texts
sequence | tags
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|---|---|
[
"Should a translated thesis get a new DOI?",
"Assuming the original thesis received a DOI to begin with, would it make sense to obtain a new DOI for your own translation of your own thesis, otherwise leaving the content as is, if you published the translation on a preprint server?"
] | [
"publications",
"thesis",
"preprint",
"doi"
] |
[
"Do I need \"Introduction\" and \"Conclusions\" parts in my PhD thesis?",
"My advisor has asked me to write my thesis in parts. So, basically, my thesis will have three major parts, each of which explains a different piece of work. However, he is asking me to also add a part called \"Introduction\" and a part called \"Conclusions\"\n\nI know he is not quite experienced with this type of thesis writing (i.e., writing in parts), so I am not sure if this is the right thing to do. Moreover, he is asking me to add \"Introduction\" and \"Conclusions\" chapter to each part (except for the parts with the same names). This is also a little bit strange to me!\n\nSo, could someone help on structuring my thesis? This is the overall structure:\n\n\nPart 1: It consists of three main chapters on topic A.\nPart 2: It consists of two main chapters on topic B.\nPart 3: It consists of one main chapter on topic C.\n\n\nI am definitely going to need an introduction somewhere to justify the three parts and how they are relevant to each other and can be placed in the same thesis, however, I do not know where this introduction should be (should it be a chapter somewhere or part?)\n\nEDIT: Here I also mention my advisor's suggested structure for clarity:\n\n\nPart 1: Introduction (with one chapter called Introduction)\nPart 2: topic A (with one chapter called Introduction and another called Conclusions)\nPart 3: topic B (with one chapter called Introduction and another called Conclusions)\nPart 4: topic C (with one chapter called Introduction and another called Conclusions)\nPart 5: Conclusions (with one chapter called Conclusions and another called Future Work)"
] | [
"phd",
"thesis",
"defense"
] |
[
"If my article submission is rejected while my PhD thesis is being examined, do I have to tell the examiners?",
"Because I submitted two journals, and my scholarship just about to end which I have just finished and approved by my supervisors. \n\nSo, yep. I wonder if it is necessary to tell the examiners of the thesis, about the progress of my journal submission, while the thesis is under their revision. \n\nAs I learned throughout this journey, good news about article submission is always on the borderline for me. So, the news is not necessarily a good one, and I don't know how much the news will impact the examiners' decision about my thesis."
] | [
"phd",
"thesis-committee",
"paper-submission"
] |
[
"How to deal with a cynical class?",
"I am dealing with this class that somehow became very cynical. We have constant complaints about the pace of the class, people asking literally the same questions over and over, blatant plagiarism, students pretty much insulting the lecturer and staff or laughing (sometimes at others asking questions) and being noisy during lectures etc.\n\nThis is especially weird since this is a professional education class. We are talking about people in their 30s on average paying $10k at a top 10 university and just for this one course. So it is not like this is some filler core requirement people are forced to attend against their will. These people were interested in this class before start and something messed up the morale.\n\nWe had the same staff --instructor and TAs-- for other cohorts and never had such issues. I am thinking it has to do with the composition of this cohort - one or two know-it-all types had a negative attitude from the beginning and some others somewhat struggling a bit started taking on their attitude. Before we realized this all snowballed into the cohort turning into a classroom of 30+ yr old high schoolers.\n\nWe have another 3 months to go and it is getting very exhausting for the staff and for the students still trying. People blatantly slowing down the class is not helping either. The instructor has been trying to talk to the whole class as well as the individual troublemakers along the lines of maintaining professionalism but that is simply having no effect. So the question is, how do we address this to salvage as much as we can and make it to the end of the class without it devolving further?"
] | [
"teaching",
"students"
] |
[
"arXiv submission with PDF and data, preferred submission strategy?",
"arXiv does not allow PDF and other file types on the same submission. My (many)coauthors are not tex savvy, and want the paper describing the database to be in PDF format so that their (also not tex savvy) community can access it. The database is 4 files, csv & json, and small, within arXiv size limits. The coauthors want their preferred word letterhead, which would be a long process to recreate in tex of any flavor.\n\nI see three paths forward:\n\n1) put the paper describing the database into tex format without their letterhead, or reducing it to an image. Be done. Incur an unknown level of coauthor confusion and wrath (they are oddly worked up about this). I would value easy (converters that work?) solutions in this vein.\n\n2) Have two arXiv submissions: a) the pdf of the paper b) the csv data dictionaries (2) and json databases (2). Reference b in a.\n\n3) Write the arXiv folks asking for an exception. I'm not sure they do this.\n\nWhat is my preferred submission strategy? Any other path forward? Educating my coauthors sounds slow and hard, so yes, I know it is an option, but I'd rather not."
] | [
"paper-submission",
"arxiv",
"preprint"
] |
[
"FAFSA and a recent permanent resident",
"I came to the US on 4th of August, 2013 from India on F1 visa as a Master's student. I was 1 day shy of being 24 and eligible for a late registration for Selective Service. But I had no idea that was even a thing back then.\n\nThings happened and I was out of status for a while and my education was incomplete. On February 16th, 2017, I got my green card through marriage. I was 27 years and 6 months then, and not eligible for late registration for Selective Service.\n\nNow, I have gotten admitted back to the college I was originally attending and applied for FAFSA. Today, I am 29 years old today and am ineligible for Selective Service.\n\nMy situation:\n\n\nI have been approved for FAFSA by the federal government.\nMy college has a pending requirement with regards to my FAFSA: Verify Selective Service registration.\n\n\nMy question:\n\nWhen I originally came to the US, I was eligible (and required, if I were to seek federal financial assistance) to register for Selective Service. I did not. Now my college requires proof that I've registered for selective service. So I tried registering, but the Selective Service registration website does not let me go past the first screen because my age indicates that I am ineligible for Selective Service.\n\n\nCould I somehow apply for Selective Service?\nCould I email my university and explain to them that I did not know of Selective Service to know I would need it in the future?\nShould I just give up trying for FAFSA?\n\n\nThank you."
] | [
"funding",
"united-states",
"international-students"
] |
[
"What can I do about my institution taking a long time to correct a mistake in my transcript?",
"In January of 2016, I completed a Master's in Library and Information Sciences in Norway. My transcripts were verified and signed by three universities as it was a joint course in collaboration of three universities.\n\nThe transcripts appear to incorrectly list my grades in 4 courses as \"Recognized\" instead of providing the actual grades. I didn't gave focus to that grades before because it was signed my the rectors of three universities so I thought may be that is some kind of grade.\n\n\n\nLater on when I applied for a job in a company, they refused to grant me the job because of that error in my diplomas.\n\nI then complained to my university about the error. After that, the universities send me temporary grade papers within few days by saying that they are going to send another copy of transcripts within a months as they have to have the transcripts signed by three universities' rectors.\n\nThe total process it took 1 year, which had wasted my time. So what shall I do to the universities regarding this issue?"
] | [
"graduate-school",
"transcript-of-records",
"norway"
] |
[
"Which PhD program should I choose, a top three program without any guarantee of funding or a top 50 with full funding?",
"Prospective advisor and project are allocated for each program. They are equally interesting and close to my interest. They are located in beautiful cities. I can become a tutor to cover part of my living expenses. There is a chance of getting funding for 2nd & 3rd years but there is no guarantee."
] | [
"phd",
"university"
] |
[
"How Much Weight does a Conference Paper carry compared to a Journal Publication?",
"I am working on some stuff for a paper. I have recently seen an advert for a conference calling for papers and I feel like I currently have enough stuff that I could submit it to this conference and get it published.\n\nHowever, it looks as if the paper would be published in the 'conference proceedings' as part of a series by Springer. Does this mean that the publication would only be classed as a 'conference paper' and do conference papers really carry the same weight as journal publications? (It's worth mentioning that the paper would be peer-reviwed if I sent it for the proceedings of this conference). If not, my idea would be to wait until I have added more to what I am working on and then send it to a journal.\n\nEdit: I am aware that there are other questions asking if a conference paper should be compared to a journal article. I am asking if in this case the publication can be listed as a journal article as it will be peer-reviewed by experts and published in Communications in Computer and Information Science, so I am wondering if this allows a work-around for me to class it as one of my journal articles. The link below provides more information: I would like to know if I can list it as a peer-reviewed journal paper or if I will have to call it a conference paper, as these are not the same to me.\n\nhttps://www.springer.com/series/7899\n\nSecond edit: To make it clear the paper would be a physics paper on the subject of quantum mechanics and would only be published in CCIS as it represents a surprising application of a particular piece of computer software. My issue is that I don't want to see the paper as a novelty item when I have been thinking about and working on the physics going into it for years. The use of software in it is really just a matter of convenience as there is a bit where it it easier to use software to generate a numerical example illustrating the general theory I have been talking about in a concrete case.\n\nThird edit: Turns out the publication could only be classed as a conference paper so I will add to what I have got and send it to a journal, as I don't regard a conference paper as being equivalent to a journal publication (or at least, not in physics)."
] | [
"journals",
"conference",
"paper-submission"
] |
[
"Finish my Masters or take a break year before post-bac?",
"I am currently a graduate student in communications, with my B.A. in English and Creative Writing. I have been utterly dissatisfied with my graduate experience and have spent most (read: all) of this past year focusing more on my music (teaching private lessons, working with marching bands, and personal practice) than on my graduate studies. I am certain that I want to return for a second bachelor's degree in music education and follow that path. \n\nHowever, I'm stuck with a conundrum here. I can finish the second year of my Masters and enter post-bac with both degrees, or I could take the next year to work and save up some money to help pay for my second bachelor's. (To give some figures, I currently make about $10,000 a year, which is enough to live but not have any savings. Working locally I could make anywhere from $25-30,000 a year, and the extra $15-20,000 would go directly into savings for the post-bac program. \n\nI'm concerned how much backlash or academic penalty there may be after dropping out of a Masters program, though. Does anybody have a similar or comparable experience that they can share? I just want to take the right path here. \n\nThank you so much!"
] | [
"graduate-school",
"second-degree"
] |
[
"Is there a tool like the Open Science Framework that can be run on a private server?",
"I am very impressed by the Open Science Framework. Unfortunately, for some projects I cannot put any data in a cloud especially if it is not encrypted. Are there similar tools which allow me to keep my data in its present windows like folder organisation but with similar features ? E.g adding files by drag and drop and adding annotations, as well as a wiki, etc. They do not necessarily have to be free. Although I would appreciate an open source project and the possibility to donate."
] | [
"software",
"data",
"projects"
] |
[
"A professor has offered to send me a hard copy of his new book. Would it be rude to ask for a PDF file instead?",
"While working my way through one textbook, I spotted several errors, TeXed them up and emailed to the author of the textbook. He thanked me and asked for my physical address so he could send me a copy of his new textbook (a more advanced one). I was planning to work though his new textbook anyway, since it matches my interests. Yet I'd much prefer a PDF file and not a hard copy. Would it be rude to ask if he could send me a PDF file instead? I don't want to come over as ungrateful, yet I'd make much more use of it if I had a PDF file.\n\nDefinitely of relevance here:\n\n\nHe certainly does have a PDF file of the new book since the publisher offers PDF as one of the options (hardcover, softcover, and PDF file),\nThe PDF file in question can not be 'freely' found on the Internet (although its previous edition can)."
] | [
"etiquette",
"professors",
"books",
"errors-erratum"
] |
[
"Which role should other graduate students serve in a PhD defense?",
"In some countries and at certain universities, graduate students are advisory members of the committee during the PhD defense. In other countries like the Netherlands, a PhD defense takes place in public and everyone might ask questions at the end. Therefore, I would like to know:\n\n\nHow should another graduate student serve his/her role as an advisory member of the PhD committee?\nWhat kind of questions should one ask in a public PhD defense?\nHow should he/she prepare for the defense (other than obviously reading the dissertation)?"
] | [
"phd",
"advisor",
"defense",
"thesis-committee"
] |
[
"How to get to pace in your first research project?",
"I'm doing my bachelor's thesis at a foreign university in Northern Europe. I come from a equally strong university in Europe and have always been one of the better students at my own university. The group I'm working in right now is very well known for its work.\nSince I started my project there two weeks ago I feel very stressed and progressively stupid though. I work with two master's students (doing their one year degree project) and one PhD student on a big project. They are all very nice and I get good supervision, but I just feel completely incompetent.\nI tried to get the adjustments for my machine right for almost two days straight now, came extra early in and stayed extra long, but didn't manage to pull it off yet. After lunch time I asked one of the PhD students for help with one specific issue I was having. He wanted to help me right away, and while answering my question he got the entire thing up and running in 30 minutes, before he rushed to his next meeting.\nI disassembled everything and tried reproducing the results from scratch with the new know-how, but still didn't get it to work on my own today. This is very embarrassing, now I will stand there tomorrow morning, once again empty handed.\nI feel discouraged by the pace my three fellow students are progressing with their project to be honest. They are much more productive than me. I fear to make a bad impression in comparison to them.\nDo you have some tips on how to catch up? Would it be acceptable to go to the lab on the weekends? Should I do that?"
] | [
"research-process",
"research-undergraduate",
"bachelor"
] |
[
"Possible to defend myself from plagiarism in draft thesis?",
"I recently submitted my latest draft thesis to my advisor. I had been having problems with my advisor because I had found him unhelpful, he would not make it easy for me to ask him questions as he would raise his voice and cut me off, and I was confused by the goals/aims of the project and I feel he has misled me. \n\nI had submitted a few draft theses before that the main advisor read, but the co-advisor did not read any of them. The co-advisor read the latest draft in detail and said I plagiarized. I admit that I didn't consider this constituted plagiarism and thought this was just a draft, I was mostly concerned about whether my ideas made sense and I was sure it would be changed because I knew the main advisor wouldn't like it. The parts they accused was plagiarism was in my previous drafts as well, so because the main advisor didn't mention those were plagiarized, I didn't change those parts. I was just hoping to keep the co-advisor. I also never intended to steal other people's work and claim it as my own. \n\nDo you know if there's a good chance I'll get expelled, based on your experience with plagiarism in master's draft theses?"
] | [
"thesis",
"masters",
"plagiarism"
] |
[
"Proper way of marking dimensions of a drawing in a paper",
"In a paper I am writing, I will give a figure that shows the mechanical dimensions of a object. I was wondering what the right way to reference the dimensions was, since I have seen multiple ways of this being done.\n\nOne way I have seen it done often is with parameters in the drawing, and text describing the values (either in the full text of the figure caption). For example: \n\n\n\nThis way offers you the flexibility to talk about the same values in a equation (for example, \"It was found that performance was optimal when R1 = D2/2\")\n\nAn alternative is to have the dimensions directly in the image. This way the reader can just skim through the figures to have an idea about the dimensions, instead of having to read the paper to know them (which can be useful, as often we might want to quickly scan a paper to see if it is what we are looking for before reading it entirely).\n\nThis would look like this:\n\n\n\nAnd finaly one could combine the two, and have it say for example \"W1 = 7\" in the figure. I don't like this that much as it starts to get very messy and crowded very quickly, and lowers the clarity of the figure.\n\nIs there a ''correct'' way to do it?"
] | [
"publications",
"writing",
"graphics"
] |
[
"Ph.D. in Geophysics while doing an online MS in CS",
"Has anyone had experience working on two graduate degrees at once? \nThe goal being to gain mastery in CS, specifically machine learning so that it can be applied to research problems in the earth sciences.\n\nI'm currently a first year Ph.D. student in geophysics focusing on applying machine learning to massive datasets of satellite imagery. I just got accepted to Georgia Techs Online Masters in Computer Science. I'm trying to decide if I should do it while working on a Ph.D. The CS program is part-time designed for working professionals and is low-cost $6,600. \n\nWhile I can certainly learn the CS material on my own, I feel a formal credential will be taken more seriously. A tech career would also be a fallback plan, knowing how competitive the academic world is having a plan B is important to me. Any advice is appreciated."
] | [
"graduate-school"
] |
[
"Is Scimago a good way to rank conference impact?",
"I have seen that the Scimago Journal Rank make a rank of journals that cover different topics and classified them into quartiles. For what I know conferences also made their proceedings books, but I was dubious if they could be compared agains journals like Scimago does. \n\nI say this because I believe that journals have most ot the time a higher impact than conferences, and compare them side to side (journals and conference proceedings) it is not such a good idea.\n\nThe question that I have is if Scimago could be a good way to rank a conference impact, and also if there is another computer science conference ranking that uses the same quartile calculus as Scimago?\n\nAny help?\n\nThanks"
] | [
"journals",
"conference",
"ranking"
] |
[
"Can I publish an article as a sole author if my supervisor agrees?",
"I'm currently working in a project that is funded by me and the supervisor doesn't contribute much to my work (he is just directing me slightly if I asked him) and he told me that he doesn't need to publish and I can publish as a sole author if I want. I only have a Master degree, can I publish as a sole author? can some journals accept that? Should I contact a journal to ask? if the journal agrees, so this is will be fine? (By the way my field is Biochemistry)"
] | [
"publications",
"research-process",
"journals",
"authorship"
] |
[
"second on campus interview for TT faculty position (3rd interview total)",
"I have a question for anyone who might be a department chair or on a search committee. What does it mean if you get invited for a second on-campus interview? I have already been there once for a standard on campus interview. For context, this is for a tenure track assistant professor position in the sciences."
] | [
"job-search",
"tenure-track"
] |
[
"Gnuplot in thesis and articles or not?",
"I'm doing an astrophysics thesis with a lot of programming in Python. I'm currently using gnuplot for my plots, but I wonder if this is actually looking quite professional. Are there other options which look better and are still easy to use?\n\nHere an example of a figure in my thesis:\n\n\n\nThe vertical line I got with the following command: \n\nset arrow from 4861.3,-1200 to 4861.3,2000 nohead lc 2 \n\n\nI know it reaches out of the figure, but I use this command for all of my script and I know only at the end what the upper and lower boundary of the y-axis will be. Every peak is different."
] | [
"publications",
"thesis",
"writing",
"graphics"
] |
[
"Is it ok if I write to all professors that are offering Ph.D. positions the same email?",
"I saw some Ph.D. positions from a particular university. Most of the projects align well with my interest. So before applying, I want to write the professors some queries (e.g. just to know what he is expecting in the candidate or even I am eligible or my profile meeting his expectations or not). Is it ok if I send the same mail to all the professors I want to work with, even when they are from the same department? If they ever come to know any candidate sent the same email to all his colleagues, will it be harmful to the candidate?"
] | [
"phd",
"research-process",
"career-path",
"professors",
"supervision"
] |
[
"Professor deviating from the syllabus mentioned apriori",
"I am currently taking a graduate course which is a combination of two subjects and we have two faculty teaching it - call them A and B - one for each subject. Before my classes started, we had an orientation and the syllabi of all the classes were shown to us. In this case, Prof A explained to us the syllabus of both the subjects.\nBut later, when Prof B started teaching, they have deviated a lot from the syllabus. In particular, the topics that were shown to us in the orientation as the syllabus, were pretty much covered in the first couple of lecture and Prof B taught it to us as "background knowledge" (which we thought was going to be the content of the entire course.) Anecdotally, a lot of students are finding the course difficult due to this reason.\nProf B also hasn't provided us with a syllabus of what he is going to teach and we find out the topics on the day of the lecture.\nSo my question here is: Would it be appropriate to approach Prof B and let them know that this is not what we were expecting from the course? If so, how do I bring it up without coming off as confrontational? Should I instead talk to Prof A and let them know that the syllabus he presented is different from what is being taught?\n[Prof B does us ask us during class if we're understanding the topics, but due to the online nature and it being a fairly large class, people haven't really spoken up.]"
] | [
"graduate-school",
"professors",
"syllabus"
] |
[
"Is volunteer lab work a good practice?",
"I met a professor last year through an online search and expressed my interests to his research and his advanced lab technique, in which I lack of experience. \n\nI also asked for a PhD opportunity from him, he says that he has no money or limited funding now, so I agreed to work for 3 months for free. Would be practical that this volunteer experience could lead to a PhD after this 3 months? On one side I am not happy with working for free, as I had employment for 1 year as a research assistant. On the other side, this potential professor appears nice to employees around and keeps his words, and has good tracks of papers.\n\nBut am I just wasting of time, what actions should I take to figure this out before too late?\n\nSupplementary information: He said that he was on travel, so I was off for a while. He did not contact me till I found him. Is this normal or just my altitude should be changed? I feel not well, maybe he does not really want me as a fellow at all? \n\nI am really frustrated, should I go further or not, is he just being polite to accept me to practice the techniques in his lab for 3 months? Am I wasting of time to even practice these test methods?"
] | [
"phd",
"research-process",
"graduate-admissions"
] |
[
"how to incorporate Virtual Reality in a business school setting?",
"Business School faculty here. We have some budget to buy electronics. We're thinking of buying a Virtual Reality \"thing\" and using it somehow.\n\nWe can use it for pedagogy, or as a marketing tool, etc. (E.g., it could contain a demonstration of the advantages of a business degree, and we could leave it in our waiting room or take it with us to student recruitment events).\n\nWe can't figure out what to buy and how to use it.\n\nSuggestions?"
] | [
"technology"
] |
[
"What to do when you discover a mistake in the archived copy of your PhD thesis?",
"I've just defended my PhD in mathematics and started a postdoc. While working on an improvement of one of the results of my thesis, I realized that there are several minor mistakes and a big bug in a proof that invalids a minor result in the thesis (about 3-4 pages out of 110). Unfortunately neither I nor my advisor or referees figured it out the mistake. Though the result is minor, it is announced in the introduction and the manuscript is on-line on an ArXiv-like server, so that I could publish a new version but not cancel the one on-line. \n\nWhat is the best thing to do? Upload an errata? Upload a \"revised\" version of the thesis? Publish a \"revised version\" of the thesis on my web-page?\n\nCan this damage my future career, making me look not \"reliable\" as a researcher?"
] | [
"thesis",
"etiquette",
"errors-erratum"
] |
[
"Publisher didn't make change to paper and now the paper still has the error",
"I recently published a paper with IEEE. During the publishing stage, I had to provide them the figures named [MyName]FigureX_a, [MyName]FigureX_b etc...\n\nBy accident, I got two figures wrong and they were named FigureX_b and FigureX_a instead of FigureX_a and FigureX_b. During publishing, I spotted this error and told them to fix the problem. They did fix it at the time and I approved the changes.\n\nHowever, when I received the final complete PDF, the error was present once again. In the e-mail, it stated that \"Please note this is not the final version of the article and corrections will not be reflected in this PDF\". I thought that the change would be reflected in the final version so did not bother to e-mail.\n\nI have just seen the final version on the web-site and the error is still present. This error should be pretty evident to anybody reading the paper. The figure is part of many other subfigures so the inconsistency is apparent. The overall message of the figure is not lost and the results are still the same apart from the order being wrong.\n\nI am unsure what to do. On one hand, I want to contact IEEE and complain. I unfortunately do not have the proofs of the pdfs that were provided for review but I have my correspondence saved. On the other hand, I think the error is minor enough that any reader should understand what happened.\n\nThe file that will be on PubMed is correct though. I could in theory submit it to ArXiv with the correct ordering, copyright notices and other information required by IEEE(DOI,PMID etc.).\n\nDoes this require any drastic actions?"
] | [
"publications",
"publishers",
"errors-erratum"
] |
[
"Asking PI I barely interacted with for letter of rec?",
"I'm a rising senior and will be applying to PhD programs this fall. I'm wrapping up a research project I was doing this summer at another school (basically an REU-like program) and the school is at the top of my field. I learned so much this summer and was able to accomplish a lot with my project. I was mentored by staff scientists and basically worked with them the entire summer. The PI of the lab is very hands off and hard to pin down. I met with him once in the beginning of the summer and have a meeting with him this week as I finish up. I was planning on asking him to write me a letter of rec then. The staff scientists said that what will probably end up happening is they write it and he'll sign it/co-sign it, but I need to ask him myself. I'm just a bit nervous/paranoid he'll say no so if anyone has any advice/words of encouragement, I'd appreciate it.\n\nI understand that letters should come from people who know you well and I plan on my other two to be from professors that I am close with at my school. Given that I attend a school where there are limited research opportunities, I consider it to be integral that I get a letter out of this experience that speaks to my capabilities as a researcher. Based on the advice from the career office at this visiting school and other lab members, the letter should be coming from the PI/professor. The scientists I work with will contribute to a strong recommendation - they themselves acknowledge that it just wouldn't be as valuable coming from them. I guess my nervousness has to do more with the fact that here with big labs and big name PI's everyone says this situation/procedure is the norm and coming from a smaller school I'm not as used to it."
] | [
"recommendation-letter",
"research-undergraduate"
] |
[
"How to address the issues of not including technical contribution",
"Recently I defended my thesis for a master's degree in computer engineering, and internal reviewers marked it satisfactory, however, they made some comments in my report and presentation, one of them was to include the technical contribution of my research in the thesis report and presentation.\nI found this comment very serious, and I couldn't get any idea on how to work around on those issues.\nMy research was related to some intervention on online learning (here I have used the techniques that are available through literature review) and it is based upon the use of popular psychological theory.\nI used statistical methods to analyze the results. I have collected the data through a self-reported survey questionnaire. Results obtained were also somehow satisfactory(findings somehow deviated from the existing findings).\nI also develop a tool to visualize the activity of the student interaction in that online learning, and which I consider as one of the contributions.\nWith all these things done, I am still confused about the problem of identifying my "technical contribution".\nMy Questions are:\nWhat should I report as my technical contribution? How should I approach myself to identify my technical contribution? Actually, what is considered a technical contribution?\nI know I need to consult my supervisor for this, but he will definitely ask the same question to me, and I will not have any answer for that.\nAny help would be appreciated and thanks in advance."
] | [
"thesis",
"masters",
"computer-science",
"defense"
] |
[
"Possibility to use PhD Thesis work in another university",
"I was a PhD student in a Japanese graduate school until March 2015 when my professor retired. Just before I submitted my thesis and it got rejected by one vote. Indeed there were 30+ voters, of whom only 6 attended my open defense and one of them was a professor who hated my professor. He succeeded in convincing enough people to vote against me. Sadly there are no student council there and the university does not provide any official jury result with the comments about why the thesis got rejected.\n\nNow the situation got worse, some other students of my previous lab also got annoyed by the same professor who now has a majority inside the department. There is also a new rule which forces the candidates to present the thesis to the professors of the department before being able to officially present their thesis to the university. Indeed, the department has to give their agreement before the official submission. Funny thing is that the department where I belonged to is not only controlled by the professor who tries to fail every student who were in my previous lab but also the students are allowed only 30min for the presentation while other departments allow 2h for the same thing. Yes the rules do not forbid that apparently. \nSince my departure as a student I could stay in the lab of a professor who was a friend of my previous professor and I published another journal paper. However the department rejected my application because the last paper title was too close to another of my paper and feared a re-submission. \nIn the meanwhile I was told very lately to write a totally new chapter in my thesis and even later that i would have to get a publication to go with it. I am now waiting for the results of another journal paper to be able to apply again.\n\nBut I am now afraid of applying there again. If the professors of the department are so biased that they will do anything so my application can't go though to the official application and if i do not have any official way to defend myself to higher authorities what are my chances to succeed now ? Some professors are too proud and scared to admit the situation as their own students could start to suffer from it as well.\n\nMy thesis is completely written, I have published as main author 4 journal papers (2 regular issues and 2 short issues) and 5 conference papers. And a potential 5th journal paper.\n\nTLDR:\nIs there a way to not waste all that work and submit my thesis in another university as free candidate or something? \nI am also afraid to not have the time and resources for another publication in a journal, since i am no longer a student, in case a university absolutely need a paper with one of their professors."
] | [
"phd",
"ethics",
"university"
] |
[
"What is the socio-economic argument or historical basis for university tuition fees?",
"One of the major differences between Europe (here I am mainly referring to Scandinavia) and Northern America, from an academic viewpoint, is the perspective towards higher education. In Scandinavia there it is generally accepted that anyone despite their financial status should be able to pursue higher education. Elsewhere in Europe I know of systems were the state subsidises a majority of the cost and only a minor portion of education costs are reflected on to the students. \n\nThe quality of education and research, and all the top X ratings aside, I personally never really understood the \"American\" way of looking at education, namely that it is a practically a business. I have noticed this other question on reasons for increasing tuition fees but little to no information behind why they exist. \n\nI came across this comic recently, which seems to be gaining some popularity on the web, where the artist takes up some of the aspects and consequences of the north american perspective towards higher education; subjects that are mentioned are student loan debt, tuition fees and federal spending on education vs military or prisons. \n\nPlease note that I the language s/he chooses might be offensive to some and it is not at all my intention to insult anyone or incite a subjective discussion. Based on the culture and traditions in Scandinavia, many find it really hard to understand why it would be useful to have tuition fees, and thus put practically everyone who studies in serious debt by the time they are done with education. Thus, I would like to know:\n\nIs there any reasonable ground (thorough studies on cost to society, overall well-being of people etc) or any indisputable historical origins behind why tuition fees were introduced for higher education?\n\n\n\nPS: I realise that the question is on the gray zone on being on-topic or not here on Ac.SE but given good, constructive and factual answers, it would be a good resource to people outside North American system."
] | [
"united-states",
"education",
"tuition"
] |
[
"Drafting Postdoc Inquiry Follow-up",
"About 3 months ago I emailed a professor asking if there were any postdoc positions open in his lab. The professor emailed back relatively quickly and thanked me for being interested in his lab, but that currently there were no openings available. However, he was waiting to hear back at the end of the year from some funding he had applied for, and that he would keep me posted. \n\nI haven't heard back from him, yet. I understand he's probably busy or maybe forgotten about me, which is why I wanted to email him again and follow-up. I don't know what to say. Mostly because I'm afraid that if he didn't get funded, maybe my email will be like rubbing salt to his wounds. I guess I won't know until I email again. Therefore, what would be the best approach?"
] | [
"graduate-school",
"job-search",
"postdocs",
"email"
] |
[
"Can I intern at my own company?",
"So I founded a company as a PhD student and I want to work on company products over the summer times. Do I take a leave of absence or can I take an internship at my own company during that time?\nWhat's the right way to do this?"
] | [
"internship"
] |
[
"How can a senior undergraduate find academic journals in math and computer science?",
"I am going to be a senior undergraduate and am looking to really find the area of research that I would like to be engaged in during graduate-school/senior year. I have submitted one conference paper as a collaborating author (currently waiting for the reviewers) in the area of Social Network Analysis (mathematical modeling) and am currently working on a conference paper in Graph Algorithms. \n\nAs you might guess, I am double majoring in Math and Computer Science and would like to pursue a graduate degree in applied math. So far (I haven't taken all the undergrad courses yet!) I have enjoyed Algorithms, Real Analysis, Graph Theory and Differential Equations. In the future I am curious to learn more about Stochastic Modeling, Mathematical Logic, Artificial Intelligence, Complex Analysis, Fractals and Abstract Algebra.\n\n\nWhere can I find current research journals about both the topics I have enjoyed and the topics I am curious to learn more about?\nDo any journals have mobile apps (IOS, Android, or Windows) in which they can be viewed?\nWhere can I find unbiased information about the quality and related-data about journals?\n\n\nEDIT: Do any journals \"stream\" (RSS feed) to GNU Emacs? or is there any type of package manager that will automatically download the latest publications? For example, I just found this \"package/program\" available in GNU Emacs. It is a list of AI publications from MIT up until 2005 (why would they stop then?)\n\nThanks for all the help! I am at least looking for a copy of a physical journal so I can take my eyes off the computer for a little bit! :)"
] | [
"journals",
"mathematics",
"computer-science",
"reading"
] |
[
"Why do academics tend to be reluctant to ask for help from other academics?",
"I've seen situations like the below happen quite a few times.\n\nAlice writes a paper. It's well-received and receives a hundred citations. Bob also works in the area, and he engages a student Charlie to study the paper. Shortly after starting, Charlie tells Bob he couldn't get from equation 10 to equation 11, in fact he thinks the derivation is incorrect. Bob is incredulous (after all the paper is well-received and has a 100 citations) and tells Charlie to check it again. A few weeks later, Charlie tells Bob he still can't get equation 11, and in fact he's increasingly convinced the derivation is wrong because he's tried it in a few different ways and always gets the same result.\nBob starts looking at the paper himself and after another few weeks he also runs out of ideas. Finally they write to Alice asking for details. Alice responds quickly with, "you've made this mistake. After correcting it and making this transformation, equation 11 follows."\n\nThe specific details vary, but the core of what happens is the same: Bob and Charlie can't do what Alice has done, but instead of asking Alice for help, they insists on trying it themselves. After weeks of struggling and many tins of coffee, they finally give up and ask Alice, who proceeds to solve the problem very quickly.\nThe question: why would Bob and Charlie grind away for weeks when help is just an email away? If I managed a team of employees who refused to ask each other for help, especially when someone has already solved the problem, I'd be quite annoyed. After all, time is precious.\nI find this especially surprising because virtually every professor I've seen teach encourages their students to ask questions. Instructors tell their students they're welcome to interrupt during class, to approach TAs, or to visit them during office hours. They discourage their students from working without progress for weeks before asking for help, and yet they're reluctant to ask for help themselves. Why?\nThe only reason I can think of is that Bob and Charlie want to be sure that the results are robust. If Alice made a mistake, then they would not be able to duplicate the results, but if they just ask Alice for help, then they're at risk of making the same mistake. But this doesn't seem like a strong reason: they can ask for help but then critically examine what Alice says."
] | [
"academic-life"
] |
[
"Deferring for non-academic reasons",
"I applied to PhD programs for Fall 2018, and am currently evaluating my options. I have narrowed myself down to two options, both good choices with potential advisors who are a good fit, though I prefer one school slightly over the other. \n\nThe reason for my post is that I am interested in deferring my admission for a year. My understanding is that graduate schools typically let students do so when the student has a \"good reason\", i.e. those who want to spend time studying abroad, doing volunteer work, etc. The catch here is that I don't have any particular opportunities I want to pursue, I just want to take a break and work on some mental health issues I have before signing on for a 5-6 year commitment (really even longer considering the time afterwards spent in post-docs, trying to find tenure-track jobs, etc. if I want to try to stay in academia). \n\nI haven't heard of any situations like this, and I'm not sure how the graduate schools will react if I ask. Is it possible that they'd revoke my offer? I've also already spoken to potential advisors, should I let them know? I'd be worried what they might think if they knew I wanted to defer graduate school for this reason."
] | [
"graduate-admissions",
"graduate-school",
"deferral"
] |
[
"Should biomedical engineering/ biotech academics aim to start businesses?",
"in my relatively short academic career, I've gathered that academic engineering seems to be more about creating ideas than actually iteratively improving a product using engineering methods. In my field, biomedical engineering, I worry that this is not enough because many biomedical ideas require immense funding that usually comes from large companies willing to wait a decade for profits, and thus good ideas are shelved (obviously many layers to this). \n\nMany questions address how academics could make money, or start up companies, but my question is whether it is actually our responsibility to do so in the biomedical and biotech fields?\n\nedit:\nmy assumption is that starting a business is the only way to get a product to customers. Answers that provide alternative strategies to achieve this ultimate goal are welcome :)"
] | [
"ethics",
"engineering",
"biology",
"biotechnology"
] |
[
"Should I add the \"presenter certificate\" to the paper presented at a conference?",
"I have presented a paper at a conference and received a certificate proving that I was a presenter. The conference does not have an English agenda, so it would not be easy for an application committee to find proof that I was the one who presented it online. I am now submitting the paper as one of my writing samples for a Ph.D. application. Should I attach the presenter certificate to the paper, in order to prove to the committee that I was really the one who presented it?"
] | [
"publications",
"phd",
"graduate-admissions"
] |
[
"Refering to the data of another study as a source of data for you work?",
"I was wondering if it's OK to use the data presented in the form of Tables in other publications and cite them as the source of data? Like doing new analyses on these data? Should we ask for permission from the authors or just citing them would be OK?"
] | [
"ethics",
"data"
] |
[
"What does renunciation of scholarship mean?",
"I want to know what renunciation of scholarship mean? Is it the same as withdrawing from a scholarship program? Which one is better to quit a scholarship?\nDoes renunciation of scholarship form enables a person to re apply to a scholarship again?"
] | [
"funding",
"quitting",
"withdraw"
] |
[
"Is it worthless to cite a paper as X et al. when X is not first author but performed the work?",
"This question is perhaps a particular case of this one. I still feel it deserves to live standalone.\n\nI am sure that a published paper with 4 authors--A, B, C, and X--was almost entirely produced by X. X designed the study, gathered the data, analyzed the data, and wrote the paper. A helped X a little bit (sort of supervised X). B and C are listed there because of typical dishonest authorship mafia. At that time, X was a student. X could do very little to oppose adding those authors in her/his very first paper.\n\nNow, I am writing a paper that references this one. While A et al. paper is correctly displayed in the References, I was thinking to purposely cite the paper as X et al. (year) in the text.\n\nThat would be a subtle way to entail that I know what was going on there. I would cite the paper in the way that was supposed to be. Maybe B and C will also get it. That's a sort of nerdish academic subversive behavior, I guess.\n\nWould that be meaningless? In particular, would that damage X citation counts? I do not think so, because the paper is correctly listed in the References. However, I am not sure because of this question."
] | [
"publications",
"citations",
"ethics"
] |
[
"Any ideas how I could get people to participate in my live Internet application experiment for my thesis?",
"I have developed an Internet application that I need people to run across the Internet to collect statistics to see how well the program works. So far, I have used LinkedIn to reach out to my friends from my university and I started an open group. I also have a Git page where the program can be downloaded.\n\nhttp://www.linkedin.com/groups/Andrew-Stantons-WSU-Masters-Thesis-6518497?home=&gid=6518497&trk=groups_guest_most_popular-h-logo\n\nhttps://github.com/acstanton515/ThesisLiveExperiment\n\nI don't think the participation is going to be what I would like, so I need a way to find more users willing to run the program.\n\nAny ideas on how to reach others in academia or elsewhere on a broader level?"
] | [
"research-process",
"computer-science",
"thesis",
"collaboration",
"networking"
] |
[
"What are reasonable alternatives to changing your name for academic publishing when you have a common surname?",
"I've recently embarked on my PhD studies (cancer, structural biology) and have yet to publish. Currently, there are some 200 papers in my name and several thousand under my surname. Because of this, I am considering switching my surname to an old, rare, surname in my family, which is only used by one active researcher.\n\nMy question is this: are there any reasonable alternatives that does not include legally changing my name? I personally don't mind changing it, but the old surname happens to be \"noble\", and may come off as quite pretentious. I would be able to change to another, less pretentious, surname, but in terms of rareness, no alternative comes close. \n\nIn short, what are my alternatives?"
] | [
"publications",
"authorship",
"personal-name"
] |
[
"Web Service to fetch article citations",
"I am trying to find a way to search for all the citations contained in an article. What I want to do is create a workflow for my research where:\n\n\nI have a pool of articles that I have already read.\nI want to find a new article to read, based on this pool of articles, so I find all the citations of all the read articles and calculate the most cited article, which is the next article I should read (obviously skipping articles that I have already read).\n\n\nBut I have been unable to find a way to automatically download all of the citations of a specific article. Is there no way to do it? even payed?"
] | [
"citations",
"tools",
"repository"
] |
[
"Is it okay to apply to more than one professors for internship at the same time?",
"I am a math undergraduate in my second year. I was thinking of applying to internship but I am confused about this.\n1. Is it okay to apply to more than one professors at the same time? If so if I get selected in more than one and I consider only one will that affect my reputation with professor badly? If so how can I avoid it?\n2. Will it be okay if I try to apply in two fields of the same \n subjects?\nI am kind of inexperienced in this; so any help would be appreciated. :)"
] | [
"undergraduate",
"research-undergraduate",
"internship"
] |
[
"LNAI conference accepting papers as accompanying proceedings",
"I have submitted an article in a conference which publishes its proceedings in LNAI/LNCS series. However, in the conference website we can see the following text : \n\n\n Proceedings with accepted papers are expected to be published in the LNAI/LNCS series (Springer-Verlag), and distributed at the conference.\n Besides, papers, that according to the evaluation of the referees, are not suitable for the LNAI but that have some merits will be published in accompanying proceedings and scheduled in the conference program.\n\n\nThis statement is confusing to me, especially the second part, which specifies that papers that have some merits will be published in accompanying proceedings and scheduled in the conference program.\n\nToday, as i'm writing this, my paper was accepted for publication at the downloadable (with ISBN) proceedings, and due to corona virus, the conference is cancelled.\n\nMy question here, is my publication have the same value as regularly accepted paper.\n\nThank you"
] | [
"conference",
"lecture-notes",
"proceedings"
] |
[
"DOI for a yet-unpublished paper",
"Suppose I have a paper #1 which was accepted by a Very Respectable Journal, and has been assigned a DOI, but has yet to be actually published (i.e. it's in the queue, and the DOI is not \"activated\", so it doesn't work for now).\n\nSuppose, at this point, that I write another paper #2 in which I cite paper #1, saying that it is accepted by Ver. Resp. J. In this case, should I or should I not provide the DOI?\n\nThe possible downside of this is that someone may try to use the DOI before it goes live and be confused. On the other hand, if someone reads the version of paper #2 later on, the DOI may be more helpful than mere mention of the paper being accepted at Ver. Resp. J."
] | [
"publications",
"citations",
"doi"
] |
[
"Publishing someone's argument",
"What if this happens:\n\nSay I contacted a researcher R in my field about particular question I had. They answered the question in a private email to me. Their sketch of the argument was about 5 sentences long, and it can be turned into a rigorous proof. I really like the result. However, R has been unresponsive for 2 months and has not replied to any of my subsequent emails where I make various offers and seek their advice. \n\nWould it be unethical to include their argument as a small part of a publication I'm preparing, assuming I give credit to R? What constitutes proper credit in this case? A sentence in the introduction when I first mention the result? A sentence preceding the proof? In Acknowledgements?"
] | [
"research-process",
"mathematics"
] |
[
"what would be the level of novelty of an undergraduate thesis?",
"I would like to know what would be the level of novelty that one advisor should ask for an undergraduate student in Computer Science whom is aimed to make an Honours or Bachelor thesis?\n\nFor what I have discussed with some colleagues, it would be enough that from the chosen topic the student would feel comfortable for knowing the technique and the experimental methods that he would use. Instead to present something really original that would be in the field of a Master or PhD thesis.\n\nWhat would be a set of guidelines regarding this issue?\n\nThanks"
] | [
"thesis",
"undergraduate",
"research-undergraduate"
] |
[
"Would going to Teacher's College be useful, if my ultimate goal is to become a university math professor?",
"I am close to entering the fifth year of a five-year Concurrent Education program. What the program involves is four years spent working on a bachelor’s degree, while “on the side” taking education courses and doing placements contributing to a bachelor of education and teaching certificate. The final year of the program is regular Teacher’s College, which is a combination of education/curriculum courses and, in total, about 14 weeks of placement.\n\nI’ve thought about dropping the education part of the program a few times since it started, but stuck with it because it left teaching open as an option, while only requiring one education course and a 3-week placement each year (which is good experience anyway). About 2 years ago, I started considering going to grad school for math, but by the end of last summer, still wasn’t 100% sure, so I didn’t write the GREs. This year I took a graduate-level algebra course, and about halfway through, realized that grad school for math is definitely something I want to pursue.\n\nAs the deadlines for applying to grad schools had passed / were soon approaching, my plan then became to finish the program and get my teaching degree, and apply for math graduate programs this December/January for entrance in Fall 2017. Spending the next year in Teacher’s College, I’ve been thinking, might actually be a good thing, as a way to set me apart on applications for grad school and for jobs in the future, as well as a way to develop good teaching and other related skills. On top of that, it would leave teaching as a back-up just in case.\n\nI would sincerely appreciate hearing the opinions of those who are in or who have been through graduate school in math. Do you think it will it be worth it, in terms of a future as a mathematician (ideally as a math professor), to finish the teaching program? I fear that the final year of this program will be painful for me, as it will require a lot of placements, which I already mostly dread. Alternatively, if I didn’t do Teacher’s College, I could spend the next year taking more graduate courses at my university, learn more math independently, focus on the GREs and honing my applications, and try to see if any professors at my university are willing to supervise me in some research experience before entering grad school for math. \n\nIn case it’s relevant, I come from a smallish university in Canada, which is probably not very well-known in the US, and I am graduating top of my class in math.\n\nI’m sorry if this question is not general enough."
] | [
"graduate-school",
"mathematics",
"teaching",
"education"
] |
[
"On discrimination in retake exams",
"I'm experiencing a practice at my university where the overall number of students who would pass the exam is adjusted based on how many students passed the first exam, so the retake exam contains questions which are beyond the lectures if previously the percentage of students who passed the exam is very high. Another question is that in first exam questions are repated from the previous years. The student might be absent in the first exam due to the illness, etc, so I consider it as discriminative practice and I need some ethics based formulations, codes, laws etc. that will help me to prove this discrimination. Thanks."
] | [
"teaching",
"ethics",
"exams",
"education"
] |
[
"Publishing Unpublished undergraduate research after a decade",
"I want to see whether I can publish my undergraduate work after a decade.\nContext:\nThis is to support my academic career as I am planning to apply for a PhD program (Biophysics/Chemistry/Structural biology) in the US soon. I do have an MA from a highly ranked Public Ivy (mastered out from PhD due to health issues). I am targetting a few very competitive programs.\nThe last two years of my career are a bit productive. I got two coauthor papers this year (Angewandte Chemie, Analytical Chemistry). Most probably get two others (Science, Angewandte Chemie). Around 15 conference abstracts published (citable). But on papers, my name is in the middle as I am just a research tech (except conference abstracts where I am the first and presenting author for most).\nThus, I am not satisfied as I don't have any first-author papers. Then I realized that I can publish my undergraduate work.\nIn my undergraduate research, I synthesized a novel hydroxamic acid hexadentate ligand and then carried out a speciation study of its iron (ІІІ) complexes using UV-Vis spectroscopy. Only one type of ligand-iron (ІІІ) complexes was revealed in spectroscopic studies. Then I was supposed to verify my results by using MD simulation. I have not completed this part. However, I can complete this now.\nI did this work a decade ago and only submitted my thesis to fulfill a degree requirement. However, I believed no one synthesized the compound after that.\nI am interested to know how to go and determine\n\nwork is publishable in quality\n\nIf it is good enough, how should I proceed to finish up the work and publish it?\n\nAlso, whether I can file a patent for this compound (I can find some useful application for the compound)\n\n\nAnother objective for doing this is to learn the process of publishing a first author paper and process of filing a patent rather than going after any commercial interest.\nI got my undergraduate degree in Sri Lanka, and my PI never bothered to publish the work or file for a patent as he does not have an active research group. Moreover, most professors in Sri Lanka are only interested in teaching.\nI appreciate any advice on this matter.\n\nUpdate #01\nThank you @buffy\nMy priority is to get a first author paper out before the 2021 application session starts ( At least submit it). The patent is secondary, but I would like to get it to strengthen my green card application.\nThe department I work for now helps with patent filing, and they have dedicated staff for that matter.\nMy biggest issue right now is to find someone that can assess the quality of the work. My current PI is busy and often delay answering to my questions related to current work. So I do not have high hope there.\nAlso, I am mostly doing biophysics/physical chemistry/analytical chemistry/Biochemistry related work now. Thus regarding this particular work, I am not sure how to judge the quality or which journal to target.\nWould it be appropriate to email a few professors that do similar work for guidance?\nUpdate 02\nThank you @kosmos\nI have contacted my supervisor and previous collaborators. I am waiting for their response. I will see where people published similar work and go from there. I am not interested in paying someone to proofread; instead, I would like to get an idea about the quality of the work. My current research is on the modulation of G-Protein–Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) by soft membrane matter. Thus, I have minimal exposure to physical organic chemistry to answer that question myself."
] | [
"graduate-admissions",
"research-undergraduate",
"publishability",
"patents"
] |
[
"best practices for organizing digital and physical articles",
"As a thirsty graduate student, I've amassed a burgeoning collection of research articles in both paper and digital formats. Right now I manage pdfs and references with Zotero, but I'm still searching for an organization logic for paper documents that allows rapid access and prevents redundant printing and storage. Some have suggested organizing by topic, while another approach is to sort by author name. Topical organization has not worked well for me in the past because my research is highly interdisciplinary, confounding my categorization efforts. For a coupled digital-physical organization system I'm considering the following:\n\n\nDigital documents and references stored and tagged in Zotero\nIndicator in Zotero whether or not I've printed in the file\nPhysical documents stored in manila file folders labelled alphabetically\n\n\nWhat is the most effective way that you've found to maintain both paper and digital document repositories?"
] | [
"publications",
"citations",
"paperwork"
] |
[
"ADM: Not Assigned Under Review",
"I recently submitted a paper to the international journal of adaptive control and signal processing Wiley. The statute of the paper is:\n\nSTATUTE:\n\nADM: Not Assigned\n\nUnder Review\n\nCan someone tell me what exactly this means?"
] | [
"peer-review",
"review-articles"
] |
[
"Would it be possible to publish a journal paper about data-visualization website?",
"I am graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. I want to know whether is that possible to publish a paper about my final-year project? The final-year project was about a website which contains data visualization of one company’s data. This works had done by help of my supervisor during my bachelor time. Does anyone know about it?"
] | [
"publications",
"website",
"publishability"
] |
[
"PhD expectations of commitment",
"I was discussing the possibility of entering a PhD program from a professor who I had during my masters degree.\n\nWe discussed the level of commitment he expected and he stated he expects PhD students to be committed to PhD completion above all else, regardless of subject interest or circumstances on the part of the student. Basically he wanted someone who would 100% be his yes-man. \n\nWhile I made clear I had a strong interest in the subject(and my prior performance in these areas is reasonably good) I couldn't say without actually entering the program what the result would be. Communicating anything else felt dishonest, basically I had a strong belief but I couldn't make a promise. \n\nIs this position standard for PhD advisors? Basically, is it reasonable to assume someone will be 100% committed to something without experience working on the problem?"
] | [
"phd",
"advisor"
] |
[
"Does anyone fund research in mathematical finance?",
"The question is pretty much the title. If you are an academic, is it possible to get anyone to pay you to do research in mathematical finance? \n\nYou can interpret the question broadly, to include mathematics or computational science that is used in finance, as long as this research has some real connection to finance as practiced today."
] | [
"mathematics",
"funding"
] |
[
"What is the correct way to write a follow-up email in case the first one ended up in spam folder?",
"It's been several weeks that I sent an email regarding to an open call for a position.\nThe position is advertised in a personal webpage with the message "[...] suitable candidates feel free to contact me," as opposed to the "job vacancies" page which the faculty has. There is no mentioned deadline.\nI have mistakenly used my commercial email address instead of my academic email address.\nI know that some people filter the incoming emails with respect to the domain name to reduce the number of spams in the primary inbox folder. I am afraid that this is the case.\nSo, I am considering to send a follow-up (duplicate) email to make sure that the email reached to the person. However, I am not sure how to word the email as I blindly assume that the person uses such filter.\nPlease note that I am perfectly fine with the idea of my assumption being wrong and the person choosing to ignore my email since I am not a good enough candidate. My concern is that I am a considerable candidate but I might have lost my chance because of some technical issue.\nThe best outline I have come up with is to write "(please ignore if duplicate)" in the subject, and blame my email provider in the first sentence, and then copy/paste the rest of the mail.\nWhat is the least annoying way to recieve a potential duplicate email?"
] | [
"etiquette",
"job-search",
"email"
] |
[
"Share prize money from conference presentation award with co-authors?",
"I am a PhD student and I recently won a young scientist award and prize money (~500 USD) at a conference for the \"best presentation\". I did the majority of the work for the presentation, and I was the only one present at the conference.\nHowever, my co-authors (8 people) all wrote their share for the conference proceedings (that's what makes them co-authors). The co-authors are in various stages of their career, from professors to fellow PhD students.\n\n\nShould I share my prize money with the co-authors? If yes, with all of them in equal amounts? Or only with those who would be eligible for a young scientist award themselves?\nWould it change the situation if I won the award for something else, say \"best paper\"?"
] | [
"conference",
"etiquette",
"authorship",
"awards"
] |
[
"qualitative research participants name",
"Basically, I am trying to find out the technical term for the participant in qualitative research, when the person giving the information is not the person experiencing the phenomena talked about first hand. So for example, I might ask a lawyer to talk about psychological impacts of the asylum seeking process, instead of asking people that have gone through the asylum seeking process themselves. This is done for reasons due to ethical concerns and also because the secondary source might be useful due to their vast amount of accumulated knowledge.\n\nI know that the term exists, but I cannot find it anywhere."
] | [
"research-process"
] |
[
"Timezone of \"AoE\" for a conference submission deadline?",
"I noticed this submission deadline for a conference listed as\n\n\n January 12th 2017, 23:59, AoE\n\n\n(that's not the real date, just an example). An explanation says \"Anywhere on Earth\". Does that mean the deadline is at the first point in time there's someplace on Earth which hits 23:59, or the last point? In other words, does Hawaii get discriminated against or for? :-)"
] | [
"conference",
"paper-submission",
"deadlines"
] |
[
"Different behaviour with wildcards on PubMed using quotation marks or not",
"In my understanding of wildcards I would assume that this search string (in title & abstract fields) would give a result of 0.\n\ntelerobot*[tiab] NOT *robot*[tiab]\n\n\nBut it doesn't. The result is 49. For me this means that there are 49 publications which won't be found when just searching for *robot*[tiab].\n\nDoes this make sense for someone?"
] | [
"literature-search",
"pubmed"
] |
[
"What do we know about working times of great living scientists?",
"I am looking for two kinds of data about the great scientists of today, \n\n\nTheir average daily routine of work. Like how many hours and when? \nTheir average length of time of being able to think continuously. \n\n\nI vaguely remember seeing a post by Terence Tao about this - like he mentioned that it takes him some x-minutes to focus on a question when he begins working. Though I don't remember if he mentioned any specific length of time for which he can concentrate at a stretch. [..sadly I can't find that post...] \n\nI am more looking for examples among mathematicians and theoretical physicists though other theory fields might also look more or less the same."
] | [
"phd",
"mathematics",
"workflow",
"working-time"
] |
[
"What are your criteria for evaluating potential PhD students?",
"A more complete description of the question\nAs the question suggests, I'm wondering if anyone could share the criteria as well as maybe heuristics or questions they use for deciding whether to take on a doctoral candidate. What really matters? What markers do you look for to tell you whether a person could be successful and a good investment of your time?\nBackground\nI'm a full-time Prof in a University-based Business School in the UK. Our PhD programme attracts a) lots of people in general; and b) lots of "post-experience" candidates (i.e., mid- to senior managers in their 30s and 40s). Although there is a structured way to inquire about PhD opportunities, the faculty are also flooded with random applications e-mailed to them directly from various candidates around the world. As usual with the PhD as a degree, very few people understand what this is all about and what they would be letting themselves in for. We have had a number of stellar graduates, but a lot of people struggle and suffer unnecessarily. The problem is, it's very difficult to estimate in advance which category a particular applicant belongs to (except the obvious cases, of course). So I'm wondering if anyone can share what they do to try and estimate a person's chances for success in a PhD programme - criteria, process, or anything else."
] | [
"phd",
"recruiting",
"business-school"
] |
[
"Is it common to cite information from a think tank into one's literature review?",
"As I was researching information on topic X, I found a paper published by a Think Tank. Interesting enough, said paper supports the policy pushed by the Think Tank. So far, all sources used in my paper are from researchers at a University, and I was wondering if I should include the paper in my lit review. \n\nMy question is whether I should include the paper or just ignore it, seeing as how the publisher holds a strong bias (possible conflict of interest). With that said, I'm also curious whether it's normal to cite research put out from a Think Tank."
] | [
"literature-review",
"conflict-of-interest"
] |
[
"How to ethically approach publishing research with conflict of interest?",
"I have an opportunity to participate in a contest with a nontrivial monetary prize, which can be summarized as "Describe in details a secure way to do X using technology Y and provide an explanation of why you think it is secure." The contest does not require a grant of any exclusive rights for the work, hence I am free to use my work elsewhere too, e.g. to publish it. Clearly earning money from the contest and getting a publication sounds nice, but can it be done in an ethically sound way?\nThe tricky thing is that it is debated in the literature whether doing X using technology Y is a good or a terrible idea from the security point of view. While I intend to do my best to present a balanced point of view including the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed solution, I recognize the obvious conflict of interest, and, hence, that despite my attempts to be unbiased when I rewrite the paper for a journal, it is unlikely that it will become completely unbiased. In general I want to avoid doing anything that might be considered unethical with respect to reviewers or readers of the paper.\nWhat is the best ethical way to handle the situation?\n\nFYI: this is not duplicate to:\n\nCan I Publish Research if I work for the company?, which addresses issues specific to the interaction with the employer on the right to publish (not an issue here), and issues specific to ethical control required for studies on human subjects (not an issue here since this is IT).\nClear explanation of Conflict of Interest with examples in journal articles asks for the explanation of what CoI means and examples of it in papers, and receives "Potential conflicts of interest" paragraphs in the acknowledgments section of the papers in response. While I recognize the need to include such paragraph in case of the publication, it seems to me that such paragraph may not be the only thing I would need to consider."
] | [
"publications",
"journals",
"ethics",
"conflict-of-interest",
"information-technology"
] |
[
"Do publishers care if a book manuscript was freely posted online before submission to the publisher?",
"Do publishers care if a book manuscript was freely posted online (e.g., made open-access with a CC license) before submission to the publisher?"
] | [
"copyright",
"open-access",
"publishability",
"license",
"creative-commons"
] |
[
"Back door route to top research schools?",
"Is there a way to gain admission to these institutions by getting paid experience prior to applying? \n\nI have a friend who graduated from a top 150ish school in the US and did moderately well (biochemistry, 3.8 GPA). He had some research experience on hand during his undergraduate career, but didn't have publications. He had about 2 year's worth of research, and maybe ~5 poster presentations at conferences. He did a summer internship at a medical research institution where he now works as a research assistant (after he graduated). After catching up with him and talking, he admitted to me he could not get PhD admissions to top tier universities with rudimentary statistics straight out of underad. He spent about 2 years working at said medical research institution, got I believe 4 papers under his belt, took his GRE, did moderately well but not amazing, and applied. \n\n \n\nNow he's been receiving admission into institutions such as MIT, Stanford, etc. Institutions by his own admission that he could not get into with a snowball's chance in hell before he started working/publishing. I was curious, what was the catalyst? Did paid experience prove he was worthy of the skills and not cheap undergraduate level (aka solidify he was \"the real deal\")? Was it the papers? Was it him now riding the prestige of his employer and not his undergrad? Was it him being 24/25 and a little more mature/realistic in interviews as opposed to the bulk of his 21 year old competition? Was it showing graduate schools that his 2 years of succeeding at his institution meant he's more likely to succeed into graduate school life? This whole idea got me curious if it's possible to massively increase one's chances at admissions to higher tier or even above average graduate schools in the sciences if one is patient and willing to wait enough to gain experience once they're done with their undergraduate career. Academics of SE, could I have your input?"
] | [
"graduate-admissions"
] |
[
"Would it be OK to in-text cite a paper without mentioning the name and year explicitly in APA?",
"For example, would this be allowed in APA:\n\nOhme, Reykowska, Wiener, and Choromanska (2009) showed...; in the next year, the same group of researchers conducted an experiment which also focused on ... to show...\n\nOr do I have to add (Ohme, Reykowska, Wiener, & Choromanska, 2010) at the end of this sentence?"
] | [
"citations"
] |
[
"How to response to the editor for a minor suggestion given by the reviewer via a formal letter?",
"I submitted a paper and after about five months the editor sent an email: \"I have decided that your manuscript can be accepted for publication after you have carried out the corrections as suggested by the reviewer(s).\" The reviewer strongly recommends publishing the paper and besides of the nedded corrections of the paper given by him/her, he/she gave a minor suggestion: \"The authors may wish to consider posting some related questions to increase the interest to the readers.\" How to response to this suggestion and how to write a formal letter to the editor if we have no further ideas to add? Does this lead to rejecting the manuscript? Thank you very much."
] | [
"publications",
"peer-review",
"journals",
"writing-style",
"editors"
] |
[
"Should I finish all work that I started before PhD graduation?",
"I have enough work done for my PhD dissertation, but I also have one on-going project which I don't plan to include it in my dissertation. My advisor suggests that I have to finish all the work before I graduate. Is it so? \n\nMy advisor doesn't currently have funding and I am not being paid now. He also wants me to share my codes with him and other students, should I do so? I don't quite want to share my work because 1) I was not be paid; 2) I wrote the codes totally on own and didn't receive any technical helps from my advisor (my advisor is a good story-teller, but he barely knows anything concerning technologies). Am I thinking correctly?"
] | [
"phd",
"advisor"
] |
[
"What strategy to follow for getting a funded PhD position?",
"I am having problems after ending my master´s in Computer Science. The main problem is that I had to return to my country because I had to take care of my parents. In any case, I managed to get a number of publications in the field, only 4. \n\nI have been trying to get a funded PhD position in some European and United States universities, but with no luck at all. By the way, my master´s degree was completed in Europe (in Sweden to be specific).\n\nI have the feeling that I will not get any paid position, and I cannot afford to pay the whole 4 years of career by myself; also I think that because I am not near any of those research groups from those universities my situation gets further complicated.\n\nWhat should I do? Should I sent my CV to the persons in charge of some more research groups, even though they do not have open positions? should I ask that they give me a task so I can prove that I am worthy for their research?"
] | [
"phd",
"graduate-admissions"
] |
[
"Video editing software for pre-recorded lectures",
"I am planning to record lectures. My lectures will be slides or notepad with voice-over. \n\nI am interested in a simple to use video editing software. The major things I need to do is\n\n\nCutting out a few seconds\nFreezing the video for a few seconds\nSpeeding up or slowing down certain parts\nperhaps do a completely different voice-over\n\n\nThe software should be as portable as possible though I am using Linux for the most part."
] | [
"audio-video-recording"
] |
[
"How to cite ebooks that have no pagination in intext cittion in MLA7?",
"I'm writing my dissertation and the novel I'm working on is an ebook. \n\nI tried looking for the paperback, but the English version is not available in my country. I tried checking on the web but all versions I found are epub or pdfs without page number. \n\nMy problem is about the intext citation. I checked citation guides and all I could find is that I can use only the paragraph or the chapter number. I think it will be weird to analyse several emphasized text quotes from the novel without mentioning their exact location. \n\nSo I was wondering whether I can use the page number mentioned in the adobe reader?"
] | [
"writing",
"citation-style"
] |
[
"Is there any reason not to crowdsource a subset of exam questions?",
"We're considering incentivising students to submit questions for the final exam in a large grad class (> 200 students) as we feel like the process of designing a problem and a grading rubric encourages students to study the material to more depth.\n\nIs this commonly done? What are the pros/cons in the literature, or that you can think of with implementing an exam where a few questions are generated by the class? What precautions should we be taking? What should we incentivise?"
] | [
"collaboration",
"exams"
] |
[
"What is the decision on my paper?",
"I submitted the revised version of my paper to a journal. after two weeks the paper status changed from under review to reviews completed. and still remains in this state about 10 days. What do you think is the decision on my paper? Reject or accept?"
] | [
"journals",
"peer-review",
"paper-submission",
"journal-workflow"
] |
[
"Grading: students give correct answers, but in the wrong places",
"In the last assignment I've given my students, one of the questions has two subquestions that go as follows.\n\n\nExplain how Theory X, as developed in Smith (2010) accounts for dataset A.\nBriefly summarize the additional data that, according to Smith (2010), fall under the scope of Theory X.\n\n\nA number of students have submitted something along these lines.\n\n\nSomething that is technically correct, but doesn't actually answer Question 1.\nSomething that is technically correct and answers both Question 2 and Question 1.\n\n\nWhat is the proper grade for this students? The three possibilities that I have in mind are:\n\n\nFull credit: they have provided correct answers to both questions, even though the answer to Question 1 is embedded within the answer to Question 2.\nFull credit only for Answer 2, no credit for Answer 1: they not only have to provide the correct answers, they also have to provide them in the right place.\nHalf credit for Answer 2, no credit for Answer 1: half credit because the Answer 2 contains more information than I asked for.\n\n\nI'm inclined towards the second option (full credit only for Answer 2). Would this be appropriate?\n\nUpdate: in response to some of the answers below, the problem is not that my questions are unclear, as a majority of the students have managed to answer them properly."
] | [
"grading"
] |
[
"Is there academic research that supports individual over group work for better learning?",
"I'm in an undegraduate program in the US where group work is a major focus in most classes. Faculty often cite the important benefits of knowing how to collaborate in teams, claiming how educational research findings strongly support collaborative learning.\n\nI'm also a TA in a course in the department, and in our learning course, we had sections in which we strongly focused on the pitfalls of group work and how to improve the learning process (e.g. strategies to divide work, how to moderate conflict, with people who don't pull their weight, etc.). We were assigned a few papers on research about collaborative work (some even written by faculty in the department).\n\nIn all these papers, there always seem to be a behavioral assumption that makes the situation utopic. For instance, among the good strategies in papers were things such as: \"Divide work early into task groups\" or \"Create a time estimate for the semester for every task.\" This is good advice, but not all students follow or care about these strategies. Otherwise, everybody would be getting As, no? Thus, despite my qualms about how the research was conducted, it seems that theoretically group work would be ideal, but in practice it is more often than not negative. \n\nIs there any research that has found that group work has more often been negative in academic settings? Or, perhaps, given the constraints (i.e. group is assigned, members don't know each other) or types of behavior (i.e. member who doesn't care about grade as long it's above C, member who just drops class) that exist in university classrooms, is positive group work unrealistic?\n\nAdditional related questions:\n\n\nIf there exists research that supports individual learning. Why is group work still insisted on? From the point of view of the professor, wouldn't it be preferable to assign a project (and if individual/group work is not a concern), let students organically generate their groups if they desire to do so, or work individually if they are willing to undertake the task alone?\nIf there isn't research that supports individual learning. What are some of the most important papers which have established group work as the desired learning strategy? Are there any popular experiments in the field of education related to this topic (e.g. famous/popular such as Zimbardo's experiments in Psychology)?"
] | [
"reference-request",
"learning",
"group-dynamics"
] |
[
"How to deal with unwanted physical contact, presents and attention by a postdoc supervisor?",
"Posting this to academia stackexchange, but if this may fit better in other place please let me know.\nMy girlfriend is a new PhD student in a male dominated field, and is supervised by a postdoc in a research group led by a professor. For the last few months, her postdoc supervisor was constantly giving her small presents, and trying to meet with her outside of work hours such as in a restaurant on weekends, for a reason of discussing the current work. This makes my girlfriend uncomfortable, but she is too shy to say no to those things, and the behavior of the postdoc supervisor up to this point was borderline, I even accompanied her for one such meeting on a weekend. Yesterday however her postdoc supervisor surprised her where he took off her glasses from her head without her asking or warning her (because her glasses were a bit dirty); My girlfriend was startled, and pulled the glasses from his hands, and put them back on. At this point he further unannounced tried to touch and fix her hair, as she put her glasses in a rush which messed her hair. The overall situation stressed my girlfriend considerably, and she ended up in tears in the evening when she was telling me this. There have been some other similar situations (albeit with no / less physical contact) which makes my girlfriend distracted and nervous when she communicates with her supervisor, which impacts her ability to do her work.\nMy view on this is that we should let her supervisor know clearly that this behavior is not acceptable asap and escalate to the professor, in order to prevent such situations from happening again. The issue right now however is that her scientific work is depending on her supervisor, so she does not want to escalate or bring up this situation for discussion until the paper deadline that she works on. I am inclined to go and talk with the professor and postdoc myself, but I also do not want to do anything that my girlfriend did not ask for. Do you have any advice for me of what I can do to help? Do you have any suggestions or comment in general what to do in this situation?\nEdit 1: As pointed in the answers / comments, I will not attempt any talking with prof or with postdoc on my own or other similar actions.\nEdit 2: Unfortunately some 1:1 situations cannot be avoided, as my gf needs to take measurements together with her postdoc who knows how to operate the machinery."
] | [
"advisor",
"supervision",
"interpersonal-issues",
"gender",
"sexual-misconduct"
] |
[
"Role of math in Computer Science",
"I've been wondering this for quite some time and decided to ask finally. What really is the role of math in computer science on higher levels like master's and PhD? Currently I am working on my BSc and hopefully get it done next summer. I have done like 5 math courses(linear algebra etc) + 5 statistics courses. I also did calculus in high school(integrals, derivatives etc) as I took the longer version of math which typically increases your chances to attend STEM programs here(EU country). Some of my professors have spoken how important they think math is in computer science, but is it really unless you go to some very specific fields like theoretic computer science? Because I haven't found it that useful outside of a few specific courses.\n\nI am not sure whether I would like to pursue a PhD in the future but I've been leaning more towards it lately. Security research has gotten my interest and I've done some reverse engineering + vulnerability analysis and working on a small JIT assembler. Sadly not many undergrad courses teach these things so I've worked on them largely by myself. I haven't had any use for university level math on that, maybe I've just scratched the surface?\n\nIn some ways I feel bad for not taking more math courses and it's something that keeps annoying me but it's very hard to try to convince myself that some proofs about integrals are going to be useful in my future work/research. It would be nice if someone could elaborate what kind of role math plays in higher level of computer science studies. I have never honestly liked math that much but instead seen it as a something that you just need to know. What are some really useful math courses one should take?"
] | [
"phd",
"mathematics",
"computer-science"
] |
[
"Abbreviation of qualification",
"What is the correct abbreviation for National Certificate in Financial Planning? NatCertFP or maybe NatCertFinPlan?"
] | [
"publications",
"writing",
"new-zealand"
] |
[
"What is the proposed penalty for students that paid an essaywriting service to complete their papers for them?",
"I had noticed a sudden change in the quality of the essays submitted two of my students. When I confronted them, they were quite frank and admitted that due to lack of time, they had assigned their papers to be written by an outside source, an essaywriting service (a booming business that must be). \n\nWhat is the proposed penalty? \n\nIf I take this on an administrative level, they face a pause of educational activities for 6 months to 1 year. But since this is the first incident, I do want them to learn their lesson, but at the same time taking into account that they were honest with me, not being punished too hard.\n\nWhat do you propose? Is there something I can do to keep this from an administrative level and at the same time punish them?"
] | [
"plagiarism",
"students"
] |
[
"Is it \"inappropriate\" to write in a manuscript \"this problem is unsolved, though arguably progress has been made\" and then reference your own work?",
"Is it considered inappropriate to write in a manuscript \"this problem remains unsolved, though arguably progress has been made\" and then reference your own work?\n\nBecause you would be saying that your own work is the only progress being made on a subject... Is not it too arrogant?\n\nThe phrase is already written with another bibliographical reference. My question is just about whether I should replace and older reference with my own new work, which I of course think advances towards a solution."
] | [
"publications",
"citations",
"etiquette"
] |
[
"Evaluating red flags in potential advisors' scientific production and impact, past students, research interests and personality",
"In the next few weeks I'll need to pick an advisor for my master's thesis (in a certain subfield of mathematics). I've narrowed down the choice to two (full) professors.\n\n\nProf. H I've known Prof H for two years, took two courses with him, and got the top grade in both of them. He is a very good, peaceful, and punctual person; and he is clear and precise in explanations. He has much academic experience (being over 60 years old) and has supervised many students (at undergraduate, masters, and doctoral level). However, I've noticed that his former PhD students (10, currently still assistant professors) are not much productive (and mostly publish with him, working on his research program). I've a marked interest in a certain sub-subfield, but he works in a different (smaller and, in my opinion, less interesting) sub-subfield; he is quite productive and in the last 30 years he has covered an impressive (and well-organized) research program (in which I could easily find a thesis topic) and he has grown to be a household name in his area of specialization; but his research, although very solid and original, has not been exactly groundbreaking and his latest works (which are all of high quality and quite innovative) have not been very impactful (in terms of citations yet).\nProf. K Regardless of the choice of the advisor, I will take one course taught by Prof K. However, I don't known him personally yet and therefore I'm not familiar with his “style” (although I've been told that he is generally a good person). He also has many years of experience (being slightly under 60 years old) but has supervised fewer undergraduate and master's students (some of whom changed areas of research for their higher studies), no PhD students, and several Post-docs. He works exactly in the sub-subfield I'm most interested in and has produced many solid papers over the last 30 years; comparatively, I'd say that his work is less innovative and much less systematic than Prof H's but maybe broader; in fact, while Prof. H has expanded, organized, and generalized in an original way a couple of (small) research areas (also highlighting connections with other areas), Prof. K has mostly applied a vast sophisticate toolbox to solve several interesting problems and created only few novel \"tools\" slightly adapting the existing ones (although I must note that Prof. K's area is essentially much more “scattered”). Prof. K does not seem to be quite an household name, but has given substantial contributions, is quite active in the community (and his former advisor was the expert of the area).\n\n\nWorking with either of them has some pro's; however, there are some alarming red flags about both of them. I have a hunch that working with Prof. H may be smoother and simpler; however, Prof K research interests are much more appealing to me (and aligned to what I'd like to do during my PhD – for which I'll apply to another institution anyway).\n\n\n Assuming that both of them would accept me as a student, to which red\n flags should I pay most attention? What factors (also other than the ones I've talked about) should I take into\n account the most when making the decision?"
] | [
"thesis",
"mathematics",
"advisor",
"career-path"
] |
[
"Competition with your advisor?",
"My PhD research interest is very aligned with my advisor. However, my concern is that if I want to stay in the academia, will my advisor become my competitor in the future?"
] | [
"advisor"
] |
[
"How to keep track of attendance and student-submitted excuses for absences?",
"I will be teaching an introductory class, in which attendance is important, with approximately 60 students in 3 sections. I'd like to have a system that:\n\n\nEnables me to quickly mark whether a student is present.\nAllows students to see their own attendance record but not other students'.\nLets students provide information about their absences.\n\n\nFor small classes, students email me (or I email them) for information about absences, but it would be overwhelming with this many students.\n\nA single Google spreadsheet would be great for data entry, and students could use comments to annotate their absences, but it wouldn't protect students' privacy.\n\nAny suggestions (besides not tracking attendance)? My school provides Google Apps and Blackboard, although I'm willing to use other solutions.\n\nUPDATE: I know a hack that would work in Blackboard would be to create a fake assignment for each day (attending class) and enter attendance information (0 or 1) there. This is not ideal because (1) entering data into Blackboard is slower than putting it into a spreadsheet, (2) it would bloat the grade listings seen by the students, and (3) I don't think students could add a comment to the \"grade\" (the excuse).\n\nThere is a similar question, but it does not address how to incorporate excuses/explanations, which, to me, is the tricky part."
] | [
"teaching",
"grades",
"attendance"
] |
[
"Do academic journals ever recommend software writing tools for scientific writing that suggest better paragraph construction?",
"I'm helping a professor with some edits to a paper under review. Comments include advice that a better writing style be used and awkward wording be fixed. The professor is comfortable and expressive in English as a second language but indeed the sentence construction and phrasing is awkward and unsmooth and it sometimes takes a while to see how sequential points connect. I'm not a particularly good writer myself and it reminds me of my first attempts at scientific writing as an undergraduate before I had any experience writing. In this case though, this is likely going to be their fully-developed style.\nThey are readily amenable to grammar and word order fixes much but less so to paragraph rewrites; "no, that's now how I want to say it" or "...what I want to say."\nI sense that further suggested rewrites on my part might not be the way to go, but "objective" advice on writing might still be welcome.\nShort of a professional technical writing service, are there dispassionate tools (e.g. websites or programs) that tackle paragraph-scale technical writing construction, and do academic journals every recommend any of these or similar? What other solutions might exist for this situation?"
] | [
"writing",
"writing-style",
"tools"
] |
[
"As a double major if you do reasonably well in only the second major will it affect your chances of getting into a good grad school?",
"I started out as an economics major after being pushed into it by my family. However, I never had much of an interest in this subject. I was going through a very rough time in the first two years and I never excelled much in economics and I did not care about what was happening to me. However, a math professor who is my current thesis supervisor encouraged me to look into the math department and that's when I thought about finally majoring in a subject I actually cared about and doing something for myself. Thus, I ended up double majoring in mathematics and I started finally feeling somewhat invested into my own future. I have done quite well in my second major (mathematics) and I hope to do a master's in either mathematics or statistics in France or Germany.\nHowever, I am worried if I can even get into a good grad school as my grades in economics are not very good.\n\nI have no idea how grad school admissions look into double majors. How will my case be considered if I want to do a master's in mathematics? Will my performance in economics adversely affect my chances of getting into a good grad school?\nIs it recommended that I retake some economics courses I haven't done well in? I really don't want to. I would prefer to use that time to study more mathematics and preparing for grad school which is a cumbersome process in itself and retaking would also mean more finances behind a subject I don't care about. But if it comes down to that then I will have to give it a try."
] | [
"graduate-admissions",
"mathematics",
"undergraduate",
"germany",
"france"
] |
[
"Perennial link to a research article",
"For convenience, I often want to give a link to a research article in addition to the citation. I am mostly look for the following two properties:\n\n\nthe link should be valid as long as possible\nthe link should provide as many sources as possible to download the article, ideally free of charge whenever available.\n\n\nI use Google scholar, e.g.: Godbole, Shantanu, and Sunita Sarawagi. \"Discriminative methods for multi-labeled classification.\" Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2004. 22-30.\n\nI link to the \"all versions\" page:\n\n\n\nAre there other any good/better alternatives?"
] | [
"citations",
"online-resource",
"tools"
] |
[
"Mention religion in CV",
"I have a muslim sounding name. But I was born to a christian family and I consider myself an atheist. I have been trying to get fellowship in Canada. Will mentioning my religion in the CV help?"
] | [
"etiquette",
"application",
"cv",
"religious-issues"
] |
[
"How to prevent Google Scholar from merging two different papers?",
"I have two papers published at the same IEEE conference (at the same year).\n\nSince they have been indexed in GS, they are being merged every few days. That is, I manually need to \"unmerge\" them, just for GS to automatically merge them again a few days later.\n\nI'm not sure why this happens. They have completely different names. Perhaps the reason is that IEEE has page numbers of 1-9 for all papers that year (i.e., they didn't actually allocate page numbers but just had 1-9 for all).\n\nHow can I make GS stop merging these papers?"
] | [
"google-scholar"
] |
[
"Jumping from an ABA to an MBA?",
"So, when I did my undergrad degrees in computer science (BA) and creative writing (BFA), I spent the whole time thinking \"I'm going to be going into industry. I should take business classes.\" But since I was doing 188+ credits in nine semesters I didn't have a ton of spare time, and I didn't.\n\nNow, after 5+ years of being in the industry (I'm a software engineer), I've had the conclusion that in fact yes, I should have taken business classes. \n\nSo that's what I'm doing. Through the local community college, I've got about ten courses to go until I qualify for an associates in business administration. Now, in a few semesters I'll be the somewhat contemptuous owner of an ASBA.\n\nMy question is this: with two baccalaureate degrees in unrelated fields and an associates' in business, would I be able to jump right to an MBA program and expect to do well?"
] | [
"graduate-admissions",
"masters",
"business-school"
] |
[
"What is the difference between bachelor of science in engineering and bachelor of engineering in the US?",
"There are many different kinds of bachelor degrees. In my country, there seems to be no difference between bachelor of science in engineering and bachelor of engineering. There is only one kind of degree for undergraduate majoring in engineering. I am now applying to graduate program in the US, and I want to know which one I should choose to correctly get my background known by people in the US."
] | [
"graduate-admissions",
"degree",
"engineering",
"bachelor"
] |
[
"Should I explain a solution to a problem that only existed due to a mistake in the fundamentals in a bachelors thesis?",
"The title is pretty broad, so let me narrow it down a bit:\n\nAs part of my bachelors thesis I had a practical part that was about developing a software. Due to a mistake in planning of my architecture, I was stuck with a problem that required a specific algorithm to solve. If I planned that architecture better, or spent the time actually revising the code (would have taken too much time at that point), I wouldn't have that issue. Is this still something I should put in as one of the few \"interesting\" algorithms I encountered on the paper? Should I admit that the algorithm only existed due to the limitation of my architecture?"
] | [
"thesis",
"computer-science",
"bachelor"
] |
[
"Expectations for Undergraduate Research",
"This summer I have arranged to do research under the advisement of one of the professors at my university in the field of Computer Science. I am still and undergraduate, looking to go into graduate school (eventually to PhD) and would like to test out if research is for me. \n\nMy overall question is \"What are the expectations of undergraduate research?\" What constitutes a success? I realize that I'm most probably not going to make some insane breakthrough and become famous. The problem that he has said that we are going to be working on is a very important problem, with many applications. Finding an efficient algorithm for this problem would be very huge for the field. Since many people have been working on it over the years, it's obviously not an easy problem, otherwise someone would have solved it already.\n\nWhat should I expect? If (when) I don't find this \"magical\" algorithm what kind of things could I pull out of this to make it a \"successful\" research endeavor?"
] | [
"research-process",
"computer-science",
"research-undergraduate"
] |
[
"Extending a result submitted to a conference before acceptance/rejection notification",
"I recently submitted a paper to a conference whose notification of acceptance/rejection is due to 3 months from now. However I realize that I can extend my results in such a way that it gets much more general and such that the results of the previous paper follows as a special case. The generalization however is non-trivial, in the sense that I will need much more advanced and esoteric techniques, and somewhat more 20 pages to write it properly. It also fits in the scope of a conference whose deadline is in 2 months. Here are my options. \n\n1) Put the first paper at arxiv. Write the second paper citing it and showing where things get different. Submit the second paper. But then the second paper doesn't get self contained enough. \n\n2) Put the first paper at arxiv. Make the second paper self contained by rewriting all results that I need from the first one, but specifying that it is a generalization of the first one. Submit the second paper. \n\n3) Write the second paper and wait for the result of the first conference. If accepted, write the second paper as an independent extension of the first one. If rejected, merge everything into a new piece of work and resubmit to a new conference whose deadline is in 5 months. \n\nProblems: \n\na) There are two groups working in a very related subject, and I'm afraid putting the first paper in arxiv would lead them to a similar generalization before me. So I wonder If I should wait to put the first paper on arxiv until having finished the second one.\n\nb) If I write the second paper and put it at arxiv before the notification from the conference, could this make the first paper be rejected because the program committee would argue that there is a possible generalization of it? Even though highly non-trivial? \n\nc) If I submit the second paper to a new conference but don't put it on arxiv, would I fall in the case of double submission?\n\nWhat is the best way to proceed in this case? I believe several researchers might have faced similar situations."
] | [
"publications",
"conference",
"arxiv"
] |
[
"Is it unwise to pick an old field of research in maths to write a PhD thesis about?",
"Some areas that come to mind:\n\n\ntheory of partial differential equations (analysis and pdes, not numerical PDE)\nnumber theory \nalgebra\n\n\nShould I pick a trendy topic so that it is \"easier\" to write a thesis?\n\nI've heard from senior PhD students not to try and write a thesis on analysis of PDEs because so much has already been done in this field and so it's very hard to do something new."
] | [
"phd",
"thesis",
"mathematics"
] |
[
"Is there an academic counterpart to Grahams hierarchy of disagreement?",
"Paul Graham's hierarchy of disagreement (http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement-en.svg) is a quite well known model for classification of disagreeing responses, from name-calling to explicit refutation of the central argument of the adversary.\n\nIs there any similar model described in an academic publication?"
] | [
"reference-request"
] |
[
"Building an academic career abroad",
"Good side of my background\n\nI'm 27 years old with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and now I'm about to finish my postdoctoral research.\n\nDuring my Ph.D. program, I've developed an innovative device that successfully passed a trial operation period and entered into commerce operation. I'm one of the authors of the patent on this device.\n\nAlso, I have a number of papers published in scientific journals that are widely known in this field in my country. I have experience in lecturing and supervising students.\n\nBad side of my background\n\nAll of my accomplishments are made in my country's language, not in English. Almost all of the engineering journals in my field are not indexed in Scopus or Web of Science (some of these have translated versions that are indexed).\n\nIn short, I'm known in my field in my country only, not world-wide.\n\nDoes it make any sense to try to get an academic job (tenure track) with such a background or it's better to build my career \"from scratch\" by publishing new research papers in English so that I would get a chance ? \nI'm interested in getting a job in Europe or Canada."
] | [
"career-path",
"job-search",
"europe",
"canada",
"electrical-engineering"
] |
[
"I just received a shameful F on 1st Year Writing. How negatively will grad school look at this grade",
"So this is the first time I am posting on this website, so I am sorry for any possible breach of etiquette.\n\nI have just finished my first year with a cumulative GPA of 3.55. However, with that I have also received an F on 1st year Writing due to late submission. The excusable reasons were lack of motivation and the pressure from 3 cumulative finals, but the main reason was my procrastination habits. I wonder if grad schools will single out this F as me being a potentially irresponsible person, or will they overlook it if I get good results on most of the other courses. Also, will redoing this course with an A helps the overall outlook of my portfolio much?\n\nI appreciate if anyone can share any anecdotes about accepted grad students with an F or two in their portfolio so that my conscience would stop gnawing on me."
] | [
"undergraduate"
] |
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