenroll to a graduate school. Though if you do need to earn money with it, you may find\nthis pretty difficult if you start now with just a BSc.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37113,
"author": "Community",
"author_id": -1,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/-1",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>If I'm in your shoes, then I would enroll to a computer science graduate program (first MSc and then PhD if everything goes well). Every computer science department offers courses in the areas that you're interested in. Then, if for some reason you get bored doing research, with your background, you should be able to find a job in industry.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37114,
"author": "Community",
"author_id": -1,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/-1",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>To do mathematics professionally you should enroll to a graduate school. I know at least two similar cases where people enrolled to a graduate school after a long gap and became successful professional mathematicians (one of them in UK).</p>\n\n<p>Of course there is also a way of self-education. But the choice depends on many other factors, for example whether you need to support yourself and/or your family etc.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37174,
"author": "Neil Strickland",
"author_id": 12638,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12638",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I suggest that you start by finding someone who does discrete mathematics or something similar on the website of a nearby university. Alternatively, you could find an MSc admissions tutor. With a modest amount of luck, you will find someone friendly and helpful who will be willing to spend half an hour talking through the options with you. They will be able to ask mathematical questions to gain some sense of how much you remember, which will be required for any realistic advice.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/18
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37110",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/-1/"
] |
37,115 |
<p>I have a paper submitted to the Arxiv 4 years ago (with another co-author). At that time, the only reason that we put the article online was that someone asked us to do that in order to cite it.
Since then it has been cited some times, including authors that claim that have found (independently) the same proof as ours.
The paper is the solution of a combinatorics problem.</p>
<p>I have been thinking lately that it would help my career to get this paper published in a Journal, but I'm not quite sure if this is a good idea, since it is certainly not a new result (and it is not super-interesting, just a nice solution for a problem).</p>
<p>What should I do? Has anyone been in the same situation?</p>
<p>Any advice is very welcome! </p>
<p>PS: In case that is a good idea to get it published it would be nice to have some kind of advise of which journal might consider articles of the types I described, as I guess that lots of Journals won't even consider it.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37139,
"author": "Inquisitive",
"author_id": 27985,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27985",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I would attempt placing it in a journal. You did the work and I'm assuming you came up with the first, greatly improved proof. You also have citations so it must be important to someone other than you.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37142,
"author": "Kimball",
"author_id": 19607,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19607",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In math, it commonly happens that, for whatever reason, an unpublished work gets cited several times. (This is rather annoying when it is something useful but not easily accessible, though this is not quite your case.)</p>\n\n<p>I think that whether you can easily publish it depends on how similar the work is now to published work. A collaborator and I were in a somewhat similar situation (though not the same), but our focus was different and we discussed some different things so it was publishable. (He didn't think it was interesting enough to publish originally many years ago, but then we did some additional things that made it more interesting, even after someone else had published the main result with the same method independently.)</p>\n\n<p>If you want to publish it, here are two suggestions: 1) try to publish as is in conference proceedings, or 2) incorporate your old paper into a new paper which does some other things (it could be expository, or with additional new research).</p>\n\n<p>As for whether publishing it will help your career, my guess it won't make a huge difference, unless you only have 1 or 2 publications, though it may help some. (It's not likely to get into a top journal unless you do something else.) It sounds like people know about your work, so letter writers can talk about it if they think it's important (in which case maybe you should've published it! but one doesn't always know in advance what will be interesting), and on your CV you can always list it as a preprint. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 73570,
"author": "Philip Schiff",
"author_id": 45021,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/45021",
"pm_score": -1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You say that the result is \"not new\" and \"not super interesting\", so I'm not sure why it should be published in any event, regardless of whether or not and when it appeared on the arXiv.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/19
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37115",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28049/"
] |
37,127 |
<p>Have there been famous/documented cases where people die from working too hard in the lab, similar to <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/man-24-dies-heart-attack-overwork-article-1.1345919" rel="nofollow">this</a> and <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/10255199/Bank-intern-who-died-after-working-for-72-hours-felt-pressure-to-excel.html" rel="nofollow">this</a> in finance/marketing?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 40810,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The term that is typically used for this is <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi\">karoshi</a> (unsurprisingly, a Japanese term). To the best of what I have been able to determine, there have not been any cases where an academic at a university has been diagnosed as having died through Karoshi. There are some significant deaths, however, of people in industry who could certainly be considered as being part of the broader community of scientists, notably <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/business/worldbusiness/10iht-overwork.1.14389149.html\">a lead engineer at Toyota</a> and <a href=\"http://m.bbc.com/news/world-asia-16834258\">more than one engineer in Taiwan</a>.</p>\n\n<p>Note, however, that there is also a strong cultural component, both in the manner of death and the classification of that death. An American, for example, might be less likely to die quietly at their desk and more likely to commit suicide or engage in criminal activity (see, for example, <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/12/business/marketer-s-dream-engineer-s-nightmare.html\">the tragedies in the development of the Apple Newton</a>). Moreover, since karoshi is not generally recognized in American culture, deaths that might be attributed to it in a Far East nation would likely be blamed on the proximate cause of death instead.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 40815,
"author": "sevensevens",
"author_id": 14754,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14754",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>A Harvard Law student named <a href=\"http://etseq.law.harvard.edu/2010/09/killed_by_overstudy_dont_let_this_happen_to_you/\" rel=\"nofollow\">William Thornton Parker, Jr.</a> died of over-studying (according to Harvard).</p>\n\n<p>EDIT:</p>\n\n<p>There is a much newer reported case of someone dying from playing <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4137782.stm\" rel=\"nofollow\">Starcraft</a> for too long without eating or sleeping properly. Some of the comments point out Parker Jr. could have had a pre-existing condition that was exacerbated by fatigue. I present the StarCraft case shows that someone with no outward signs of a fatal illness can die from exhaustion.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 40827,
"author": "user-2147482637",
"author_id": 12718,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12718",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Im not sure what limits death through working too hard, as im not sure what that would do to the body. However, there are some cases when working too late or 'hard', accidents happen. A <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/nyregion/yale-student-dies-in-machine-shop-accident.html?_r=0\" rel=\"nofollow\">student was killed</a> working at night on a lathe. This type of late night work accident is used in my schools as the reason not to work while tired or alone at night.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 40831,
"author": "Jeromy Anglim",
"author_id": 62,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie\" rel=\"nofollow\">Marie Curie</a> might fall into this category, although her death was not from working too hard per se. To quote wikipedia:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Marie Skłodowska-Curie (7\n November 1867 – 4 July 1934) ... conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person (and only woman) to win twice, the only person to win twice in\n multiple sciences, and was part of the Curie family legacy of five\n Nobel Prizes. She was also the first woman to become a professor at\n the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be\n entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Regarding her death:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Curie died in 1934 at the sanatorium of Sancellemoz (Haute-Savoie),\n France, due to aplastic anemia brought on by exposure to radiation –\n including carrying test tubes of radium in her pockets during research\n and her service during World War I in mobile X-ray units created by\n her.[7]</p>\n</blockquote>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/19
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37127",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27545/"
] |
37,152 |
<p>I shall note up front, I am myself a student looking for insight from any lecturers or professors who have had a class with this situation and what I might expect in my case.</p>
<p>I am on a "Computer Engineering" integrated masters degree for which much of the assessment is done via assessed projects and coursework. Most of these projects are undertaken in groups of two where students are expected to share out work and each create a logbook also which documents their progress and individual contributions.</p>
<p>In a particular unit my class has an odd number of students, which after being split into pairs (using a random process) left me as the "odd one out". I discussed this briefly with the unit lecturer who felt that it would be inappropriate to create a group of three as there would then not be sufficient work for each student to demonstrate mastery over the subject.</p>
<p>I agreed that I would attempt the project on my own (admittedly there were not any other obvious options). Fortunately I have significant prior experience in the subject area and have therefore been able to keep up with the workload despite working alone. However I cannot help but feel that I would be able to accomplish a more polished and complete piece of work if I were not working alone.</p>
<p>I am therefore concerned that my work may not reflect what I would otherwise have been able to accomplish in terms of feature richness and polish and fear that this could negatively affect my grade in the unit. Note that I have completed all the basic requirements of the project fully but feel that the lightened workload from having a partner would have allowed me to explore and research in greater depth as well as complete a range of interesting optional features which would have been credit-worthy.</p>
<p><strong>Firstly, what should I expect in terms or grading?</strong> Should I expect that they will grade my work exactly as they would that of a normal team of two, or are they likely to take into account the situation?</p>
<p><strong>Secondly, should I try and talk to my lecturer and see if there is some way I can express my mastery of the more advanced areas without having the time to implement them in the project?</strong> or is this likely to come across merely as begging for lenient marking? If I were to have such a talk is there anything specific I could say to clearly express my concerns as I have stated here?</p>
<p>My institution does not appear to have any specific policy regarding uneven group sizes such as this case and as it has not happened before (as least in my classes) so the lecturer has not made any statements of how they will treat this situation.</p>
<p><strong>TL;DR:</strong></p>
<p>I am the last odd numbered student in a class for a pair project and am therefore working alone. What can I expect regarding grading and are there any actions I can take to express my mastery of the topic area to my lecturer without enough time to implement all the features in my project to prove this?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37172,
"author": "Bill Barth",
"author_id": 11600,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11600",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You should arrange special grading expectations with your instructor. You should not be expected to do more than one person's work. You should get this in writing from your instructor.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37173,
"author": "J.R.",
"author_id": 780,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/780",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>First, I'm surprised the instructor didn't ask for a volunteer to work alone. In a reasonably-sized class with pair projects, there's almost always at least one student who would rather not work in groups or pairs. It seems a lot of this angst might have been avoided had the professor simply polled for a volunteer. Is it too late to ask for groups to be rearranged? He could ask for a volunteer, and you could be paired up with that person's previous partner. </p>\n\n<p>(Then again, maybe those students who would rather work alone are the very students who need group experience the most – and maybe that's why your professor opted to do this at random.)</p>\n\n<p>Getting to the crux of your question, though, I would first study the assignment carefully and imagine how things might be different if you were working in a team of two. Would you be able to divide up the work? Brainstorm ideas? Once you have something concrete in mind, I'd reengage with the professor and ask for more clarification about how you will be graded. </p>\n\n<p>In other words, if you simply say, \"Will I be graded more leniently?\" that might be regarded as premature grade grubbing. However, if you say something more specific, like:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I noticed this project has a lot of work, and I think I might be at a disadvantage working alone instead of in a team. For example, if I had a partner, we might divide this up, so that he was working on the interface while I was writing the guts of the program. If I have trouble getting this assignment completed on-time, will you take into account the fact that I had to work alone?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>then I think you'll get your professor to think objectively about your disadvantage and answer accordingly.</p>\n\n<p>It's generally best to be up-front about potential hardships that might affect the quality of your work, and to do so early. Otherwise, you risk coming across as a whining procrastinator. However, your question is reasonable, and I think it's best to get an answer sooner rather than later. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37210,
"author": "blankip",
"author_id": 11420,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11420",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Whenever I have presented people with a \"pairs\" assignment I have always dealt with the odd person by making a group of three not by having that person work alone. Part of the point of the project is teamwork. </p>\n\n<p>If your professor doesn't care about teamwork then I suggest you cut the project in half and do half. If there is no teamwork requirement then the assignment is simply to do half the work and turn it in. I would actually go one step further (smarter). Have the professor break it in half and choose which half you want to do.</p>\n\n<p>Now when I had three people in a group and it was a large project my thinking was that each doing 33.3% was much closer to 50% than one doing 100%. I would often add a small piece of work for the group that had three people but nothing that would have pulled that group into the range of doing 150%. I felt that having the dynamic of another person was probably work in itself.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37222,
"author": "Ben Bitdiddle",
"author_id": 24384,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24384",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Some things to consider:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><p>If you want to go to grad school, the professor's opinion of you might matter more than the grade you get in the class. When he writes your letter of reference, do you want him to say "this guy asked for special grading, which I guess is fair, but still a bit annoying" or "this guy did the work of 2 people and still built a better project than everyone else?" You want to show that you can thrive even when put at a disadvantage.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>In most group projects, one person does substantially more work than everyone else. Usually the strongest student, or the person who cares the most. You have a lot of prior knowledge of the material, so there's a good chance that if you <em>were</em> assigned a partner, you'd end up doing all the work anyway (or spend a lot of effort trying to convince your partner to do his share).</p>\n<p>Even if your partner wants to help, he probably won't be able to implement the advanced material at the same level that you would. (You could teach him, but that usually takes more time than doing it yourself.) And then you'd end up with results that are just as bad, except this time you won't have a good excuse for them.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37223,
"author": "Inquisitive",
"author_id": 27985,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27985",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Firstly, I'm glad you didn't agree to this situation and instead it was imposed upon you. The professor imposed it upon you regardless of the method he used. That fact could help you in any formal complaint. Remember, this extra work is also taking time away from any other work or activities. It is negatively impacting you.</p>\n\n<p><strong>\"Should I expect that they will grade my work exactly as they would that of a normal team of two, or are they likely to take into account the situation?\"</strong></p>\n\n<p>You should absolutely expect, and if need be demand, that the professor take into account the real situation.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Secondly, should I try and talk to my lecturer and see if there is some way I can express my mastery of the more advanced areas without having the time to implement them in the project?</strong></p>\n\n<p>This is tricky. Before I would have any conversation with the professor, I would try to find out anything I could about the quality of the other students' work. For example, if your work is of better quality than multiple of the other pairs of students, you may not need to say anything at all. Judging by your posted statements, I'd lay money on the likelihood that you have a damn good product to turn in to the prof. Then again, at this point it might be beneficial to show him what you have and ask him if he sees any serious area for improvement...and throw in something innocuous about not having had the time to perform an in-process review given your situation. \"Am I on the right track\" kind of thing.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/20
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37152",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20404/"
] |
37,157 |
<p>Are there universities that cater specifically to shy or reserved people? It seems like many universities have the usual social hierarchy set up of 'popular' student , 'overachievers' , 'sports-inclined' , 'outcasts' or 'rebels' and the very reserved who might also fit into 'outcasts'. Unfortunately nothing seems to be done about this academic social-caste system which is in regular schools and university. Though I'm primarily concerned about the socially reserved students. As young minds are very vulnerable to emotional instability it would be great if reserved students had a special university or at least a special part of a university where they could learn freely without worrying about the problems of socializing. Are there such universities that can be a haven for reserved students?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37162,
"author": "xLeitix",
"author_id": 10094,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>On academia.SE, undergraduate studies are out of scope, hence, I will answer for graduate programmes here.</p>\n\n<p>For these (master and PhD programmes, and beyond) I am simply not buying into your premise:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>usual social hierarchy set up of 'popular' student , 'overachievers' , 'sports-inclined' , 'outcasts' or 'rebels' </p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Frankly, any graduate programme in the sciences I know of consists primarily of what you would call slightly derogatory \"the outcasts\" (plus maybe the \"overachievers\", depending on what you mean with that). Your prototypical high school bully or football jock rarely ends up in a physics PhD programme. In that sense, <strong>most graduate programmes are in their own way a haven for such students.</strong></p>\n\n<p>Beyond that, I do not know about any program that specifically caters towards shy people. Further:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>where they could learn freely without worrying about the problems of socializing</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>As long as we are just speaking about \"regular\" shyness (no clinical condition), I would argue that you would do students a disservice to not \"have them worry about socializing\" at all. Firstly, even shy students usually enjoy company (if it is the right amount and the right kind of company - I should know, I am also pretty introvert), and, secondly, if you are <em>really</em> painfully shy, learning how to deal with people is arguably a more crucial life lesson than any subject matter you will learn at university. And don't kid yourself - shyness is definitely something that you can learn to work on (again, I should know), given enough practice.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37211,
"author": "mkennedy",
"author_id": 5711,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5711",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The closest thing I can think of, are the Honors Colleges or Honors programs that exist at some universities. Honors classes will tend to be smaller, so even though you may be asked to participate more, you'll have more support and interactions with your professors. Smaller classes may make it easier to find friends as well. </p>\n\n<p>However, these groups look for not just the brightest, but the best. Normally, they will still want well-rounded students--active in their communities or in sports or other activities--not just bright social recluses. </p>\n\n<p>Another solution is to go to a smaller college or university that has a strong program in the field you want to study. Again, smaller classes, closer interactions with professors, etc.</p>\n\n<p>-- edit --\nSome schools split incoming classes into small groups during orientation. They will meet, do activities, learn about the college...it's a great place to start finding new acquaintances who may turn out to be friends. </p>\n\n<p>My undergraduate university did this (Trinity U, in Texas). My first friend there was in the that group, but the friend that really stuck was person with whom I shared a music folder in choir. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/20
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37157",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28074/"
] |
37,158 |
<p>I submitted my application with a supervisor's name fora UK university last week. I plan to apply for a scbolarship after getting an offer. The scholarship application deadline is in March. I would like to know how long it takes to get an application result in a UK uni?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37162,
"author": "xLeitix",
"author_id": 10094,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>On academia.SE, undergraduate studies are out of scope, hence, I will answer for graduate programmes here.</p>\n\n<p>For these (master and PhD programmes, and beyond) I am simply not buying into your premise:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>usual social hierarchy set up of 'popular' student , 'overachievers' , 'sports-inclined' , 'outcasts' or 'rebels' </p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Frankly, any graduate programme in the sciences I know of consists primarily of what you would call slightly derogatory \"the outcasts\" (plus maybe the \"overachievers\", depending on what you mean with that). Your prototypical high school bully or football jock rarely ends up in a physics PhD programme. In that sense, <strong>most graduate programmes are in their own way a haven for such students.</strong></p>\n\n<p>Beyond that, I do not know about any program that specifically caters towards shy people. Further:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>where they could learn freely without worrying about the problems of socializing</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>As long as we are just speaking about \"regular\" shyness (no clinical condition), I would argue that you would do students a disservice to not \"have them worry about socializing\" at all. Firstly, even shy students usually enjoy company (if it is the right amount and the right kind of company - I should know, I am also pretty introvert), and, secondly, if you are <em>really</em> painfully shy, learning how to deal with people is arguably a more crucial life lesson than any subject matter you will learn at university. And don't kid yourself - shyness is definitely something that you can learn to work on (again, I should know), given enough practice.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37211,
"author": "mkennedy",
"author_id": 5711,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5711",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The closest thing I can think of, are the Honors Colleges or Honors programs that exist at some universities. Honors classes will tend to be smaller, so even though you may be asked to participate more, you'll have more support and interactions with your professors. Smaller classes may make it easier to find friends as well. </p>\n\n<p>However, these groups look for not just the brightest, but the best. Normally, they will still want well-rounded students--active in their communities or in sports or other activities--not just bright social recluses. </p>\n\n<p>Another solution is to go to a smaller college or university that has a strong program in the field you want to study. Again, smaller classes, closer interactions with professors, etc.</p>\n\n<p>-- edit --\nSome schools split incoming classes into small groups during orientation. They will meet, do activities, learn about the college...it's a great place to start finding new acquaintances who may turn out to be friends. </p>\n\n<p>My undergraduate university did this (Trinity U, in Texas). My first friend there was in the that group, but the friend that really stuck was person with whom I shared a music folder in choir. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/20
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37158",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27421/"
] |
37,165 |
<p>I am a math PhD student considering changing universities.
I have suspicions that my supervisor has not been very honest with me
since I told him that I considered changing universities (and therefore
supervisors) because of shift in interests. He got angry with me, told me that it would bring
bad reputation to the research group and that I can't just leave after
1 year.</p>
<p>In a conversation I mentioned a university, in which there is a professor,
call him professor M, whose work interests me.
My supervisor said that professor M is the only
one in his field in the university (apparently
with the intent of discouraging me from
trying to apply to that university).
I looked up the website of professor M's research
group, which seems to tell a different story
(plenty of PhD students, at least one post doc).
I found this a bit suspicious.
Moreover I recently realized that my supervisor
has coathored an article with an emeritus professor, who
is in the university, who has worked on the same field, although
not part of the research group of M. The "research group" in my
university is not that active itself.</p>
<p>When I told him that I want to consider alternatives
he told me that the doctoral programme is collecting
information about PhD students (which was true), and
that he needed to know whether I was part of the group or
not. He gave me 3 days to decide whether to stay or leave the
doctoral program. I asked the coordinator of the program about this,
and he told me that the list in question changes all the time and
that it is not nearly as serious matter as my supervisor claimed.
It should be noted that my supervisor is notoriously bad at
bureucratic/adminstrative university matters.</p>
<p>I suppose in all the above cases it is possible that
the explanation is something less malicious, such
as ignorance or misunderstanding.
In any case I am not in good terms with my supervisor
and I don't think we trust each other very much.</p>
<p>The dilemma is that the funding is good and secured, and that
the alternatives are abroad (and uncertain).</p>
<p>Could the situation be worth fixing?
Should I run for my life?
Is there a risk that if I try to change universities
he will refuse to write a recommendation letter or
write a mild one (he supervised my Master's thesis)?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37169,
"author": "RoboKaren",
"author_id": 14885,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14885",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Faculty are human beings. We might be given only one slot a year for a doctoral student to work with us and we thus invest (or we feel we invest) an incredible amount of time into the students in our lab. We aren't paid extra for this, which perhaps exacerbates the feeling of ownership. </p>\n\n<p>While I don't know you or your advisor, I would find it easy to believe that his feelings were hurt by your desire to shift PhD programs. You are basically taking his investment in you (which you may feel is minimal, but he may feel is considerable) and throwing it in the trash. </p>\n\n<p>Managing people's feelings are part of being a professional academic. You might as well practice being good at it. Some day you'll be on the other end of the equation -- being told by a student that you had high hopes for that they no longer value working with you and that they want to move to a different program altogether. It's all part of the karmic cycle of being faculty. </p>\n\n<p>Now, with that preamble out of the way. You need to let your advisor know that your shifting programs isn't seen as any rejection at all of his lab or his style of mentoring you, etc. etc. (even if part of this might be true); but rather that you are seeking something different at the other program. It's the stereotypical \"It's not you, it's me\" form of a break up.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37179,
"author": "Alexandros",
"author_id": 10042,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10042",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Besides, @Robokaren's excellent answer, I find some problematic things on your question.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>He told me ...that he needed to know whether I was part of the group\n or not.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This is a very just demand on his part. So the real question is, do you actually want to leave or not? In any job (including your PHD) or in any relationship, your colleagues, supervisors (jobs) or your friends, partners (relationship) must know if they can count on you or not. It is unfair to actually make him wait until you make up your mind. </p>\n\n<p>I also do not know, what did you expect from your advisor when you told him you wanted to go elsewhere. He gave you his advice (the fact that only one professor / faculty member works there on your preferable research area) and suggested that you should stay in your current university. That means he thinks highly of you which is always a good thing. And how did you react? You believed that he lied to you, because you saw on the other university's website there is a postdoc who is working there with your \"dream\" professor. If this is your definition of lie, you are sadly wrong. Also, the fact that he later asked you if you would finally stay or not, is probably an indication that he will not stand in your way (by not providing a reference letter) of you leaving.</p>\n\n<p>Either way, as @JeffE would probably say, the relationship with your advisor\nis broken (at least from your side, since it is obvious you do not trust the guy anymore). So, I do not think in a little while you will really have any other real choice but to leave. In any case, make a decision and make it fast, before burning any more bridges with your current advisor. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37221,
"author": "Inquisitive",
"author_id": 27985,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27985",
"pm_score": -1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I don't trust your advisor either, but I also, like you, realize the importance of stable funding. I would try to get along with the advisor. Much of this might be related to the advisor's ego if it's a big one. Talk of leaving could have resulted in a nice big bruise.</p>\n\n<p>Keep in mind as well that bosses are always in an adversarial relationship with their \"employees\". It's the nature of the beast in the workplace.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/20
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37165",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28082/"
] |
37,166 |
<p>So the question is simple: What is the common way of saying something in parentheses in a journal paper like engineering or mathematics.</p>
<p>Assume you are talking about a mathematical approach, but in the middle you want to point out to something else, or mention an special case. I give an example:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...our approach is based on the following linear equations....</p>
<p>Eq.(1).....</p>
<p>(now here I want to make a big parenthesis or a break to discuss about something regarding the approach which is not too long to be considered as an Appendix, maybe only one paragraph )</p>
<p>One can think of the other approach such as .....</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So the question is it, how this feature is normally handled in papers, and what is the latex function to do so.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37168,
"author": "DCTLib",
"author_id": 7390,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7390",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>There are sometimes \"remark\" blocks that some authors use for discussing aspects that are of substantial interest to some readers but do not strictly belong to the core of the story that you are telling. If you are preparing your document with LaTeX, then such text blocks are called \"environments\".</p>\n\n<p>An example is given in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science <a href=\"http://www.springer.com/?SGWID=4-102-45-72797-0\">guide for preparing papers</a>, page 4 at the bottom.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37186,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>When it is the right thing to do, I am comfortable with putting a whole paragraph in a footnote and have done so. The ideal option, however, which some journals will let you do, is to have a sidebar or boxout. This has the same segregating effect as an appendix, but keeps the material closer to its reference.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/20
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37166",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28084/"
] |
37,175 |
<p>I am currently an undergraduate student in Turkey. I will graduate from genetics department and I would like to do a PhD without MSc in abroad. However my GPA sucks ( probably it will be 2.5 or 2.6 out of 4 ).</p>
<p>I have done my summer internships in Germany and America. I am very good in laboratory and I think I have got enough knowledge to do a PhD in genetics. My English level is upper-intermediate and I definitely have good references ( I have talked with 4 people, they are all Prof. and they all said that they would give very good references ).</p>
<p>But I am still concerned about my GPA. What do you think, can I be accepted to a PhD program?</p>
<p>Also, can I apply for both MSc and PhD or will they think that I am a fickle person and don't accept me for neither of them?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37182,
"author": "Piotr Migdal",
"author_id": 49,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Some places in continental Europe can accept people with BSc but without MSc (but most - don't). In UK and US, MSc is a part of PhD, so typically you do don't need one to start.</p>\n\n<p>But you ALWAYS need to consult a particular university/institute, as rules vary (and especially with treating foreign diplomas).</p>\n\n<p>However, if your \"GPA sucks\" then, unless you have a strong research track (i.e. strong recommendation letters from your research internships, published papers) special exceptions may by unlikely.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37193,
"author": "Adam Kimberley",
"author_id": 7038,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7038",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Written from my perspective and potentially varying in different countries but...</p>\n\n<p>It is certainly <em>possible</em> to do a PhD without doing a MSc (I'm currently coming to the end of my PhD at a UK university and I applied straight from undergraduate). In my experience it is unusual though, possibly for good reason. You don't say why you don't want to do a Masters, but it's probably worth pointing out that if you are able to get a good MSc then it is likely to greatly help both your chances of getting a PhD and your academic development. The learning curve from undergraduate to PhD without a MSc can be a steep one, particularly in terms of managing your own time and activities.</p>\n\n<p>If you have decent undergraduate grades (mine were ok but certainly nothing special), experience in a research environment and can convince whoever is making the decision about the application that you will be able to work well <strong>independently</strong> then I don't think there are any definite barriers against getting on a PhD. You may however find it difficult to compete with other applicants who have Masters degrees, since they have more definite proof of their ability to do independent, focussed research.</p>\n\n<p>I'd suggest it's worth applying to PhD's if you feel that they are a good fit for both your interests and your experience, provided they don't absolutely require a MSc (for funding purposes etc). The worst that can happen is being turned down and you get some practice crafting applications. Obviously there is a time cost to this however so I'd advise being selective with your choices, only applying where you feel you have a real chance. This may also allow you to apply to some MSc programmes without having to worry too much about conflicting applications.</p>\n\n<p>Hope that helps.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37204,
"author": "sevensevens",
"author_id": 14754,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14754",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In the US, its quite common to go from BS to PhD. When I entered grad-school for a masters degree most of the other students assumed I was a PhD student. </p>\n\n<p>The general consensus I found in grad-school was that the university preferred PhD students as they had committed for 3-5 years of doing research for very little pay, and the ones that couldn't cut it could \"drop into\" a masters program. Master's students (like myself) had difficultly finding assistantships as they were \"taking them away\" from PhD students.</p>\n\n<p>While a low GPA is not good, you can make up for it by getting great GRE scores and making sure your letters of recommendation are super. Not every PhD student has a 4.0 GPA coming in. If you have good recommendations, I would consider applying to a university as a PhD student (many schools will not allow you to apply to 2 different programs).</p>\n\n<p>Especially consider applying to schools your recommenders work for or closely with. Also consider trying to get a full-time position at one of your internships where you'd work closely with researchers. This will allow you to strengthen your application for next year if you are not accepted.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37220,
"author": "Corvus",
"author_id": 27900,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27900",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In the US, students often go straight from a BS to a Ph.D. But many graduate schools e.g. <a href=\"http://grad.berkeley.edu/admissions/requirements/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\" title=\"UC Berkeley\">UC Berkeley</a> have a college- or university-wide minimum GPA of 3.0. This has been discussed a bit on a previous SE thread: <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/15784/do-all-universities-have-a-minimum-required-gpa-for-graduate-school-application\" title=\"Minimum GPA?\">Minimum GPA?</a></p>\n\n<p>The bottom line is that with a 2.5 or 2.6 GPA, you'll be ineligible for many PhD programs and you will not be a strong candidate for the others. Great letters can compensate for a 3.2 or 3.3 GPA, but rarely if ever will help much below 3.0. In your case, a masters degree may be a necessary step to partially compensate for the undergraduate grade point while building up research experience that will make you a more competitive candidate. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/20
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37175",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28090/"
] |
37,177 |
<p>What is the difference between a research paper and a scientific paper? Does the research paper also mean a term paper at the end of your Masters?</p>
<p>I need to present a research paper. So does it mean I need to present a solution to an existing problem or does it mean a summary of various solutions already existing?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37180,
"author": "ff524",
"author_id": 11365,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>A research paper is a paper containing original research. That is, if you do some work to add (or try to add) new knowledge to a field of study, and then present the details of your approach and findings in a paper, that paper can be called a research paper.</p>\n\n<p>Not all academic papers contain original research; other kinds of academic papers that are not research papers are </p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>review papers, (see <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/10467/what-is-the-difference-between-a-review-paper-and-a-research-paper\">What is the difference between a review paper and a research paper?</a>)</li>\n<li>position papers (which present an opinion without original research to support it)</li>\n<li>tutorial papers (which contain a tutorial introduction a topic or area, without contributing new results).</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>A scientific paper is any paper on a scientific subject. </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Does the research paper also mean a term paper at the end of your Masters?</p>\n \n <p>I need to present a research paper. So does it mean I need to present a solution to an existing problem or does it mean a summary of various solutions already existing?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>If the term paper at the end of your masters contains original research, then it's a research paper. </p>\n\n<p>Depending on the policies of your department, you may or may not be required to attempt original research during your masters. In some departments, a review of existing literature may be fine. If you're not sure exactly what's required from you, you need to ask the relevant faculty or staff members in your department.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37181,
"author": "Paul de Vrieze",
"author_id": 10183,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10183",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Research means that you add something new. Something you didn't know before, and ideally something no-one knew before (although at BSc. and MSc. levels the novelty requirement is generally relaxed). This can be a new investigation, or simply an analysis of a number existing papers. It must however not be a summary of existing solutions. It should go beyond that.</p>\n\n<p>An important thing to remember is that in terms of assignment you are expected to demonstrate insight and understanding. To demonstrate this you need to engage with the topics, not merely summarise (which requires less understanding).</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/20
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37177",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28092/"
] |
37,190 |
<p>After the first review process, could the rebuttal totally change the reviewers' minds, i.e. from accept to reject or the other way around?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37194,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>First, it's worth noting that very few computer science conferences actually allow a rebuttal: mostly, the decision you get is the final decision. In those rare cases that I have encountered that have a rebuttal period, it mainly serves to help disambiguate papers that are near the borderline. Thus, it can certainly shift the status of a paper between accept and reject (e.g., by showing that reviewer #3 really was nuts and should be discounted or by eliminating the doubt that the authors were benefiting from), but is unlikely to do so unless the paper was already quite close to the boundary.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37197,
"author": "xLeitix",
"author_id": 10094,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<blockquote>\n <p>After the first review process, could the rebuttal totally change the reviewers' minds</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Very likely no. The rebuttal letter is usually very short (a few hundred words, typically) in comparison to the actual paper, so it is unlikely that the few extra explanations will turn the reviewer around entirely. Also, what is true for most humans is also true for academics - once people have formed their opinion about something, it is hard to fundamentally change their mind. That is, if a reviewer hates a paper enough to vote for full reject in the first round, a few good explanations will not be enough to turn her/him around to accept.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>from accept to reject</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Not unless you write something really idiotic (\"I don't understand the criticism that this paper is drawing. I am sure, Prof. Bigshot did not have to listen to such criticism when he originally published the same contribution.\"). Also, if your paper is accepted, what is there to rebute?</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>or the other way around?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>As jakebeal writes, the most likely case is that the rebuttal letters are used to differentiate between a number of borderline papers for a few remaining conference slots. In my (limited) experience in the matter, nobody will even really look at rebuttal letters for papers that are already clearly accepted or rejected.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/20
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37190",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28100/"
] |
37,207 |
<p>I'm currently applying to an MSc programme at Imperial College London but at the bottom of the page for each of the programmes I am considering, it states the following:</p>
<p>"A Postgraduate Certificate and Postgraduate Diploma are not available on this programme."</p>
<p>Is this usual for MSc programmes? What exactly does it mean? </p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37209,
"author": "Compass",
"author_id": 22013,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22013",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I am not familiar with UK terminology, but the probable American equivalent, the Post-Master's Certificate, is usually taken after a Master's degree and reduces the number of courses taken.</p>\n\n<p>The graduate certificate may indicate a program that can be taken after graduating with a Bachelor's, and would fit between an BS and an MS in terms of education level.</p>\n\n<p>I guess the better way to say it would be it's the Master's-level equivalent of a Bachelor of Arts vs a Bachelor of Science in terms of course load.</p>\n\n<p>In most cases, if you're applying for a Master's program for MSc, you probably don't need to worry about anything regarding a PGCert or something similar. Those are separate degree programs that you're not going for.</p>\n\n<p><em>As always, contact the advising department to make sure.</em></p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 68739,
"author": "DimP",
"author_id": 49855,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/49855",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<blockquote>\n <p><a href=\"https://www.prospects.ac.uk/postgraduate-study/postgraduate-diplomas-and-certificates\" rel=\"nofollow\"><strong>What are postgraduate diplomas and certificates?</strong></a></p>\n \n <p>Postgraduate diplomas (PGDip, PgDip, PG Dip, PGD or PgD) and certificates (PGCert, PgCert, PG Cert, PGC or PgC) usually follow Bachelors study in a similar subject. They are both at level 7 on the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and generally vocational in nature, which makes them a popular choice for professionals looking to boost their CV.</p>\n \n <p>The key difference between the two is that a postgraduate diploma is more extensive. Postgraduate diplomas require that you gain 120 credits, the equivalent of 30 weeks' full-time study. Meanwhile, a postgraduate certificate usually requires just 60 credits, the equivalent of 15 weeks' full-time study. Diplomas take around 6-12 months to complete when taken on a full-time basis, but part-time study can take up to a few years. Both diplomas and certificates are usually classified into distinction, merit and pass.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>The exact structure of each PGDip/PGCert usually depends on the university itself, but as @kitty said, in most of the cases a thesis is not required. On the contrary, this is usually in what your PGDip differs from the equivalent Master's Degree. </p>\n\n<p>However, many universities now offer the option to their students to go on after they have completed their PGDip commitments and write up a thesis, in order to reach the 180 credits a Master requires.</p>\n\n<p>It is worth noting all these qualifications are of the same level (NQF level 7). For more, see:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p><a href=\"https://www.prospects.ac.uk/postgraduate-study/postgraduate-diplomas-and-certificates\" rel=\"nofollow\"><strong>How does it differ from a Masters degree?</strong></a></p>\n \n <p>The postgraduate diploma is often vocational, or at least allows the student to pursue a new study direction. It is, however, on the same level of the NQF as a Masters, and students often complete a dissertation to reach 180 study credits and turn their diploma into a Masters.</p>\n</blockquote>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/20
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37207",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28113/"
] |
37,212 |
<p>Is there a standard practice in academic writing regarding the use of accented letters when the underlying language is English? I'm specifically thinking of the word <em>naive,</em> which often has a dieresis above the <em>i,</em> but I suppose this is applicable to other words.</p>
<p>I would prefer to not use them since it's simpler and seems somehow less pretentious to me.</p>
<p>Also, is there is a difference between dissertations and journal articles? </p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37213,
"author": "user141592",
"author_id": 27327,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27327",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I personally always use them, mostly since my last name includes a dieresis, but most style guides only tell you to be consistent: either always use them, or never use them. Like Chris pointed out in his comment: consistency means consistency for each word. There have been some answers that point out that names should always be spelled with whatever accents marks the person uses. To do otherwise would be disrespectful. For other words it's up to you.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37215,
"author": "Massimo Ortolano",
"author_id": 20058,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Do you like reading papers with misspelled words, grammar errors, uncertain syntax, badly formatted equations, unreadable graphs and unclear pictures? Probably not. </p>\n\n<p>Modern typesetting systems and careful proofreading allow writers to avoid, as much as possible, the above unpleasantnesses and, moreover, allow them to typeset all sort of characters. Furthermore, macros and shortcuts can be defined for quickly repeating difficult words. Thus, with modern typesetting systems there's really no excuse for not using diacritical marks, regardless of practices which date back to an epoch when typesetting systems were not as flexible as modern ones. </p>\n\n<p>Academic papers and books are not only read by native English speakers, but by people from all over the world, where a missing accent can be cause of confusion or, in case of many missing accents, considered a sign of sloppiness (which typically does not put the reader in a favourable mood), especially if the accent is missing from a proper name.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37239,
"author": "BrenBarn",
"author_id": 9041,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9041",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You should follow the conventions of the style guide for the journal/publisher you're writing for. A general pattern is that words which have been fully borrowed and assimilated into English as ordinary vocabulary (such as \"naive\") tend to lose their diacritics, whereas words or phrases that are still considered foreign, flowery, or restricted to specialized use (e.g., détente, fin de siècle) tend to keep them. The place where you would most likely keep them is in proper nouns (especially names of people).</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37246,
"author": "user2622016",
"author_id": 28143,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28143",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It would be very hard to be consistent with the two dots, for example if you use it in naïve, you should probably use in coöperate, reënter, etc.</p>\n\n<p>The diaeresis forbids to join in speech sounds of two vowels - it gives a hint to the reader not to read cooperate as in <em>Cooper</em>, or reenter as in <em>reel</em></p>\n\n<p>Sometimes we see them separated explicitly co-operation, re-enter, but since naive, cooperation, and reenter are very common, special orthographic rules may apply.</p>\n\n<p>I would write:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>naive</li>\n<li>cooperate or co-operate</li>\n<li>re-enter</li>\n</ul>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37273,
"author": "Daniel",
"author_id": 22062,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22062",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Not having enough reputation for comments, I'll add my perspective on the topic with an answer.</p>\n\n<p>There are words that have more than one accepted usage, such as naive/naïve or a la carte/à la carte, where accepted means these are actually alternative spellings and are shown in dictionaries. <a href=\"https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_words_with_diacritics\" rel=\"nofollow\">Here</a> is a list of English words with diacritics; some of these words have alternative spellings.</p>\n\n<p>However, while in some languages it may be acceptable to replace diacritics by a version without, such as the German <em>ö</em> replaced by <em>oe</em>, in other languages certain funny looking characters are not considered diacritics. An example that comes to mind is Finnish, where <em>ä</em> and <em>ö</em> are considered two vowels that also have their place in the alphabet, and not a version of <em>a</em> and <em>o</em> on steroids. As such and as stated <a href=\"https://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/lang/finnish-letters.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">here</a>, \"<em>replacing them by ae and oe is not acceptable for Finnish</em>\".</p>\n\n<p>So my view on the subject is to use them unless you're unable to; and I can't see why you would be <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter\" rel=\"nofollow\">unable</a> to do so nowadays. I don't mind <em>naive</em> because it is still correct (and a widely used alternative spelling); <em>Jyvaeskylae</em> instead of <em>Jyväskylä</em> on the other hand, would just tell me you either do not know the correct spelling or are plain lazy.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 71656,
"author": "Matthew Nace",
"author_id": 56985,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/56985",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The question you need to answer is what purpose the accent serves. Traditionally, in English and related languages, the accents have three purposes: to change pronunciation (for instance, the cedilla in the word soupçon causes the c to be pronounced like an s, not a k), to distinguish between homophones (as in French, between a, which means \"have\", and à, which means \"at\"), and to mark a change in historical spelling (the circumflex often indicates an s that has been lost to history, as in the French word hôpital, which used to be hospital).</p>\n\n<p>My answer would be that an accent that shows a change in pronunciation (especially acute accents and diaereses) should be retained in formal writing, because we cannot know who will read it, and the reader may need these pronunciation aids; the same argument could be made for homophone distinctions, particularly in poetry.</p>\n\n<p>However, if the accent marks a spelling change, it would depend on when the change occurred: there is no reason to continue to mark a spelling change that occurred before the word entered the English language. If the accent exists, for instance, on the French word, like contrôle, and it shows a letter was omitted long before the word was borrowed into English, then there is no reason to continue to mark the missing letter that was never part of the English spelling. There is, for instance, no mention on Oxford Dictionaries on-line of the spelling hôtel in English. The older word hostel came into the language in the middle ages, and is still spelled thus. The newer form hotel arrived in the mid-seventeenth century, when its French form was already spelled with a circumflex, and the two words were used differently. Hence, it is pointless to write hôtel; these are two separate words, not a change to an older form in English.</p>\n\n<p>On the other hard, there are some newer conventions that are equally acceptable. The older spelling coöperate had already been completely lost by the time I learned to spell, twenty-five years ago, having been replaced by co-operate, which seems to do the same job, and so is perfectly reasonable. These days, cooperate seems to be quite common, and of course, there are no language police to say that it ought not be so; however, in formal writing, I still use the hyphen (as in e-mail; remember when there was still a hyphen there? And that was an originally English word! **And yes, it is okay to begin a sentence with the word \"and\"; your English teacher only said no because all young school children do it far to much).</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/20
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37212",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10371/"
] |
37,224 |
<p>I took the TOEFL test more than three months ago (outside US). Well before my deadlines. But I haven't received the paper scores yet and I shall mail them to the admission committees as an obligatory in my application package. Now, I'm running against the clock. Although I contacted customer support at ETS, the only thing I got is copy-pasted information of mailing time (allow 4-6 weeks abroad...) with a we-can-do-nothing-else statement. </p>
<p>This is totally upsetting. I don't want to lose my applications (and the money I have spent to get all my document translated, legalized, etc.) because of such kafkian situation. Also, it doesn't make sense to order extra reports; probably, they will get lost again.</p>
<p>Has anybody else passed throughout this predicament with ETS? What did you do? What should I do?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37226,
"author": "user28126",
"author_id": 28126,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28126",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I faced similar problem during my undergrad application process. The admission officer told me to fax them a print of my score report from my online account. You can try asking the admission office at the institute that you are applying to and see if there is any way you can self-report the score before the official report arrives. \nGood luck!</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37231,
"author": "Nobody",
"author_id": 546,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>There is a probable cause for the mail delay - weather.</p>\n\n<p>I am a retiree from the US and I currently live in Taiwan. In the past month or so, I have experienced mail delays between the US and my current residency. Usually the first class air mail (US Postal Service) between the US and Taiwan is about 2 weeks ( sometimes 3 weeks at most). But, recently the time is about a month. And I haven't received couple of mails from US that were supposed to be delivered in the last week of December last year.</p>\n\n<p>I mailed something to the US the week before X'mas. The receiving ends said they have not got it. I had to check with the local post office, their response was that this was due to the bad weather in December and January in the US.</p>\n\n<p>My advice is: contact the admission offices to see if there is another way to send in the official transcript. Even if you receive the score report today, please consider using express mail to send to the universities because it could take another month or so for delivery. (I do know express delivery is expensive, bit it's worth it if you have good chance to get to a good university). Good luck!</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/21
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37224",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28124/"
] |
37,233 |
<p><strong>Is it appropriate for a student to attend a class s/he is not registered for?</strong> </p>
<p>I am a CS student and I am almost done with my degree, but there are some very interesting electives that I will not get to take and I would love to simply attend those courses any way. </p>
<p>Is this inappropriate to do? Should I ask the professor's permission first? </p>
<p>I am not sure what my school's policy on the matter is, since I could not find a single source on the topic online from them.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37234,
"author": "ff524",
"author_id": 11365,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<blockquote>\n <p>Should I ask the professor's permission first? </p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Yes, this is the polite thing to do. (It's a perfectly reasonable and common request, so no need to be embarrassed about asking.)</p>\n\n<p>As an instructor, it's useful to be able to understand any apparent discrepancy between the number of \"official\" students and the number of students I see in class. (For example, for determining whether I need to reserve a bigger classroom for an exam, or if I need extra TA support.) So even though I've never turned down a request like this (given that it's permitted in my university), I still like to be asked.</p>\n\n<p>Some schools have an official policy about this kind of thing. If you couldn't find anything relevant, maybe the professor will know and will clue you in when you ask him.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37235,
"author": "RoboKaren",
"author_id": 14885,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14885",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>In the American system, this is called \"auditing\" a course. Auditing means that you are attending the class but are technically only listening (auditing => auditory => listening) to the material and not sitting for exams or handing in homework assignments. You can audit a course formally (which often means that this is listed on your transcript) or informally in which you just sit in on the lectures/discussions. For the former/formal, see your local university guidelines. This answer deals with the latter.</p>\n\n<p>Permission of the instructor in all but the larger lectures is always a good idea unless your university has an open classroom policy (as with many European universities). The instructor may have different rules. For example:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>In larger lectures, I do not mind auditors (of any ilk) in lecture but they may <strong>not</strong> attend discussion sections since those are for the paying students.</li>\n<li>I allow graduate students to audit my graduate seminars but with three rules: a) They must attend all of the sessions; b) they must do all of the readings; c) they must not be a 'dead body' but must participate in the seminar discussion.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>Note that the university itself may have rules on auditing which the faculty member may ignore (for example, I do not mind if local community residents audit my lectures even if they are not registered as auditors through the university).</p>\n\n<p>This is different from PASS/FAIL (also known as CREDIT/D/FAIL) which is another alternative in which you take the class but are allowed a lower level of participation.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37287,
"author": "Longdaysjourneyintocode",
"author_id": 28164,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28164",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Other, more qualified, people have answered your direct question, so I will add to it without detracting from what they have to say.</p>\n\n<p>There are some schools with 'alumni audit' policies, in which - as the name suggests - alumni can formally audit courses. Check with the registrar on policies about this. If your school has such an option, find out the rules. Some classes may be auditable and others may not. Some may be auditable online if you are far away from your university...etc. </p>\n\n<p>While you will likely only be able to do this for one course at a time for courses offered at night, assuming you work a day job, it could be a good way to take those elective courses, create & maintain relationships with professors and with your university.</p>\n\n<p>Good luck with your studies, and have fun. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37354,
"author": "Community",
"author_id": -1,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/-1",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>As a student who has attended four universities and counting, I can provide a student's perspective on this subject.</p>\n\n<p>Most large state schools require auditing students to pay the same tuition to audit a course as it would cost to actually take that course for a grade. The ethics of this are debatable, but I personally disagree with it strongly. </p>\n\n<p>If your university charges to audit a course, then I would consider asking the professor if you are aloud to sit in on some lectures. The professor may be alright with you 'unofficially ' auditing. However, this will depend entirely on the professor and how strict your university policies are. </p>\n\n<p>If the course is very large, as many entry level courses are in state schools, then you can consider just auditing unofficially and without permission. Be careful though, you would potentially be violating university rules, and may anger the instructor. But, if it's a large class with hundreds of students, chances are you will not be noticed, and your presence will not detract from the course. Learning is never a bad thing, and charging students to audit a large course like this is wrong, in my opinion.</p>\n\n<p>Keep in mind that when unofficially auditing a course, you will most likely not have access to any online material used, and be unable to submit assignments/take exams, unless the instructor agrees to allow otherwise.</p>\n\n<p>Overall, never stop learning. If you want to learn something then it's up to you to seek out that knowledge whatever way possible. No one will fault you for this morally, but Universities don't like missing out on tuition fees. Don't get in trouble.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37358,
"author": "cbeleites unhappy with SX",
"author_id": 725,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/725",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I'd like to add a perspective from <strong>Germany</strong>: </p>\n\n<p>Fees here are usually paid for the fact that you are registered as a student (typically a general service fee, student union fee, possibly obligatory bus ticket), only very particular courses have course fees (sports, languages, and postgraduate courses that get you certified for sth. come to my ming). And even if you do your PhD without being registered as student or work as post-doc, for general lectures usually nobody checks whether you are technically \"allowed\" to attend the lecture: many <em>lectures</em> are anyways public. Registration is required if you want to take an exam and get a certificate, but usually not if you are just interested in the knowledge.</p>\n\n<p>So for most lectures it would be totally OK to just attend and listen. \nThat is, unless it is really crowded: then it would be seen as impolite to take away the seat of a student who needs to hear that lecture. So for certain subjects, you'd just not get in in a polite way, whereas in others (SMT) the lecturer may be happy to have one more face in the audience.</p>\n\n<p>In fact, a certain amount of broadening your horizon is encouraged (\"studium generale\"). For that purpose, lectures that are of interest to students of unrelated subjects or the general public are often offered in the evening hours. For example, I heard some more physics than I was required, plus a bit of philosophy, computer science, economics and law and got an introduction to Polish language (I'm chemist). </p>\n\n<p>For language and sports courses you'd typically be required to register. And you may not be that welcome to more intense courses that are meant for smaller groups such as excercises and lab practica (where there would be questions as to who pays insurance and material as well as safety concerns such as whether you know what you are doing).</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37378,
"author": "Tom Au",
"author_id": 755,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/755",
"pm_score": -1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Policies vary, from university to university, and even from department to department in the same university.</p>\n\n<p>The first thing you MUST do is to ask the professor for permission. Not doing so, is a form of \"stealing.\" If you have the professor's permission, it's more like borrowing.</p>\n\n<p>The professor will usually know what the university's policies are, or at least be in a position to find out. In some cases, there may be an extra fee involved, for as many credits as the course is worth.</p>\n\n<p>In some cases, there may be \"loopholes,\" that is, there is no problem if you audit for less than half the semester, then \"drop out.\" Some universities will allow you \"sit\" for three to five lectures early in the semester before having to choose between courses. In other cases, you may be allowed to attend ONE lecture on a particular topic. (I have used all these strategies in my career). </p>\n\n<p>In any event, do what the professor tells you. That is the best guide for \"university\" policy, as well as his/her own.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/21
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37233",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27558/"
] |
37,236 |
<p>I found some relevant advice on the first day of teaching online (e.g. <a href="http://teachingcenter.wustl.edu/strategies/Pages/teaching-first-day.aspx#.VL9C13Mo7qA">here</a>, <a href="http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/firstday.html">here</a>, <a href="http://teaching.berkeley.edu/what-do-first-day-class">here</a>, and <a href="http://teaching.colostate.edu/tips/tip.cfm?tipid=93">here</a>). Common themes include setting expectations, motivating the course content, and having two-way interactions with students. </p>
<p>Besides for reviewing the syllabus (and relevant university-wide policies referenced but not located in the syllabus), how can an instructor most effectively use the first class session? Are there any especially effective ways to do these things on the first day of a class?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37237,
"author": "Patricia Shanahan",
"author_id": 10220,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10220",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>From a relatively recent student point of view, once you have discussed the syllabus, university policies, and your rules for e.g. how homework should be turned in, try to make as much as possible of the class typical of what the rest of the course is going to be like. Think of it as a sample.</p>\n\n<p>Students may be faced with having to make a decision early in the session on which classes to take. The more typical the first class is, the more valid data they have to make that decision. If, on the other hand, you spend the whole of the first class doing things other than teaching in your normal style for the class, they have no way to evaluate whether that style works for them.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37238,
"author": "Ben Bitdiddle",
"author_id": 24384,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24384",
"pm_score": 7,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>Students basically want to know if they should take your class. To that end I would include</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>A short (10-15 minute) sales pitch explaining what exactly your class is about and why your topic is interesting.</li>\n<li>Administrative details of the class (I would cover this after the sales pitch, so students who are late don't miss anything).</li>\n<li>A presentation on the first topic in your syllabus. This is important because hearing your first lecture will give them a good idea of the difficulty of the class, which prerequisites are required, and the style/quality of your lecturing. Also, if your entire first lecture is a sales pitch, students will feel like they wasted time coming to your class, or that your class is \"easy\"/not serious.</li>\n</ol>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37240,
"author": "thecommexokid",
"author_id": 25091,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/25091",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>My perspective is as a student of physics; I hope this answer generalizes sufficiently.</p>\n\n<p>I have had several teachers in physics who have presented on the first day whichever tricky mathematical theorem, process, or derivation will be used most frequently throughout the semester. This becomes valuable because each time the concept comes up during the rest of the course, the teacher can say, \"Now I'm using the Helmholtz theorem (or whatever), which you'll recall from our first class,\" and the distinction of having been the very first material presented means the students <em>actually do</em> remember it, or at least remember <em>of</em> it. Whereas a proof done sometime in the middle of the fourth lecture will as likely as not need to be reviewed each time it recurs, because the students don't recognize it when it resurfaces.</p>\n\n<p>So if the item is well-chosen, it can save enormous amounts of time in the presentation of later material, since it can essentially be skipped each time it comes up with a casual \"…as you'll remember from our first class\" in a way that material introduced later often sadly cannot.</p>\n\n<p>Obviously you have to determine if there is a similarly valuable sort of thing in whatever field you teach.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37244,
"author": "Prashant Kumar Gupta",
"author_id": 28140,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28140",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Tell them about the history of topic, get an idea what your students know about it. Then relate it how is it different from that or how is it related. Let them know, Why they are studying this topic, What is application of this and what can be the possible future of the topic. Sometime, even pros and cons can be discussed.</p>\n\n<p>Then, You can start about the topic lecture, This will create some idea to the students in the practical life and they can get more valuable information and study with more interest.</p>\n\n<p>Let the conversation flow from both the sides and motivate them to ask more questions they can ask.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37286,
"author": "jraow",
"author_id": 27889,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27889",
"pm_score": -1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>At my top 10 US university, some of the math professors do not care about grades, or administration, etc. They would rather teach. So within one minute of starting the class, they begin the main material. Any administration information is placed on the website or sent through emails, if necessary.</p>\n\n<p>But the (undergraduate and graduate) students are at a sufficiently high level that grades are not an issue either. Virtually all my friends are hovering around the 4.0 range. So this may not apply to other situations with lesser students.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37321,
"author": "KharoBangdo",
"author_id": 12064,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12064",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I'll add something more to the already good answers from the perspective of a student, what he expects his first lecture to be. </p>\n\n<p>One of the things which, apparently, is pretty common throughout the academic life is, seriously listening to the advice of the so called <em>Seniors</em>.\n The <em>Seniors</em> will <em>advise</em> you to take a particular course regardless of the teacher / teacher regardless of the course. </p>\n\n<p>Something along the lines of \n\"Dont take that professor's course, he will screw you up every class with tonnes of homework & will not give good credits even if you manage to pull it off.\"\nOR \"Take this particular course. It has great opportunities. The recruiting companies want this course as a prerequisite.\" </p>\n\n<p>So, professors, during your first lecture, assuming you are privy to this gossip of <em>Seniors</em> being passed down since generations, please address each & every \nrumour & clear the thought process of the naïve juniors & be absolutely truthful about it. Then the students can really decide for themselves whether to take the course or not</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37325,
"author": "dionys",
"author_id": 22520,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22520",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>For undergraduate courses your \"first day of class\" is really an administrative meeting with students that are signed up for your class. Often students are still arranging their schedule for the semester. In this light, the first lecture is an opportunity to get them excited about the course topic and familiarize them with your approach to teaching it.</p>\n\n<p>In my experience, it's a good idea to do something real in the first lecture in any case, to give the students an idea of what your lectures will be like and to give them a taste of the course material. Just keep in mind that anything important that is touched on in the first lecture should be revisited in a subsequent lecture--basically treat it like a bonus lecture that most of your students didn't attend.</p>\n\n<p>In my view, the first session should be used to accomplish the following:</p>\n\n<p><strong>1. Motivate the course topic and your syllabus.</strong></p>\n\n<p>Try to communicate why this course is important and why you are interested in teaching it. Your engagement and enthusiasm can have a strong positive influence on the engagement and learning potential of your students. Whenever possible, take the opportunity to relate the course topic to current events, new approaches/practices, or recent research results.</p>\n\n<p><strong>2. Clarify your expectations for the course.</strong></p>\n\n<p>Don't read information verbatim from the syllabus, but try to quickly sum up what you expect from your students and what their grades will be based on. Here, a little information on yourself as and instructor, and a little friendly advice on how to stay on your good side is often helpful.</p>\n\n<p><strong>3. Highlight any important or unusual requirements for the course.</strong></p>\n\n<p>If your course requires background in another subject, or if past students have had lots of trouble with certain topics, try to give students a heads-up regarding any difficulties they can prepare for.</p>\n\n<p><strong>4. Get a feel for the level of your students and their expectations.</strong></p>\n\n<p>A short quiz or survey can often be helpful as a segue or starting point for a discussion of the course topic in addition to giving you some idea of how familiar your students are with prerequisite material and material to be covered in the course.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37751,
"author": "digitaljoel",
"author_id": 28594,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28594",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Show the students why this class is awesome. You want to sell them on the class. Covering a syllabus or the policy on late work isn't going to do any of that. Students come to the first day with very low expectations because they are conditioned to the fact that it's a \"do nothing\" day where they just cover administrative crap.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Give demonstrations of why your subject is amazing and relevant.</strong></p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Show awesome chemistry or physics (something that produces fog or involves lasers!)</li>\n<li>Show math puzzlers (I once had a teacher \"prove\" that pi=2 and nobody could refute it.)</li>\n<li>Read touching poetry or even meaningful modern song lyrics (show you are in touch with their generation)</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>I've been out of school for a long time, but still remember my greatest teachers and they always loved the subjects they taught and kept it interesting.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37763,
"author": "Massimo Ortolano",
"author_id": 20058,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20058",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Sorry, I know I'm gonna lose a great deal of rep for this, but I couldn't resist (from <a href=\"http://spikedmath.com/562.html\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Spiked Math</a>): </p>\n\n<p><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/BliGV.png\" alt=\"First day\"></p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/21
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37236",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365/"
] |
37,241 |
<p>I'm in a large class where lectures are recorded and posted online. The lectures are difficult enough that I benefit a lot from being able to pause the videos and stare at the slides for a few seconds, or even rewind the video if I realize I missed something from an earlier part of the lecture. It's also nice to be able to pause the video if my mind starts wandering, so I can give the lecture my full attention.</p>
<p>However, if I don't go to class, it's easy to get behind on the lectures, and it's easy to get distracted while watching the videos (so watching a lecture online takes me a lot more time than I would have spent in class). What do you think is the best approach?</p>
<p>If it makes a difference, it's my advisor's class, and the lectures are at 9 am.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37242,
"author": "Patricia Shanahan",
"author_id": 10220,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10220",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>A combination may be best. Go to the lectures. During the lecture, if you miss something, or have trouble understanding, make a note of the time. Afterwards, before attempting the coursework, bring up the recorded lecture and view the places you missed during the live lecture.</p>\n\n<p>That way, you get the keep-on-track benefit of the live lectures. You spend your viewing time in a very focused mode, looking only at the difficult parts of the lecture, which may reduce the tendency to get distracted.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37252,
"author": "Alexandros",
"author_id": 10042,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10042",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>Just go to the class. In class you can ask questions for things you do not understand or answer the instructor's questions as well. Moreover, you also have the chance to interact and get to know your co-students and coordinate assignments (for group assignments) or reading sessions.</p>\n\n<p>If this was a concert of your favorite artist, would you consider watching the concert from YouTube the same as actually being there? Especially, if you already paid for the ticket (since you are officially enrolled to the class and therefore paid the corresponding fees - if any). Live interaction during a course is vastly superior to watching a lecture in your pajamas, which is still a valid alternative for people who cannot be there (sickness, online learning, free courses on Coursera). Do not miss this opportunity you are given to actually be there. And use video lectures as supplementary material as the excellent answer from @PatriciaShanahan already states.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/21
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37241",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24384/"
] |
37,245 |
<p>For example, if he spends 20 hours a week on his advisor's project, and 20 hours a week on a project with another professor (that the advisor is not involved in). Do most advisors find this acceptable, or do they see this as taking up work time that belongs to them?</p>
<p>And what if those 20 hours a week are spent on non-research activities, such as taking classes unrelated to the topic of the PhD, or a part-time job outside the university?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37280,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It really depends on the funding source. </p>\n\n<p>It is fairly common for researchers in industry to get a Ph.D. \"on the side\" as part time work away from their full-time job. Many professors are OK with this because 1) an industry researcher often has more maturity in their approach to a subject than a student fresh out of undergrad, and 2) The professor is likely not required to provide funding for the student. </p>\n\n<p>A professor who is funding a student to work full time from their grants, however, will be rightfully angry if the student does not work full time for them.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37294,
"author": "BigAl",
"author_id": 28177,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28177",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>It is down to the supervisor, i myself believe any extra research projects adds a LOT to your own skills. Being taken out of your comfort zone and learning new skills improves yourself as a researcher. Besides how much \"real\" work time can you devote to one PHD before your productivity falls off dramatically.</p>\n\n<p>I see a lot of PHD's concentrate soo much on their project that they don't spend enough time learning new things that makes them so much more productive in the long run. However, aimlessly going to lectures where you don't apply those skills is less worthwhile than doing a project. Having said that, if you know a good lecturer whose lecture series illuminates a previously difficult and unknown area, and those gems are out there, then it is not wasted time. Devoting your time to a job unless it does teach you new skills may be pushing it.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/21
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37245",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24384/"
] |
37,253 |
<p>Let's say I'm a PhD student in a field, let's call it X, and my research is all based on taking the methods developed in field X and applying them to some other fields, let's call them Y, Z, and W. Let's further suppose that I do not make any contributions to the theory of X, I only apply it to Y, Z, and W. Is X the proper fit for me, or should I really pick my favorite of Y, Z, and W?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37255,
"author": "silvado",
"author_id": 3890,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/3890",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>A PhD is meant to extend the knowledge within a field. It's obvious that you can contribute knowledge to Y, Z, and W, at least if you apply the X methods to solve some research questions in these fields. It's less clear what you contribute to X.</p>\n\n<p>You state that you don't contribute to the theory of X, but maybe you extend or generalize the X methods alongside applying them? If you do that, you could get a PhD in X. Otherwise, Y, Z, or W would seem to make more sense.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37260,
"author": "Florian D'Souza",
"author_id": 26958,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26958",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>If you are making most of your contributions to W, Y, or Z, then it probably makes most sense to get a PhD in those compared to a PhD in X. This is for the reasons given by silvado.</p>\n\n<p>However, if you're already a PhD student in X (your first assumption), you have to consider whether it is worth switching to W, Y, or Z. From what you've written, your department or advisor seems fairly flexible in terms of allowing you to work in different areas. Would switching to W,Y, or Z mean switching advisors or departments? Would it mean that your funding might change (e.g., if your funding is tied to a particular field)? It seems like if your research on W,Y, and Z is viewed positively by your department/advisor, there would have to be a substantial reason to switch away from that department/advisor, since the switch might result in less flexibility. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37278,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>If you are applying X to Y, you can easily be in either a department of Y (where you are making a difference) or in a department of X (where you will no doubt be contributing through the adaptation of the techniques to problems in Y). The biggest factor, I think, would be where you can find the best match between yourself and an advisor and departmental culture.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/21
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37253",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11251/"
] |
37,256 |
<p>I am having problems with Endnote outputting a mix of citation styles (or possibly a broken citation style!) in the same document, despite applying the Endnote Frontiers Science style (official, from the Endnote website) throughout. Eg</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...feline herpesvirus 1 (Thiry et al.) and terrapene herpesvirus 1-associated pneumonia in Eastern box turtles (Sim et al., 2014)...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>and when I look at the final reference list I see that both references look correct and the same eg</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thiry, E., Addie, D., Belak, S., Boucraut-Baralon, C., Egberink, H., Frymus, T., Gruffydd-Jones, T., Hartmann, K., Hosie, M.J., Lloret, A., Lutz, H., Marsilio, F., Pennisi, M.G., Radford, A.D., Truyen, U., and Horzinek, M.C. (2009). Feline herpesvirus infection. ABCD guidelines on prevention and management. J Feline Med Surg 11, 547-555.</p>
<p>Sim, R.R., Norton, T.M., Bronson, E., Allender, M.C., Stedman, N., Childress, A.L., and Wellehan, J.F., Jr. (2014). Identification of a novel herpesvirus in captive Eastern box turtles (Terrapene carolina carolina). Vet Microbiol.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So I am at bit of a loss as to why one reference looks correct (author, year) and the other does not (author).</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37311,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>While I don't know Endnote in specific, I have seen this type of failure mode in other citation software. Typically, it happens because the software is treating the reference as the wrong <em>type</em> of reference, e.g., confusing a book chapter with a journal article.</p>\n\n<p>I don't know if your example is the real references, but I notice that first has volume/issue, and page/doi information, but the second does not. This leads me to suspect that Endnote is treating the first reference as a journal article and the second as something different. That may be where to start looking for the problem...</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37315,
"author": "Jeromy Anglim",
"author_id": 62,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/62",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>A few options:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li><p>It is possible to exclude the year from an in text citation in Endnote. So I'd check that setting. Right clicking the in-text citation should give you a few options.</p></li>\n<li><p>Make sure you are showing field codes in Word so that you can confirm that you have actually inserted a citation there. Without field codes it's possible that you have written some text manually.</p></li>\n<li><p>You may want to explore the style settings in Endnote (e.g., go to <code>edit - output styles</code> in Endnote and select the current Endnote style). There are a whole range of settings that you may need to explore. There might be some rules that you can tweak related to how in text citations display.</p></li>\n</ol>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/21
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37256",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28151/"
] |
37,262 |
<p>One part of the work of any researcher is to referee the work of other scientists in his field. This is a time-consuming and volunteer work, that is made with the idea of service for the community. </p>
<p><strong>My main question</strong>: What are the standards of organization for the referee report of an article? </p>
<p>For instance, is a "<em>general comment</em>" section (mostly, explaining why the paper should be accepted or rejected) and a "<em>specific comments</em>" (in the form of a list of precise comments e.g. "Page $2$ line $4$: typo. It should read X instead of Y") enough? Or do people organize the review under specific sections like "<em>Typos and writing</em>", "<em>Missing definitions</em>", "<em>Scope of the paper</em>",etc...</p>
<p>I wish my report to be as useful as it could for the author, so I am inquiring about the best practices for referee reports.</p>
<p>PS: It may be a field-dependant question. I am mostly interested about standards in mathematics, but answers for other fields would be interesting too.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37277,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I organize my reviews in the way that I would like to receive them, sorted from most important from least important. My general structure is:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>First, I summarize my understanding of the the key ideas and contributions of the paper.</li>\n<li>Next, I give my judgement and main reasons for this judgement.</li>\n<li>Third, I have a \"Major Issues\" list of other <em>scientific</em> problems that I think absolutely must be addressed before publications</li>\n<li>Finally, I give a \"Minor Points\" list of nitpicking, language issues, typos, etc.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>The first two sections show that I have understood what the authors are trying to say, and the big picture issues. The third gives the contributing factors, but tries to make it clear that fixing these without fixing the big picture issues won't change my basic judgement (if that judgement was negative). The final is things that will improve the paper but aren't really affecting my judgement.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37279,
"author": "Peter Jansson",
"author_id": 4394,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4394",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>There are no standards but there is a reasonable logical progression that can be followed from the general and larger to the smaller points. I would therefore structure a letter as follows:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>An introduction highlighting the merits of the topic and the study. Often this paragraph ends by stating that certain revisions may be necessary. It i snot the reviewers task to state whether he or she feels the manuscript should be rejected, under go revisions or be accepted. That should be stated to the editor only.</p></li>\n<li><p>Following the introduction would be more general aspects such as structure, language etc.</p></li>\n<li><p>Next larger scientific issues that concern more general aspects of the study, not tiny details. The points would concern entire chapters or sets of paragraphs and usually be the cause for significant reworking of the manuscript.</p></li>\n<li><p>The final part, and usually the longest may be small issues or questions concerning aspects that need clarification or correction, usually pointing at the page and line where the problems occur.</p></li>\n<li><p>The letter should be capped off by summarizing the review and making a statement as to whether you think significant or minor reworking is necessary. Note that I am not speaking about a verdict but an assessment of how much work you think is necessary to complete the short-comings you have identified.</p></li>\n</ul>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/21
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37262",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15528/"
] |
37,264 |
<p>In my master’s thesis in inorganic characterization, I have a theory chapter about X-ray (powder) diffraction. This technique is almost 100 years old, and have been described in a vast number of books, articles, and web-pages.</p>
<p>I could easily take any book about X-ray diffraction and just cite that book, but I don’t want to keep citing the same book every four sentences for basic knowledge. So I was thinking that something like the following might be suited:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The principles of X-ray diffraction are described in a number of books [1-4], articles [5-9], and web-pages [10-13]. The theory presented in this section is just a brief summary of what one might encounter in published works, such as those cited above.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This way I give some sources of the principles of X-ray diffraction, and I explain that what I present could be found in the cited sources. Thus, I don’t need to cite anything in-text, and the reading is easier.</p>
<p>Is this approach acceptable?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37272,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>The real question is whether you need to cite anything at all. In your field, if this information is considered undergraduate-level material that every practitioner should be familiar with, then you can simply assume that all readers will be able to reference their favorite textbook if they care, and launch right into the relevant review.</p>\n\n<p>If you are speaking to an audience that may not be so familiar, however, you definitely do need to cite. You don't need to put in lots of citations, however: you can simply say that this is well-established information and give one citation to a good textbook:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>The principles of X-ray diffraction are well-known (see, e.g., [textbook]).</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>For example, when I am writing to a computer science audience and need to say something about the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-complete\">NP-completeness of constraint satisfaction</a>, I would probably not include a citation, since this is such a foundational concept to the field at this point. When I write to a biology audience about the same problem, however, I explicitly note that these are long-established facts and include citations to basic textbooks.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37274,
"author": "Bitwise",
"author_id": 6862,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6862",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>X-ray diffraction is such a common technique that you do not need to cite sources. At most I would cite a single review of the technique once at the beginning of your chapter. If you want to give a historical perspective, you could either cite a historically-oriented review of the technique, or mention+cite important discoveries made with the technique (e.g. the DNA double helix).</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/21
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37264",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14393/"
] |
37,265 |
<p>I am writing a book, and in its bibliography I would like to include a paper whose title has the German word "Über" printed as "Ueber". As far as I know, this is an equivalent way of writing the word, but the former way is the normal way. It is definitely spelled as "Ueber" in the (nineteenth-century) journal in which it appeared - the body text uses umlauts so I assume there was some typographic obstacle with the title font.</p>
<p>I can see three options for me:</p>
<ol>
<li><em>Ueber</em></li>
<li><em>Ueber</em> [sic]</li>
<li><em>Über</em></li>
</ol>
<p>I have a soft preference for (3), because I think it looks nicer. I do not like (2) because it carries the implication that <em>Ueber</em> is an error, which it isn't. But (1) is the original form. I could just about imagine somebody failing to find the paper because I wrote (3) instead of (1), but it seems unlikely - search services like Google "know" about the equivalence, and readers will have the volume/page/date information regardless.</p>
<p>The publisher has asked me to follow Chicago Manual of Style guidelines if in doubt. Unfortunately, I cannot find a definitive ruling there.</p>
<p>Am I bound to use the precise conventions of the original publication, or should I adapt to a more normal modern style?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37268,
"author": "Peter Jansson",
"author_id": 4394,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4394",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You should follow the spelling of the printed publication. The purpose of the references is for others to be able to trace your sources. Obviously most search engines would possibly suggest other spellings by similarity but this is no excuse for changing the spelling in your reference list so go with your option 1.</p>\n\n<p>A similar effect is caused by people doing things the other way, changing umlaut spelling to a spelling without umlauts because they are not familiar with the spelling or do not have the letter on their keyboard. This can cause slight confusion in searching for the literature down the line. It is however, in most cases not a severe problem.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37269,
"author": "Wrzlprmft",
"author_id": 7734,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7734",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>I would always prefer the original title of the paper (only ignoring all-caps or similar), even if it contains spelling mistakes, as this is the most likely search term, somebody is going to use (and not all search tools do autocorrections). This in particular applies to titles in spelling conventions that readers might not be familiar with. A German paper from that time might use the spelling <em>Oscillator</em> instead of the modern <em>Oszillator</em> or <em>Maasssystem</em> instead of <em>Maßsystem</em>¹ – would you also change these?</p>\n\n<p>As a sidenote:\nUppercase umlauts (such as <em>Ü)</em> only came up in German in the nineteenth century and were only fully established as a consequence of the spelling reform/establishment of 1901. Thus, it’s very unlikely that <em>Ueber</em> was used due to typographical restrictions and one could argue that it is the more correct spelling here. Also note that nowadays, substituting <em>Ü</em> with <em>Ue</em> is only allowed as a makeshift solution and the two are not regarded as equivalent.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p><sup>¹ Taken straight from <em>Max Planck – Ueber irreversible Strahlungsvorgänge.</em></sup></p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/21
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37265",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13203/"
] |
37,283 |
<p>In a recent review of a paper, the reviewer suggests several solutions to a flaw, one of which was collecting more data. The other solution was to shorten the paper substantially. The editor said that the revisions needed before acceptance were between minor and major revisions. In my mind, collecting additional data is a major revision. The editor has not indicated any specific steps he would like taken. Is it acceptable to contact the editor to discuss exactly what he wants done before the paper can be published? For example, can I ask if he wants more data collected? Or if there he wants the paper shortened?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37284,
"author": "Peter Jansson",
"author_id": 4394,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4394",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>There is certainly no problem contacting an editor to enquire about a manuscript and review responses. It is difficult to assess the issue in your particular case but I do agree that adding new data can be a significant endeavour indeed. Shorting the paper may be a relevant point in any case but I do not see, in general how, shortening a paper would improve any lack of data although it may be obvious in the individual case.</p>\n\n<p>So, if you feel the advise you have received is difficult to follow or is unclear (and that seems to be the primary point), then asking for a clarification is in place. You can be constructive and also suggest some plan of action for the parts you see more clearly and then focus on the ambiguous parts in your request to the editor. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37307,
"author": "RoboKaren",
"author_id": 14885,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14885",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The gist may be that your claim is modest and needs further substantiation/proof.</p>\n\n<p>Increasing the n of samples (or including meta analysis) would increase the strength of the argument without lengthening the word count of the paper significantly.</p>\n\n<p>Shortening the paper will help tighten the argument, making the claims clearer, and from the journal's perspective, align the impact of the article with length of the article. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/21
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37283",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28160/"
] |
37,290 |
<p>I am in a situation where I have several adult students for an all-day career training program that runs for about a year. So, they and I sit in the classroom most of a normal work-week. I decide when to get up and lecture. Although I tell them to raise questions any time, they rarely do unless I ask.</p>
<p>I enjoy speaking in front of the class, but because it is not on a particular schedule, I usually find that I have trouble motivating myself to get started. I don't have employee reviews or a mentor. My feeling in class is similar to how I have never gotten used to making phone calls: every time, it is like jumping into cold water, it never gets any easier. (I would rather talk in person. I am almost 50, by the way, and male.) How do I get beyond this basic motivation hurdle?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37292,
"author": "RoboKaren",
"author_id": 14885,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14885",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>I don't enjoy lecturing either and yet my student reviews ask for more lectures even if I prefer discussion. What I've done for some classes is prepare a portfolio of 15 minute mini-lectures that are on one specific point, targeted, succint, and within the attention span (maybe) of 18 year olds.</p>\n\n<p>You might also want to create a similar grab bag of canned material so that when a particular topic arises, you can easily lecture on it. </p>\n\n<p>Otherwise, the only other way is to practice. I've realized my own aversion to lecturing is something I need to work more on, so I deliberately designed a large lecture course that was 100% lecturing, rather than the smaller seminar courses that I prefer. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37295,
"author": "mkennedy",
"author_id": 5711,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5711",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Why not schedule some of them? Put up a weekly schedule of lectures based on what the students are working on. You could even brainstorm with the students on what they'd like to hear. Also, do they have preference on when they would prefer lectures? First thing in the morning, just before lunch, not after lunch (too sleepy), etc.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 58639,
"author": "aparente001",
"author_id": 32436,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/32436",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Your \"problem\" is very unusual. Most people love to hear themselves talk!</p>\n\n<p>Which leads me to a creative proposal. How about if you ask your students to prepare some short presentations, too? Then you wouldn't be the only one taking a turn standing at the front of the room explaining something.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 58676,
"author": "Laurent Duval",
"author_id": 38057,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38057",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Consider you are your first student: a Latin saying says \"<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docendo_discimus\" rel=\"nofollow\">Docendo discimus</a>\", or \"The best way to learn is to teach\" (<a href=\"http://cs.nyu.edu/~dodis/quotes.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">attributed</a> to <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Oppenheimer\" rel=\"nofollow\">Frank Oppenheimer</a>). I am amazed how I still find simpler or nicely illustrative ways to explaining stuff I have been teaching for years. Which in turn help me understand them better. And you can turn that into an exercise of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_by_teaching\" rel=\"nofollow\">Learning by teaching</a> (allow students to prepare and to teach lessons, or parts of lessons). Or into a book?</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 58681,
"author": "Daniel R. Collins",
"author_id": 43544,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/43544",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Preparation (or \"class prep\" as many call it). Write it down.</p>\n\n<p>Schedule in advance when lectures will be given (perhaps on a monthly or quarterly basis). Write down notes on what you will say and present. Some people practice this in advance (personally, I just practice it mentally a bit). Keep records and write down modifications, improvements, and refinements.</p>\n\n<p>I often do the same for phone calls with strangers (particularly on touchy subjects). Write down a short script or some notes and read from that to get started. A little prep time always makes a big difference.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/21
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37290",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/-1/"
] |
37,291 |
<p>I applied to several Grad schools and recently got a letter of acceptance from one of them.
Should I inform the other schools about being accepted? Will it improve my chances with them or just create antagonism?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37293,
"author": "icehawk",
"author_id": 28170,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28170",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You don't need to inform them when you are accepted at another school. \nThey only want to know if you are taking the course. So you should withdraw your application as soon as you are sure that you are not interested any more. \nYou dont need to give a reason. </p>\n\n<p>Don't wait long.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37296,
"author": "Florian D'Souza",
"author_id": 26958,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/26958",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I can't imagine a situation where letting a program know about an acceptance to another program improves your chances of admission. To me, if I was on an admissions committee for school X and got word that you got accepted to school Y, all that would tell me is that you met a (largely unknown to me) set of criteria that school Y uses, which might share all, none, or some of the criteria that I use for admitting students to school X. By the same token, I don't think it will create too much antagonism.</p>\n\n<p>On a personal note, I found that communicating with different schools AFTER I received a decision helped me. For example, I was accepted to programs both with or without funding. By letting the programs that initially didn't fund me know that I was accepted to a (rival) program with funding, I was able to turn one of my offers from non-funded to funded. </p>\n\n<p>As others have said, once you know that you won't be attending a program, it is common courtesy to let that program know, particularly if you have an offer with funding.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37297,
"author": "StrongBad",
"author_id": 929,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/929",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You should definitely tell any school you no longer want to attend as this will save them a little time. Any school that you would rather attend, you should contact and let them know when you need to make a decision by. Not all grad schools do admissions in an atomic manner. If a higher choice school wants you, they may be able to hurry their decision so as not to lose you.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37306,
"author": "RoboKaren",
"author_id": 14885,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14885",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In general, you shouldn't notify before you have heard from all schools <strong>unless</strong> the acceptance letter from School A has an expiration date and/or you will go to School A regardless of the other offers. </p>\n\n<p>The risk is if you tell School B that you got into A before they make their decision:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><p>If B feels A is stronger in your area, they may not want to risk an admissions slot and roll down to the next candidates.</p></li>\n<li><p>If A feels as if it is superior to B, it may wonder why you're telling them this info. Are you seriously overrated in B?</p></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>If you have offers in hand from both, it's certainly in your best interest to let both know. You may be able to get A and B to bid against each other for you.</p>\n\n<p>Admissions slots are very precious to departments. We don't want to waste then on candidates that won't come, and once we've made an offer we want to ensure the candidate will come.</p>\n\n<p>That being said, once you've made up your mind, please notify everyone so that we can free up your slot for someone else lower down on the admissions list.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/21
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37291",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28175/"
] |
37,310 |
<p>I was in an accident during college, and I graduated with a low GPA (just under 3.0 or so). I switched majors to Math and while I did well in some classes, in general I was a B/C student or so. I think if I went at a normal pace, I could have done much better. Since graduating I've worked as a statistician and a computer programmer. I don't have ANY profs to ask for a letter, but I think I have an employer reference. </p>
<p>Can stellar GREs help me get into a Math PhD?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37312,
"author": "IainDunning",
"author_id": 28191,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28191",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I am not a mathematician, but I think a \"stellar\" score on the GRE Mathematics Subject Test would be essential, especially in the absence of recommendations or undergraduate grades.</p>\n\n<p>To elaborate, admissions to a doctoral program are made on the basis that the student has a good chance of succeeding in the doctoral program and developing into a quality researcher in the field. This can be hard to determine for someone coming out of undergraduate (or industry), so proxies are used like grades/GRE, recommendations, undergraduate research projects. With only one of the pieces of this puzzle, it'd be a risky pick for an admissions committee. A masters degree would fill this gap, and the bar for admissions could be a lot lower.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37314,
"author": "Corvus",
"author_id": 27900,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27900",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Stellar GREs can help but they won't get you into a top tier program on their own. Recommendations from faculty who know you are very important, academic research experience is desired, and in most programs grades matter quite a bit. That's the bad news. </p>\n\n<p>The good news is that there's a fairly straightforward way to address the situation. In a case like yours, a masters degree can often offer a way to reset your record and give you the portfolio you need to get into a good PhD program. You'll get a chance to show your ability in the classroom, you'll presumably get some research experience, and you'll have the opportunity to get to know a number of faculty well enough that they can write strong letters on your behalf. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/22
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37310",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28189/"
] |
37,327 |
<p>Suppose a PhD student got clinically depressed and stopped producing research for a year or two. </p>
<p>What would most PhD supervisors do in this situation? Would it be considered usual or acceptable to stop working with him?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37328,
"author": "DCTLib",
"author_id": 7390,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7390",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p><em>Good PhD Advisors</em>(tm) would first of all <em>talk</em> to the student about the issue. Large-scale depressions need to be properly treated and respected. The important thing is to find out if it is the academic work that causes the depressions and to take counter-measures if it is.</p>\n\n<p>Now if the depression lasts, is properly treated and puts obtaining the PhD at >90% risk of failure <strong>and</strong> all possible measures have been taken to help the student (both on the professional level and as far as applicable and feasible, on the personal level), then the student is wasting time in academia. And nothing is more depressing than that. So a <em>Good PhD Advisor</em>(tm) would help the student with establishing a new working life that makes use of the degrees already obtained as much as possible. This is basically the best the advisor can do to pave the way to a happier life for the student. I wouldn't call that \"firing\" someone.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37336,
"author": "cbeleites unhappy with SX",
"author_id": 725,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/725",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I assume \"clinically depressed\" means \"major depression\".<br>\nAnd I assume \"fire\" means \"get rid of as fast as possible\".</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>As a very first rule I'd say, <strong>deal</strong> with depression <strong>as with any other disease of comparable severity</strong>. Would you <em>fire</em> a student who had a bad accident and needs a year of rehab? I mean, <em>fire</em> as opposed to think together with the student of how to deal best with the situation. </p>\n\n<p>Secondly, (at least in my legislation) a work contract does come with more duties for the employer than just to pay the wages: typically there are <strong>duties of care</strong> (? not sure about the correct English term - the German word is Fürsorgepflicht; this covers things like work safety, but also includes e.g. the duty to get an ill employee to a doctor, and about accomodations for chronic diseases, etc.). </p>\n\n<p>I'd say that for depression this would at least include making sure that the student receives proper treatment (don't worry about doing too much: as a third party you're most probably anyways not allowed to do much) and that the student knows the psychological emergency services of your university exist, and how exactly to reach them. In an emergency, do as you'd do with any other kind of medical issue: get the student to the doctor.<br>\nAgain, I really don't see much difference here to making sure your students know who's the contract surgeon in case of emergencies or attend the company medical officer's preventative screening for work-related health issues, etc. </p>\n\n<p>I'd argue that a PhD supervisor has <em>at least</em> the same duties towards the student as a normal employer. Maybe even more: the student may have agreed to do research on the supervisor's behalf at low (or even no) wage, and PhD supervisors and PhD projects are typically far more is done and difficult to change than a job. \nAlso, <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/35187/on-agreeing-on-length-of-phd-program-in-advance-and-three-year-studies\">remember that agreeing to PhD supervision is not a contract about what exactly is done when, but that a grade will be granted for a corresponding level of research</a>. </p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>Chronic disease/disability may mean that some special considerations need to be taken into account, or possibly that the field of study needs to changed. Maybe even that the profession needs to be changed, as @DCTLib already pointed out. </p>\n\n<p>But this is no excuse for initiating such changes with a kick in the ass. </p>\n\n<p>Consider to help finding a well-suited new field of study if necessary. As in: after accident, student now has metal implants and cannot work near the NMR machine any more => someone else carries out the experiments the student plans and analyses, student switches their focus over to data analysis, switches to other project that can be carried out, etc. </p>\n\n<p>For depression, it may not be as immediately clear what helps and what doesn't. It may be anything from switch away from lone-wolf experiments that need weeks in dark basements to doing things that are in a friendly environment with collaboration with colleagues to switch from computer work to doing more practical work like experiments.<br>\nIt may also very well be that options need to be tried out. Just as it may be difficult after a severe accident to predict how much and which work the student will be able to do when. </p>\n\n<p>It may also be that you decide you are not able to supervise this student as needed. But maybe you can help to find a new supervisor. </p>\n\n<p>Last but not least, your university may have someone who can professionally suggest what to do - just as for the hypothetical student with the accident. Ask integration office, or the psychological emergency service may be able to tell you whom to ask.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>With respect to hat, I sadly have to say that I recommend to <em>any</em> student to get away as fast as possible from a supervisor who thinks about <em>firing</em> PhD students because of a disease. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 43592,
"author": "Community",
"author_id": -1,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/-1",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In a situation like this, I would have a long conversation with the supervisor about what your special needs and requirements are, and make it clear how your special needs (e.g. depression) can have an adverse effect on your work. Stress to your supervisor that if they can adjust their supervision techniques sufficiently well to take this into account and get the most out of you. If they're willing to do that - then best of luck! If they're not - then they're probably not worth working for in the first place.</p>\n\n<p>I do sympathise with you quite a lot, OP. I am a first year mathematics PhD student and I suffer from Asperger's Syndrome, anxiety and depression. These have all had a negative effect on my work ethic and organisational skills and the first year has been an anxious experience for me, as I have been taking rather a long time to get into the mindset of being an independent researcher and only recently have I realised this. My supervisor doesn't really seem to acknowledge this (even though there is a statement of needs on file about me, which my supervisor has seen) - her solution is simply to put more time in. I am going to give this a go but there are other factors which can affect my performance which my supervisor doesn't seem to understand - so one thing I am considering doing is organising a meeting with my mentor, disability advisor and my supervisor just to make things clear. I've thought about leaving my PhD for a while - but I am going to devote a lot more time towards my research and see how it goes. If, after that course of action, my supervisor is still worried but isn't willing to take on board my personal difficulties, and appreciate that they have impacted on my performance, then I might consider switching supervisor or leaving the department.</p>\n\n<p>I find it unacceptable that at such a professional level, hardly anyone in academia is given any sort of psychological training or leadership credentials for dealing with students. You would think that for a job that requires guiding a student through 3-4 years of their life conducting research, that this is a position of high responsibility and not something that socially inept supervisors can treat with a pinch of salt. Although I'm not expecting them to provide therapy or anything like that, general psychological factors <em>do</em> play a part in the effectiveness of someone's research quality and methodology - regardless of whether academics are willing to admit it or not. Academia is a very unforgiving place towards those with mental health issues. This is why academia can be an unnecessary turbulent experience for some students, and (I feel) wrongfully so. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/22
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37327",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24384/"
] |
37,330 |
<p>I have submitted a paper to an Elsevier journal. After two weeks of required reviews completed status I have sent and E-mail to the editor. He replied:
Your paper is still under review. We need 1 or 2 more review comments and make the decision within a month.</p>
<p>So, I have to ask... What does he mean by we need 1 or 2 more review comments?
If the paper is still under review what is with the status of required reviews completed? </p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37331,
"author": "Peter Jansson",
"author_id": 4394,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4394",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>An educated guess is that the manuscript handling system by default expects two reviews. The number of reviews required for a decision can usually be changed by the editor. A reason for adding reviews is that you receive, for example and in the worst case, one accept and one reject from the two reviewers. It is therefore reasonable for an editor to search for additional reviewers to provide a better basis for a decision. Another reason can be that one or both of the original reviewers left reviews but they were deemed unconstructive and the need for additional reviews arose from the lack of reasonable feedback. There can be many other reasonable explanations as well, these are just examples.</p>\n\n<p>Anyway, in this case, it is possible that the editors have not bothered to change the number of required reviews to 4 (which I assume the total would be). The system then shows that all reviews are in and that the manuscript should be decided upon. So hopefully, the editor will try to get speedy reviews and get back to you with useful feedback on your manuscript.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37409,
"author": "Kakoli Majumder",
"author_id": 9920,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9920",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The manuscript status shows \"required reviews completed\" once all the reviews have come in. After that, the paper along with the reviews could be waiting at the editor's desk for a while before he has time to look at them. This would probably account for the status having remained the same for two weeks. </p>\n\n<p>For many journals, the status would change to \"with reviewer\" once again if the paper is sent for additional reviews. Since this has not happened, I feel that perhaps the editor is not referring to additional reviews. </p>\n\n<p>There is a possibility that by \"one or two more review comments\" the editor is referring to a few additional comments by the same reviewers. One can't be sure, but perhaps the editor has found some of the reviewers' comments unclear, and has asked for clarifications, or the editor has a view slightly different from the reviewers and has asked for their opinion. If that is the case, you wouldn't probably have to wait too long, as it will definitely be quicker than getting additional reviews done.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 88564,
"author": "Fomite",
"author_id": 118,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/118",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It could mean any number of things, as \"Required Reviews Completed\" is likely an automated message that the initial review requests sent out have been returned. Three possible explanations, all rooted in my own experience:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>The reviewers are divided enough, or there's enough ambiguity, that the editor has decided to reach out to more reviewers to broaden the available opinions.</li>\n<li>The editor is currently clarifying a comment with a reviewer. I have, at least once, gone back and forth with an editor a few times as a reviewer refining what I mean, giving examples, etc. so the editor can convey useful information to the reviewer.</li>\n<li>Some journals have checkboxes suggesting the need for additional review. For example, many clinical journals have an entry for \"This paper should be reviewed by a statistician\" for methodologically complex papers. It's possible one or more reviewers suggested someone with additional expertise should review the paper.</li>\n</ol>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/22
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37330",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28211/"
] |
37,341 |
<p>I am not a genius but I am a good test taker and a very practical person. I went through undergraduate school without studying much (skipping classes, doing homework, reading the books and doing some exercises the day before the test) with a 3.6 GPA in Computer Engineering from a decent school (CWRU). </p>
<p>I know I might get angry answers from people saying that it simply cannot be done. I am interested to hear from the people in the other side of the spectrum. Can it be done? Have you done it?</p>
<p>I want to become a college professor so a PhD is a requirement I need to fulfil.</p>
<p><em>slack off</em> = not put much effort and work in, like when you didn't bother to google that word!</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37342,
"author": "Bill Barth",
"author_id": 11600,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11600",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I think it's possible depending on your definition of \"slack\". You have to work on your research, but if you find that part fun and therefore not real \"work\", you can potentially just scrape by on the other required components. The only exception to that might be writing up your results in a timely fashion. I think lots of folks find this latter part at least somewhat tedious, and there's really no way to put it off or not do it if you want to graduate.</p>\n\n<p>That being said, you can get minimum acceptable grades in all your required courses (if your department has any) and do mediocre on your qualifying exams and dissertation proposal (if your department requires either) and still get a PhD. As long as you're engaged with your research, getting a PhD might not be all that much like work. </p>\n\n<p>Now, if you research is mediocre, too, you might still get the PhD but then find yourself with mediocre grades, mediocre research, and a supervisor and other faculty with mediocre opinions of you. That might lead to mediocre, at best, and, at worst, <em>no</em> letters of recommendation for future jobs. It might also mean that any papers you try to write from your dissertation work are also mediocre and unpublishable, and it's not like you will have published anything along the way if you were trying to maximize your slack. That won't likely be good for your career, but at least you'll have gotten the PhD, right?</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37345,
"author": "xLeitix",
"author_id": 10094,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"pm_score": 7,
"selected": false,
"text": "<blockquote>\n <p>Can I slack and get a PhD?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Yes, definitely. I have known PhD students that graduated, which I can only describe as lazy.</p>\n\n<p>Now the more important question is <strong>Why the heck do you want to?</strong> If your goal is to stay in research, slacking off during your PhD time is career suicide. If you do not want to stay in research, <em>and</em> you are not particularly interested in the research contents, then a PhD degree will not be much more than a piece of paper to put on your office wall. A piece of paper for which you have accepted 3+ years of lousy pay.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Edit:</strong></p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I want to become a college professor so a PhD is a requirement I need to fulfill.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I correct my point from above: \"<em>If your goal is to stay in <strong>academia</strong>, slacking off during your PhD time is career suicide</em>\". Let me put it this way - faculty positions, including those at liberal arts colleges, are typically competitive to get into. Having a PhD that shows that you are less than enthusiastic about your field will likely not land you such a job. If this is your career goal, you need to ask yourself not <em>\"What is the minimum amount of work I need to put in to get a PhD?\"</em> but rather <em>\"What is the minimum amount of work I need to put in to have a real shot at scoring a position afterwards?\"</em> (where the second effort is substantially larger than the first effort).</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37348,
"author": "afaust",
"author_id": 21371,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21371",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You mentioned that you got a decent GPA with not much work. This possibly indicates that you are quite capable, and not motivated unless pressured with a deadline.</p>\n\n<p>There are many reasons the lack of motivation can show up during in college; from things being too easy, to not having an ownership over the work you are doing. As others pointed out, research is a different animal all together, and you might find yourself thriving doing research. </p>\n\n<p>If your goal is to get the degree with the least amount of work, that attitude won't get you far. However, if you are considering PhD, but you are concerned about your lack of motivation as an undergrad, then you stand a chance. Think of the reasons you lacked motivation, and how you can overcome them. And, please, don't think of yourself as a slacker, because you lacked intrinsic motivation to go above and beyond in classes that had little to do with what you are passionate about.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37349,
"author": "Pete L. Clark",
"author_id": 938,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/938",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": false,
"text": "<blockquote>\n <p>Can I slack and get a PhD?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>You seem to have started early in your laconic/lazy formulation of the question. Nevertheless, I know what you are asking at least in spirit: can you get a PhD without really trying, i.e., by doing the minimum necessary and having that minimum be significantly less than your peak activity.</p>\n\n<p>The answer is: while no one is guaranteed to succeed in a PhD program and some people get kicked out of PhD programs (including, more's the pity, some who are \"really trying\"), the answer is that <strong>yes</strong>, it is most certainly possible for some, and probably the average PhD student could introduce a non-negligible amount of \"slack\" and still complete their PhD. </p>\n\n<p>Now please listen carefully:</p>\n\n<p>The old saw <strong>But you would only be cheating yourself</strong> was <em>made</em> for this situation. By doing so, you will be cheating yourself out of some very valuable commodities: time, money, future employability, your own happiness and even contentment. </p>\n\n<p>Look, don't do it. Maybe I can express it like this: how much would someone need to offer me to get me to go back to school and get a PhD in some field I didn't really care about? I would say that for half a million dollars now under the agreement that I would stay in school until I got it and another half million dollars upon successful completion, I would have to consider it. If you do not have financial incentives of this order of magnitude, forget it.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37356,
"author": "Longdaysjourneyintocode",
"author_id": 28164,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28164",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The question you are technically asking may be unanswerable. I do not know if you (personally or the more general you) can slack and get a PhD. The only way to know is to try. I'll game it out a bit based on the assumption that slacking is a higher priority for you than accomplishment and that you will do what it takes to be accepted into a PhD program. I mean no judgement here. I am interpreting this from your question.</p>\n\n<p>If you slack and you do not get a PhD (kicked out or you exit for whatever reason), what do you have to show for your time and whatever effort you put in? Would this be the best way to spend your time and effort?</p>\n\n<p>If you slack and you do get a PhD, will you be able to put that to good use? (See answer from Bill Barth) Will you be happy with the time you spent? Will it really help you do better work/earn more money/have a more meaningful career. If the answer to any of these questions is yes, a PhD may be worthwhile for you.</p>\n\n<p>More specifically, you have described yourself as a practical person. Even in computer engineering, a PhD is rarely pursued because of how practical it is. Even if it's practical to have, it's extrordinarly impractical to attain. </p>\n\n<p>If there are masters programs you are interested in, that may suit you better. I gather that you are a good test taker (your description), can absorb material quickly, and are willing to do what needs to be done(homework, reading, exercises). </p>\n\n<p>If there are any PhD programs that let you leave with a Masters if you have completed a certain amount of coursework, that may let you 'have it all.' With that said, I would be surprised if this is considered an acceptable motivation/approach for applying to and matriculating in a PhD program.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37362,
"author": "thomij",
"author_id": 20865,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20865",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>There is no \"amount of work\" or \"trying hard\" requirement for a PhD.</p>\n\n<p>Instead, typical programs require you to do a few things:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Pass qualifying exams</li>\n<li>Pass a certain number of required and elective course (usually this happens in the first year or two)</li>\n<li>Maintain a minimum GPA (usually 3.0 or so)</li>\n<li>The big one - complete original research that advances your field.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>Notice that none of these requirements has anything to do with the amount of effort you spend. If you are exceptionally smart or talented at taking tests, you could probably \"slack\" and make it through the first three requirements. In my program there were definitely people who put in more effort than others, sometimes they needed to, and sometimes they didn't. In the end though, all that matters is that you meet the requirements, not that you spent X amount of time or effort on them.</p>\n\n<p>The first three requirements are easy to measure, and the bar is about the same for everyone. However, the last requirement is tricky. This is why some of the other answers are saying it's not a good idea to go in with the idea that you could slack off and get by.</p>\n\n<p>The reason is that judging your success at #4 comes down to the personal opinions of your adviser and your dissertation committee.</p>\n\n<p>Partly it is based on the number and quality of papers you publish, partly it depends on the perceived quality of your thesis, and partly it depends on your adviser's perception of your ability to conduct original research.</p>\n\n<p>A lot of other answers are saying that if you don't <em>excel</em>, then you won't get good recommendations, won't publish much, and won't get a job after graduating. It is true that there are more PhD recipients than there are PhD jobs, and so you definitely need to be on the \"really good\" end of the spectrum if you want to do well after school.</p>\n\n<p>On the other hand, even though the original research requirement is highly subjective, and can depend a lot on what your adviser's perception of your work ethic is, I think it is only fair to point out that there is no built-in requirement that you work all the time.</p>\n\n<p>As an example, if you took two students, one who worked 40 hours per week and produced 4 or 5 highly respected papers in a field that brought in a lot of research funding, and one who worked 60 hours per week but only produced 1 or 2 papers that weren't considered ground-breaking, I think it would be unrealistic to think that the first student (who some might say was slacking) would have a hard time getting a job.</p>\n\n<p>I think what the other answers are trying to get you to see is that as a general statement, \"hard work\" is correlated with success in research. Note that I said <em>correlated</em> - in the end, the research is what matters, and hard work doesn't guarantee anything, nor is it necessarily required. Luck and talent play big parts as well. In my experience, breakthroughs in research actually happen when you take time off to think. You need to put the work in to design the experiments, generate the data, and process it. But the real insights come from stepping back and thinking about things differently. You can't force that, and I have a hard time thinking of that part as \"work.\"</p>\n\n<p>I think what really matters is your ability to overcome challenges. Sometimes people equate that with work, in the sense that you have to keep going even when the going gets tough.</p>\n\n<p>If you are considering going into a PhD program, you should accept the fact that for most people, it takes a lot of effort to succeed, and even more to excel. As a general statement, your adviser will expect you to put in as much time as you can and will not like it if you \"slack off.\" However, in the end, all that matters is the quality of your research and the opinions of your adviser, colleagues, and committee. If you can work less and still do groundbreaking, original research, while maintaining the respect of your colleagues, then it can be done.</p>\n\n<p>Don't tell the admissions committee that you want to slack off, though. They won't like that.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37364,
"author": "angarg12",
"author_id": 27993,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27993",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I don't know what you mean by \"slack\", but if you want a living proof of somebody \"lazy\" getting a PhD, here I am.</p>\n\n<p>I remember tales from my colleagues speaking about entire summers spent working on their PhD, even working on it every Saturday at home.</p>\n\n<p>I never did such a thing.</p>\n\n<p>I never worked in my PhD outside my working hours: I can even think a couple of really dry periods where I got really distracted and worked on personal projects instead of in my research.</p>\n\n<p>The whole process got 4 years (6 years including Master Thesis), although I completed all my work 1 year before obtaining the title, and I spent all that time in bureaucracy.</p>\n\n<p>Just by looking at the highest voted answers to this question, you can feel the general vibe of this community. My vision however is somewhat different: you don´t need to slave yourself over getting a PhD, and certainly, it is not worth sacrificing holidays and weekends for it.</p>\n\n<p>Also keep in mind that research is a very intellectual activity, so logically you will go through less productive periods influenced by your own mental state.</p>\n\n<p>As a caveat, I have to point out that I got away with it because my research group was quite lousy. I did almost all the work by myself with little supervising, and indeed this may very well be the cause that my motivation to work was so low.</p>\n\n<p>My takeaway message is: if you want to get a PhD and are afraid that it will be too hard on you, don't be. On the other hand, if you want to know if getting a PhD is a good way to slack for a few years, you can probably find better jobs that suit your needs.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37365,
"author": "Chris H",
"author_id": 8494,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8494",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Another side of it is that you will <em>need</em> the respect of the academics you work with, also postdocs etc if you're to get a job at the end. They're the people best placed to spot real slacking, and one bad word from them can ruin your chances of getting the next step in your career. Depending on the group/field you may well need to be a team player which mean volunteering to take stuff on if it fits your expertise. To progress in academia you'll also need a publication record, and writing papers that are accepted isn't much like turning in undergrad work done to the best of your night-before ability.</p>\n\n<p>I'm not saying that every day has to be a grind, but some will. Also there will always be non-productive days or months. You need good bits in between when <em>something you enjoy working on</em> is going well. But it won't work out well going at it the way you think. </p>\n\n<p>Finally - how do you expect to write up on that basis - it's probably the most serious piece of self-motivated work you'll have seen to date.</p>\n\n<p>I'm not saying don't go for it, quite the opposite, do go for it. but only when you've found something you really want to be working on. After all, if all goes well you'll be working on it for a few years afterwards as well.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37366,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Most of the answers so far seem to assume that the OP wants to continue as a researcher after graduating. I think that if the OP is comfortable with getting a teaching post at a low-ranked institution, then a lot of the criticisms do not apply. A professor in such a place might well \"slack\" their way to a comfortable, tenured career by continuing to do a decent but not exceptional set of research and solid teaching.</p>\n\n<p>Those places, however, do tend to pay more attention to one's teaching, both before hiring and on the way to tenure, so that aspect would still need to be quite solid, which might or might not fit with the OP's definition of slack.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37442,
"author": "awsoci",
"author_id": 28324,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28324",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>There are some interesting responses to this question, but I think the most important ones highlight the lack of understanding of what a PhD is about. A PhD isn't going to get you a better job in the long-run, a PhD is about becoming immersed in your research topic and gaining the necessary tools to conduct good research. </p>\n\n<p>You also don't 'study' for a PhD, you research and you write. Unlike undergraduate school where you might get away with hashing out a half-decent paper the night before it's due and get a good grade, that's not going to fly when you try to get your work published, which is one of the major things you'll need to be doing if you want to be a professor. Publications are blind reviewed, usually by other subject experts in the field. They will pick apart everything that your lecturer will skip in your 2nd year essay. </p>\n\n<p>Your success will be dependent on a heap of factors, including your supervisors mentorship and your examination outcome. Common PhD results tend to be Revise and Resubmits or Passes with Major Revisions. </p>\n\n<p>Professors don't just teach, in fact, teaching is a very small component of what they do. You need to advance your research, and while you can potentially get a PhD by slacking (depending on what you perceive as slacking) the work only gets harder when you attempt to advance your career. You won't be offered a cushy professorship upon completion, there are hundreds of PhDs out there who have heaps of publications, grants, conferences etc under their belt and can barely get their foot in the tenure-track door. </p>\n\n<p>You need to critically think about why you want to be a professor, and if you are ready to put the hard work into research, conferences, teaching, seminars, publications and so on, go for it. But if you want a PhD for this rather vague idea of being a professor without a clear understanding of what that actually means, you need to seriously reconsider. </p>\n\n<p>However, a PhD can also give you the training to enter into research in the industry/not-for-profit/government as opposed to academia (but again, this is about research, not teaching). If you want to be a professor to teach and have no interest in research, I would suggest you look into something like a trades/vocation teacher training. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37458,
"author": "Fred the Magic Wonder Dog",
"author_id": 28339,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28339",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>There is a basic misunderstanding in your question. You are thinking of a PhD as similar to a Bachelor's or MS degree. (i.e. a simple badge that you have acquire to \"level up\" in your career.)</p>\n\n<p>It's not. People will actually at least read the abstract of your PhD dissertation and your future career prospects ( in academia at least ) will depend greatly on the perceived quality of the research you do while getting a PhD. The people deciding whether you get any academic position will actually read it and a slacker's PhD is very obvious. </p>\n\n<p>Your PhD research is the equivalent of the \"masterpiece\" required of craftsman in medieval guilds. It shows how well you've learned the guild arts and will be judged to decide if you are really a master or not. If it's not good enough, you may have the sheepskin, but you will never be admitted into the guild (i.e. tenure track). </p>\n\n<p>Even at \"teaching colleges\" the competition for professorship positions is pretty fierce. Computers won't be quite as cut throat as say English Lit, but your chances of getting a tenure track position with a \"slacker's PhD\" are minimal. </p>\n\n<p>I'm quite sure it's possible to get a slacker's PhD, but expecting to get a tenure track position with one is wishful thinking. One the other hand, you could likely get a lecturer's position, but those generally only require a MS degree and are a dead end jobs. Pay is terrible and there are no prospects for career advancement. They do allow lot's of time for slacking between marathon grading sessions though... </p>\n\n<p>Even if you got lucky enough to get a tenure track position, that is only the start of race. You are expected to keep publishing to rise through the ranks to achieve tenure. If you don't publish enough, you'll be asked to leave and make space for somebody that does. It's a lot like grad school, except the teaching load is higher, you have no advisor and all the weak competitors are long gone. But you are getting paid almost as much as an assistant plumber. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37495,
"author": "user3035900",
"author_id": 28278,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28278",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Perhaps being a college professor is different in computer science than in the humanities, but I think that the OP is not very clear on what being a professor involves. Fundamentally it is about doing research and discovering new things. The emphasis on teaching varies by institution but even in places that are heavy on teaching will still expect you to do research. While you don't have to kill yourself to produce acceptable work, you can't slack off completely.</p>\n\n<p>Academia has changed a lot in the past 20 years or so. It's extremely competitive, not very well paid, and tenure track positions are not as numerous as they were. Even badly paid adjunct jobs are hard to get. Try searching the Chronicle of Higher Education for articles about the job market, for example. Having a PhD is absolutely not a guarantee that you will get a job.</p>\n\n<p>Can you slack off and get a PhD? It's certainly possible -- I was a bit of a slacker and I still managed to finish mine. But because I didn't put in enough extra work beyond my actual research project (publishing papers, teaching undergraduates, organizing other professional events, starting a second research project, etc. etc.) there is pretty much no chance that I will ever get an academic job.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37515,
"author": "I Like to Code",
"author_id": 8802,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8802",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>My interpretation of the original poster's question is:\n<em>If I were to do a PhD without putting in much effort into my PhD,\nwould it be possible for me to get a PhD and become a college professor?</em></p>\n\n<h3>Short answer</h3>\n\n<p>Yes, it is possible;\nbut if you work hard,\nit is much more likely that attain a PhD\nand your career goal of becoming a college professor.</p>\n\n<h3>Long answer</h3>\n\n<p>As others have noted,\nit is getting more and more difficult to obtain a job in academia\nbecause there are fewer positions available,\nand more smart people trying to attain those positions.\nUnless you have been gifted with an exceptionally brilliant mind\n(e.g. <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao\" rel=\"nofollow\">Terrence Tao</a>),\n<em>there is no guarantee that you will be able to attain a college professor job\neven if you were to put in your best effort.</em></p>\n\n<p>In view of this situation,\nmy advice to you if you are serious about attaining this job is:\n<strong>Be a conscientous researcher and put in your best effort,\nso that if you still don't attain this job,\nyou aren't going to regret that you didn't try hard enough.</strong></p>\n\n<p><strong>What does \"best effort\" mean?</strong>\nI don't mean that you need to work 90+ hours a week\nand sacrifice your social life\nas well as physical and emotional well-being\non the altar of academic achievement.\nI would argue that being focused and diligent\nand working regular office hours (roughly 9 am to 5 pm)\nshould allow you to achieve >80% of your theoretical maximum output.\nThis may not hold true in certain experimental fields like chemistry\nwhere my friends tell me they work 12 hours a day\nand half day on Sunday.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 145605,
"author": "Wakem",
"author_id": 10739,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10739",
"pm_score": -1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It depends where you work. If you have a lot of original creative thinking you can meet research requirements easily if you don't work for a lab. Labs have routine grunt work that has to get done.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/22
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37341",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28215/"
] |
37,344 |
<p>I ask because I am finishing a paper and need to decide on which journals I'm going to submit it to, and I have never done a paper before.</p>
<p>I know very little about this, but my general sense is that I want to match the interest level of my paper to the renown of the journal (<em>Nature</em> probably doesn't want my lame paper, but I'm also not going to submit it to a fly-by-night journal that's purely for-profit). I have a vague idea of what some high profile journals are, and a few I know to be disreputable, but there's a pretty wide range in between I have no idea about.</p>
<p>I've heard of the concept of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor">Impact Factor</a>, but also heard (as that article mentions) that it's not everything and just a rough guideline. I've also heard favorable things about review journals, namely that they're often understated but can actually be a great place to submit because people often look there for fresh ideas.</p>
<p>Any advice on how to find the journal(s) that best match your paper?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37346,
"author": "Peter Jansson",
"author_id": 4394,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4394",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>A few steps can help. Check your reference list. Where have others writing on similar topics published? you will end up with a list of reasonable journals. The next step can go in one of two ways,, either you chose a high impact journal on the list and take a chance it will be published there or you try to assess where your paper would best fit. The first approach is high risk and if you get rejected you would take the comments and resubmit to a lower impact journal. Trying to figure out an optimal journal directly is not easy and requires experience and insight. You can, for example, ask peers what they think might be a suitable journal and why. Even if you end up with a few differing answers you will be in much better shape. To decide from the final selection might be a matter of flipping coins. You can also look at the editorial staff and see if there is someone among th editors that is very close to your topic. That can be very useful since it is likely that peson will handle your paper and treat it with insight.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37410,
"author": "Kakoli Majumder",
"author_id": 9920,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9920",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Checking your reference list and discussing with your advisor and senior colleagues will definitely help you shortlist a few journals suitable for your study. Once you have this list, try to figure out the best match for your paper in terms of journal scope. Also keep in mind the study design while selecting your journal. Some journals publish only original research articles, while some publish review articles and opinion pieces as well. Go through the \"instructions to authors page\" of the shortlisted journals carefully. Certain journals have clear specifications about the nature of the study. For example, a certain journal might not publish experiments conducted on animals.</p>\n\n<p>Of course, the journal prestige and impact would also play a role in your selection. But I would focus more on finding a journal where my paper fits best with respect to the scope, study design, and author guidelines. Once you select a journal, it is always preferable to send a pre-submission inquiry briefly explaining the scope of your research and asking if the journal would be interested in it. If the editor shows interest, you can submit your paper to the journal. In case the editor is not interested in your study, you definitely end up saving a lot of time, rather than submitting your paper and getting a rejection.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/22
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37344",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13312/"
] |
37,347 |
<p>I am from india. I have a strong desire to pursue Masters in Computer Science in USA. I enjoy academia. However, I am sure that I do not want to pursue a Phd and also not attracted towards an IT Career.</p>
<p>I understand that teaching positions are mostly reserved for full-time Phd holders and is getting increasingly tough. So how difficult it will be, post MS, for an international applicant to secure a full time instructor job? I do not want an adjunct position as I can't survive travelling from university to university. What other degrees/certificates can help tip the scales in my favour?</p>
<p>I have seen certain Master students get a faculty position in the university itself where they completed the course.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37357,
"author": "Anonymous Mathematician",
"author_id": 612,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/612",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<blockquote>\n <p>I understand that teaching positions are mostly reserved for Full time Phd Holders and is getting increasingly tough. So how difficult it will be, post MS, for an international applicant to secure a full time instructor job.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>In the US, community colleges (i.e., two-year colleges) sometimes hire faculty with master's degrees. At four-year colleges and universities, it's basically impossible to get a regular faculty position without a Ph.D. (It might theoretically be possible, but only under extraordinary circumstances, for example a pioneering industrial researcher who never completed a Ph.D.)</p>\n\n<p>So that means you would have to target community colleges. How difficult that would be depends on the circumstances, and it's important not to assume it's easy to get such a job just because the institution is less prestigious. I don't think you'll be able to get a full-time instructor position without some prior teaching experience, since you'll need to demonstrate your teaching abilities.</p>\n\n<p>Being an international applicant shouldn't be a big deal overall (assuming you have authorization to work in the U.S.; see Paul Garrett's comment below), but it may come up in several ways, such as English proficiency. The most annoying may be that teaching experience is other countries is sometimes not taken as seriously. It can be difficult for evaluate for people unfamiliar with the system it took place in, and it may involve students who are very different from typical U.S. college students.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I have seen certain Master students get a faculty position in the uni itself where they completed the course.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I've never seen that happen for a regular faculty position in the U.S. Occasionally, a master's student may be kept around for a while as an adjunct to teach low-level courses nobody else wants to teach, but this is generally not a well-paid or respected position. Someone with truly exceptional teaching skills might be retained long-term in a position with a title like \"senior lecturer with security of employment\" (not a regular faculty member but reasonably paid and without fear of abruptly being fired), but there are not many such positions and they are not easy to get.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>What other degrees/certificates can help tip the scales in my favour?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I don't think any other degree or certificate will play an important role. If you find an opening for which the hiring committee genuinely doesn't care about having a Ph.D., then teaching effectiveness will be the primary criterion. Any evidence of excellent teaching will be helpful, but other degrees or certificates are not generally a compelling form of evidence.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37447,
"author": "Ramrod",
"author_id": 28310,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28310",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You're in luck! International students do it all the time!</p>\n\n<p>First, I recommend ignoring community colleges. You won't be able to successfully pursue your masters there.</p>\n\n<p>Second, how good is your English? It's potentially the largest contributing factor to landing a teaching position. If you haven't already, practice speaking with people outside of India to get a gauge of your proficiency.</p>\n\n<p>Third, find a few large four-year universities that grant master level degrees. Apply, and enqire about employment. What you're looking for is a Graduate Teaching Assistantship (GTA) position. Now, it isn't great pay - it'll cover rent and groceries... typically with a little left over each month. The great deal though is that they usually come with waived tuition in exchange for your working.</p>\n\n<p>So you get paid, reduced (if not free) tuition - and you get to complete a masters!</p>\n\n<p>Source: I'm a masters student that teachers introductory computer science. I'm not Indian - but I work with quite a few!</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/22
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37347",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28218/"
] |
37,368 |
<p>I'm about to finish my master's thesis on a TCS topic (algorithms). I'm quite happy with my results; the most engaging part of the thesis was grappling with getting up to speed on the state of the art, then taking that and developing new and/or more efficient algorithms for the specific model I'm working on. Proving that the algorithms actually work has been very satisfying as well.</p>
<p>However, I'm having a hard time sitting down and TeXing it all; it feels very tedious. I did write out the most important bits very soon after I had them figured out so I could give them to my advisor. Yet for the better part of the past two weeks, every day I considered getting down to it and putting it all together into a presentable thesis, eventually deciding to put it off for another day. As I'm hoping to do a PhD afterwards, I thought I should nip this in the bud so I won't be wasting time like this for too long.</p>
<p>What are effective methods to motivate myself to do what is necessary in research as efficiently as possible so I can focus more on the actually interesting, creative parts?</p>
<p>(I could not figure out how to tag this; feel free to edit tags)</p>
<hr>
<p>There is a number of great answers speaking to organization and extrinsic motivation by now; I was wondering if anyone has had any success in finding/improving their intrinsic motivation with regard to writing? Possibly a change in attitude, maybe a point of view that may not have occurred to me that makes writing appear more useful?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37374,
"author": "Compass",
"author_id": 22013,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22013",
"pm_score": 7,
"selected": true,
"text": "<blockquote>\n<p>tl;dr: Divide and conquer. – aeismail♦</p>\n</blockquote>\n<h3>The Balloon Analogy</h3>\n<p>I used to hate writing with a passion. Trying to squeeze a 5 page paper out of me was like trying to juice a rock.</p>\n<p>Eventually, though, I figured out the root cause for my procrastination.</p>\n<p>The biggest sense of daunting I found when writing a paper is that you start with <em>nothing</em>, and have to end up with a significant <em>something</em>.</p>\n<p>So, let's look at what you have set up. You create a new Word/TeX document, and it's there. <em>Page 1 of 1</em>. A blank page with that <em>blinking cursor</em>.</p>\n<p>Pretty intimidating and most likely the reason why we push it off till tomorrow until it's due next week and then we've wasted forever. This is basically like us trying to inflate a big weather balloon. You do a little work, and it doesn't seem inflated at all.</p>\n<p>I eventually got over this intimidation by reducing the size of the problem to its individual parts. Imagine trying to fill up a dozen individual party balloons with the same amount of air as the weather balloon. Each bit of inflating goes a long way, and a fully inflated mylar balloon is much easier to achieve.</p>\n<h3>Transforming one Big Balloon into a Bunch of Smaller Balloons</h3>\n<p>A strategy that we all learned in K-12 is outlining, which actually helps more now than it did then. Now, it doesn't have to be a formal outline. However, the idea behind the outline is that it can transform into a full-sized paper much more easily than a blank slate, for little actual effort in.</p>\n<p>Stub out each individual section of your paper. If you have a glossary, add that. If you have a bunch of subsections, create them, and add the titles. Don't be afraid to dedicate an entire page to a chapter with no content, if you feel that eventually you will need it.</p>\n<p>For basically 12 or so lines of typing, you've turned a single blank sheet into perhaps 8 or so pages with a rudimentary summary of what you're going to talk about. Filling out a single page or two is much less daunting than that previous 20-page paper we were fretting about before. This dividing and conquering of pages has turned 1 very large paper into 8 relatively easy to populate short papers.</p>\n<h3>Inflating the Balloons</h3>\n<p>After that, pick a section, any section, that you want to write. It doesn't have to be the introduction if you're drawing a blank. That's perfectly normal. I rewrote my introduction all the way to the end of my paper because the rest of the paper was evolving to include additional topics. Some sections needed more meat or could be expanded, others could be shortened or removed.</p>\n<p>Now, type away at the keyboard on the section you've assigned to yourself until you fill it up or have run out of ideas. Wanted to write Chapter 5: Potatoes in Artwork? Go for it! Chapters 1 to 4 can wait until you're sufficiently inspired to do them, or have enough information from Chapter 5 to help give substance to the other chapters.</p>\n<p>When you're done with the small subsection you're working on, you should evaluate whether you feel you can do more. Sometimes, after doing a relatively easy section, I enjoy tackling a somewhat harder piece and getting that out of the way. Other times, I'll need a break, and take one.</p>\n<p>Basically, my strategy is that one shouldn't plan to, or even reasonably expect to, write the paper front to back.</p>\n<p>Breaking the paper into parts, giving them sufficient weight so that you can see the progress as you go, and slowly but steadily inflate and become a full paper.</p>\n<hr />\n<p><strong>Author's Note:</strong> Yeah, for some reason now I write really long posts even when I don't mean to.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37376,
"author": "afaust",
"author_id": 21371,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21371",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I don't like writing either. It feels very clumsy. And it is hard, especially if you haven't done much writing. Sometimes it felt that I learned a lot more about writing during my PhD, than actual subject. </p>\n\n<p>I did find that some sections are easier to write than others. I find that describing results easier than describing the method. And describing the method is easier than writing introduction. So, I work backwards sometimes. </p>\n\n<p>Now, this is a funny thing, I cannot start an introduction of a new paper by just typing in. I found that using good-old paper and pencil, away from the desk, are much more productive in creating the first paragraph or two. Then it starts flowing from there. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37404,
"author": "bobnoble",
"author_id": 28276,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28276",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I have run into similar cases where I had to deliver written evaluations of my team members. I typically knew what each person had accomplished, their strengths and weaknesses, and areas for improvement. I could sit down with them and talk to them 1:1 and give the feedback. However, it needed to be captured in written form.</p>\n\n<p>I tried several approaches to getting the write-ups done, but found unless I physically put myself in an environment that offered no opportunities to do something else I just couldn't get it done.</p>\n\n<p>Using my laptop to draft the write-ups never worked as the laptop itself offers too many ways to get distracted (an email in instant message comes in, playing with formatting in a Word document, browsing the web for correct spelling of a word and then ending up searching for other things).</p>\n\n<p>Two things helped my get the task done:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li><p>Isolate myself from everyone and everything that may interrupt or distract me. A local library in the middle of the day is typically fairly deserted and quiet, and was ideal for me.</p></li>\n<li><p>Hand writing the initial draft with pen and paper. This allowed me to avoid the distractions a computer offers, and I didn't worry about perfect grammar/spelling/sentence structure/formatting/etc getting in the way of being \"creative.\"</p></li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>Once I had the hand-written draft, I was able to work much more mechanically to type up the evaluations.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37405,
"author": "PypeBros",
"author_id": 28280,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28280",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>What is the form you're most comfortable with ? mind maps can be turned into text with less effort than writing text right from the start. Reading out loud powerpoints can be recorded and then written back. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37408,
"author": "Phil",
"author_id": 19988,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19988",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The divide and conquer approach applies to time management and writing location as well as content, in my experience. For instance, when writing up my PhD thesis I found myself rotating between my home office, work office, and the \"coffice\" (starbucks!), usually any two in any given day. I also gave up trying to write in the late afternoon, because I noticed that it always felt like even more of a drag, and rested instead, often having a productive evening session as a result. I probably got about 5-6 productive hours a day with this approach, but I found that to be plenty to make encouraging process day by day. I think that being encouraged by one's progress is an excellent motivator!</p>\n\n<p>So, in addition to all the other good advice here, try changing scenery during the day and think carefully about how you work at various times of day.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37425,
"author": "Szabolcs",
"author_id": 11907,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11907",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>If you often get stuck with writing, you can try two things:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><p>Try <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_writing\" rel=\"noreferrer\">free writing</a>. Forget about your thesis for a moment, and just start writing. It doesn't matter what you write, just keep writing. It doesn't need to produce usable material. It doesn't even have to be on the topic of your thesis, if you feel you just can't do that at the moment. But do keep writing. This helps overcome writer's block for many people.</p>\n<p>When I first heard about this, I considered it very silly, but it turned out to work for me. Very often I end up with a text that turns out to be usable after all, or relatively easy to polish to the required quality. Not having the pressure of having to write <em>good quality</em> material helps me be more efficient.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Sit down with your colleague and explain to him or her what you are going to write before you write it down. This will help you organize your thoughts and write in an easier to understand manner. It also helps eliminate the tedium and get you more excited about your work.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>I'd recommend talking to someone first (2.), then sitting down <em>right away</em> and writing down your thoughts, without the intention to use the text as-is in your thesis (1.).</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37497,
"author": "user3035900",
"author_id": 28278,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28278",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Have you tried the \"<a href=\"http://pomodorotechnique.com/\" rel=\"nofollow\">pomodoro technique</a>\"? It's just a form of what's called time boxing: you set aside a limited amount of time to work on something (in this case, 25 minutes) followed by a short break (5 minutes). You use a timer to tell you when the work and break times are up, and periodically take a break. There are tons of online timers, phone apps, and so on for the actual timing part.</p>\n\n<p>I found all the extra rules and writing down goals and stuff to be too much, but the basic method of telling myself that I only had to work on this for 25 minutes and then I could go do something else was really useful. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37513,
"author": "paul garrett",
"author_id": 980,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Perhaps you need a different mental image/metaphor... If you were on train-tracks, and you could hear a train coming in the distance, you'd move... You'd not linger, as a pedestrian, crossing a busy highway. Now, yes, these comparisons seem to miss the long-term grind aspect of \"writing a thesis\", but they do aptly convey the failure-mode. The \"problem\" is that, happily, many people in grad school have a relatively easy-enough life that day-to-day there's no connection between sweat and food, or sweat and rent-payment, etc. I'd not advocate that people be so stressed that they see every day as a battle to merely survive. However, the (happy!) opposite extreme does seem to subliminally confuse many people, unsurprisingly.</p>\n\n<p>The difficulty of understanding viscerally \"passage-of-time\" might be well suggested by thinking of \"something slipping away\". Sure, at any moment, the change is small... but every moment wasted contributes to a negative situation, etc.</p>\n\n<p>If you're at all competitive, imagine that every moment you're not doing the write-up, your competitors are... or, at least, the best-self-disciplined of them are, and they will be the ones that get the post-docs... (??!!??)</p>\n\n<p>Another tack: \"it's fine to be demotivated, and it merely shows that you're failing a diagnostic test...\" That is, depending on your motivation and worldview, you could castigate yourself by observing that the very failure to write is not merely inconvenient, but is a literal failure of a certain academic-survival(-ist) test. \"The bear ate you.\"</p>\n\n<p>Of course, among other issues, thesis-writing comes at an awkward time of many peoples' lives, among other awkwardnesses that of finding that \"being smart and quick\" is completely insufficient for thesis-writing, for example. A sort of smart-person's trap/disappointment.</p>\n\n<p>And, in the latter context, if \"find motivation in previous terms\" is the goal, I think there is none. Maybe some fakes, but, srsly, at some point things are not so completely \"kid games\" as earlier school might have been for smart, quick people. That is, there is some heavy lifting to be done, and it can't be bluffed-through so easily.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37538,
"author": "Aleksandr Blekh",
"author_id": 12391,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12391",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>A couple of points, which I thought might be helpful (despite being rather obvious as well as you having some great, albeit non-brief, advice in already posted answers and comments):</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>What people in some previous comments and answers called a \"divide and conquer\" strategy or \"the balloon analogy\" strategy, I call an <em>\"extended plan\"</em> or, better, <em>\"extended outline\"</em> approach. IMHO, it's self-explanatory.</li>\n<li>For <em>motivation</em>, you have to feel <strong>excitement</strong> about the <em>topic</em>. If you don't have such or lost it, try to revive the <strong>enthusiasm</strong> for, at least, some <em>aspect</em> of the topic.</li>\n<li>I would recommend you to write <strong>plain text</strong> first for everything (maybe with <em>simple formatting</em>, such as <code>Markdown</code> or similar syntax) and <em>only then</em> convert the content into the <code>LaTeX</code> format.</li>\n</ul>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37548,
"author": "Charles Moeller",
"author_id": 28409,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28409",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>A small percent of the overall effort is the creation, say 5%. \nThe bulk of the effort, perhaps 95%, is what it takes to adequately describe the work so others can understand. \nThe 95% is our payment for the joy of creation and for the privilege of doing it again and again. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37575,
"author": "Ken",
"author_id": 28428,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28428",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Intrinsic motivation to write up your results can very well be a hard thing, especially if you're distracted with further consequences of your work. Here are a couple of ideas:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Further consequences of your work will likely be addressed once you start your doctoral studies, possibly leading to good papers, so it might be a good idea to postpone working on them until then.</li>\n<li>Try to imagine teaching others what you've done using techniques you find the easiest (conversations, slides, blackboard banter, whatever). Did you like the feeling of them learning about your work? Use that feeling as a spark. (If you didn't like them learning about it, we might have pinpointed the problem.)</li>\n<li>Try to imagine you following your own work years later. You'll know the high points, sure, put perhaps some details will get fuzzy or the reasoning for certain choices you made may be unclear. Save your future self frustration and get it all down while it's still fresh in your mind. (Like commenting code you know you'll need to revisit later.)</li>\n<li>Sometimes the act of documenting helps you discover problems with your approach (okay, not the most desirable outcome, but better to find them now rather than later), as well as give you ideas for other directions you haven't yet considered.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Good luck!</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/22
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37368",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5943/"
] |
37,370 |
<p>After I had published my paper, some people asked me to share the software that I developed. At first, I was very happy that my paper attracted some attention, and I was happy to share not only the binary but also the source code, case studies etc. But looking at my software, I feel very embarrassed. </p>
<p>My software is just horrible: the source code is just a mess, containing several of my unsuccessful attempts; I have never used design patterns, so duplicate code is everywhere; for simplicity and quick implementation, I often prefer recursions to loops etc etc.</p>
<p>I'm always under pressure to produce new results, and cleaning those code would cost me significant effort. </p>
<p>My question is if sharing this horrible software will give people a very negative impression of me? Would it do harm to my career if the people I share are prospect collaborators, employers, as they work in the same field.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37372,
"author": "Ian",
"author_id": 22000,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22000",
"pm_score": 9,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>Yes, you should.</p>\n\n<p>First, most scientific software is terrible. I'd be very surprised if yours is worse than average: the mere fact you know design patterns and the difference between recursion and loops suggests it's better.</p>\n\n<p>Second, it's unlikely you'll have the incentive or motivation to make it better unless, or until, it's needed by someone else (or you in 6 months). Making it open gives you that incentive.</p>\n\n<p>Potential upsides: possible new collaborators, bugfixes, extensions, publications.</p>\n\n<p>Potential downsides: timesink (maintaining code or fixing problems for other people), getting scooped. I'll be clear: I don't take either of these downsides very seriously.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37373,
"author": "Blair MacIntyre",
"author_id": 28128,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28128",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I would clean it up a little and share it. I've released a lot of code over the years, and also not released code for the reasons you give.</p>\n\n<p>Go through it and and comment it, at whatever level you can. Leave in \"failed attempts\" and comment them as such. Say why they failed, and what you tried. This is VERY useful info for people coming after you.</p>\n\n<p>Make a README file that says you are releasing it on request in the hope it helps someone. Say that you know the code is ugly, but you hope it's useful anyway.</p>\n\n<p>Far too many people hold things back because it isn't perfect!</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37377,
"author": "jamesqf",
"author_id": 27365,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27365",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Yes! Especially if your paper is e.g. about a new/improved algorithm that you've implemented, or you do significant non-standard data analysis, or basically anything where reproducing your results means re-implementing your software.</p>\n\n<p>Papers seldom have room to give more than an outline. I know I've spent (= wasted) much too much time trying to implement algorithms from papers that left out critical (but not strictly relevant to the paper) details.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37395,
"author": "David1199",
"author_id": 28261,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28261",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I think you should share it. First of all you should do some basic clean up. (e.g.: no earlier code which is not used anymore; no code in comment; valid way of commenting and so on) Moreover if you put some \"to do\" in the code others can see that you were out of time and they can see your intentions. (e.g.: todo: this should be changed to enum) I also think you should share the most important part of your algorithms. When I share a code I have never share unimportant parts. Everyone can handle reading/writing of files, communication between threads, gui and so on. But don't share unreadable code. It would make no sense. So I think the middle way is the best as many times. :-) </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37397,
"author": "Davidmh",
"author_id": 12587,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12587",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>¿You think your code is messy? I have seen (and attempted to work with) code that gave me nightmares:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Five levels of <code>if True</code> nested, scattered at random places through the code.</li>\n<li>Create an array of zeroes, convert it to degrees, take the cosine, and back to radians. Then, throw away the result.</li>\n<li>On a software under heavy development, the list of \"supported architectures\" is so ancient (and they do say themselves) it would difficult to get your hands on one of these computer nowadays.</li>\n<li>Features broken or modified several versions ago, still recommended in the docs.</li>\n<li>Code that goes from using a standard format input to some format of their own. How to generate it? No one really knows, and the developers handwave a response.</li>\n<li>Releases that don't even compile. (Did you even test it?)</li>\n<li>GUI menus that you have to access in a specific order. Otherwise, you get a segmentation fault and have to start from the beginning.</li>\n<li>Hard-coded paths scattered through the code. So you have to shift through several files finding and changing all the occurences of <code>/home/someguy/absurd_project/working/</code> to yours.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>And, my personal favourite, a certain program of thousands of lines of code, only used comments to eliminate random bits of code, except for one:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Here we punch the cards.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Still, no idea what it was doing.</p>\n\n<p>And this is only leaving outside the classical good practice stuff, like one-letter variables all over the code, algorithms not specified anywhere...</p>\n\n<p>If you are concerned about the quality of your code, it probably means you care enough to have made it better than the average. If you wait until the code is clean, it may never get out, and your scientific contributions will be partially lost.</p>\n\n<p>In my opinion, the important things that you should care about, in order, are:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Input and output formats. Use standards when available, make it simple when not. Make using your program as a black box easy.</li>\n<li>Commented. Brief descriptions of the functions, quick overview of the algorithm.</li>\n<li>Legibility. Using idiomatic code, good variable names...</li>\n<li>Structure. This is easier when you know what you want to do, that is usually not the case in research code. Only if there is interest in the community, you may consider refactoring it.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>So, release your software whenever you have 1 (2 and part of 3 should come in as you are writing it). </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37463,
"author": "Zuberi",
"author_id": 28345,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28345",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You should definitely share your code.</p>\n\n<p>For sorting things, make regions of the same parts of code like make a region of a failed attempt, and explain why it failed. Also, if you develop in Visual Studio, install the “CodeMaid” extension from Extension Manager and clean your complete solution. It will remove spaces and also remove unused references making most of the things look better.</p>\n\n<p>If you develop in C# then share your code with me. I can also help you with sorting things out :)</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37482,
"author": "lovelyzlf",
"author_id": 27111,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27111",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You may just push it to <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub\" rel=\"nofollow\">GitHub</a> and try to maintain a project in case other people who are interested about your project can access your code easily and maybe they can help to improve your code.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37484,
"author": "King",
"author_id": 28366,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28366",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Of course. The only way you are going to get better at writing good software is to get feedback (all types). If you're afraid of feedback then you won't really get very far. The three basics to writing great software are practice, practice, and practice.</p>\n\n<p>Now on as to the question of whether it would harm your career if people found out that your software writing skills aren't top notch. I think that no, on the contrary, they would respect you for your academic integrity. And would look forward to collaborating with you.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37491,
"author": "Dima Pasechnik",
"author_id": 27469,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27469",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Of course you should share the source code. </p>\n\n<p>Academically speaking, a software-based result using code that is not readily available is not very valuable, as how would other people be able to verify your claims, if needed? Do you expect them to program on their own for this purpose?\nSharing binaries only is much less valuable, and often leads to nightmares for people trying to run them.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37524,
"author": "user28382",
"author_id": 28382,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28382",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Yes, you should. After all, the Linux kernel source code is quite a mess and that haven't prevented many professional developers from studying it and contributing patches and additions to it. Remember also that the Linux kernel is the base of the operating system that runs the fastest and most powerful supercomputers and most devices in the world.\nP.D: Linus Torvalds, the guy who invented the Linux kernel have a very profitable and successful career which have not been affected negatively or harmed in any way by the fact that the Linux kernel source code is messy.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37535,
"author": "dotancohen",
"author_id": 23951,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/23951",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Tangentially related, I will addresses <strong>how</strong> to share the software given your concerns (not <strong>should</strong> you share the software which you already have an answer for).</p>\n\n<p><strong>Putting the failed attempts in version control effectively means that nobody will ever see them.</strong> The way I handle this is to put each attempt in a method, and each failed attempt in a separate method:</p>\n\n<pre><code>def main():\n get_foobar(x, y)\n\n\ndef get_foobar():\n return x**y\n\n\ndef get_foobar_legacy_1():\n \"\"\"\n This attempt did not work for values > 100\n \"\"\"\n return x + y\n\n\ndef get_foobar_legacy_2():\n \"\"\"\n This attempt did not work on Wednesdays in September\n \"\"\"\n return x - y\n</code></pre>\n\n<p><strong>As per the comments below, it may be a good idea to put these methods in a separate FailedAttempts or BadIdeas class.</strong> This has the nice effect of compartmentalizing the various stages for the process as per actual need. I find that computer <em>programmers</em> often have a knack for when to break logic off into a method and when not to, but computer <em>scientists</em> often do not. This approach helps the computer scientists break off into a method when necessary.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37539,
"author": "CaptainCodeman",
"author_id": 15541,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15541",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Share it if you want to, don't share it if you don't want to. I know this sounds snarky but I think there is too much pressure nowadays to \"share everything\" and people will try to make you guilty for not sharing, but really you have no obligation to share anything.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37558,
"author": "J.R.",
"author_id": 780,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/780",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Talk to some of the professors in your computer science department. See if any of them are looking for a project where students can clean up messy code to make it more presentable. </p>\n\n<p>For the students who revise the code, this can be a good learning experience. What happens when coders program with a results-first mindset – or results <em>only</em> mindset? They get to see that first hand. They also get to apply some of those best practices they've been learning about. And they might be motivated to do an especially good job knowing that other professionals are already interested in seeing the code. </p>\n\n<p>A professor might even make this into a contest, where teams of students all take a crack at revising the software, and the best result is shared with the rest of the world.</p>\n\n<p>If their refactoring efforts flop, you're no further behind than you were. If that's the case, disclaimers are a wonderful thing. Simply share the code, but add a caveat: \"It isn't pretty. When I wrote this, I was trying to get my research done – I wasn't thinking it would ever go outside my computer lab. But you're welcome to take a look if you really want to.\"</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37581,
"author": "Toxaris",
"author_id": 7946,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7946",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You're asking whether sharing low-quality software would give a bad impression of you. I think that sharing software at all gives a good impression.</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li><p>As a computer scientist, I like when colleagues make their source code available. It makes me more likely to look deeper into their work, maybe contact them, maybe cite them, because there is one more artifact to interact with (not just the paper, but also the code).</p></li>\n<li><p>When a paper reports a result that is \"proven\" by source code, but the source code is not public, I'm often wondering whether the result is real. Looking at the source code (or just the availability of the source code, without ever looking at it) can convince me.</p></li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>So sharing your source code, horrible or not, would always give me a good impression of you.</p>\n\n<p>Now, if you want to impress even more, it would help ...</p>\n\n<p>... if you react to issues or pull requests on a site like github, that is, when I see that others try to contact you and you react.</p>\n\n<p>... if your code contains a readme file which relates the claims from your paper to the source code. This way, when I read the paper and want to know more, I can use the readme to jump to the appropriate place in the code. Typical phrases from such a readme could be: \"The algorithm from Sec. 3.2 of the paper is in file algorithm/newversion/related/secondtry/foo.c\" or \"To repeat the run with the small dataset described in Sec. 2 of the paper, run \"make; make second_step; foo_bar_2 datasets/christmas.dataset. This run takes about 2 days on my laptop\".</p>\n\n<p>You might also be interested in Matthew Might's CRAPL (Community Research and Academic Programming License), available on <a href=\"http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/\">http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/</a>. It contains this term: \"You agree to hold the Author free from shame, embarrassment or ridicule for any hacks, kludges or leaps of faith found within the Program\". It is not clear to me whether this \"license\" has any legal effect, but the intent is clear: Release your ugly code, and don't think bad of the ugly code of others.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37587,
"author": "jwg",
"author_id": 5824,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5824",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>A reason that no one has mentioned why you should share your code is that you might find someone who is interested in collaborating with you, but who is prepared to spend more time cleaning up the code and making it work on different systems, etc. than on doing the innovative development that you have done.</p>\n\n<p>Lots of people find this kind of work very satisfying and if your code is genuinely useful to them they might be happy to do it. In any case, you might find that getting feedback from people who have tried to use it, but need some kind of help, is a good motivation for you to make it more maintainable/easier to use and understand.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 38704,
"author": "user168715",
"author_id": 5596,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5596",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Put up a disclaimer that the code is provided \"as is\" with no promises of support, etc. And then share the code.</p>\n\n<p>Case study: Turning a cloud of isolated points into a watertight surface is an extremely important practical problem, used everywhere from robotics to computer vision to processing data from 3D sensors like the Microsoft Kinect.</p>\n\n<p>Poisson surface reconstruction is 7 years old and has long stopped being the state of the art for solving this problem. But everybody still uses it to this day. Why? Because the author <a href=\"http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/hoppe/proj/poissonrecon/\" rel=\"nofollow\">released the code</a> and it has since been incorporated into a bunch of popular geometry processing libraries. The paper now has over a thousand citations.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 42749,
"author": "erwin",
"author_id": 31805,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/31805",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Yes. You should release your code, probably under the CRAPL license. The goal is to build a better future - and your lousy code will help people do that. A caveat is that you should document how to successfully operate the code well enough for someone to have a decent chance of reproducing any published results.</p>\n\n<p>And, don't worry - one bit of research code I worked on had been developed by 5 postdocs of indifferent programming ability for a series of projects over the course of about 8 years.</p>\n\n<p>The list of global variables (just the names) was roughly 4 pages.</p>\n\n<p>Roughly one third of them were used to set default behavior to change the functionality that functioned at a given moment. Another 20% were parallel data structures - meaning that they stored approximately the same data - and therefore functions in the code pulled from the data structures more or less at random. Yes. They were sometimes out of sync. And sometimes needed to be out of sync.</p>\n\n<p>There were roughly 50 undocumented versions, stored in random portions of the group's server - each of which served at least one specific purpose - and only one admin kept those specific purposes in his head. It was more common than not to have people using the 'wrong' version for a given purpose.</p>\n\n<p>The use of incredibly complex recursive procedures to, eg, write a file, was standard. Seriously - a few thousand lines to save image results.</p>\n\n<p>Oh, and the remains of a butchered attempt to solve a memory leak (actually an invisible figure) by never creating a new variable.</p>\n\n<p>Oh, and the database, that lovely database. About half of the data was unusable owing to (a) database design errors (b) data entry errors (in automatic programs). The code to retrieve files from the database was several hundred lines of logic long... The database itself was also kind enough to contain many copies of the same data, much with broken links between tables. Constraints? No. I watched a statistician proceed from disquiet to fear to tears to quitting within a month of being entrusted with the database...</p>\n\n<p>There were somewhere between 0 and 1 ways to operate the software and retrieve correct results at any given instant...</p>\n\n<p>And yes, there were gotos.</p>\n\n<p>Oh, and in an effort to ensure opaque and nondeterministic operation, a series of computations was performed by calling GUI buttons with associated callbacks.</p>\n\n<p>Approximately 90% of any given function was, quite reliably, not relevant to the result or to debugging of the result - being composed, rather, of short-term projects inserted and then never removed. Seriously - I wrote a feature complete version that actually worked that was 1/10th the size... Significant fractions were copy-pasted inserted functions, many of which differed from each other.</p>\n\n<p>And, no Virginia, there is no documentation. Or descriptive variable names.</p>\n\n<p>Oh, and the undocumented, buggy, dlls and associated libraries - generated using code that no longer existed.</p>\n\n<p>All written in Matlab. In terms of Matlab coding practices, assume that copious use of eval would be the highlight of your day.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Seriously, your code isn't so bad.</strong></p>\n\n<p>That said, if you've done something actually useful, it might be career-enhancing to release a cleaned-up version so that other people will use and cite your library. If you've just done something, then reproduction is probably as far as you'd be well-advised to go.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 42806,
"author": "O. R. Mapper",
"author_id": 14017,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14017",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Lots of points in favour of publishing the code have been named in the other answers, and I completely agree with them. Hence, as the basic desirability of publishing the code has been discussed, I would like to supplement this with a checklist of further points that need to be considered. Many of these issues probably appear in virtually all academic software, so even if you cannot respond \"This does not apply to <em>my</em> project.\" to all of them, you should at least be able to respond \"This is a concern, but we can deal with this issue by ...\" before publishing your code:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Are you allowed to publish the code?</strong>\n\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Can you guarantee you only used code fragments that you are allowed to redistribute?</strong> Or did you possibly use code from non-open sources that you may use for your own internal software, but that you are not allowed to publish? Can you guarantee all the code that you used is allowed to be published in one complete package? License compatibility is a non-trivial issue.</li>\n<li><strong>Can you even reliably find out?</strong> Did you outsource any parts of your coding work, or integrate unpublished code from elsewhere? For instance, did you supervise any students during their graduation theses or employ any student research assistants, whose work was based upon your research and thus their code was added to your codebase? Did any co-workers contribute code to your codebase? Did they get some of their code from students? Did all of these people involved properly pay attention to licensing issues (if at all they had the knowledge to make an educated judgement about these licensing questions)? Can it even still be determined where which parts of the code originated? Do the people who contributed each part still know? Are they even still \"within contact range\" for you?</li>\n<li><strong>Was the code developed during working time based on third-party funds? If so, do the funding contract terms allow to publish the code</strong>, or do they include any requirements that software created within the funded project must be shared exclusively with the project partners?</li>\n</ul></li>\n<li><strong>Do you have sufficient resources (time and otherwise) to spend the effort to clean up the code and its comments</strong> in a way that it is still meaningful, but does not provide any information that must not become public?\n\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Do you have any comments giving away who worked on the code?</strong> Were the people who contributed code officially allowed to work on the respective research, as per their funding? (Software developers are well aware that teamwork and reuse of components are core aspects of software development. Funding agencies, unfortunately, are typically very unaware of this and assume that if developer A is funded from project X and developer B is funded from project Y, A works exclusively on X and B works exclusively on Y, and revealing that, w.l.o.g., A spent only half an hour doing something that ended up in project Y could lead to severe consequences, such as reclaiming parts of the funding.)</li>\n<li><strong>Does anything in the published data give away any information about the particularities of how the work was done that must not become public?</strong> This is especially important if the whole commit history in a VCS is going to become public (or, practically, means that the commit history should never be published), but may also play a role in other situations. For example: Was any work on the code done outside of the officially assigned working times (e.g. during weekends)? Do working times give away that you worked more than the legal limit of your country for working hours per day? Do working times give away that you did not adhere to legally required breaks? Do working times give away that people assigned to other projects made contributions? Do working times provide any reason to distrust any of the statements you made otherwise about your working times (e.g. in project success reports that required a detailed assignment of working times to pre-defined work packages with certain maximum allotments)? Does anything give away that you worked in situations where you should not have been working (e.g. during a project meeting)? Does anything give away that you worked in locations where you should not have worked (e.g. from home, when your contract does not allow you to do home office, e.g. for insurance-related complications)?</li>\n<li><strong>Is there any secret information in the code</strong>, such as passwords, user account names, or URLs that must not be publicly known (because the servers are not laid out to handle larger amounts of users beyond a small number of select people who were given the URL for the test setup personally)?</li>\n</ul></li>\n<li><strong>Is the code usable by anyone else?</strong>\n\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Will the code run</strong>, or does it require extensive configuration efforts? Can you spend the effort required to explain what configuration is necessary?</li>\n<li><strong>Can the code be compiled?</strong> Have you used any unofficial modified or custom-built compilers that are not publicly accessible? If so, does the code add anything beyond what may already be provided as a pseudo-code algorithm in your papers?</li>\n<li><strong>Does the code require any external resources?</strong> Will the code only be useful if it can access servers, libraries, or datasets that you cannot publish along with the code for one reason or another? Can at least a description of these resources be provided, or are their interfaces subject to some kind of an NDA?</li>\n<li><strong>Does the code make any irreversible changes to systems it runs on?</strong> For example, does it automatically change any system configuration (such as overwriting the system search path)? Does it perform any low-level access to hardware components that could, in certain constellations (that you internally avoid in your test setups) cause permanent damage to any components? Can you reliably warn users of the code of such possible unwanted side-effects?</li>\n</ul></li>\n</ul>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/22
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37370",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15501/"
] |
37,380 |
<p>I have seen the work of previous and current students and I have done a lot more than them, and my dissertations is about 60% written already, however, my adviser seems to not be comfortable with the idea of me graduating in May (Is January now). I have asked him several times up front and he keeps evading the topic and goes around it and never confirms it. He is always on travel and is not even at my same institution anymore, so that makes things worse. I have a job lined up and he knows about it, but he seems to be holding me back. I have talked to fellow students and they feel he is being unfair to me. What should I do?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37381,
"author": "Corvus",
"author_id": 27900,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27900",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Most departments have a faculty member who serves as the director of graduate studies. Talk to this person about the situation. He or she will have much more contextual information than any of us here, and it is this person's job to resolve such conflicts between students and advisors. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37382,
"author": "mkennedy",
"author_id": 5711,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5711",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You need to check on deadlines for your university. </p>\n\n<p>With a May graduation date, you may have to apply to graduate within the next few weeks, and your defense may have to occur a month or more before graduation. Your committee will have to read your dissertation, you'll have to revise it, and resubmit, etc. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/22
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37380",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28244/"
] |
37,383 |
<p>I currently have applications into several top tier education programs. I am a bit worried about my chances. I have about 7 years working in education, a unrelated masters and a masters in education. My GPA in undergraduate was a 3.8 and in graduate school a 3.9 from a top 25 university. I did well on the GRE verbal but poorly on GRE math. </p>
<p>Does anyone have any insight as to what they are looking for and what my chances are? I read in another post to look for brutal honesty, so bring it on.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37381,
"author": "Corvus",
"author_id": 27900,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27900",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Most departments have a faculty member who serves as the director of graduate studies. Talk to this person about the situation. He or she will have much more contextual information than any of us here, and it is this person's job to resolve such conflicts between students and advisors. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37382,
"author": "mkennedy",
"author_id": 5711,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/5711",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You need to check on deadlines for your university. </p>\n\n<p>With a May graduation date, you may have to apply to graduate within the next few weeks, and your defense may have to occur a month or more before graduation. Your committee will have to read your dissertation, you'll have to revise it, and resubmit, etc. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/23
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37383",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28251/"
] |
37,384 |
<p>I have some idea of how well I'm doing with my research in PhD, but maybe it differs from what my advisor thinks. Is it okay to ask (e.g. at the end of a meeting) how well I'm doing with my research? Can I say "Oh, by the way, how am I doing with my research?"</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37385,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>Yes, this is a fine question to ask, although I might phrase is slightly differently:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>\"How happy are you with the progress that I am making?\"</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>which makes it a little more open-ended and focuses the question more on process and progress.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37412,
"author": "Kakoli Majumder",
"author_id": 9920,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/9920",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I think it's fine to ask this question. It's perfectly reasonable to be interested in getting feedback from your advisor. Most advisors should be okay with this kind of question as it shows a high level of interest and willingness to improve. However, I agree that you could frame your question differently. You could ask if your advisor has any feedback on your progress or if there are any areas where you need to put in more effort.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 59353,
"author": "Sarlo",
"author_id": 45391,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/45391",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I would also agree that it's fine (even good) to ask this question, but I would suggest not throwing it out at the end of the meeting, which may lead your advisor to just give a perfunctory response - for example saying that everything is fine even if s/he has concerns because they have another meeting about to start... </p>\n\n<p>Instead it might be better to bring it up at the beginning of the meeting or even before the meeting in an email, which would allow your advisor to give you a more considered (and hopefully useful) response. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 59365,
"author": "paul garrett",
"author_id": 980,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>First, I think it is very easy for PhD students to err wildly (from the viewpoint of the advisor and/or more senior professionals) in all possible directions in their self-appraisal, if for no other reason than having no perspective or prior experience (and friends and peers in similar no-perspective/experience situations).</p>\n\n<p>And, then, answers to the question may vary enormously depending on the precise wording. E.g., \"Are you happy with my progress?\" might tend to invite reassurance rather than critique. I think it is misguided to ask \"Should I be working harder?\", since in too many cases over-the-top \"effort\" ends up being seriously misdirected and only serves to exhaust you. Perhaps \"How would you appraise my progress thus far?\" if you really want some constructive criticism (and asked at the beginning of your meeting, rather than end).</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/23
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37384",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28245/"
] |
37,386 |
<p>Now I'm in a community college and I am trying to gathering recommendation letter to apply to graduate school.(I have already got my bachelor degree). I performed well in calculus and got an A in that course. After i got my grade, I wrote a thankful email to my professor and he replied me that I am the top student in his course. I thought he is nice. Therefore I asked him whether he can write me a recommendation letter to me by e-mail but there is no-reply. I considered if he didn't see my email, so I went to his office and wanted to see him in his office hour. His office hour was posted on the wall and on the schedule he said if anyone want to see him please notice him ahead of time. So I e-mail him again to ask for an appointment. Here is the content:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Dear Prof XXX:
It's XXX, a student who finished your calculus 1 last semester. I went to you office yesterday and record your office hour on the wall. Would it be possible to meet with you next Monday 11 am (office hour) about whether you can help me write an recommendation letter?</p>
<p>Regards</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He didn't reply me. I almost lost my confidence. I don't know whether I need to go to his office directly. I am afraid it's impolite or disrespect. And I don't know if he don't want to do it, why he praise me in the first thankful note?</p>
<p>Hope anyone can help me.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37387,
"author": "Nobody",
"author_id": 546,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Your e-mail looks okay as an appointment mail. There are a few possibilities. The professor may be busy with some important things he has to do. He may be on vacation, not available. Please don't lose your confidence yet. You probably should wait a few more days for him to reply. </p>\n\n<p>It is also possible that he didn't think an A in Calculus I is good enough for him to write a recommendation letter for you. He may want to wait until you get another A for Calculus II and then write a good recommendation letter.</p>\n\n<p>However, depending on which field you are going to study in graduate school, the professor who taught you Calculus I may not be a good candidate to write you recommendation letters.</p>\n\n<p>You already have Bachelors degree. I think the recommendation letters written by the professors in the university where you graduated from, who had more working experience with you would be more helpful for your graduate school application.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37406,
"author": "paul garrett",
"author_id": 980,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"pm_score": -1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Honestly, it seems unlikely to me that any level of performance in calculus could be relevant to <em>any</em> graduate school admission process or prediction of success/failure. For mathematics or engineering or science, it's too elementary, by far. For non-mathematical things, it's simply irrelevant. In either case, the intellectual context of \"calculus\" is almost always too rudimentary, uncritical (whether or not there are epsilons and deltas). That is, at most, its intellectual context is that for students just beginning college, most likely disinterested in the subject, and most likely not really needing the content, either. And large numbers of students take such a course.</p>\n\n<p>Thus, even a top grade in first-year calculus is not really a distinction in the first place, and is certainly not a good basis for letters of recommendation for grad school.</p>\n\n<p>In fact, to <em>have</em> such a letter might be viewed as an indicator that you do not understand what the grad programs involve.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/23
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37386",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28255/"
] |
37,389 |
<p>By "gender preferential treatment" I mean: Person A is selected ahead of Person B partly because of gender. In other words, Person B would have been selected ahead of Person A had gender not been taken into account.</p>
<p>By "deliberate" I mean: as a matter of policy at the department or university or state or national level, or at the discretion of the committee that makes the decision. This does <strong>not</strong> include unintentional bias, which might occur as part of human nature.</p>
<p>By <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEM_fields">"STEM fields"</a> I mean: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.</p>
<p>I'm interested in four stages.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Graduate school admission</p></li>
<li><p>Postdoc hiring</p></li>
<li><p>Professor hiring</p></li>
<li><p>Tenure or promotion decision</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Answers can be about any country. But please keep in mind that the question is <strong>not</strong> about why deliberate gender preferential treatment is a good or a bad idea. It is about what happens <strong>in reality</strong>.</p>
<p>Answers should be supported by either references to publicly available policies, research, or firsthand personal experience (e.g. on hiring committees).</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37390,
"author": "Nobody",
"author_id": 546,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I can only provide answer about Graduate school admission.</p>\n\n<p>In the countries where graduate school admission is based on written exams and the student names on the exam papers are sealed when grading, the gender preferential treatment is next to impossible.</p>\n\n<p>In Taiwan, where I live, this was the case a few decades ago. However, the sytem has been changed to include written exams, oral exams and recommendation letters in some cases, no one knows how much bias is there. As far as I know, there are more female scientists than in the past. I will find some hard data if there is some available in English and update my answer here.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37394,
"author": "Anonymous Mathematician",
"author_id": 612,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/612",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It's rather subtle trying to decide what counts as gender preferential treatment. For example, suppose the hiring committee decides to interview Bob, Carl, and Dave. As a sanity check, someone goes through the applications from women to see whether anyone was overlooked, and they are impressed by Alice's application. There's some debate about whether she looks quite as strong on paper as the other three, but the department decides to interview her as well. Alice is extraordinarily impressive in person, and once all the interviews are complete and the department has learned more about her work, she is the unanimous first choice. Does this count as preferential treatment? A male applicant might not have been rescued from being overlooked the way Alice was, but he might have been less likely to be overlooked in the first place, so it's difficult to give an objective answer (it depends on which counterfactual scenario you imagine). Gender was not relevant for the decision once all the information was gathered, but deliberate steps were taken based on gender to minimize the potential for bias in the process.</p>\n\n<p>In my experience with mathematics in the U.S., these sorts of steps are pretty common. In the committees I've served on (for both admissions and hiring), people have often gone out of their way to try to identify diverse sorts of candidates and make sure they are not overlooked or disadvantaged. Not everyone participates eagerly in this, but some do it out of conviction that it's intrinsically worthwhile, while others play along to keep the administration from complaining. On the other hand, I've never seen this process extend to advantages in the final decision. In particular, I haven't seen a case in which Alice was hired or admitted instead of Bob just because she was female, although the committee was more impressed by Bob than Alice otherwise.</p>\n\n<p>Tie breakers are the closest I've seen to an explicit preference. In graduate admissions many decisions are easy, but there's always a (small) group of comparable candidates right near the borderline for admission, where nobody can give a compelling argument for why one is superior to another. Within that group, being female could prove an advantage: if Alice and Bob are equally strong candidates in other ways, but Alice would help bring gender balance to the department and Bob would not, then that's a good reason to admit Alice. This doesn't generally arise in hiring, since few enough people are hired that there are many strong opinions and the hiring committee is unlikely to decide two candidates are truly tied. However, it can happen in admissions, which is a lower-stakes process carried out on a larger scale and with less information. I'm mainly mentioning it for completeness, since few applicants are actually close enough to the cut-off for this to matter.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37399,
"author": "Raphael",
"author_id": 1419,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/1419",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>In Germany, women are in some instances preferred over men for professor positions, to the point of excluding male applicants at all.</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li><p>There are scholarships and other forms of funding specifically (and \nexclusively) geared towards women (at all levels). A prominent example is\n<a href=\"http://www.bmbf.de/press/3408.php\">special funding for female professors by BMBF</a>:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>[Secretary of Education Schavan:]\n \"There are not enough female professors, most university teachers\n are men. [...] 260 new positions have been established [between 2008 and 2012]\n thanks to the Female Professors Program and have been staffed with women. \n This is a success - but not nearly enough. Therefore we have\n initiated a second round.\"</p>\n \n <p>[...] </p>\n \n <p>Up to three [female] professor positions per university [are\n possible]. [We make] an additional 150 million Euros available \n for this purpose until 2017.<br>\n <sub>Best-effort translation by myself from the German original.</sub></p>\n</blockquote></li>\n<li><p>There are professor positions offered only to women¹.</p>\n\n<p>For one thing, there are \"additional\" positions like those mentioned above\nor e.g. at FU Berlin\n(<a href=\"http://www.fu-berlin.de/sites/frauenbeauftragte/foerdern/programme/w1/index.html\">1</a>, <a href=\"http://www.fu-berlin.de/sites/frauenbeauftragte/foerdern/programme/w2/index.html\">2</a>). </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>[Departments] could apply for being assigned [such a position]. [...]\n [The applicants] must bring forward proof of at least one highly\n qualified female applicant.²<br>\n <sub>Best-effort translation by myself from the German original.</sub></p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This is probably an effect of additional funds for women being available (cf 1).</p>\n\n<p>But also regular positions can be designated for women only, see e.g. these\n<a href=\"https://www.htw-berlin.de/fileadmin/HTW/Zentral/DE/HTW/Akademische_Selbstverwaltung/AS/Protokolle/2004/144_260104.pdf\">commission minutes</a>\nfrom FHTW Berlin (page 8):</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>One of the two professor positions will be tendered twice as\n women-only position.</p>\n \n <p>The [Academic Senate of the FHTW Berlin] passes the motion \n [with 9 yes, 0 no, 4 abstention].<br>\n <sub>Best-effort translation by myself from the German original.</sub></p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Official statements regarding systemic discrimination (of men) are hard to \ncome by (even if it is effectively encouraged/enforced by policy at times). \nSee some press on one case <a href=\"http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/berliner-mathematik-professur-maennerdiskriminierung-an-der-humboldt-universitaet-13006311.html\">here</a> and <a href=\"http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/jobundberuf/verdacht-der-diskriminierung-frauen-an-der-hu-berlin-bevorzugt-a-972145.html\">here</a>.</p></li>\n<li><p>There are support structures available only to women, such as the concept\nof <a href=\"https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frauenbeauftragte\">Frauenbeauftragte</a>\n(Am. <em>women's affairs officer</em>) \n(who have special roles and privileges) and often have funds spent on e.g. \ntraining seminars only open for women (which is not always enforced).</p></li>\n</ol>\n\n<hr>\n\n<ol>\n<li><p>You hear stories, but there will often be no paper trail as these things\ncan and tend to be decided behind the curtains. The way\nhiring of professors works in Germany, if the commission wants phenotype X,\nthey can get it (if they play their cards right). In the gender question, \nthis may be a result of a) policy makers demanding more female professors \n(by way of blocking any other choice) and b) the funding situation (cf 1),\nesp. in the light of decreasing funding across the board.). </p></li>\n<li><p>They then say, \"after the position has been assigned to the department,\na regular hiring process ensues\". I'm not clear if that means male applicants\nare admitted, or if only the process itself is a regular one.</p></li>\n</ol>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 69385,
"author": "Doug Spoonwood",
"author_id": 7158,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7158",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The University of Melbourne has instituted the sex of the applicant as a requirement for <a href=\"http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/may/19/university-of-melbourne-mathematics-school-advertises-women-only-positions\" rel=\"noreferrer\">some positions</a>.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 94084,
"author": "John Slegers",
"author_id": 37939,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/37939",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>On February 2017 Trump signed laws <a href=\"https://www.cnet.com/news/trump-women-in-stem-tech-laws/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">designed with the purpose of promoting women in STEM</a>.</p>\n\n<p>Multiple universities have Women In Science Programs (WISP) that \"promote the full realization of equal employment opportunity for women\", sometimes along with <a href=\"https://www.science.purdue.edu/wisp/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">\"minorities, persons with disabilities and veterans\"</a>. Some of these programs involve <a href=\"http://students.dartmouth.edu/wisp/internships/about-internships\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">paid internships for women only</a>.</p>\n\n<p>The Mickey Leland Energy Fellowship (MLEF) Program is an internship program for women and under-represented minority students is a 10-Week Summer Internship sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy. It is directed towards students who are pursuing academic majors in science, technology, engineering, and math. <a href=\"https://energy.gov/student-programs-and-internships\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Only women and \"minority\" students need apply</a>.</p>\n\n<p>In 2016, seven global engineering and tech companies (IBM, Intel, General Motors, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cummins, Caterpillar, and Johnson Controls) piloted re-entry, paid internship programs for people who had taken career breaks of two years or longer. In IBM, <a href=\"https://www.fastcompany.com/3057081/how-paid-re-entry-programs-can-get-more-women-in-tech\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">selected participants are all women</a>. </p>\n\n<p>In Australia, there's the <a href=\"https://www.officeforwomen.sa.gov.au/womens-policy/womens-employment-and-economic-status/edith-dornwell-internships-for-women-in-stem\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Edith Dornwell Internship for Women in STEM</a>, which is a program provides that one woman each year with three months full time or six months part time fully paid employment with an organisation whose focus is on STEM.</p>\n\n<p>These are but a few examples of the many programs that result in women generally being favored over men. A 2015 study demonstrated <a href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">an overall 2-to-1 advantage for women in being ranked first for the job in any STEM field</a>. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/23
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37389",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28245/"
] |
37,392 |
<p>Do most professors value their PhD students, or do they see them as easily replaceable by fresh, new blood? If a PhD student stops working, will the professor try to fix things, or replace him like a cog in his machine?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37393,
"author": "ff524",
"author_id": 11365,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11365",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>Most PhD advisors invest a great deal of time, money, and effort in their PhD students. This is a sunk cost.</p>\n\n<p><em>If</em> the advisor acts as a selfish rational decision maker, he/she would evaluate the prospective (future) costs of continuing to work with the student, the likelihood of the student becoming productive again given some level of intervention on the part of the advisor, and the benefit to the advisor if the student becomes productive again. Other contributing factors may include the cost to the advisor's reputation of having a failed PhD student and the impact of a failed PhD student on the advisor's promotion prospects.</p>\n\n<p>Based on these parameters, a selfish rational player could evaluate whether it is in his/her own best interests to try and \"fix things\" or whether to cut his/her losses and \"replace him like a cog in his machine.\" </p>\n\n<p>In other words, there is no single action taken by \"most\" advisors here - the best response of even a <em>purely selfish</em> advisor depends on the parameters of the situation.</p>\n\n<p>Finally, most of the PhD advisors I personally know also feel some level of affection for their students and personal interest in their future, and would not necessarily make the strictly selfish decision described above. Rather, most PhD advisors I know would make an irrational decision that would consider the students' interests in addition to his/her own selfish interests. Depending on the situation, it may or may not be in the student's interests to be \"fixed.\"</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37403,
"author": "paul garrett",
"author_id": 980,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/980",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>As others have mentioned, it is not at all universal that grad students or postdocs are \"helping\" their faculty advisor. That is, often the relationship is more teacher-student than boss-worker, to say the least. Yes, hopefully the discussion takes place with content at a far more interesting level than absolutely routine teaching might. Yes, such discussion can be stimulating and edifying to the advisor about the advisor's own larger enterprise. The model is that, for example, the advisor has a certain research program, a grad student or postdoc expresses some interest in the content, and the advisor is happy to spend time explaining and talking about it. Grad student or postdoc does a related project, and generates a PhD thesis or paper or... </p>\n\n<p>In such a context, there are at least two relevant sorts of \"dysfunction\", which I do put in quotes because it's only a very qualified sort. The first, and most relative, is that the student/postdoc (rationally/justifiably or not) loses interest in either their own sub/related-project or in the advisor's larger enterprise. That's fair. This is not a \"problem\" except in the most practical terms, about whether it is feasible for the student/postdoc to significantly change course given whatever funding-and-time constraints they have. </p>\n\n<p>A very different sort of problem is student/postdoc's personal crisis/situation not generated by the work, such as (mental or physical) health difficulties, living-situation difficulties. Of course, very often such things have a huge impact on the work. Most advisors are not so callous as to be able or inclined to hold the student/postdoc culpable for the vagaries of fortune... So, at least up to a substantial point, I think most advisors try to be sympathetic, indulgent, hoping that things heal up well enough to allow return to a more \"normal\" role.</p>\n\n<p>There is <em>also</em> a caricatured situation that according to substantial gossip seems to be perceived as relevant by, for example, grad students: the alleged scenario in which grad students are expected/required to be near-geniuses, are gradually discovered not to be, and thus are branded as failures, tossed aside in favor of other genius-contenders. I think this fantasy-scenario is not relevant to actual events, but <em>can</em> play a negative role in the mental-health aspects of students/postdocs... The point is not that the scenario takes place, but that people <em>worry</em> about it: hopefully the advisor offers appropriate reassurances of the irrelevance of that little myth.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37414,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I have seen it go in both directions, and which way it goes seems to be strongly correlated with theoretical vs. experimental science. The more that a professor's research requires lots of \"lab tech\" work, the more likely that a student may find themselves treated as a lab tech rather than an independent researcher in training. I think that has been significantly driven by the economics of funding, since a) many funding agencies have become progressively less willing to support lab techs, and b) a good lab tech can easily cost 2 to 4 times as much as a student, depending on field, cost of living, and how a university does its accounting.</p>\n\n<p>Another place where I have heard of things going particularly badly is with foreign students (and postdocs) in the US, where an unscrupulous professor can use the delicacy of visas to exploit students.</p>\n\n<p>In the end, however, the strongest determinant is the individual professor: in every field, there are both excellent people to work with and horrible people to work with.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/23
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37392",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24384/"
] |
37,413 |
<p>I'm writing a contribution for a double-blind submission system. </p>
<p>Since I would like to supply more data than I could show on a small number of pages, I'm looking for a way to reference supplemental data in my manuscript, such as software scripts, figures or databases.</p>
<p>I could upload on GitHub, RPubs, Figshare and Zenodo, but all of these would expose my real user name (and I don't feel like making a throwaway e-mail account with a new repository for every anonymous publication that I intend to write).</p>
<p>Is there any way to get the above services to do what I want? Or is there a similar service that would allow anonymous hosting of research data? </p>
<p>It would be even better if I could later (e.g. after publication) declassify the information, with the link from the manuscript still being intact.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37415,
"author": "DCTLib",
"author_id": 7390,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7390",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>What you could do is to host your data on Dropbox. When you try to share a file, you will get a link that you can put into the paper. It seems as if the recipient of the link has no way to see the dropbox user account name/e-mail address of the person who shared it. After acceptance of the publication, you could move the file to your institutional website.</p>\n\n<p>Equally important, when using Dropbox it will be clear for the reviewer that you cannot see any server logs -- if you referred to a link on a server that you manage on your own, you could use the information to de-anonymize the reviewer (to some extent).</p>\n\n<p>Other cloud service providers may also be suitable. I have no experience with them, though.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37417,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Most journals allow (and even <em>expect</em>) you to upload supplementary data with your submission, which can be accessed by the reviewers. If you are submitting to a journal, this is the best way to make it accessible as part of the reviewing package, as well as to ensure long-term storage of an archival copy of the relevant data.</p>\n\n<p>On the other hand, if you are submitting to a conference (which typically have strict page limits and discourage supplementary information), it is often considered sort of cheating to have your paper depend critically on supplementary information. The reviewers would be acting reasonably if they did not choose to read your supplementary information in any case. I would thus recommend for a blinded submission to not include it, but instead say \"[link omitted for blinding]\" in place of the archival URL you will use for the final submission.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 128143,
"author": "Ben",
"author_id": 417,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/417",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>If an author is very concerned about keeping their data private and anonymous until the last moment before publication, the workflow would be like this:</p>\n<ol>\n<li><p>The authors deposit their data in a private repository while they are finalizing the manuscript, before submission. They ensure that the documents and files they upload to the repository do not have their names on them.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>The authors obtain a 'view-only' link from the repository. This link will give anyone access to their private repository in a way that hides the repository metadata so that the authors of the repo are not visible to people using this link.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>The authors insert this view-only link into the text of their manuscript, for example in the data availability statement. Then they submit their manuscript for peer review. Their data remains private on the repository.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Anyone with the manuscript, such as the editor and peer reviewers, can click on the 'view-only' link in the paper to download the data. The peer reviewers can anonymously inspect the data on the repository, and they do not see the names of the authors on the repository.</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Once the paper is accepted, the authors switch their data repository from private to public, and the 'view-only' link is removed from the manuscript, and replaced with the DOI to the public repository of the data. The editor or copyeditor checks that the paper now has a DOI, because the 'view-only' links typically expire after a few months.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>The repositories that I know support this workflow are:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://help.osf.io/hc/en-us/articles/360019930333-Create-a-View-only-Link-for-a-Project\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Open Science Framework</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://knowledge.figshare.com/articles/item/how-to-share-cite-or-embed-my-data\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Figshare</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://guides.dataverse.org/en/latest/user/dataset-management.html#private-url-to-review-unpublished-dataset\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Dataverse</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://ineed.coffee/post/how-to-disclose-data-for-double-blind-review-and-make-it-archived-open-data-upon-acceptance\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Zenodo</a> (not exactly as I describe above, but very close)</li>\n</ul>\n<p>There may be others I don't know about!</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 170354,
"author": "Rob",
"author_id": 74658,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/74658",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>If you don't need the reviewer to see the data during review, you can use zenodo's reserve doi feature. Here you can reserve a doi (so you can put the url in the paper) but it's not public untill you decide the publish the data so anyone following the url doesn't know who reserved the doi (untill you want them to).</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 177744,
"author": "a3nm",
"author_id": 17423,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17423",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>If your "supplemental data" can fit in a Github repository, you could use <a href=\"https://anonymous.4open.science/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Anonymous GitHub</a>, which allows you to create links to browse the contents of a Github repository while making it anonymous and censoring certain information.</p>\n<p>It doesn't work with files larger than 8 MB, so this is mostly intended for code rather than large datasets.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/23
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37413",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11974/"
] |
37,418 |
<p>Are there guidelines or best practices for adding references to a research PowerPoint presentation?</p>
<p>For example, should I put the full citation at the bottom of the slide?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Liu, J., Rinzler, A. G., Dai, H., Hafner, J. H., Bradley, R. K., Boul, P. J., Smalley, R. E. (1998). Fullerene Pipes. Science, 280(5367), 1253–1256. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>If you have even a couple references, this slide starts to look really busy. </p>
<p>I've seen quite a few presentations with truncated references (just first author, journal, year), like so:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Liu, J., et al. Science (1998)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Is this shortened reference alright? It looks cleaner on the slide, but at the expense of the ease of the viewer locating a reference. Any other solutions? If it makes a difference, this would be for the engineering/science fields. </p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37421,
"author": "Bill Barth",
"author_id": 11600,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/11600",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>My preferred way to do this is to put a short reference on the slide, perhaps not even a formatted citation (e.g. \"Liu, et al. show that ...\"), maybe use a numeric cite (e.g. \"...[1]\"), and then have a slide or two at the end listing your citations, in full form, as taken from the paper that the talk represents or will represent if the talk is discussing a work in progress. This moves the distracting stuff to the end of the talk and allows anyone who wants to go look up the citation to do so assuming you or the conference makes your slides available. </p>\n\n<p>If you don't intend to make the slides available, then putting a short cite like your second example in a footnote on the slide where you first cite it is probably best. That's short enough to be remembered or jotted down by an audience member for later look up. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37422,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>I would strongly recommend against putting the full citation at the bottom of the slide. The problem is, when you are actually presenting, it will both a) make the slide look very busy as you note, and b) distract people away from the rest of the slide. Another problem is that few people will actually be able to copy down the citation (unless you linger on the slide for a very long time).</p>\n\n<p>Truncated references deal with all of these problems, generally giving just enough information for a quickly scribbled note that will give the reader the ability to track down the cited paper with a little bit of work.</p>\n\n<p>In addition, however, if you will be making the slides available for others to read at their leisure, there are two other good places to put references:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>A \"bibliography\" slide at the end, before or after where many put the funding/acknowledgements slide.</li>\n<li>In the \"notes\" field associated with the slide on which the truncated reference appears.</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>This is especially good when dealing with funding agencies, who like to pull slides out of your deck for presentation to their own higher-ups. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37437,
"author": "D.W.",
"author_id": 705,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/705",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Don't put a full citation on the slide. That's too busy and distracting. It will distract some members of the audience from your main message.</p>\n\n<p>Personally, I recommend against putting citations on the slide at all, in most circumstances. Many people adopt a text-heavy style, where their presentations are full of text and bullet lists with text and text text wall-of-text. There's a lot of evidence that this is not good for comprehension.</p>\n\n<p>Instead, try minimizing the amount of text on your slides. It takes more effort, but it can lead to much more effective communication style. Try to write less on your slides. Less is more.</p>\n\n<p>Finally, remember the goal of a presentation. The purpose of a presentation is not to present every last detail of your work. Instead, the purpose of a presentation is to tell a story, a narrative, that conveys the main ideas and intuition and takeaways. Details belong in the technical paper. And citations are typically one of those things that belong in the technical paper. When you're preparing a presentation, you shouldn't try to \"cover\" everything in the technical paper. Instead, think of your presentation as a lecture where you teach people about some idea, or an advertisement to read the full paper.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37446,
"author": "J.R.",
"author_id": 780,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/780",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I generally agree with the sentiments already mentioned (that is, avoid putting full citations on individual slides; there is usually a better way to handle it). That said, I occasionally find myself wanting to do so for some reason, such as when I'm likely to reuse the presentation a year from now, and want to easily recall where the quoted information came from, or when I want to have the full citation available on the screen in case I'm asked about it during my presentation.</p>\n<p>When this has been the case, I've often handled this by including a full citation, but I use a color that is very similar to the background color of the slide – perhaps a light gray if my background is white, for example – and make the font very small.</p>\n<p>Here's an example, the slide on the left has a reference, while the slide on the right has the same reference in a more "subdued" color and smaller font:</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/rfZIM.png\" alt=\"enter image description here\" /></p>\n<p>This allows me to put the reference on the slide when I want to, but avoid having the reference be a distraction to the live audience.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 81138,
"author": "MK Adams",
"author_id": 65932,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/65932",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Just to add perspective and context, <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/37437/7734\">D.W.’s approach</a> is good for exactly what he asserts – “a live presentation to a group of folks that conveys the main ideas and intuition and takeaways”.</p>\n\n<p>However, with more presentations being presented online via courses or other means, citations are imperative. In particular, where images or other media are being used. In order to responsibly address copyright and fair use, the presenter must give a reasonable citation on every slide where they use media that isn’t theirs.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/37446/7734\">The options J.R. offers</a> are excellent ones for just this purpose – the aesthetics are attended to as well as the obligation to cite work used in a presentation that could possibly be distributed beyond the intended audience. While the most common presentation is still “live”, as we move forward into the uncharted territory of conventional tools – like Powerpoint – being accessed online, we will have to find better ways to protect the integrity of the media we use to support our efforts.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/23
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37418",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28283/"
] |
37,433 |
<p>I am corresponding via email with an industry researcher regarding an internship. He always signs off his emails with his first name, Bill. Still, I have addressed him as "Dr. X" for several emails now. I realize that if I am offered this internship I wouldn't want to keep calling him this and would prefer to be on more casual terms. Should I just abruptly switch to his first name, or wait for him to actually tell me to use his first name? </p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37436,
"author": "Ramrod",
"author_id": 28310,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28310",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Since he is academically your superior and you are trying to get a research position, I'd continue addressing him as Dr. X. I'd continue doing this until he directs you otherwise.</p>\n\n<p>Now, if you get the internship I would continue addressing him as Dr. In person, at least initially. Eventually you may notice other people who work under him that call him by Bill. That would be a good time to say \"I notice everyone else addresses you as Bill, would you prefer I address you as Bill or Dr. X.?\"</p>\n\n<p>Either way, don't get in a hurry to be on a first name basis.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37441,
"author": "Davidmh",
"author_id": 12587,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12587",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Easiest solution, ask him.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Dear Dr. X,</p>\n<p>[Rest of the email]</p>\n<p>P.S.: do you prefer me to call you Dr X, or Bill?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>No mistake possible.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/23
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37433",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28313/"
] |
37,439 |
<p>I started my PhD in one of the very well renowned institutes in Germany.
Unfortunately, in the middle I was forced very much to manipulate the data. I was extremely upset and did not know what to do. My supervisor has enormous amount of grants and he was very ambitious to prove all his hypotheses correct and he had to show the data to the grant givers as well. He starts forcing the PhD students in the middle of their PhD so that they can't leave. And he also doesnot allow somebody to simply graduate without publishing the manipuated data. So even for degree one has to publish that and afterwards if that person gets caught then the phd degree is gone and then the people would say that he/she should have reported the case when he/she was forced. It is a circular process , once you enter it is hard to get out.</p>
<p>I went to the University Higher Authority and told them indirectly(not very bluntly but slightly) about this problem. They gave me the feelings that they were helping me but it was actually leaked to my supervisor. He made my life even more difficult and finally I had to leave my Phd at the end of third year. I had three path: 1) to continue with dishonesty 2) To give him a full fight 3) To simply leave him. I chose the last option. </p>
<p>Afterwards, I started applying again to different places and everywhere I was asked that why I left my position. Initially , I told to the places I was called for an interview that I was not motivated in the project (without talking anything negative about my prveious lab) but this answer was not very well- accepted. Then, in one of the places I tried to tell about the real problem what I faced and I was given the feeling of committing a' grave crime of 7 murder cases' by one of the members of the Graduate School Selection Committee. I seriously felt like that after talking to them that leaving a PhD in between is a CRIME. </p>
<p>I am still applying to different places , it is almost going to be a year and now I am in real conflict that what is wrong and right? I left my Phd for not compromising with ethics of science and after leaving it people are giving me the feeling that not finishing my Phd is wrong. </p>
<p>1)I would like to ask you that what should I do and in what way I should approach other supervisors at this situation for a Phd position? Or I have to simple leave academics? Although I do not want to leave it because I have not done anything wrong or violated science ethics. Kindly help me and provide your suggestions.</p>
<p>P.S. My previous supervisor is not also giving any good recommendation so that is another big problem. </p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37567,
"author": "Inquisitive",
"author_id": 27985,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27985",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>My following opinion is all hindsight.</p>\n\n<p>If I were in your initial situation of being forced to falsify data, <strong>and I had proof of that</strong>, then I would have taken all my proof and found a lawyer and asked him for his legal advice on how to proceed. I think this whole problem should have been confronted immediately at the beginning.</p>\n\n<p>Falsification of data is one of the most serious offenses in academia. It doesn't surprise me at all that this is taking place per my own, different and past experiences in academia.</p>\n\n<p>This is an extremely difficult situation. If you want to get into a new program, you have to answer their questions, but you can't make accusations without proof. You might just be forced to say that you had serious ethical conflicts in your prior program and that you are seeking an institution that in no way resembles your prior institution's appearance regarding ethics. Hopefully nobody has any proof that you may have participated in data falsification.</p>\n\n<p>Perhaps you should think about obtaining legal advice.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37572,
"author": "WetlabStudent",
"author_id": 8101,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8101",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You could say the following</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>\"I left due to reasons in my personal life. This issue has now passed\n and I am excited to get back into research.\"</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This is not a lie. Your ethical convictions and how you handled a difficult ethical situation is personal. Personal life as defined by the lead sentence in Wikipedia \"the course of an individual's life, especially when viewed as the sum of personal choices contributing to one's personal identity.\" Your situation seems to be a quintessential example of that. </p>\n\n<p>If they inquire further, you can say:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>\"It is personal and I am a private person. I wish not to discuss\n the details.\"</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Try to get off the topic quickly. Don't lie but don't give them any real information either. Focus on the positive things you bring to the table. Basically you need to convince them you still have an enthusiasm for research. I know this is kind of dodging the question, but saying you weren't excited about the project or explaining the situation in detail will look worse. People have all sorts of personal problems in grad school and it is very reasonable to not want to discuss them. I think the University you are applying to will assume a far better excuse than the one you give them, so basically don't tell them anything. Of course this isn't ideal,; it would be better to have a well thought out answer that makes you look great. Unfortunately you cannot give them one with the information you supplied us. Your goal is to let your research and enthusiasm shine and hope they take a chance on you.</p>\n\n<p>If they ask you, \"why didn't you reenter at the school you left?\" You could say</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>\"The personal problem occurred in city X and I found if very\n traumatizing. While I have put it past me, I would like a fresh\n start in a new city, so I can focus on research without any\n distractions.\"</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I think the bigger red flag is that I assume your former advisor will not be writing you a letter of reference. Don't bring it up, but if they ask you about it you can say</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>This personal problem affected my work. I wish I could go\n back and change the way I responded to the personal problem, but\n unfortunately that is in the past, all I can do now is focus on my research.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Unfortunately, all of what I have suggested will hurt your chances vs. a well crafted explanation as to why you left, and it may even sound evasive, but it might read better than opening a can of worms by talking about your past advisor relationship. Even if you talked about your relationship very carefully, as others have suggested (both Anna's and anonymous mathematician great answers) you could accidentally slip in the spontaneity of an interview (you seem strong in your ethical point of view and convictions - if you are upset slipping would be very easy). I believe my above answer is the \"lowest risk\" option, although the careful explanations possibly carry a higher reward, if executed perfectly.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37578,
"author": "Anonymous Mathematician",
"author_id": 612,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/612",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<blockquote>\n <p>Then, in one of the places I tried to tell about the real problem what I faced and I was given the feeling of committing a 'grave crime of 7 murder cases' by one of the members of the Graduate School Selection Committee. I seriously felt like that after talking to them that leaving a PhD in between is a CRIME. </p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Leaving your PhD position isn't a crime, but you've made a dreadful accusation in a terribly awkward way. If what you say is true, then it should mean the end of your former advisor's career, and there is no reason why you shouldn't return to graduate school. On the other hand, maybe it's not true. There are any numbers of other explanations: maybe you're crazy, maybe you don't understand how research is supposed to work, maybe you're trying to cover up your own misconduct or incompetence, etc. I don't mean to cast doubt on your story, since you have no motivation to lie to us anonymously, but the admissions committee has no way of knowing whether to believe you. The only way to find out is by a careful investigation, which the committee is in no position to carry out. (It's not their job, and they don't have the time or resources to do it even if they wanted to.)</p>\n\n<p>As soon as you explained the accusation, they couldn't possibly admit you. The difficulty is that admitting you would come across like an endorsement of your accusation, since nobody would dream of admitting a student with a history of false accusations of fraud. But nobody is going to endorse a career-ending accusation without strong evidence, which you haven't provided.</p>\n\n<p>I'm not surprised the committee members were upset, because you put them in an awkward, no-win situation. How did you expect them to react? Were you hoping they would simply believe the story without evidence? Did you think it didn't matter to them whether it was really true? It sounds like they were harder on you than you deserved, which is too bad, but it makes no sense to offer an explanation without having in mind a plausible way in which it could lead to being admitted.</p>\n\n<p>You can't offer fraud as an explanation unless you are willing to make a formal complaint. It sounds like you weren't direct enough last time:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>I went to the University Higher Authority and told them indirectly (not very bluntly but slightly) about this problem.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>If you believe you could help investigators find evidence of fraud, then I'd recommend making a detailed formal complaint to the university and funding agencies. It won't be a pleasant experience, but you'll be doing the research community a valuable service. If the investigators conclude that your accusations are true, then you'll have a great explanation of why you left graduate school.</p>\n\n<p>If you don't think anything can be proved or you would rather not try, then you should avoid talking about fraud.</p>\n\n<p>One option is to admit to the conflict without discussing the underlying issue of fraud. For example, you could try something along the lines of \"Unfortunately, my former advisor and I developed a serious personality conflict. Our working styles turned out not to be compatible, and our interactions became difficult enough that I eventually withdrew from the Ph.D. program.\"</p>\n\n<p>This will hurt your chances of admission, since it raises the possibility that you have a difficult personality and might run into conflicts with other people in the future. However, it's a reasonable explanation, and it's close enough to the full truth that you could comfortably answer questions (which you should expect to get). It also helps explain why a letter of recommendation from your previous advisor won't be useful.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Initially, I told to the places I was called for an interview that I was not motivated in the project (without talking anything negative about my previous lab) but this answer was not very well accepted.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>One possibility is that your answer sounded evasive, like you were making an excuse to avoid talking about what happened. But even aside from that, it raises the question of why next time will be different. What makes you think you'll be better able to build/maintain motivation to work on a new project? Not addressing this is worrisome.</p>\n\n<p>Unfortunately, I don't think there's any great way to handle this if you can't back up a formal accusation of fraud against your former advisor. The fact that you spent three unsuccessful years in graduate school is going to worry admissions committees, and they will often prefer candidates without this history.</p>\n\n<p>Perhaps you'll have better luck if you lower your standards and apply to weaker Ph.D. programs? An advisor who would normally find it difficult to attract a student at your level might be more willing to take a chance on you. I am sorry to make this suggestion, but you might prefer this option to a career change or a formal accusation of fraud.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37586,
"author": "Benoît Kloeckner",
"author_id": 946,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/946",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I think that your problems roots before your tentative to enter another PhD program: it seems that your institute authorities have not made their job. Your accusations are serious, but as you say in comments there are several previous PhD students that were willing to tell you, at least, about the same misbehavior by your advisor. The fact that several students quit this advisor in a relatively short amount of time is enough evidence to start an investigation: there should be a disciplinary committee investigating the data published by your advisor over the years (forged data can in many cases be proved so), hearing you and the other quitting students, and of course hearing your advisor.</p>\n\n<p>If what you say is right, and I assume it is, then your advisor's career should be terminated, he should be prosecuted with fraud, and a public statement should be available to back up your tentative to reenter a PhD program. Unfortunately, I am not surprised by poor handling of such a case by academic authorities: they tend to think that it reflects poorly on their institution and have an interest in covering them up. If you have a way to file a more formal complaint about your former advisor, it might be a way out your situation -- but the timing is definitely against you. Short of that, I do not see a good solution, you might want to use the tangential one of WetLabStudent.</p>\n\n<p>Oh, and something else: if the truth about your advisor comes out in a few year, and you managed to enter academia, you might prefer to be one of those that made it right, rather than one of those that covered it up. I am not promising that it would be a more comfortable position with respect to your colleagues, but since you obviously value ethics, it would be more comfortable with respect to yourself.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37604,
"author": "Ana",
"author_id": 322,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/322",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>You can tell the committee that you and the PI were not a good fit. That you tried to make it work for a while, but, as you reached a stage where you were ready for more research independence, it became increasingly clear that your two research styles were incompatible. For example, you had differences in opinion on which data were trustworthy enough to merit a publication. After a number of attempts to reach a common ground, you concluded that the best course of action is to start another PhD elsewhere. You are sad that you have lost some time, but overall, you were doing research and that's what matters, and you don't mind putting in a few extra years if that means you can do what you love. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37878,
"author": "Ansa211",
"author_id": 28693,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28693",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Here in the Czech Republic, it is customary to approach your future advisor in person before applying for PhD. At least in my faculty, if the future advisor wants to accept a student, the selection committee usually does not object.</p>\n\n<p>Talk in person to whoever you think might become your advisor. Ask them if you could join their research group to work on (... enter your thesis proposal here...), or if they could recommend one of their colleagues to turn to. Be pretty concrete; if you think of using some specific lab equipment, ask if the department has it. Who would not like to take on a student that has a clear vision of his thesis?</p>\n\n<p>It the faculty member you are talking with shows interest in accepting you, it's time to show hesitation and tell them about your previous study (along the lines suggested by <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/37604/28693\">Ana</a>). Explain that you understand that taking in a drop-out is a risk that not everyone is willing to take. If your chosen advisor thinks that this would be an obstacle to accepting you, ask them if there would be any other way to become part of their research group so that you could prove yourself. You might work as a lab technician, do some (boring but necessary) data analysis, prepare a review of literature on a selected topic that your advisor would be interested in but does not have the time to read in detail. If that is so, indicate that you would not mind doing one of these things for free until the next application deadline.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 38233,
"author": "lucas",
"author_id": 28894,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28894",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>After seeing your post, I also think I should tell my story.\nI also worked as a PhD for around 2.5 years in a very famous institute in Germany and I also faced the same problem. I do not mind revealing the name of the institute as I have no respect for it after my weird experience. \nI worked earlier in memorial Slaon kettering cancer center , USA and also National University Singapore (NUS). Fortunately nowhere I was forced to manipulate the data and it is only in this German institute where I was forced. If I tell my entire story it will take 4-5 pages. I also went to the people who are members of ' Scientific Ethics Committee' gave me the feeling of 'great ' help but actually did not help. They told me neither they can help me changing my supervisor nor getting a reference letter from him. But if I can bring the proof, they can take steps against my boss. Ofcourse being a foreighner I was not willing to fight a case(or take any trouble) rather I prefer to fight anonymously.\nI left my position and started applying. Everywhere I faced the same question and I also did not have any answer. But finally after 9 months I talked to a group leader and he knew my previous boss. I started the conversation without talking much about my previous boss but I had the feeling that he also didnot have a very good impression about my previous boss.\nAnd I told him about what has happened to me and he really did trust what I said. I joined his group after 2 months and now it has been already 2 years in this lab I have been working with him and everything seems good. May be in my case ,my current PI knew my previous boss and probably he heard something similar about him. So my case might be different but I still believe that there would be some people who genuinely understand your real problem and it will serve as a filter itself. \nSo do not loose your heart and try applying outside Germany as well .</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/23
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37439",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28322/"
] |
37,444 |
<p>I'm interested in knowing if/how to properly cite a personal communication within a reference and if credit should be given to the primary source (the personal communication), the secondary source (the reference that cites the personal communication), or both.</p>
<p><strong>Hypothetical example:</strong> There is a textbook which has tabular data that I would like to reference. The textbook cites the tabular data as being from a personal communication with another author. I see this as a quandary since:</p>
<p>(1) If I reference the textbook without the personal communication, I am not giving proper credit to the original author (even though they never published the data separately in its own right)</p>
<p>(2) If I reference the personal communication, this would be incorrect and perhaps fraudulent as it was not between myself and the author, I am only a third party, and I would not be giving proper credit to the textbook authors, which is how the data was published.</p>
<p>(3) If I reference both, that is somewhat awkward as that would imply that I found the data from <strong>both</strong> sources independently, even though I only found it in one.</p>
<p>What is the proper way to reference this?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37445,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>This is a very odd situation, and you may want to consider carefully whether to use the source, per Nate Eldredge's comment above. If you do want to use it, however, I would recommend citing the textbook, but mentioning their original source in prose:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>blah blah context context, per the table in [citation of Textbook], as attributed to [their source].</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This way you give the citation and appropriate credit, but do not assert you have personal communication of your own.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37480,
"author": "Andreas Blass",
"author_id": 14506,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14506",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I would not put the original source (\"John Doe, private communication\") in my bibliography, because, as you noted, it gives the false impression that I was the direct recipient of the communication. Rather, I would include the textbook (\"Jane Roe, \"Introduction to Astrology\", Predator Press, 2010\") in the bibliography and then write in the body of the paper something like \"Table 17, due to John Doe and published in [Roe, 2010] ....\"</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/23
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37444",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15399/"
] |
37,448 |
<p>I know that, in North America, the opportunity is given (and often mandated) to take on teaching assistantships while in a PhD program. </p>
<p>I knew that, often, European PhD programs pay you to do RA from day one. But, in European PhD contracts/programs, are there countries, or universities even, that set conditions under which you have to TA? Or can you even TA in the first place?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37464,
"author": "xLeitix",
"author_id": 10094,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<blockquote>\n <p>But, in European PhD contracts/programs, are there countries, or universities even, that set conditions under which you have to TA? Or can you even TA in the first place?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>The European universities I am well aware of generally don't distinguish that strongly between TAs and RAs. In reality, in my current university in Switzerland, the \"formal\" job title of each employed PhD student (which is to say, practically all of them) is German for \"Teaching And Research Assistant\". Everybody is expected to teach a little, and (clearly) everybody needs to conduct research, so this job title seems appropriate.</p>\n\n<p>What courses each student is responsible for, and what they are expected to do, is typically assigned by the professor / lab head (sometimes after extensive negotiations / arguments within the group leading up to the start of the semester).</p>\n\n<p>Typically, PhD students are expected to only \"assist\" in the running of a course done primarily by a designated lecturer (\"Dozent\") or professor. However, in practice, often a large part of the actual work is done by TAs. in my old university, it was also possible to essentially become a lecturer already during your PhD, and from then on do courses officially on your own, without involvement of a professor.</p>\n\n<p>It is not possible to \"take on\" additional TA jobs to improve one's monetary situation (but then again, standard salary is already around 60.000 Swiss francs for a first-year student - other universities outside of Switzerland pay less, but still substantially more than the stipends that are common in other places of the world).</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37468,
"author": "PatW",
"author_id": 7357,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/7357",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In France, the possibility to teach during a PhD is pretty much ruled by the nature of your contract (and not the nature of your funding).</p>\n\n<p>For a regular <em>contrat doctoral</em>, you are not allowed to teach unless you sign an additional clause. This clause stipulates that you are now authorized to dedicate some time (with a maximum of 64 hours* a year) to teaching. Now if your goal is to pursue an academic career, you should also know that by the end of your PhD, you need to pass a <em>qualification</em>: your profile is examined by the <em>Conseil National des Universités</em>. I guess there is no need to say that without teaching experience, your chances at passing the qualification are lower.</p>\n\n<p>Note: In France universities, one hour doesn't weight the same depending on the nature of the class:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>1h of lecturing = 4/3 hour</li>\n<li>1h of tutoring = 1h</li>\n<li>1h of practical work = 2/3 hour</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Now when I say 64 hours a year, it's 64 hours of tutoring.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37475,
"author": "user14470",
"author_id": 14470,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14470",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In Austria, the Netherlands and Germany at least some amount of teaching is quite often expected from a PhD student, as in the USA it may be required for the stipend. In the UK, this varies by departments and universities, and is normally capped e.g. at 10 hours a week, since your PhD (if funded) is meant to be a full time job.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 130684,
"author": "anon",
"author_id": 108863,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/108863",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<h1>UK perspective</h1>\n\n<p>In UK institutions, teaching is not considered part of the PhD qualification itself, so it is possible to do a PhD without ever teaching.</p>\n\n<p>However, if you intend to pursue an academic career, it is highly advisable to do some teaching, since teaching experience is very important for a lot of academic jobs. Opportunities to do so vary considerably by institution and even by department; some PhD students do teaching at a different institution. In respect of funded PhD students, there may be restrictions (for example, a maximum of 6 hours per week for AHRC-funded students) or even obligations (typically, this would apply in the case of students funded <strong>by</strong> the university itself) as to the number of hours one can teach.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 130691,
"author": "Jakob",
"author_id": 108869,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/108869",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In Austria, there are many third-party funded PhD students (by the FWF, probably the largest organization for funding in Austria) who are only funded for doing research. Indeed, it is possible for them to teach classes - they get payed extra per class then (as it should be).</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 130709,
"author": "user108902",
"author_id": 108902,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/108902",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I don't know if you refer to Turkey when you say \"European.\" but I will explain anyway. I know it is different than North America; it may be similar to European programs. </p>\n\n<p>In Turkey, doing Ph.D. is your education; it is not working. So, you can be an instructor if you have done your masters and have working experience in the field. <strong>Instructors not obligated to do Ph.D.</strong> but, most of them do. There are two types of instructors present:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li><p>Units directly related to rectorship like Turkish Education, Ataturk’s principles and History of Turkish Revolution or theoretical & applied research centers, and other central organizational units. </p></li>\n<li><p>Instructors who run courses as himself/herself and an employee of the department as a subsidiary of the faculty deanship.</p></li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>Or you can be a research assistant as I am and you run the laboratory parts of the courses with a faculty member or lecturer (mostly lecturers run their laboratory exercises). You help reading homework and quizzes, cannot run courses your own until you finish your Ph.D. <strong>You are obligated to do masters or Ph.D. while you employed</strong> and you expelled after 1 year when your Ph.D. finished. You have a constant wage no matter what are you doing in that semester or holiday. You assist some administrative work in the department and contribute research. You do most of the work with your advisor who responsible of you other than department chair. You have rights as a government employee with retirement, medical insurance, and annual leave in both types of employment. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 130715,
"author": "Emma",
"author_id": 106392,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/106392",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In my experience, in Physics in the UK, teaching wasn't an essential part of your PhD, but you could be employed by the department to work as a Teaching Assistant in the labs.</p>\n\n<p>I did this for two semesters while working on my PhD, helping students set up and run experiments. Others in the department did similarly in the computing labs. The pay was generally considered to be quite good, at around £13 per hour, with lab sessions of three hours taking place once or twice a week.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/24
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37448",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15996/"
] |
37,453 |
<p>Is it possible to get a job in industrial mathematics with a Masters in math but no work experience and no PhD. Or would one be limited to only nonresearch industrial math jobs?</p>
<p>How about the type of jobs listed here: <a href="http://www.siam.org/careers/thinking/solve.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.siam.org/careers/thinking/solve.php</a>
?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37454,
"author": "user141592",
"author_id": 27327,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27327",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>PhDs are usually preferred for research jobs, since a PhD is literally 3-5 years of training how to do research. However, if you did research during your Masters, you might be considered. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37456,
"author": "Brian Borchers",
"author_id": 4453,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4453",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Students with master's degrees an applied mathematics (and statistics, OR, actuarial science, mathematical finance, etc.) often find work in industry doing applied mathematics, but this work is not typically \"research\" of the sort that results in publications in research journals. If you want to do publishable research, then complete a PhD. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37457,
"author": "Nobody",
"author_id": 546,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/546",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>The link in your question lists many possible job opportunites of what applied mathematicians have. They all look exciting to me (and possibly you) and they are useful to human society.</p>\n\n<p>However, you probably will have some difficulties when you apply for those jobs. There are two things you don't have yet: Math knowledge in depth (you don't have PhD in Math) and domain knowledge (you have no work experience).</p>\n\n<p>For example, <em>How might disease spread in populated areas in the event of a bioterrorism incident, and how would it be contained?</em>. Do you have enough Virology background to devise algorithms to simulate this? Do you have enough Math knowledge to solve the math problems behind the algorithms?</p>\n\n<p>Another example, <em>How can you allocate an investment among various financial instruments to meet a risk/reward trade-off?</em>. How much do you know about Finance? How much do you know about quantitive finance mathematics?</p>\n\n<p>You need to have at least one of them, either <strong>math in depth</strong> or <strong>domain expertise</strong>. Without either one of them, the best you can do is a research assistant or simply a programmer (to implement the algorithms other scientists and mathematicians devise).</p>\n\n<p>My advice to you: either pursue a PhD in Applied Math or a masters degree in an area that suits your most interest.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/24
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37453",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/527/"
] |
37,462 |
<p>Suppose you are introducing a new concept, and you start with (what you think is) a toy example. Is it okay to refer to your example as a "trivial problem?"</p>
<p>Does this depend on the field and/or level of the class you are teaching?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37465,
"author": "Bob Brown",
"author_id": 16183,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/16183",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Context matters. If you say, \"Let's start with a trivial example\" and then you <em>do</em> start with a trivial example, that's good. You've put your class on notice that you starting with something that's stripped down and you're going to build on it. If you say the same thing but immediately introduce something that's moderately complex (even if it has been simplified as much as possible) then \"trivial\" was the wrong word.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37467,
"author": "Colin Johnson",
"author_id": 22703,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22703",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>\"Trivial\" often means \"too simple to be a real problem\". For example, in an class on optimisation methods years ago, the lecturer said \"for our first example, we're going to study the problem of maximising the number of ones in a binary string of length <em>n</em>\". My thought for most of the class was \"well, that's bloody obvious—you just write <em>n</em> ones in a row—why are we looking at this\". I eventually realised that it was being used because it made it easy to describe how the algorithms worked, not because it was a challenging problem in any way.</p>\n\n<p>I think that's a good example of where the word \"trivial\" is good shorthand—the problem isn't of any importance, but it is being used to illustrate a point. This is similar to how trivial is used in a lot of pure mathematics, where it often means \"the simplest example that satisfies the definition\" (like \"the trivial group\"). As with all such jargon, though, it is worth <em>explaining</em> to students what you are going to be meaning by the word \"trivial\" and why trivial examples are worth looking at at all.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37479,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I personally would not use the word \"trivial\" to describe a simple example. Instead, I would call it a \"simple\" or \"toy\" example. </p>\n\n<p>The reason is that, to me at least, calling something trivial means it is not just simple, but <em>degenerate</em> in some way, and that there is therefore no insight to be gained from it. The examples that one uses in teaching are often very simple, so that they are able to be worked in real-time, but anything but trivial: instead, a good example is typically very carefully crafted to reveal particular interesting aspects of the material from as simple a situation as possible.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37553,
"author": "Stephan Kolassa",
"author_id": 4140,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4140",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It is useful to recall what \"trivial\" means. It derives from the seven medieval liberal arts, and refers to the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium\">Trivium</a>, or the \"lower three\" arts: grammar, logic and rhetoric. After the Trivium, students would study the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium\">Quadrivium</a>, or the \"upper four\" arts: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.</p>\n\n<p>The idea was that the Trivium provided the student with the tools needed to address the Quadrivium.</p>\n\n<p>In this context, calling something \"trivial\" essentially means that this was either already addressed in a lower-level course, or can easily be understood using tools from that lower-level course. It does not mean that the \"trivial\" problem is easy, or boring, or useless.</p>\n\n<p>Keeping this bit of etymology in mind, I'll happily call something \"trivial\" that fits this definition.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37555,
"author": "Anonymous Physicist",
"author_id": 13240,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/13240",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>No. The other posters have based their responses primarily on the meaning of the word. Mine is based on the impact on students. Students may be offended or hurt if you call something \"trivial\" which they do not feel is trivial. Students may not view the word with the connotations you, or other posters on stack exchange, anticipate. In addition, you cannot anticipate in complete detail what academic backgrounds your students might have. Maybe they were sick the day they should have learned the basis for your \"trivial\" concept. I consider the word unwise to use unless given a specific meaning first.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/24
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37462",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24384/"
] |
37,470 |
<p>Say I work as an AE for an international journal. I managed to find only two reviewers for a manuscript submitted to the journal lately. Personally, I don't find enough contribution of the manuscript, but it is not fair to not base my final decision on the reviewers' comments. </p>
<p>For the first round review, both reviewers recommended a minor revision of the manuscript. Reviewer A appears to be more impartial than Reviewer B (who is positively biased). The same decision is delivered to the authors. However, during the second round, Reviewer A suddenly changed his mind to a major revision, which according to himself/herself is due to the failure of the authors to address his/her comments.</p>
<p>For this particular journal, there is usually only two rounds of review, and I don't think a third round will help improve the manuscript anymore. I am inclined to agree with Reviewer A and thereby reject the manuscript. However, it seems unfair to the authors and is hard to justify Reviewer A's change of mind in the second round. </p>
<p>Now I am inclined to reject the manuscript, but it has to be based on solid grounds. Solid grounds can be found (if I write the review myself, I can certainly make one), but the reviewers did not give me one: if the recommendation is minor revision for the first time, how can it be major revision for the second time? Therefore, it seems to me both the authors and the reviewers did a poor job.</p>
<p>So, how should I make the decision here? If I choose to reject, how do I appear fair to the authors?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37471,
"author": "o-0",
"author_id": 21552,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21552",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>First, you should not reject a paper/journal because you don't like its \"research taste\", you should look at the facts the paper/journal provides. Second, as an individual researcher any other review's decision; should not effect your decision anyhow. So, if you really do not find the contribution satisfactory based on the journal's factors then reject it; but, if you find it do be in the gray area, give it a major correction and see how the authors will respond to your demands. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37478,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>The reviewers make recommendations to you, not judgements. As the associate editor, you have to decide how to interpret those recommendations, taking your own judgement into account.</p>\n\n<p>I think that it is actually reasonable for a reviewer to become peeved if issues that they think are important were not addressed, and therefore judge a paper more harshly. Usually that goes Major->Reject, rather than Minor->Major, but if it was borderline for the reviewer before, it's not bizarre. The real question is: do you agree that those issues are important?</p>\n\n<p>If you disagree with the reviewer, you can recommend minor revision or acceptance.\nIf you agree with the reviewer, however, that this paper has some real issues that need to be addressed before it get published, then it's entirely reasonable to request another revision, even a major revision. In your editorial statement, you then say something like:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>In particular, Reviewer #1 points out that the following issues in the original manuscript have not been addressed in the revision, and these must be addressed for this paper to proceed toward publication: [key issues]</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Now the authors have a clear editorial directive for what exactly must be done in their revision. If they follow this directive, all well and good and they get published; if they refuse to follow it, then you have reasonable grounds for rejection.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/24
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37470",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/20539/"
] |
37,473 |
<p>I've applied to several graduate schools in the US for a physics PhD. As I currently have some free time, I'm willing to travel around and visit graduate schools that I've applied to. My current research advisor (who is also one of my letter writers) can possibly establish contact between me and some of the people I have expressed interest in at different schools. My question is that whether in your opinion this is something that can actually boost my chances of getting admitted (provided a meeting with a person of interest goes well). Could pursuing this plan be advantageous?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37474,
"author": "o-0",
"author_id": 21552,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/21552",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Yes! Most definitely seeing your potential supervisor will effect their decision. Also, it might effect your decision in later stages, when more than one will accept your application. Remember, to also look at their environment they conduct the research in; as well as having a talk with one/two of his/her current Ph.D. students.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37487,
"author": "NSERC Protester",
"author_id": 15996,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15996",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>The answer depends a lot on the department. A POI at one department explicitly said that, at his particular department, visits had little to no effects. Then again it's an Ivy League physics dept, top-20 in the US; I wonder whether there is a correlation between program prestige and the impact of a visit.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37488,
"author": "GEdgar",
"author_id": 4484,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4484",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>One of my students (I think my top undergraduate student ever) did, indeed, visit his top choices of graduate departments (all of which had already accepted him and offered financial support). I think that the three departments even paid airfare for him to come. </p>\n\n<p>So, I guess, this was not about improving chances of being admitted. This was those departments trying to improve their chances of getting the student.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37490,
"author": "RoboKaren",
"author_id": 14885,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14885",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It depends when you are visiting. At my department, we welcome visits in the Fall semester -- before the applications are due. I'm not sure if these visits are that useful -- a few times, I've been much more intrigued; but many more times I've been convinced that the applicant is <strong>not</strong> suitable after an in-person visit. If you do come, come well prepared (i.e., knowing which faculty you want to talk to, what questions you want to ask, and what impression you are seeking to make). (see FN1)</p>\n\n<p>In the spring semester (after applications have been handed in) we tend to disincline visits initiated by candidates. (See FN2 and FN3)</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>FN1. I do think that campus visits are very useful <em>for candidates</em>. You get to meet faculty and see what they're like and more importantly - talk to other graduate students. In many cases, you can glean insight about the department that can help improve your application. </p>\n\n<p>FN2. We interview all candidates by skype or telephone in the third round. We tend to fo2llow the same protocol for all such interviews so as to keep the playing field equal.</p>\n\n<p>FN3. After we have made offers to finalists, we then again welcome visits so that we can convince them to come to our program. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37493,
"author": "ARM",
"author_id": 17859,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/17859",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>It may not give you an advantage at being admitted, but it could help in other ways. I visited my first-choice program (also in physics) around Thanksgiving of my senior year, and scheduled meetings with two PIs I wanted to work with. The first stood me up, but the second took several hours to meet with me and show me the lab, and at the end of the visit he told me \"If you get in and want to start early, let me know and I could probably give you an RA for the summer\". This ended up being a big help -- the visit made clear who would be better to work with, and also helped me get started with research shortly after graduating. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37601,
"author": "Alexander Gruber",
"author_id": 4545,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4545",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>During my last semester of undergrad, I happened to be driving by a department I was applying to on the way back from an out of state trip, and decided I'd stop by to check out the digs. The administration evidently saw this as me gaming for admission, and were not very welcoming. They promised me a tour and then left me in a waiting room for a couple hours, before finally telling me that the advisor did not have time and I should go home. </p>\n\n<p>I ended up going off on my own and meeting some of the professors there who I would have wanted to work with. That part was fun. I got to have some cordial conversation with legends in my field. One of them had heard through the grapevine that I'd just published a paper with his coauthor, and requested a preprint, which I emailed to him later. I think this may have improved my chances for admission; however, the experience of networking with these professors was surely of greater value (and non-conditional). </p>\n\n<p>After hanging around for a few hours, I ran into a couple of grad students, and took them out for a beer. They told me that the cold and dismissive treatment I'd gotten from the staff was actually just how they acted all the time. I learned that, internally, the department refers to itself as an engine in a factory school, and that many of the TAs felt undervalued and exploited, rather than just \"roughing it\" on a low stipend.</p>\n\n<p>The whole experience painted a picture of a department that has abandoned common courtesy and respect, which I personally place a lot of value in, so by the end of the day, I decided I would turn this school down, if admitted. And as it turns out, I never had to, because they never sent me a decision letter one way or another! (I did call to ask check my application status once, just out of curiosity, and was put on hold until the system hung up on me. Go figure.) I might have been very upset by this if I'd never stopped by, but since I had, I felt free to accept an offer from another school without concern for this loose end. So, sometimes it can be very worth it to visit a department, whether it improves your chances or not.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/24
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37473",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/24542/"
] |
37,492 |
<p>How protectionistic are PhD admissions?</p>
<p>Here, protectionism means to favor residents of the country (or state) the university is in, as far as PhD admissions are concerned. Usually, protectionism arises due to funding restrictions or other burdens of a financial nature (e.g. tuition waivers). </p>
<p>But how much of a disadvantage are foreign students at, when it comes to PhD admissions?</p>
<p>I understand that the answer differs from a country to another, and from an institution to another within the same country. And even different fields within the same institution have different standards, so please pay attention to context when providing answers.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37499,
"author": "aeismail",
"author_id": 53,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>Basically, admissions decisions follow from two main issues:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>government policies regarding funding and immigration</li>\n<li>the available pool of applicants</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>For instance, recent policies in California made it very difficult for the University of California system to enroll international graduate students. This was not the result of internal decisions, but rather something imposed upon them by the government. Similarly, a visa embargo applied to a particular country would make it impossible for a university to bring in students from that country.</p>\n\n<p>Other than that, I think most graduate admissions groups are looking for the best available talent, rather than having a specific quota of domestic or international students. They might do some recruiting domestically if they're not getting enough domestic candidates (compared to any \"targets\" they might have), but I don't think they're going to admit domestic candidates that are unqualified <em>just</em> because they're domestic.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37500,
"author": "Ian",
"author_id": 22000,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22000",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In the UK, in STEM areas without industry funding (where I have most experience), funding restrictions typically meant there are <em>at least</em> 10 places restricted to home (or in some cases EU) students for every place open to students of all nationalities. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37507,
"author": "emcor",
"author_id": 18228,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/18228",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>In Germany, PhD positions are often awarded individually by the Professors. So if you know your Professor well, you have an extremely higher likelihood of getting a PhD with him.</p>\n\n<p>However, if you have really outstanding talent/grades, you can still beat these personal relationships, only it is very much harder.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/24
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37492",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/15996/"
] |
37,494 |
<p>I finally got the revision of my paper, but one of the reviewers complained that <code>the paper is not anonymized</code>. Since I'm not the native english speaker, it's quite strange to me. </p>
<p>Does it mean that I should remove authors names from the paper? If so - what for, and why should I do this?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37496,
"author": "Brian Borchers",
"author_id": 4453,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4453",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Some conferences and journals do \"double blind\" peer review in which the reviewers are anonymous to the reviewers and the authors are anonymous to the reviewers. In that case you are expected to submit your manuscript without author names (or any other identifying information.) </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37498,
"author": "Alexandros",
"author_id": 10042,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10042",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>To add to @Brian's answer, in double blind review besides submitting your manuscript without author names, you should eliminate any information about datasets, affiliation or previous works that may betray your identity. E.g. for an Elsevier journal <a href=\"http://www.journals.elsevier.com/social-science-and-medicine/policies/double-blind-peer-review-guidelines/\">here</a> instructions for double blind review to authors say:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Besides the obvious need to remove names and affiliations under the\n title within the manuscript, there are other steps that need to be\n taken to ensure the manuscript is correctly prepared for double-blind\n peer review. To assist with this process the key items that need to\n be observed are as follows:</p>\n \n <ul>\n <li><p>Use the third person to refer to work the Authors have previously undertaken, e.g. replace any phrases like “as we have shown before”\n with “… has been shown before [Anonymous, 2007]”. </p></li>\n <li><p>Make sure figures do not contain any affiliation related identifier </p></li>\n <li><p>Do not eliminate essential self-references or other references but limit self-references only to papers that are relevant for those\n reviewing the submitted paper.</p></li>\n <li><p>Cite papers published by the Author in the text as follows: ‘[Anonymous, 2007]’. For blinding in the reference list: ‘[Anonymous\n 2007] Details omitted for double-blind reviewing.’</p></li>\n <li>Remove references to funding sources</li>\n <li>Do not include acknowledgments</li>\n <li>Name your files with care and ensure document properties are also anonymized.</li>\n </ul>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Of course, this hiding of information is limited only during the review rounds and after your work gets accepted, the camera ready copy of the publication should include all the relevant information , that was hidden / anonymized during the review rounds.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37536,
"author": "O. R. Mapper",
"author_id": 14017,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/14017",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>While <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/37496/14017\">Brian's answer</a> and <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/37498/14017\">Alexandros's answer</a> have accurately described how to anonymize a submission and how to find out whether to do it, I would like to add an answer to the concrete question asked:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>If so - what for, and why should I do this?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>The assumed benefit of a double-blind review, in which the reviewers do not know who authored a given submission, is an improved fairness toward submitters.</p>\n\n<p>Reviewers are supposed to judge a submission entirely and exclusively based on its contents. They should not take into account the reputation of the authors or their institution (or lack thereof), as verifiable and clearly described results are to be considered equally valuable coming from a reputable as well as coming from an unknown institution.</p>\n\n<p>Likewise, while one can hope for reviewers to behave in a fair way, keeping submitters anonymous is another safety measure to prevent any personal biases based on culture, gender, or other personal factors from playing a role in the judgment on the submission.</p>\n\n<p>Lastly, secondary effects of the judgment might be avoided. If submitters are known to reviewers, reviewers might have external incentives to provide a good or bad review. While direct conflicts of interest are generally excluded by review organizers (someone reviewing their own submission, for example), indirect interests of conflict (someone being promised a position in exchange for a favourable review; someone writing a bad review to prevent a direct competitor from publishing etc.) may not be apparent to those organizing reviews.</p>\n\n<p>With all of this in mind, not all conferences conduct double-blind review for various reasons that are discussed in <a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/8891/why-dont-all-disciplines-follow-a-double-blind-review-system\">another Academia SE question</a>.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/24
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37494",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28370/"
] |
37,501 |
<p>I have just received a decision letter for my submitted manuscript to an Elsevier journal. It was a revise and resubmit (R&R). Two reviewers comments were included in the decision letter. One of the reviewers suggested minor revisions. The other reviewer on the other hand recommended rejection and his comments were really unfair. Evidently, he hasn't bothered reading the manuscript completely.
I am really disappointed and don't really know how to even respond to his comments. what do you recommend me to do? I am really frustrated.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37505,
"author": "awsoci",
"author_id": 28324,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28324",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Most journal articles are often a revise and resubmit before they get published.The final article that you see in journals is often never the first submission attempt but rather, crafted through continuous revising and editing. </p>\n\n<p>You should revise and resubmit, you would be doing yourself a disfavour if you don't.</p>\n\n<p>The editors had two very contrasting reviewers for your piece, one who suggested a minor revision and the other an outward reject, so a Revise and Resubmit is a pretty good outcome from that, but also highlights a stark contrast of views. </p>\n\n<p>When you receive harsh comments, it's good to take a step back for a few days and let the anger and frustration that you undoubtedly feel to disappear. At the moment you might feel like it's a bit of a personal attack, and have used language such as 'it's unfair' and 'he hasn't read the article completely.' These are emotional responses and are not helpful for your success. </p>\n\n<p>Why are the comments unfair and how can you determine whether they've read the article completely? </p>\n\n<p>When you are ready, sit down and read them with fresh eyes, highlighting what you can do to improve the article. There will be things in there (difficult to find) that you can utilise to strengthen the quality of your article. You don't have to address everything the second reviewer says but you might be surprised that once those personal feelings die down, the number of things you might find helpful from that second reviewer. </p>\n\n<p>When you do your revision, you'll need to prepare a summary report regarding all the comments, highlighting what you changed, and what you didn't. The things you do not change you provide justification for in your summary report. </p>\n\n<p>You would be surprised by the number of academics who never bother to revise and resubmit a paper to a journal, the numbers are outstanding. Revising and resubmitting allows for you to continue to improve your ideas and produce something of high quality. </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37508,
"author": "Phil",
"author_id": 19988,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/19988",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Yes, you should revise and resubmit, if you still want the article to be published in the journal you originally targeted.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Evidently, he hasn't bothered reading the article completely.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>This may be true, but once you've waited a day or two and digested the comments, look at it again. This kind of review might highlight that some readers of the journal would not understand your paper properly! Even if you think the comments are unfair, be sure to include them in your response. Treat them thoroughly, with evidence from your article and the literature, or include supplementary material with the response letter. Then, ask a co-author or trusted colleague to read over the revised article and response, to check the tone. Good luck!</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37509,
"author": "xLeitix",
"author_id": 10094,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10094",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<blockquote>\n <p>one of the reviewers suggested minor revisions. The other reviewer on the other hand recommended a rejection and his comments were really unfair.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Welcome to peer review. Yes, it sucks to have a reviewer criticise your work so much, especially if you feel the comments are unfair. However, both, the editor and the other reviewer seem to give the manuscript a chance. You cannot throw your work away as soon as somebody disagrees with it.</p>\n\n<p>As a sidenote, try to get a bit perspective and figure out <em>why</em> the second reviewer hated the paper so much, <em>without thinking that (s)he is just an idiot</em>. The reviewer didn't bother to read the paper to the end? Yes, that's bad form, but clearly your paper wasn't exactly compellingly written either. The reviewer didn't \"get\" the paper at all? Maybe your descriptions are not that great. The reviewer thinks your contribution isn't strong enough? Explain better how your paper improves the state of the art. Oftentimes, the most negative comments are the ones that help you most in improving your research, even if they are clearly the ones that hurt the most.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Should i revise and resubmit?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>Yes!</strong> </p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37541,
"author": "Peter Jansson",
"author_id": 4394,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4394",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>First, remember reviewer's \"verdicts\" are only recommendations. The handling editor evaluate these reviews along with your original submission to see what is a fair balance. Deviating reviews are not uncommon. Editors have two solutions at their hands, either, as in your case, make a decision based on the two, or to add a third reviewer to the mix. The former will likely happen if the editor has good insights into the topic, the latter if the editor may require more input to feel safe with a decision. After all, the editor is chosen to have broad knowledge but will not master everything.</p>\n\n<p>So, you have received a revision decision which means the manuscript is very likely accepted if you provide a good set of revisions and a good account of how you have treated the comments from the reviewers. A \"bad\" review, can emerge from a nebulously written manuscript so if you think the comments are unfair or even rude. Take them with a grain of salt and focus on whether or not they emerge from some misunderstanding or unclear writing and revise accordingly. The editor should have given you some pointers on how to view the reviews but this does not always happen, You are then left to your self to handle the revisions. Important is to not dismiss any of the reviewers just because they disagree or criticize your work. You need to consider their comments and provide a rebuttal to the editor so that any grounds for disagreement is firmly described.</p>\n\n<p>So carefully revise the paper, provide a detailed and polite letter outlining your actions, make sure the revision fulfils all the journal's instructions for formatting and resubmit on time.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37549,
"author": "Inquisitive",
"author_id": 27985,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27985",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I would revise and resubmit. Not only that, I would implement as many of the harsh reviewer's comments as feasible and truly warranted. At least it will show that you are taking the journal and its personnel seriously. Remember, only one of the two said \"reject\". Show a good faith effort to satisfy both of the reviewers. Keep up the effort my friend!</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/24
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37501",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28211/"
] |
37,502 |
<p>I got three recommendation letters from three of my former school teachers (professors A, B, C).<br>
On 20th Jan, I got an email from the graduate school that I had applied to. In the email, they told me that they had received the confirmations from professors A and B, but are still waiting for the confirmation from professor C.<br>
My application will be considered as successful on condition that they have received the confrimation from professor C before 30th<br>
I have sent at least ten emails to professor c for the past few days, but not seen any replies from him.<br>
I have got the phone number, fax number, and address of his office in my former school. <br>Since my former school is a few hours by bus away from my house, and I can not reach him by emails, I am thinking to call him directly on his office phone number, but I am wondering if it will make him very angry or I may be getting scolded by him.<br>
What shall I do?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37504,
"author": "Arian",
"author_id": 28211,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28211",
"pm_score": 5,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I think you have made a mistake sending him so many E-mails.\nNevertheless, its always okay to call someone and ask something politely (If the prof. C is sane you should be okay).</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37511,
"author": "aeismail",
"author_id": 53,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/53",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>There are a couple of possible scenarios at work:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Instructor C is very busy, but has seen the emails and will write the recommendation in time.</li>\n<li>Instructor C's email program flagged your emails as spam, and has not actually read any of them.</li>\n<li>Instructor C has not read your emails for whatever reason.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Regardless of which case applies, a <em>polite</em> call to instructor C during normal business hours (whatever those happen to be for the university) would be considered perfectly acceptable.</p>\n\n<p>If you cannot get a hold of the instructor directly, perhaps there is an administrative assistant who can help you by flagging down the instructor, or setting up a time for you to talk to the instructor directly.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/24
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37502",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27408/"
] |
37,516 |
<p>As I was thinking about the question
<a href="https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37341/can-i-slack-off-and-get-a-phd">Can I slack off and get a PhD?</a>,
I realized that I wanted to say in my answer</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you want to slack off,
the best time to do so is <strong>after</strong> you have received tenure
as a college professor,
because at that point you can't be fired
except for egregious offences.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I am not yet even an assistant professor,
so I don't know whether the statement above is really true.</p>
<p><strong>Question:</strong>
What could the negative consequences be
for a professor who has just received tenure,
if he were to put in the bare minimum effort needed in teaching
just to achieve average teaching performance,
and were to just stop doing research and publishing papers?</p>
<p>Note:
I don't plan to slack off if I were in the future
able to get a tenured position,
but I am just curious what happens to those professors who do.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37518,
"author": "Inquisitive",
"author_id": 27985,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27985",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I believe the consequence question has been answered here:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/185/in-practice-how-secure-is-a-tenured-position-in-the-us/186#186\">In practice, how secure is a tenured position in the US?</a></p>\n\n<p>I'd just like to add that I believe the overall, industry reaction to \"tenured slackers\" is that tenure track positions are rapidly declining. Nobody, but nobody wants to be saddled with a slacker for life.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37519,
"author": "GEdgar",
"author_id": 4484,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4484",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Some consequences may be: minimal raises; more teaching assignments; administrative duties. Perhaps it is not a desire to \"slack off\", maybe they just lost the \"spark\" (or the funding) for research. And they are eager to pull their weight by doing other things.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37523,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 6,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>I think the first question is, what does \"slack off\" really mean? Many professors do change their priorities after tenure for a slower paced approach to their work more in line with their own intellectual values. Many things that might be perceived as \"slacking off\" in a pre-tenure professor actually do have value and are much easier to pursue post-tenure, e.g., dedicating more time to students and teaching rather than research, or taking a slower pace to try to figure out an angle on deeper and harder to address issues.</p>\n\n<p>But let's assume that our hypothetical professor is just saying, \"I got mine, and I'm going to do the absolute minimum hereafter!\" Here are some of the non-firing consequences:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Not getting grants, it will be hard to have students.</li>\n<li>Their professional prestige will plummet, and anything they <em>do</em> want to do will get harder.</li>\n<li>They may get stuck with unpleasant scut-work tasks for the department, and will have more responsibilities foisted on them because \"they have the time\" that their harder working colleagues do not.</li>\n<li>They will not get promotion to higher academic ranks, nor the accompanying pay rises.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Some people may actually be comfortable with this, and having a person who's given up ambition and embraced a comfortable position as the organization's reliable clean-up detail can actually be a good thing, as it takes those tasks away from others who have more ambition.</p>\n\n<p>But what if the slacker professor really doesn't care, and does a poor (but not quite enough to be fired) job at all the tasks they are assigned by the department?\nWell, every organization has ways to make a person's life hell without firing them. In the next departmental reorganization, the slacker professor might find themselves getting moved to a small lightless basement office, the administrative staff may ignore requests for assistance, colleagues may simply treat the person as a pariah. Few people last long in an actively hostile workplace, and it may be harder to fire a person than to make them quit...</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37526,
"author": "PALADIN 458S",
"author_id": 28383,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28383",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Their students will suffer. And, their ranking on ratemyprofessor.com will most certainly go down causing people to avoid their classes. Probably not the type of answer you were looking for, but true nevertheless.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37542,
"author": "Community",
"author_id": -1,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/-1",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p><strong>Teaching</strong></p>\n\n<p>In general, schools have no way of measuring performance or effort in teaching. They can try to do it by using student evaluations, but student evaluations don't actually measure effort or performance. People get good evaluations by giving high grades and giving polished presentations. If you've taught freshman calculus a dozen times, and all you do is walk into the classroom and deliver the same canned lecture year after year, your teaching evaluations will be fine, even though you're putting in zero effort. Another way to get good teaching evaluations is to give scantron tests and tell your students what will be on them. There is some good material on this topic in the book Academically Adrift, by Arum and Roksa. They cite an implicit contract between teachers and students: \"I'll leave you alone if you'll leave me alone.\"</p>\n\n<p><strong>Research</strong></p>\n\n<p>I think this varies quite a bit from school to school. First off, not all schools really care about research. For example, California has a three-tiered system, consisting of UC, Cal State, and community colleges. At community colleges, research is neither expected nor supported. At Cal States, some research is required in order to obtain tenure, but over all there is very little emphasis on research. So at many schools, the consequences of ceasing to do research are zero.</p>\n\n<p>Other answers have suggested that if you slack off, you will not receive promotions and pay raises, and will be stuck with scutwork. Again, this depends on the school. At my school, promotions and pay raises are on a set schedule, which is negotiated by the union and depends only on seniority and education. In my experience, people who avoid working hard on their primary responsibilities of teaching and/or research are the same people who avoid committee work.</p>\n\n<p>In summary, my experience is that external incentives tend, if anything, to be anticorrelated with the quality of one's work as a tenured professor. People who do a good job and work hard are doing it because of their own internal motivations.</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/25
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37516",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/8802/"
] |
37,520 |
<p>I was trying to access <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02602938.2013.769198#.VMRlNC7B6ar" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this article</a> and was told this journal is "<strong>embargoed</strong>" for more than a year. This is the first time I have seen the term embargo used in an academic setting.</p>
<p><a href="https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/34136/2692">This answer</a> talks a bit about the idea of journal embargoes. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_embargo#On_articles_in_scientific_journals" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Wikipedia</a> has more information but I do not find it helpful at all.</p>
<p>As I read (on Wikipedia), it seems embargoes in journals are for <em>future</em> stories (and not for everything ever published). The article that I am seeking is from two years ago.</p>
<p><a href="https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/11193/2692">This question</a> implies that embargoes deal with the relationship between publisher and author, which does not make sense in the context of my request.</p>
<p><a href="https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/29477/2692">This answer</a> implies that embargoes are about limiting access electronically, but, again, it seems I can buy the article for $40 so clearly it is available electronically.</p>
<p>So, what exactly is an embargo (in this context)? Does it really mean that I simply have no access to this through my university account? It looks like it is available to the general public (if you pay) but not to those of us with access through university subscriptions.</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37521,
"author": "jakebeal",
"author_id": 22733,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/22733",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>So far as I know, your understanding of the typical use of \"embargo\" for journals is correct: it is when a journal wants to be the \"first to press\" with its article, and so places a gag order on the authors and their institutions so that they don't go talking to the press first.</p>\n\n<p>There is another place where journals also often want to be \"first to press,\" however, and I suspect that this is what \"embargo\" refers to in this case. It is often the case that a journal makes its content available through multiple routes: immediately through the publisher for a premium, and with time-lag through larger accumulations, such as PubMed or ScienceDirect. </p>\n\n<p>Thus, I think that what is probably going on here is that your institution does not judge this journal important enough to subscribe to directly, but gets it as part of a time-lagged \"package deal.\" You should check with your librarian how long the time-lag is, and then decide whether it's worth waiting or if you want to ask a colleague to help you get around the paywall...</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37522,
"author": "410 gone",
"author_id": 96,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/96",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Some journals have adopted a model for open-access whereby the published version is pay-to-view for a fixed period (e.g. the first year) and becomes freely available after that embargo period.</p>\n\n<p>However, in this particular case, as other people (including me) have no trouble in accessing that particular article, it looks like your institution has restricted access, either to that article or that journal.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37583,
"author": "Benoît Kloeckner",
"author_id": 946,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/946",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Embargo is often use when an academic journal authorizes the publication of its articles (usually author-versions rather than publisher-formated version) in an open repository, but only some time after publication in the journal. So, during the embargo, only paid subscriptions give access to the article, while after the embargo one can also access the article or at least a version of it on some repository (assuming that the author took advantage of this possibility, or that the publisher does it itself which is rarer). </p>\n\n<p>This is much discussed when talking about green open-access (i.e. open access via author deposit on open repositories), but it may not apply to the case you describe.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 43712,
"author": "bxfd82",
"author_id": 33244,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/33244",
"pm_score": 1,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Within this context it sounds like your library doesn't subscribe to this journal directly and none of the databases they subscribe to includes the current year. Journal publishers can make deals with the database publishers so that one database vendor has priority access by creating a one year embargo to a journal such that only that vendor can publish the current year, but often will offer a subscription to a set of years that has a one year delay to other database providers. The library typically pays for access to print serials, databases that host print serials, and various library consortia that provide access to interlibrary loaning services but it seems that none of these options provides access to the current year. The issue is not that the electronic access doesn't exist, but that your institution doesn't have any subscriptions or consortia connections with the vendor that made the deal. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/25
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37520",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/2692/"
] |
37,531 |
<p>I'm finishing my M.Sc. thesis and I sent it to my supervisors so that they can read it.</p>
<p>In the final version, I would like to insert an acknowledgements page where I thank them. Should I include it in the last draft that I will send them, so they can read it? Or should it be included in only the final version, without their knowledge?</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37533,
"author": "Peter Jansson",
"author_id": 4394,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/4394",
"pm_score": 4,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>There is no need to remove the acknowledgement in the final version. I know students have done so and for very different reasons, they want to \"surprise\" someone, they are not on friendly terms with an advisor and does not want the advisor to see it before it is printed. etc. The \"surprise\" aspect is, I would argue, greatly overrated. To not provide it because of a conflict is not likely to help the conflict. So, even if the reason is non-controversial, not including it might raise an eyebrow of a sensitive advisor. In the end, this is something that should not matter but some people are overly sensitive so ask yourself, are you confident that you will reach your intended effect by doing what you suggest, then go ahead, but if you do not feel so, avoid it. You will sometimes be surprised how much is read into a benign text such as an acknowledgement.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37546,
"author": "Inquisitive",
"author_id": 27985,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27985",
"pm_score": 0,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>I would include the proposed acknowledgements in the last draft. I would also include those that net-positively helped you even though you may not be on the best terms with them. By doing so, you will be taking the \"high ground\".</p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/25
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37531",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28393/"
] |
37,537 |
<p>I’m currently a computer science (and mathematics) B.Sc and M.Sc student in my third year (since I started my B.Sc).</p>
<p>At the second year of my B.Sc studies, I have started to work on research (in computer science) and I have two (amazing) advisors, I have written (i.e, submitted) a couple of papers so far and currently working on a few more.</p>
<p>One of the papers I have already submitted was quite big and accepted to one of the top conferences in my field, so my advisors suggested it will be my master’s thesis.</p>
<p>As I’m still finishing the B.Sc courses (and the M.Sc courses at the same time) I have two options after finishing the courses:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Submit the thesis, get the B.Sc and M.Sc and sign up as a PhD student (signing up will be more of a technicality as I’m [obviously] staying with the same advisors and our current work will be a part of the PhD anyway).</p></li>
<li><p>Not submitting the thesis and signing up to a “direct PhD” program, which I don’t know much about, but it should basically mean doing the same as an M.Sc and a PhD minus submitting the master’s thesis.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>My question is, is there any reason for me to choose the second option? Are there any benefits to having or not having a masters degree? (My thought of this right now is: Maybe the direct program will be faster if it is not allowed to include the masters thesis in the PhD thesis and then going in the direct program will allow me to include that paper in the thesis?)</p>
|
[
{
"answer_id": 37550,
"author": "Inquisitive",
"author_id": 27985,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/27985",
"pm_score": 2,
"selected": false,
"text": "<p>Given how hot the computer science field is and will remain, I think you should get the M.Sc. Let's say something happens to you and you can't complete the PhD, at least you'll have the M.Sc. It seems to me that a lucrative job will be waiting for you even if getting the PhD via this route takes a little longer. It sounds to me like financial success is easily in your future with or without the PhD or the time it took to get the PhD.</p>\n"
},
{
"answer_id": 37573,
"author": "Alexandros",
"author_id": 10042,
"author_profile": "https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/10042",
"pm_score": 3,
"selected": true,
"text": "<p>If you want to stay in academia, you cannot rely on getting a PHD degree faster, based on that one (possibly very good) paper done during your undergraduate years. You need to have as many equally good or better recent publications as possible, during your PHD years. Otherwise, some people might think that this paper was more your advisors' work than yours, since you could not back it up with equally good publications during your PHD years, when you worked more independently on your own.</p>\n\n<p>In this sense, this paper should not help you get a PHD faster if you cannot back it up with better publications during your PHD studies. And if you actually manage to write those better papers, you will not actually need this paper to get your PHD faster. Listen to your advisors and stick to the slower BSc + MSc => then PHD route. </p>\n"
}
] |
2015/01/25
|
[
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37537",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com",
"https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/28389/"
] |
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