texts: Can I negotiate an acceptance to print delay, post acceptance?

texts:
Update: My withdrawal request was accepted and I was also offered to be published in the immediate issue of the Journal. I took back my withdrawal request.

Edit : Mentioning Journal

I have an accepted paper. But it is slated to appear in 2021. And both print and online versions appear around same time. I was hoping online would appear much faster than that, but its not the case. According to copyright I cannot host it on my website also for an embargo period of 12 months. So it's not even sharable, let alone citable. I have a followup paper already being written, and more ideas in pipeline that are built on top of this. This publication wait period defeats my whole purpose of publishing as I cannot share it with others and I cannot cite in furthur works. I cannot use it for advancing my career too. I also have plans to seek research positions or phd fellowships. I am kind of stuck. I cannot withdraw it now as it is already accepted. Is there anyway I can negotiate to get it out much before than the slated time?

Edit:

An excerpt from the copyright.

    Retention of Rights

  The Author/Editor may deposit an Author-created version of the Article
  on Author’s/Editor’s funder’s or funder’s designated repository at the
  funder’s request or as a result of a legal obligation, provided it is
  not made publicly available until 12 months after official
  publication. Author/Editor may not use the Publisher’s PDF version,
  which is posted on www.publisher.com, for the purpose of that deposit.
  Additionally, the Author/Editor may deposit the Publisher’s PDF
  version of the Article on Author’s/Editor’s own website or
  Author’s/Editor’s institute’s designated repository, provided it is
  not made publicly available until 12 months after official
  publication. Furthermore, the Author/Editor may only post the Article
  provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of
  publication and a link is inserted to the published Article on
  Publisher’s website. The link must be accompanied by the following
  text: “The final publication is available at www.publisher.com”. The
  Author/Editor is requested to use the appropriate DOI for the Article.

Update : I have made a gentle and polite withdrawal request citing delay as reason, to which I got a one line reply, "Thank you for your message". I don't know how to interpret this one line  reply. Does it mean that they will get back to me on this? or I should assume that it's been withdrawn?


texts: Are there other evaluation processes besides traditional to evaluate disabled person at university based on their understanding of the subject matter?

texts:
Say there is a disabled person who wants to have B.Sc degree in Computer Science.

He knows he has the option of college and other manual jobs.

I want to know are there any other easier evaluation processes for that student who understands the subject matter but cannot answer the traditional questions on the paper like other ten students because these questions require creativity and he doesn't have that talent?

If there are other evaluation processes why aren't they implemented in real life? And if they are implemented which university allows such implementations in Canada and USA?


texts: Is it plagiarism if I copy somebody else's answer I already solved but misplaced?

texts:
For an assignment, I was supposed to do some tedious calculations and essentially compute a certain number of things and then just list them as answers, one after another, without the calculations. There were about 15 of these things that I had to list.

I did this, and then misplaced the paper on which I had written them. I was sitting in class getting ready to hand in my paper when I realized this. It was the last paper in the stack and I guess it just got lost somewhere.

So what I did was that I found the solution online, and then just listed those things down again and turned it in. The problem is made worse by the fact that I listed the 15 things down in the same order as the solution found online. There wasn't a "natural" order to the things, apart from maybe the first and last thing, and therefore, there were 13! = 6227020800 different ways of listing them, and so of course it will look very suspicious if somebody noticed that I just happened to have the same order as this other solution.

Is this plagiarism? What should I do if this is caught? I am considering writing a mail to my instructor right now, but I could also leave it be and hope it is not caught.

EDIT:

One of the answers below raised another question. What if my original solution was wrong? In this case, I definitely cheated by copying from the correct solution, but, since I did not know whether my original solution was wrong, I did not cheat intentionally, so .... ?


texts: Should I mention a discovery was made by mistake? How is this practice viewed?

texts:
How common is it to mention that a discovery was made by accident and if it is acceptable to say that in a paper?
We often hear historical accounts on how discoveries were made by accident, however, I never saw it mentioned in a paper. I wonder if here would be a good place to ask for examples.
I am asking that because I recently made a discovery and the specific conditions I used were simply by mistake. These conditions were not used before and it was not my intent to use them, I just used the buffer of a different experiment.
Usually, there is an explanation of why a specific condition was chosen, but if there is no reason beforehand, is it better to come up with an explanation or to state it was by trial?


texts: Does it look bad if I apply to two very different fields for grad school?

texts:
I'm going to be applying to grad school (a combination of direct PhD and research thesis masters programs) this fall, and I cannot make up my mind between two different fields - machine learning (essentially artificial intelligence) and computer architecture (essentially processor design). They would fall under either the Computer Science or Electrical/Computer Engineering departments.

I obviously need reference letters to apply and I'm going to be asking professors I've done research with in the past. However, I'm worried that asking for reference letters for two very different fields reflects poorly on me; it makes it look like I'm not entirely dedicated towards either.

I'm afraid that the letters I get from the professors will be a lot weaker than if I only applied to one field, because in that case it would look like I'm extremely passionate about it, compared to now where it looks like I'm not entirely sure what I want to do.

I'm wondering if this is a valid concern, and if so, how I should best address it. I could obviously pick one field now, but I'd prefer to put it off till after I get offers, so I have more time to make up my mind.

Just for context, out of the three professors I'm going to ask, one of the professors worked with me on a machine learning project, one on a computer architecture project and the last one on a signal processing project (not directly related to machine learning or computer architecture).


texts: Should I mention in my statement of purpose that I did not attend lectures in my last two years of undergrad?

texts:
In my first few years of university I had very uneven grades because traditional classrooms just didn't work for me. My GPA was probably around a 2.8-2.9. I was able to turn my grades around by not attending lectures at all. My GPA for these last two years of undergrad was a 3.5, and my GPA in graduate coursework was a 3.8.
Most of my statement of purpose is forward looking, but I feel the need to elaborate on my transcripts a little bit, particularly because I am hoping to switch fields. I also want to also try to amplify the fact that the decision to not attend classes was positive and life-changing; it has benefits for functioning independently as a researcher.
So, my question is: Would it be perceived negatively if I stated in my SOP that I stopped attending classes?
I'm not asking for writing help, but I'll include a short snippet just to demonstrate what I have in mind:

I have always been naturally curious, but coming from a family where both parents did not graduate from high school I struggled with developing healthy academic habits and with finding success in traditional classroom environments. My poor habits persisted until the fall of 2015 when I made the decision to stop attending classes so that I could experiment with alternative ways of learning. This risky decision forced me to critically reflect on my weaknesses in a way I never had before, and while I did not realize it at the time, this decision was my first step towards becoming an independent researcher. By initially stepping away from the structured classroom environment I struggled finding success in, I was then able to enter and engage in my graduate classroom discussions with maturity and a recalibrated sense of purpose....


texts: Effect of work experience in gaining PHD acceptance

texts: I am a senior in water resources engineering. I graduated in master degree in 2008. After that I have worked in cosulting companies to now in my expertise. Recently, I am intrested in studying in water resource,PHD. Is having work experience positive point in gaining acceptace for PHD or not?


texts: Will already having a masters degree make it harder to get funding for a second masters in Europe?

texts: If a person who already has M.Sc degree (from the university outside of Europe) wants to enter European university for another M.Sc degree, would having M.Sc degree be a hindrance for getting a scholarship or other kind of funding?


texts: Does citing reviewers' papers significantly increase the chance of the submitted paper to be accepted?

texts:
A paper submitted to some peer-reviewed venue might cite some of the reviewer's papers.

Is there any research/study that looked whether citing reviewers' papers significantly increase the chance of a submitted paper to be accepted?

I am most interested in the field of computer science, and English-speaking venues.


texts: Journal submission refered to Editor-in-Chief

texts:
I had submitted to a reputed computer vision journal. Both the reviewers (there were only two) marked it as "reject" with comments that alluded to the fact that they had actually "missed the point". It was interesting that the reviewers missed the point on two major levels, first on the actual aims and scope of that journal and second the actual scope of the conducted research. With 2 reviewers recommending "reject", the Editor decided to "reject" the article.

Even though there was no avenue for rebuttal, I drafted a long email with my rebuttal highlighting where the reviewers had missed the point of my article. The Editor replied saying that he himself was very much surprised by the reviewers decision because from his reading of the paper he actually saw value in it. On top of that, my rebuttal was very convincing. However, he does not feel comfortable reversing the decision because both reviewers had recommended "reject"  hence he is going to refer this to Editor-in-Chief to get his opinion.

Now, what are my chances of publishing this article of mine with this journal?

Update: The editor-in-chief got back with a list of possible items for major-revision that they would like to see. The major-revision deadline was quite short (just three weeks), they agreed to postpone the deadline on my request. I tried my best to address the items of major-revision and the article was finally accepted. Perseverance pays! :-)


texts: What power do student councils typically hold? And what role do they have?

texts:
So, awhile back I wrote this answer suggesting that the student council would be ideal to handle the issue, but got told that student councils have no influence/role in such matters. In general I am used to the idea that a student council and student representatives do anything where students have to be represented at a higher level (from specific studies, to the faculty level, to the university level, up to even international politics). This does not only mean being a part of the rule making process, but also making sure students aren't disadvantaged because of professors not following those rules. Now, today I came across this question and a comment (+22) on the highest voted answer warns the OP against escalation, because of retaliations against him as a student. For me that's exactly the kind of thing where I would expect the student representative to step in, he would first approach the professor in his role as student representative (not revealing the names of individual students). If the professor doesn't resolve the issue at once the student representative would know - unlike a typical students - exactly who best to approach within the institution and is best aware of all the rules and systems that are in place (and importantly if a dean for example were to ignore student complains too many times a student council is able to escalate this easily to upper university levels).

Now, it's becoming clear to me that that's not how it works in a lot of institutions as a lot of answers which I would expect to be "go to your student representative" are instead complex diplomatic answers or just "live with it" answers, so what I am trying to understand is where this model does apply (is it typical of just some western countries? Europe in general? Only our institution?). And how a student councils activities and responsibilities broadly look in different systems.


texts: What should I do if I can't get a copy of original transcript from the institute?

texts: I saw an offer for a Ph.D. position in US where they asked for original transcript which directly should be sent from the home institute. When I asked my institute, they said they don't have these kind of options. In this case what can I do? Should I write the programme co-ordinator?


texts: Is there a financial motivation for organizing a summer school?

texts:
Do professors and scientific staff of an institute make money from summer schools?

Or is it a well-intentioned unpaid activity done by organizers?

For example, a summer school about a topic in mathematics.


texts: What is the role of a PhD advisor after a student has graduated?

texts:
It seems from answers to certain questions (such as Should a mid-career faculty application include a letter from the former PhD advisor?) that the role of an advisor may continue after a student has graduated.

In general, what is the professional role of a PhD advisor after a student has graduated? Are they simply possible collaborators and sources of recommendation letters, or is there more?

I've seen this question: What is exactly the role of a phd advisor? which is related, but focuses on the role of an advisor during graduate school.

When should you stop asking your PhD advisor to do advisor like things? is related, but my question is what are the advisor-like things a PhD advisor might/should do after a student has graduated.

Here are some other related (but not duplicates as far as I can tell) questions:

How to handle not having my PhD advisor as a reference?


texts: Do tenure reviews in U.S. universities usually consider the number of PhD students that a professor successfully graduates?

texts:
When it comes to the tenure review process, someone puts it like the way it's put below:

  The tenure review process is designed to determine whether someone has
  "the ability to do their job." The junior faculty member has six years
  to construct a track record of success. During these six years, the
  junior faculty member acquires teaching evaluatons from students and
  colleagues. The junior faculty member acquires grants and sets up a
  lab with a productive research program. The junior faculty member
  develops a reputation of collegiality and service within the
  department and the university.

Though that's how it's done in name. Others, like Sean Carroll, say that research is far more important than teaching (which is probably true in the elite private universities).

What about things like successfully graduating PhD students though? Can a PhD student help an assistant professor gain tenure? I'm particularly curious about whether or not this applies for all universities - both in the elite privates and the public ones.


texts: Should I ask professor for recommendation letter for graduate school if a month earlier he declined to give me recommendation for some internship?

texts:
One year earlier I did a project under a Professor, I asked him for a recommendation letter for an internship program, but I couldn't get selected. Then this year I asked him for an internship program but he politely rejected me saying that it would affect if he give a lower rank to a student like me(He give rank to students and then send recommendations).
Now since I am going to apply for graduate school programs that also seem to ask for referees, should I ask the same professor for the recommendation?
He knows me well from classroom as well as project work.


texts: Not being a first author diminishes the contribution of co-authors?

texts:
If a group of students (say, 3 students), produces a work which has been accepted to a reputable conference. All of them contributed equally to the project,from implementation to writing and proof reading of the paper.
How should one decide who should be the first author. Even if the names are listed in alphabetical order, so by not being the first author, does it affect the prospects for the other two in any means ?
My field of research is computer science.

(This question has been partly inspired by the  flurry of questions on ASE, regarding the importance of being the first author)


texts: Inclusion of `computer code` in a thesis

texts:
During the compilation of thesis (MSc or PhD) in a case we wanted to include some program codes as chapters:

We prefer to put heading to all program codes everywhere they appear as complete source to clarify the license. Is it nice to do so? Any other solutions?

Something like this:

  3.1.1  Loop
    ...text...
    -------
    Copyright 2013 Coder, ...                   !this part
    -------
    function loop(...) result (...)
    some code
    -------
    ...text...


texts:
I'm planning to apply for a PhD program and I wonder whether I should sign the motivation letter or not. I have read many articles about the subject, and many stated that if I'm going to send it online it's not necessary to sign it, but if I'm going to send it as a hard copy I should sign it.

I'm kind of confused because the university I'm applying for wants me to send it online and also as a hard copy.


texts: Compiling ethical standards for coauthorship across academic fields and regions

texts:
One of the hot-button issues on this site is standards for coauthorship, especially variants of the question "Must I automatically include my thesis advisor as a coauthor on all my papers?"

Since these questions (sensibly) come up again and again, I thought it would be useful to have a collection of links to various ethical standards for coauthorship.  To the best of my knowledge, these standards will apply only to one particular academic field and/or to one geographic region.  For instance, most of my colleagues would point to this statement by the American Mathematical Society.  It applies (explicitly) to mathematics and (implicitly, I think) to mathematics done in the US and by Americans.

I was thinking of a community-wiki question where each answer posts a link to ethical standards in some academic field(s) and geographic region(s).  To make the answers better, I would ask that respondents:

Quote in their answer the passages most relevant to coauthorship.
Please avoid "alphabet soup".  Above I wrote "American Mathematical Society" rather than "AMS": mathematicians will know what AMS means, but most other academics presumably won't.  Some other answers here refer to things like "BMJ": I certainly didn't know what that was.
(Ideally) Give commentary as to whether/how the standards in their answer differ from those posted in other answers.

The more comprehensive the list we can compile, the more authoritatively we can point future questioners to this list and tell them what is or is not an ethical practice.


texts: APA format - hyperlinking the citation rather than providing a separate URL

texts:
I'm at my page length maximum for my APA-style references section. Beyond using Bitly to shorten URLs, can I simply hyperlink my entire citation rather than wasting space with a following URL?
Example:
Terrell, Tracy. (1977). A Natural Approach to Second Language Acquisition and Learning. The Modern Language Journal. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-4781.1977.tb05147.x
Becomes:
Terrell, Tracy. (1977). A Natural Approach to Second Language Acquisition and Learning. The Modern Language Journal.
If so, which part of the reference can I hyperlink?


texts: What is the percentage of Bachelor or higher degree holder that finish calculus 3?

texts:
What is the percentage of Bachelor or higher degree holder that finish multivariable calculus in US?

Please list your reference


texts: I am applying for PhD programs in the USA, one of the schools requested a PhD research interest. The problem is I do not know how to write it, and I didn't done any research in my masters degree, are there any solution?


texts: How bad is it to accept a competitive Fellowship, then reject it BEFORE April 15

texts:
My situation:

I applied to school A (R1 school, US News ranked, aligned research) and is nominated by POI for a competitive Fellowship. This fellowship covered tuition + stipend for a couple of years and comes from the school itself (not department). The fellowship offer is only through email, so no official signed letterhead yet. Since the Fellowship is competitive, POI urged me to accept it  "within the week"  otherwise it will go toward somebody else (one week after Fellowship decision). However, I:

Have reservation about the research group (haven't visited the place, only Skype called, their pressure for me to accept, outcome of graduates)
Still waiting on other schools, which are very promising (contacts with POI, recommended for admit) yet entirely unsure of fundings.

I know that according to the April 15 agreements, I can accept then reject the fellowship before the deadline without personal repercussion. However, I want to know:

How much am I screwing up the POI if I accept the fellowship then reject it later? I am afraid that an email confirmation then rejection would make his research lab and department looks bad to the school for losing potential spots.
With question #1 in mind, should I do it? The April 15 agreements seems to be set up for these situations, but is it selfish for me to jeopardize other people chances?


texts: In a mathematics publication, is it preferable to state all definitions immediately, or as they arise?

texts:
I am writing a mathematics paper for publication which frequently:

Uses special functions the average reader would not be aware of.
Uses my own notation.

Within the first section of my paper (introduction/preliminaries), I define the relevant special functions. Should I also define my own notation within the preliminaries, or wait until its use naturally arises within the paper to introduce it? My notation can be understood without context, though its usefulness will obviously not be clear.


texts: Switch majors in pure math masters in order to apply for a PhD in statistics?

texts:
I have finished the first year of my Masters in Mathematics from a German university. The area that I intended to write my masters thesis in was in Differential Geometry. However, I have decided that I would not want to pursue a career in academia in the future, or at least not one in pure mathematics.
I want to get a PhD in statistics from a top US university.
Is it a good decision for me to switch my major to Probability Theory and Stochastics? This would involve another year of coursework, thus making my masters 3 years instead of 2 years. Will this be reflected negatively on my grad school application? Will they think that if I couldn't complete my masters in 2 years, how can I complete my PhD in 4-5 years?
I have done well in a rigorous Stochastic Processes course in my first year of masters and I did well in 3 statistics courses and a couple of baby probability courses in my undergrad. I might also get to be a TA for the stochastic processes course next year.
The other alternative is that I start my thesis in Differential Geometry and then apply for a PhD in statistics. When doing so, I'm afraid that I won't be getting recommendation letters for a statistics program from my pure math professors. Are my fears valid?


texts: Is it necessary to have big paper during PhD?

texts: I have a present PhD fellow from another research group who gets pressured by his PI to produce a "big paper" before he could graduate. He has already data and paper ready for publication but his PI continues to add more work and scope to make it "big".  Is it really necessary to produce big work at this level? What is the cons and pros of publishing big and small paper?


texts: What is the difference between PhDs in the US and Europe (in terms of employment)?

texts:
It is frequently mentioned that PhD students are employed in Europe (e.g. the Netherlands, Scandinavia, etc). I still don't understand how this affects a PhD program.

What is the difference when one enrols as a PhD student in the US or has a work contract in the Netherlands? Is there any specific difference in responsibilities, expectations, freedom, etc?

Please make a tangible comparison rather than listing various possibilities. If a student enrols in a PhD program in the US or in the Netherlands, how will their work and life be different?


texts:
We are re-writing a bunch of our lab manuals for a first year circuits course.  We want to make a mix of focused questions ("what was the voltage across X?") and thought-provoking questions.

At the moment, the "thought provoking" questions in the current lab manuals are all variations on "comment on the differences between your pre-lab and your experiment".  These invariably get students to just chime off a litany of "errors in the equipment" without really thinking it through.  What I would like to see the students doing is a thorough comparison and making a value judgment, and mentioning their observations.

I feel that the issue I'm having is that the focused questions are way too specific (just write down the number) but useful for learning certain things like how to take measurements.  Thus they are valid questions if not outstanding ones.  The thought provoking questions, though, are vague and don't get us what we're really looking for.  Can anyone suggest some in-between questions that give students a hint at what we are looking for without just asking them out right?


texts: Major field of study and its specializations in the USA

texts:
I am not a resident of the USA and I am not familiar with the system and the hierarchy of fields of studies and specializations.

I have several questions:

Computer Science is a Major Field of Study, right? Are Software Engineering and Computer Graphics its specializations? Or what are they?
Universities have several schools/departments. Each offers Bachelor's, Master's, PhD's programs. But these programs are called just like Master of Computer Science, for example, and there is no clarification in which specialization I can get this Master of Science degree. In my country I can apply for a Master's program, and It has a specialization, like Master of Computer Science with Software Engineering specialization, or Master of Computer Science with Information Security specialization. Why there is no such clarification? Or do I apply for a program and then select a specialization which determines the courses I will study?
Is there a complete list of fields of studies and their specializations? There is a Management specialization, how can I learn is it related to Economics field of study or Business?
Are there official codes for specializations common among all the USA universities? So I can search which universities offer this specialization, for example, Corporate Finances with code 130007? Or where can I find this information?


texts: Doing a masters degree level research without following a Master Course

texts:
I have a degree in computer science but I don't have any research experience. But everyday I read research papers from free journals. I also managed to understand the content of them. Now I want to do a research like that. Can anyone help me to learn standard procedure of doing a Computer Science research and publish it in a free journal ?, it's better if you can some give books reference on "how to do a computer science research" with your answer and format of standard thesis.

I read about several question like This. But they don't tell about standard format of thesis and research methodologies.


texts: Difference between bursary, scholarship and fellowship

texts:
What is the difference between bursary, scholarship and fellowship funding?

Is a fellowship more prestigious than a scholarship which in turn is more prestigious than a bursary?


texts: How to use lemmas and proofs from another paper?

texts:
Suppose that paper A has a lemma called Lemma A, along with its proof.

I want to use this lemma in another paper B.  However, in the scope of my paper, I have to change it slightly, but without losing the general idea.

For instance, the original lemma might read as follows:

  Lemma A: The intersection of two straight lines in the plane is either empty, a single point, or a straight line.

Suppose I need the following variant in paper B:

  Lemma B: The intersection of two planes in 3-space is either empty, a single line, or a plane.

Also, the proofs for both lemmas are very similar.
Therefore, I have two questions:

Can I use the same methodology and same terminology with similar words to prove my own lemmas?
If I can, is citing paper A in my lemma confusing? If I cannot, can I just specify the lemma in paper A and say that this lemma and proof can also be used etc.?


texts: I am nearing the conclusion of my first course as an adjunct instructor and I'm searching for some useful and engaging activities for reviewing the semester's content as a group. This is a required undergraduate survey business systems course that covers a fairly wide range of concepts and terms, with students representing a variety of majors. I hope to both prepare them for the comprehensive final exam and to reinforce the key ideas that we've covered (between which, ideally, there is significant overlap). Although most of the students are performing quite well, there have been several complaints about the difficulty of preparing for an exam covering such a diverse set of topics.


texts: A professor stole my dissertation topic. Now what?

texts:
After completing my dissertation proposal, I got data from a company for my idea. After that, I was searching to find an advisor for my dissertation.
I talked with an assistant professor. Let's call him Alex. He asked me to send all of the collected literature and the proposal to him.  A few days later, he informed me that he could not accept me as his student.
I found another professor (Bob) and then began to work with him.  However, my advisor forced me to give up the proposal without any clear reasons.  So I needed to give it up because for a month, he kept asking me to find a different topic.
About 2 years later after the time, I found that my advisor and his former student (Carol) had been working on my proposal topic and began to submit several papers.
The story was that: His former student was in a relationship with Alex, whom I initially contacted before starting to work with Bob. Alex sent my stuffs to Carol and she contacted Bob to ask for his help to develop the idea.
Such a thing happened one more time as well.  Carol was unable to find a topic and so Bob had provided my research ideas to her again.
This Fall, Carol tenure will be under review.  I'd like to send a letter to dean of the department to inform this. However, I am unsure how to do that effectively. I appreciate any suggestions on this.
By the way, I do not work with Bob anymore. I had a chance to talk about this matter with Alex. He said that he just shared the proposal with Carol because it was an interesting idea.  He did not know the other stuffs and why and how she worked with Bob. Finally, Bob said that it happened because Carol brought the idea to him before I met him.


texts: What's the correct way to cite a paper cited by another paper?

texts:
The example is when you might be reading a certain paper, and the authors refer to another paper. You can't get that other paper as it's unpublished, or it's in a language that you can't read, or maybe something else.

My guess is:

  Featherstone et al 1900 (in Thomas and Cullen 2002).

And how is it to be handled in the bibliography?


texts: Writing a recommendation letter for student with low GPA

texts:
I have an undergraduate student who has been working in my lab for quite some time, doing relatively advanced work and has even been able to mentor other students in getting up to speed in the workings of the lab and the methods we use. I never had this student in a class, but they approached me in their second year asking if I had any opportunities and I was happy to provide an unpaid opportunity and the following year a student job for them after seeing their exceptional work.
This student is now applying to graduate school and has asked me to write them a recommendation letter, and I said I would be happy to do so since the student has demonstrated competence and has even started asking quite interesting research questions related to our work. As part of the recommendation process I always ask for the application materials, including transcripts, personal statement and so on. Upon looking at the transcripts I found out the student has a very bad academic history and has even recently been on academic probation. They got C's in classes closely related to our subject (but taught by people I don't know well in the department). I'm not sure what to think or whether to include that as part of my recommendation letter, or to ignore it overall?


texts: Explaining Temporary Voluntary or Medical Leave from Prestigious PhD on CV?

texts: I am in a bind. I just decided to take a voluntary leave of absence for medical reasons (also partly financial reasons) from my PhD program and I need to look for a job. I have stupendous credentials and recommendations but most of my recommenders are academics who recommended me two years ago for this doctoral program.  My urgent worry is how to brand and market myself on my CV. If I list that I am enrolled in a PhD program there is always the risk that I will be asked to provide a transcript (which at this time shows failing grades for the last semester)? Also, if I don't list the program on my CV it looks like I have 2 gap years because I took a year to travel between the last employment and the start of the PhD. However, the benefit of listing my program is that because it is very prestigious, it is likely it will push my CV to the top of the applicant pool for interviews.  If I list my PhD program on my CV I am almost guaranteed interviews, but in doing so, I run the risk of  having to go into detail to explain my extraordinary poor performance and decision to suspend my study for a year.  What should I do?


texts: How to revise a paper when the reviewer has not understood my work?

texts: A reviewer asked for modifications, which are not necessary. It is obvious that he has not understood my work. What should I do?


texts: Why would a European-style professor want a Ph.D student instead of a research staff? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

texts:
Related to my questions:

How much knowledge is expected of a PhD applicant as compared to a postdoc or a research assistant?
For the average pure math US PhD program, what are essential topics after basics topics of complex analysis, abstract algebra and topology?

The question from quora Why would a professor want a Ph.D student instead of a research staff? What are the advantages and disadvantages? is answered mostly by US or US-style professors. I would like to know the European or European-style take on this.

My ultimate goal is to understand Country A (see here or here) which seems European-style. You can go on about how academia varies and how I won't gain much understanding, but please answer the question also.


texts: Sharing a master thesis with a third party before the final exam

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I start by describing the situation: a friend of mine is a master student in Italy, and is going to graduate soon. She wrote her master thesis and submitted it, and should have her final exam (the one in which the thesis is discussed) in about a month. In the meanwhile, she is sending PhD applications.

A professor that she contacted asked if he could read her master thesis. The problem is that I am not sure if she can (and should) send a master thesis to a third party before her exam.

What do you think of it? Do you think it could be a problem? The thesis is not meant to be publicly available before the final exam through the university site, but I've read the regulations and this kind of issue is not mentioned at all.

To give some context:

There is no copyright involved. The thesis is going to be available on the university site for free, but only after she has her final exam.
The professor knows that the person is going to graduate soon, but maybe he did not realize that he was asking for an unverified thesis.
She works in the field of pure science, where people usually have a "sharing" attitude.

Thank you very much for your attention.


texts: Dealing with an advisor who is not interested in publishing

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My advisor is a full professor nearing retirement age. Although he does not seem to be planning to retire anytime soon; he has this "been there/done that" attitude toward publications. He says that he has published enough significant work to be happy and that he only wants to publish breakthrough papers from now on. My issue is that I need publications to build a good resume. As of now, I have no publications from my PhD research.

My research project is structured in a way that any other professor would see it as an opportunity to get multiple publications out of it because each stage of the project has enough significance to be published separately. My adviser however wants only one comprehensive paper. I have several issues with this:

This reduces the number of publications appearing on my resume. I know that this really shouldn't be important, because I would still be publishing the same content. However, this is important when applying for competitive R&D positions in tech (the types of jobs I'm interested in) where during the first stages of screening applicants the number of publications would matter (since no one will actually read them at that point).
This also means that I will not be able to submit anything until close to my graduation which would mean that unless I delay my graduation until after the review process is over, I would have no publications when I graduate. Several people in industry who would be hiring for the types of jobs I'm interested in have told me that they do not consider PhD applicants who have no publications.

How would you propose I handle this situation? Today I told him that I'd like to submit an abstract to a conference but he would not permit it, saying that he is afraid that someone at the conference will steal our idea and publish it in a journal before we are able to. I really think he was just using that as an excuse though.


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I took Figure 1 from this article
and made a few changes to it.

How should I cite it?

Do I have to cite it?

Should I cite it like "from [source] (modified)"?


texts: Applying deferment after offered admission for second time

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I am a university lecturer (say university A) that has been offered admission to university B's PhD program. This university B is a well-known university in Asia..and I have to say that this is truly a dream come true for me. I planned this for two years to pursue my PhD here and what an amazing feeling I had.

I should have started my study in August 2018, but I had asked for deferment to enroll in January 2019. This was due to a training I had to complete in uni A. I also told them that, according to the promised deadline, this training should be over in December 2018. I simply wrote this on my email. I was so worried uni B wouldn't permit this, but they did! I was incredibly happy to hear that and became even more excited to start my study..even more committed and fell in love more with uni B.

I was ready to wait for January 2019 and also for the training I would face soon. I was waiting for the news of the start of the training, and kept waiting. I waited..to the point where I realized that this training just wouldn't happen in December 2018 or before.

I was so sad. It's not that I couldn't leave this training. I mean, I could also reject the admission offer, right? It's just that I had to make this choice. If I were to leave this training, I would have quite a big consequence..roughly as big as what I would have for rejecting the offer from uni B.

However, I know for sure that the training SHOULD be given to me before July 2019 as the rule states so. Hence, now, I am trying to figure out how I can ask for my second deferment..now to August 2019. My effort and questions:

Instead of just email, I plan to ask rektor of uni A to back me up, and it seems positively this will happen. The rektor will send statement letter to uni B that explain my condition. I go this far because I just think clarification is needed and hopefully this will show my commitment to them. How do you think this will work?
Beside that, I am considering to also emphasize my commitment through my own letter. Here I would like to write that this deferment will be the last one I ask, and if I can't enroll in time, I will accept the consequences such as I can no longer pursue my PhD in this department, even in uni B. Will this do? I mean, am I doing too much, or this should indeed be done, or not enough? What would this letter be called? An agreement letter?

Advices are really appreciated.


texts: Can I mention the completion of online courses as professional qualifications when applying to university?

texts: I am applying now to a postgraduate program in Computer Science. In the application, there is a subsection where I can mention my professional qualifications; I am wondering if it is appropriate to mention the completion of a web-development online course (on Udemy) with uploading the certificate of that?


texts: Will I look bad if I'm never in my office as a graduate student?

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I just checked out my office. It looks like a dungeon. There are no windows. It is kind of cramped. Everything looks kind of industrial. I don't think I would like to study/work there. There are other places in the math building that look like much less depressing places to work such as the math library. Also coffee shops, at home, etc.

I have to have some number of office hours which I will gladly have. But for studying for my classes, working on research, etc. I would much prefer other places. There is no formal rules on where you have to be. I don't have an adviser yet and when I do, he won't be watching over me just looking for results. So there is no formal reason why I have to be in my office other than office hours.

If I simply don't use my office will I look bad to other grad students or professors? Will I maybe miss out on productive discussions? I can see if my office mates are in the same classes; we can work on the problem sets together.

What are the potential pitfalls of not being in my office other than for office hours?


texts: How to stop spam from ConfDriver of TU Wien?

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This year I submitted a paper to a conference that used ConfDriver of TU Wien. From the time of submission, I started receiving a lot of CFPs from conferences that also use ConfDriver.

All the conferences seem solid, and the emails are from researchers of well-known institutions. However, I find it really annoying, because they are completely unrelated to my research area, and sometime unrelated to Computer Science.

There is no option to "unsubscribe" to these kinds of CFPs, and there is nothing in common to make a filter in email client.

By the way, I find ConfDriver much worse than EasyChair, and it even doesn't notify the co-authors when making (or updating) a submission.

UPDATE

I understand that some people from TU Wien may be upset with this question. But what this ConfDriver is doing is really spam, and it is really annoying. Unlike spams from junk conferences, this kind of spam is much more difficult to block, since the emails are from well-known institutions, e.g. MIT etc.


texts: How to cite a paper which has been presented and included in proceedings but not yet published online?

texts: I have submitted my paper to a conference A, where it has been presented and is included in the proceedings and is yet to be published online and would be completed in few months. How do I cite this paper in my follow up work to be submitted to another conference B, whose deadlines are way before the previous work can show up online?


texts: Usage of a TV show transcript in my Thesis is under fair use exception?

texts: Can I use the data of Friends TV show transcript in my thesis for analysis and publish my paper/findings. Does the usage of TV show transcript data for analysis and construction of new script based on the original script come under fair use of exception in US copyright law ? Can you please advise me on how to proceed further.


texts: Omitted question mark in quoted material

texts: How do I insert a question mark into a quotation that was omitted in the original material? For example, "Now we find that our land has unacceptable levels of contamination. Will it never stop[?]” Or "...Will it never stop"?


texts: Do universities in US contain rooms for discussions between students

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In India, many universities I know personally does not have any discussion rooms intended for students. There are class rooms(for normal lectures), faculty cabins, seminar halls, administrative buildings, library and labs. None of them allows discussions between two students.

I want to know whether there is concept of discussion room for students in US.


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Is it OK to take a graduate-level course at a US university while you are already dating one of the prospective TAs?

I think that the instructor should be informed. My question is about the implications of such an action.

Will anyone else beyond the instructor be informed? Can it cause any inconvenience for the TA/instructor and is it possible that a record pertaining to this situation will be stored in any university-related platform/communications?

Context: The relationship started well before the time one can take the class.


texts: How can I confirm that the format of the paper is correct?

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I am a new PhD student. I have been in school for more than a year. But I basically never met my mentor. I can only find a way to post the paper. Now, I am preparing to submit a paper to a conference. But I haven't submitted a paper before. I want to know if I use the Latex template given by the conference party to write a paper, how can I confirm that the format is correct. For example, the requirements of the paper are:

This is the requirement of this conference. Its Latex template can be found here. https://www.microarch.org/micro54/
Initially, I thought that this template should have all the relevant parameters set, but it is not.
For example, Space between columns 0.25in. When I compared the pdf file generated by the template with the papers of previous years, I found that this parameter in the template was not set.
I didn’t find the font and margin settings in this template. What should I do?

Reviewing will be double blind (no author list); therefore, please do
not include any author names on any submitted documents except in the
space provided on the submission form.

Declare all the authors of the paper upfront

The above two paragraphs are all requirements given in the template. Does this require the author to be written in front of the paper or is it forbidden to write?
Thanks


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I am interested in the basics of how a conference organizer would go about finding potential sponsors for a conference. I am referring to limited sponsorship for things like travel fellowships.

This includes a few questions:

What kind of sponsors are there?
Do they generally expect something in return (in addition to advertising their contribution)? What kinds of things?
How does the process work? Do you just write various potential sponsors and ask if they are interested? Do you promise anything in advance? Is there some kind of negotiation?

Any thoughts on this are welcome.


texts: Published papers with incorrect solutions of famous problems: how to raise concerns with editors?

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I recently discovered the following two papers:

Bruckman, Paul S. A proof of the Collatz conjecture. Internat. J. Math. Ed. Sci. Tech. 39 (2008), no. 3, 403–407, DOI: 10.1080/00207390701691574.
Bruckman, Paul S. A proof of the strong Goldbach conjecture. Internat. J. Math. Ed. Sci. Tech. 39 (2008), no. 8, 1102–1109, DOI: 10.1080/00207390802136560.

Mathematicians probably do not need to read any further to see where I am going with this.
For non-mathematicians, the Collatz and Goldbach conjectures are two of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics. In addition to being the focus of active research, they are also popular targets for non-experts, who have proposed countless numbers of erroneous proofs over the years.
The MathSciNet reviews for the two articles (Collatz, Goldbach), which are written after publication by independent reviewers, identify a critical error in each, which invalidates their results.
The journal in question is apparently reputable (otherwise I would not bother) and is published by a major commercial academic publisher, though its main focus is on topics in mathematics education rather than pure mathematics.  It appears that the chief editor has been in charge since before 2008.  I did not find any errata or editor's notes regarding these papers.  (A corrigendum of the Collatz paper was published, but it fixes minor typos only, and the MathSciNet reviewer apparently took these corrections into account.)
It seems to me that the papers cannot have ever undergone proper peer review - the titles alone should have subjected them to extremely close scrutiny - and that they ought to have been retracted long ago.   But in light of their age, I wonder if it is it still appropriate to raise the issue with the journal's editor, or if people will just see it as "water under the bridge".
I am also not quite sure how to explain the issue tactfully.  I think with most professional mathematicians, I could just show them the citations with no further explanation, and they'd immediately understand why this is bad.  Obviously that didn't happen in the first place, but I'm not really sure how much more background I can give the editor without potentially appearing condescending or insulting.
I saw the question I found a published paper that looks dodgy. What to do? But I think this case is more egregious than that one, in that the papers are not merely "dodgy" but in fact flatly wrong, and frankly, an embarrassment to the journal.  The two answers there suggest "comment on PubPeer" and "do nothing", neither of which seem adequate.


texts: Do MDPI reviewers have access to each other's reviews?

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Follow-up question to discussion in comments of this question.
Summary is that in 2015, there was a MDPI reviewer who was unhappy because their recommendation wasn't followed. The reviewer complained in the blogosphere claiming that the paper was published in spite of his serious objections, and that MDPI refused to let him see the other reviewers' reports or their contact information.
It's normal to not provide contact information of the other reviewers (since it breaks anonymity), but providing the other reviewer reports seems fine. I asked an MDPI employee about this last week and they claimed that it's already possible as a matter of course - their editorial management system allows each reviewer to see the other reviewer reports.
Something is contradictory here. I can think of many possible explanations, e.g. the reviewer didn't know how to operate the editorial management system, MDPI changed their review process between 2015 and 2021, or even the MDPI employee is lying/mistaken. I don't have any firsthand experience of MDPI's review process, hence I'm asking if anyone who has reviewed for (or has experience operating their editorial management system) can confirm if MDPI reviewers can see each other's reports.


texts: Should I say congratulations to my professor? What is the best way for this?

texts: Few days ago I found on a website that my professor's student won the "Golden Kingfisher Prize" for her presentation under his supervision in his previous university 2 years ago .. Do you think it is good to talk about it? And what is the best way for this ?.


texts:
I am writing a paper with my adviser.
Some of the key contributions of our paper include:

A computer simulation model of an inventory system
A set of simulation experiments and results to validate the simulation model
An implementation of an inventory policy which we propose
Simulation results of our proposed inventory policy and inventory policies which are currently used in practice

We want to make our computer code freely available to others.
The simulation model was written in the Java programming language so other researchers should be able to run the code on their own computers fairly easily.
By sharing our computer code, we hope that other researchers will develop inventory policies which they can test using our simulation model.
(Of course, it would be beneficial for us if they would do so and cite us in their paper!)

Question: What is a good way to go about sharing our computer code?

Where do I host the code?
Which software license should we "publish" the code under?
How do I make it easy for other people to run the code?


texts: Working with a Ph.D. supervisor that may have to take medical leave?

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I'm interested in working with Professor X for my Ph.D. My first meeting with X went very well. I like him and I get the impression that we would work well together in the graduate school environment. Moreover, the research is in a field that I am extremely interested in and I think it would be a good fit for my skills.

In speaking to the graduate students privately, I heard nothing but praise for Professor X. However, one student disclosed that he (the professor) suffers from a disability that required him to be on medical leave for over a year. The student said that this slowed the progress of research and probably delayed his Ph.D by a non-trivial amount. Otherwise, he said that he was very happy working with Professor X and would even make the same decision again.

Obviously, I think it would be inappropriate to ask Professor X about this. However, I am concerned that such a situation may arise again during the course of my Ph.D. I also don't want to discriminate against someone due to a medical condition.

So my questions are:

How problematic is it for an advisor to be unavailable for research consultation for a long period of time?
Is it unwise (or unethical) to make such a decision based on the disability of an advisor?
Would it be inappropriate to ask other graduate students about his condition and how it has affected their work?

I know that the choice of advisor is often considered the most important decision about graduate school. Professor X would be my clear first choice but I'm just having second thoughts due to potential uncertainty in the future of my Ph.D.


texts: Academic CV/grant proposal: Should you include students who have abandoned?

texts: I am wondering whether I should include students I have supervised but have quit in my CV, especially for grant proposals where supervision history is assessed. I have a couple of students who could not finish their programme, either because they didn't meet the academic requirements of our university or because of lack of funds. Do you think it would look bad on my CV to include them? If I do include them, should I explain why they quit?


texts: How to understand the details of European Doctorate?

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I am currently in the process of being a PhD student in a distance university in one of the european countries. Also, where i live and work (at the university) currently is another EU Country.
The supervisor from the distance university wrote me the following to explain me the PhD Commission system which i am having difficulty to understand the second part (part b).

"a) You will work on the research article compendium PHD and we can try to have an European Doctorate. In this case, you must be in an European stay (6 or 3 months) outside both countries (neither distance uni nor where i work)".

"b) A tutor and report on the stay site, one report of one European external researcher of the PhD (use to be from the stay institution but NOT from the stay Tutor) and one from European (neither distance uni nor where I work) member on the PhD commission".

So, I have to stay in another EU Country (varying from 3 to 6 months)for the research purposes. There, I will have a Tutor and report? What does Report mean?

Could anyone please who had the similar experiences highlight me?

Thank you beforehand.


texts: Supervisor insists on writing a manuscript, yet procrastinates on writing for years

texts:
So my supervisor insisted on writing a manuscript himself (because he wants to submit the paper to a better journal), but constantly procrastinated on the task for one and a half years despite repeated reminders from me. The drafting of the manuscript was completed eventually and submitted to a journal, but I can't help feeling that this situation has caused me to lose a tremendous amount of trust in my supervisor. This stems from the repeated broken promises by him to complete drafting the manuscript after attending to whatever unrelated tasks he deemed a higher priority at that time. And as I said, this went on for 1.5 years until I started to lose my patience and complained to the dean. This loss of trust is also a major cause of a further breakdown in the relationship with my supervisor down the line (e.g. me pestering him on other tasks incessantly etc.,) among other problems.

This is in the past and I will be graduating soon so it is now too late to change anything. But I now wonder if I should have acted any differently? Is it not that big of a deal for a supervisor to delay something for so long? I was concerned with being scooped, the delay affecting my cv post graduation, and other potential complications that may arise from such a delay. Did I make a mountain out of a molehill? If not, maybe I should have requested for a change of supervisor before things had gotten out of hand. At that time, I thought a change of supervisor was a huge decision but I now realize that the alternate path that I have treaded has become the death knell of my future academic career.

Edit: I had actually prepared a draft manuscript way back before my supervisor decided and insisted on writing the manuscript himself because he wanted to submit to a better journal (believing his writing skills to be better, which may or may not be true but that is unimportant; for what it's worth, I have sole-authored publications before so my writing skills are at least satisfactory).

Edit 2: The degree in question is a PhD but the publication was only just submitted on the eve of the submission of my thesis (~2 months before).


texts: What if an undergraduate concentrated on research on the account of his study?

texts: I am studying medicine. We study different disciplines and different specialties during our undergraduate years.  My subject grades aren't very good. Then, I rushed to research and biostatistics -maybe to veil my low grades- and have made a little good progress at them while I am still undergraduate. Will doing this help me in my future? (I mean if I continued doing bad at the subject exams and concentrated on research methodology and biostatistics)


texts: Abstract-only presentation - How does it work?

texts: I submitted an abstract for presentation in an international conference. The paper was accepted, but with a caveat. The organizers replied me that it is an abstract-only presentation. Please what do I do?


texts: Do universities keep your college application materials, if you are rejected?

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I guess I am just being curious, but I was wondering whether college applications are kept or saved (i.e common app) by the institutions you applied to?
I assume that if you are accepted they are pretty much kept until you graduate. But what happens to the application materials of people who have not being accepted? All those applications are kept for some period of time and then disposed?
Thanks!


texts: Referring to previous work “by the authors”

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Let's consider two papers, one by authors A1, A2, A3 and one by authors B1, B2, B3. In the case of two publications by the same research group, some of the authors may be the same, some may be new… Typically, the senior author/team leader is the same, which means that A3 = B3 (in fields where the senior author is typically listed last).

Now, my question is: in which cases is it okay to refer to the earlier work by the words “the authors”, as in “the authors have shown in [ref] that…”? Is it only okay if the two author sets are strictly equal? Or is it used when A ⊂ B or A ⊃ B? Or when the first author is the same?


texts:
A few weeks ago I told my college professor that im depressed. She said I can go to her at anytime if i need help.

Then my psychologist kicked me out, because I didnt want to tell her the details of sexual abuse.

Can I ask my prof to help me find a therapist? Or it would be awkward/it would be a burden for her?
I really like her, it felt really good, when she offered her help. I just dont know if she truly meant that i can ask her for help, or just said it...


texts: Is it worth submitting a paper to journal-first track of a conference?

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Some of the prestigious conferences in Computer Science and Engineering have a "journal first" track. In that track they accept recent papers from selected journals. An example is https://2020.esec-fse.org/track/esecfse-2020-journal-first.

Other than offering an opportunity to attend such a conference, what are the other reasons one may submit a paper to such a track? I feel that since the paper is exactly same as what is  already published in a top tier journal, publishing the same work in another venue won't have much benefit. At best, one can have another item in his/her list of publications, though of actually the same piece of work as an earlier one.

I will appreciate if you could shed some light on if there are any other reasons/benefits from submitting to such "journal-first" tracks.

Thank you in advance!


texts: How to find ways to proofread English in papers

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As a non-native speaker of English, it can often be hard to spot some of the errors that a native speaker would find. For a long time, I've been thinking about getting a native speaker to help me with proof-reading my texts (articles, theses, application, etc), but I don't quite know where to look. What are some good ways to get proofreading for your texts?

For example, are there any websites on the Internet where one can exchange proofreading services between different languages? (Say, if you help me proofread my text in language x, I'll help you with yours in language y.)


texts: Should I correct grammatically incorrect quotes when using them in a paper?

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As a researcher, I often need to quote from the previous authors. Sometimes, it happens that there are spelling mistakes in the part I want to quote. I treat this as a human error and write the correct spelling. However, I am unsure how should I handle if there is some (relatively) serious error? For example, I found the word choosed (instead of chose). Should I simply copy with the wrong word, or fix it?
If I change it, the previous authors (from whom I took the quote) may be unhappy. If I do not change it, the reviewers (who would be reviewing my paper) may be unhappy by seeing my lack of care while writing a paper.
This question is different from this, as I am confused whether or not to correct. Since I am writing a formal paper, I cannot use sic.
Originally asked here https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/567310/grammatically-wrong-quote


texts: Advice on reusing images/illustrations from an AIMS paper

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I'm working on a chemistry paper about the Belousov-Zhabotinsky-reaction (a chemical oscillator).

On of my sources is this paper from the AIMS. In the paper the authors have a few figures, especially figure 2 (you can view it on the website). If permitted by the copyright, I would like to include the figure.

I've no idea how the copyright is regulated with such papers. The AIMS website provides even an option to download the full-size figure.

What is the copyright for DOI-papers (by the AIMS)? And how can I determine such a thing the next time (if it has an DOI)?

For this specific case, is it allowed to include the figure, on the condition of correct reference?


texts: How should I compare my algorithm to others when their code is not available?

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In computer science, we usually implement our work into algorithms and codes. So in order to compare our work to others, we also need to implement their approaches as well.

But the problem is that usually there are recently published works in each area which have used complicated mathematical methods and claimed to beat other previous methods. But some of them are difficult to implement by just reading the papers; or they have not mentioned all the necessary details in the paper for a precise implementation of their work and neither have they make their code available.

How should I compare my work to these most recent algorithms for which the code is not available?


texts: How to find the paper that initializes a new field

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Problem

I am now working on a relatively new field in machine learning. My advisor suggested me to read milestone papers in this field. I think The first paper that proposed the problem is surely an important one. However, I do not know how to find it even after reading several review papers (actually none of them mentions the origin of the field).

Though finding the origin of the field may not sound useful, it is important to me since I have some fundamental doubts about the problem description, etc.

Could anyone help me, thank you in advance.


texts: I have already finished my studies and work in a private  company. I would like to know that I could do my sabbatical as a researcher in a university. Is there any specific procedures or limitation for it?


texts: How to ask someone to collaborate on a joint paper?

texts:
So far I have worked on papers by myself and have been the sole author in all of them. There is one project that I am interested in and have been working on it for a while with no significant progress. It seems, I'm  definitely going to need some fresh thoughts. In our department there is absolutely no one interested in that subject.
My question is how exactly am I supposed to ask someone to collaborate with me on a joint paper?
In case it matters, I work in field of Mathematics.


texts: How to tell about mistakes made in a previous publication to adviser?

texts: I am currently a PhD student. I have a previous publications on my field in a top tier conference. Now my adviser wants to extend the work. The problem is when I started working on that again, I found some results were not correct in the published paper. I did mistakes unintentionally interpreting the results previously, but somehow the reviewer did not notice that. Now I am too worried telling about this to my adviser. Can you please suggest me how to approach this to my adviser? What can be the consequence of this to the published paper?


texts: Accused of cheating due to the time accounted by Blackboard

texts:
Since the exams this year for college is online, there is a timer. Usually, when I start an exam I click a random answer choice or what I think is right at that moment. Once I finish most of it, I go back to look it over.
I got accused of cheating since I answered the questions in 15 mins, and the system recorded that automatically once clicked, instead of recording the time of completing the whole set of questions.
When reviewing my answers after the 15 minutes, I realized I guessed correctly and there was no need to pick another answer. But I got accused since I finished so fast and so accurately.
We were allowed to use cheat sheets with equations and info, allowing me to finish so fast, so I do not understand why I am being accused. And some of the questions were similar to the homework which helped even more. So how do I prove that I did not cheat. It took me an hour and 9 mins to take the exam.
The only information that they kept repeating over and over again was the timing. I clearly stated that I did not look up anything and I had other tests to take the same day. i went over the review powerpoint which had very similar questions to the test once I started taking it. They flagged my test when they were looking for people that posted it on chegg.
There was no other allegation made besides the timing and I have all the proof that I did not cheat. The person telling me the allegation did not give me the chance to clearly defend my self.
Please help me prove that I am not cheating.


texts: Subject or object in the Dewey Decimal Classification

texts:
I'm not sure I understand how the Dewey Decimal Classification works. Do the numbers relate to the object or subject of the book?
The confusion I have comes from the fact that in my faculty library, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (ISBN 9780415278447) and the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science (ISBN 0190939397) have a completely different subject, the first one talks about science, the second one about philosophy, but the same number (501). And according to http://classify.oclc.org this is the choice most often made.


texts: I am finding literature about the term startup came from, which is referring to budding company. However, the info is scarce. Can anyone suggest to me, what the best website to find for terminology/etymology used by scholars? If applicable, it is good if there is a journal discussing about this


texts: Reliable Asian university rankings datasets suitable for evaluating applications to a graduate program

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Our (American) university has a lot of applications coming in from Asia- especially China, India, Japan and Korea.

Each of these seems to follow a different grading scheme and it is hard to do  apples-to-apples comparisons of students scores across universities. We don't request WES transcripts.

What is a good way to normalize students across Asian universities? Which ranking schemes (global and local) are reliable? Do these ranking schemes provide fine-grained, easy-to-parse data that we can use for CS and ECE admissions (not just relative ranking)?

ADDENDUM: There seems to be an XY problem with the original question, as @FedericoPoloni points out. What we're interested in is indeed-- "What is a good way to compare transcripts for graduate admission, especially from Asian universities? Admittedly, this is a broad problem and solutions may be reductive or simplistic, but it seems unfair to not consider the quality of teaching, research and the cohorts worked with, when evaluating student transcripts.

The current answer and comments, while helpful, will leave admissions restricted to IIT, Tshingua, KAIST-- since we do not trust transcripts from other universities, and though exceptions can be one-off, this approach does not scale. I'd be grateful if you could share references to meaningful datasets and ideas to use the data without unfair bias.


texts: Do Master of Research programs require prior research experience?

texts: I have a research question that I want to explore, so am considering completing a Master of Research (MRes) degree in the UK. I will soon finish a terminal master's program by coursework (in the US), with no thesis option, so I do not have a research background. Is research experience a typical prerequisite for an MRes?


texts: Why do academics frequently write very short email replies?

texts:
Why do many academics write short replies to emails?

For example, I write Professor MK some polite email with salutation, etc., just polite and decent email.  MK then responds like this:

  OK, MK

Is MK so busy that they have no time to write, for example, this:

  Hello,

  It is fine. This is the correct approach.

  Best regards,MK

I do not understand this.


texts: Without teaching experience, but industry experience, how can I begin teaching at college level?

texts:
I have a desire to teach at one of the colleges/universities in my area. I think my experience in industry and my own educational background would be an asset to an IT program. However, I'm finding that when looking for positions, all require previous teaching experience. This requirement exists at the technical college, local community colleges and two universities in my area.

I'd like to start by teaching a night class or two. How does one go about translating valuable industry experience (combined with Bachelor and Masters degrees) to the teaching requirements that are desired by the institutions?


texts: Can I ask a lecturer for letter of recommendation

texts:
I wonder can I ask a lecturer who I took his course and I did amazing in his class for a letter of recommendation?
The reason why I am asking is because lecturers are not usually doing research and might be permanent faculty member.


texts: How to explain why I want to go to a summer school?

texts:
I want to go to a summer school in biomathematics for undergraduate level, and they ask to give some sort of explanatory of why do I want to attend. I've never done this before, so I have no idea what to write, first I wanted to write that the relationship between biology and mathematics is very interesting, and that stimulates my curiosity, however I feel this sounds extremely immature. How do you write this things?

Also, I've seen that in general for other events that usually involve (short) courses, they ask the applicant to write their reasons to attend, why is that?


texts:
I often see in a CV that certain papers are labelled as ‘communicated’. What does that mean? (Not ‘communicated by’.)

E.g. this document which is a list of papers including entries like:

  "On complicated things and related stuff" (with A. B. Coauthor) (communicated).


texts: Supervisor not satisfied and only willing to see me every two weeks, what should I do?

texts:
My research supervisor is a quite strict person who constantly criticizes me for my faults (such as slow progress, or always asking others for help on programming issues).

I don't blame him being a bit too strict with me, because anyway supervisor is here to supervise and give constructive suggestion. I really learn from his lessons for me. In fact, I am very grateful for him being willing to teach me some lessons. His comments are always very helpful.

During the last meeting, he seemed not very satisfied and happy with my progress. I have previously told him about my plan of submitting a paper in November. It seems that he thought this kind of slow progress would fail the aim in the end.

At the end of meeting, after criticizing me for asking others for help too much instead of solving the problems myself, he decided to schedule the originally weekly meeting to two weeks later.

Obviously, I am quite worried as the submission deadline is just in November. Given my poor performance, I have no right to suggest getting the meeting every week.

It seems that my research indeed gets stuck here. I kinda need the supervisors' advice to move on. What may I do to save this situation?


texts: Is it ok to give your Old Assignments to others?

texts: My friend wants an old assignment which I have done few semesters ago. I want to know whether it's ok to give the assignment to him and whether it's going to be a problem for me in the future. (I have already done that subject, but still following the degree) Please let me know.


texts: KAU is accused of hiring well-known professors to boost university rankings by adding affiliation. Is it ethical to accept this kind of offer?

texts:
For those unaware of the situation, here are some links:

  Messerly, Megan. 'UC Berkeley Professor Critiques Saudi University's
  Recruitment Process Of World's Top Researchers'. The Daily
  Californian. Last modified 2014. Accessed March 16, 2015.
  http://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/05/citations-sale/.

  Yahia, Mohammed. 'Are Saudi Universities Buying Their Way Into Top
  Charts? : House Of Wisdom'. Blogs.Nature.Com. Last modified 2012.
  Accessed March 16, 2015.
  http://blogs.nature.com/houseofwisdom/2012/01/are-saudi-universities-buying-their-way-into-top-charts.html.

KAU is asking people to claim KAU affiliations on papers where no collaboration exists, thus boosting KAU's metrics in the easily-fooled US News university rankings. The existence of ancillary benefits, such as collaboration with local KAU researchers, seem to have been somewhat debunked by now, but this was not clear before. (There are some such benefits, but largely they fail to materialize.)

$72k per year is a lot of money, and there are some very accomplished people who have accepted this association. In a situation not too different from the one I am in now, I could easily see myself selling this part of my reputation for $72k. By no means can I stand above this deal on moral grounds.

Is it ethical to accept this kind of offer? What is the impact on prestige and reputation of the researchers who have accepted this offer, now that its primary motive of citation-gaming is unambiguous?


texts: What to do if a conference rebuttal is closed before the specified deadline?

texts:
My paper was submitted to a conference, and they sent me a rebuttal email specifying the deadline in UTC-12 time zone.
However, when I prepared my rebuttal and tried to submit it into the system, I found that the system was closed. The time was over in my time zone but more than 12 hours were still remaining in UTC-12 time zone.
Although my paper seemed to be accepted(maybe somewhat marginally), yet I did not want to demonstrate a naive attitude.
What is the best thing to do in such a situation?


texts: Transfer of credit (masters) in Germany?

texts: Is it possible to transfer credit (masters) in Germany? I have completed half of my credits in a German university. Now I want to transfer to other university. Is it possible?


texts: Verbatim copying of text that itself contains references - plagiarism?

texts:
Author A has a paper where a sentence (25 or so words) that refers to the work of Authors B and C.

If author Y copies verbatim the sentence by A, and includes the reference to B and C (as it's a verbatim copy), this is plagiarism, right? There are no quotation marks.


texts: How to deal with PhD advisor ignoring correct answers

texts:
I am a PhD student. I am feeling something unusual in my PhD: to me it appears that my supervisor ignores my correct answers and always gives me a feedback when my answer is wrong. I know this is a good thing, but the problem is that due to this kind of his behaviour I always feel demotivated and my confidence has gone very low. These days I try not to give many answers because I fear being wrong, which gives the (incorrect) impression that I am not curious about research. To me it looks as though in academia people will not highlight positive things about you, but they will highlight negative things about you.

Question : How to deal with this constant negative feedback in academia as a PhD student?

One obvious solution is not to pay attention to these things; but that is not working for me.


texts: When should I send mail to a university professor for a position as a research assistant (RA) or as a teaching assistant (TA)? i.e. after getting successful admission for MS or after applying to the university? If I send mail to the professor for a position as RA or TA after applying to that university, is there any chances to get successful admission confirmation to that university?


texts: Realistic to stay in the industry and study neuroscience at the same time?

texts:
I want to do interdisciplinary research in CS and neuroscience and I think attending at least some form of a grad program that gets me to the level of being able to publish and be taken seriously in neuroscience after finishing a MS in CS will give me a good edge both ways.

At the same time I do not want to leave the industry and take the lifestyle hit or lose my edge in engineering. I am not worried about the workload since I imagine it will not be different than my current situation already working full time and doing school.

I am more worried about grad programs being geared towards exclusive attendance causing issues with daytime conflicts, reduced faculty support, having to relocate etc. which I do not see worth the sacrifice since all I want out of it is to be able to do research, write and publish interdisciplinary work without putting my foot in my mouth, rather than committing to an entire career track.

Is there a realistic way I can accomplish this?


texts:
For me, it feels slightly clumsy to say I'm a Research Fellow without actually being a fellow (defined as a male person).  Nevertheless, it's unsurprising to have female research fellows at universities.

Q: Is Research Fellow a gender-neutral term?

With this question, I'm seeking a way to understand why no-one seems to mind using "research fellow" to describe non-males.  Perhaps there's some etymology to the term that would clarify things.


texts: Public dataset without license: what is allowed?

texts:
Many public scientific datasets are accompanied by a license, for example variations of Creative Commons are used quite often. However, in many cases public academic datasets lack any licensing information. Here are two examples:

At PhosphoSite we find it is "created by Cell Signaling Technology is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License", so permissions of usage are clear from the license.

Here is an other dataset where we don't see anything about licensing, not even a statement that the data is free to use for academic purposes. It only states that "can be downloaded", but what can I do after downloading? Can I redistribute it, modify it, sell it? From the context I suppose they intended their data for public use, they are happy if more people use it so they get more credits and citations. But this is just an assumption.

The copyright holder is clear in both cases, the permissions are missing in the second case.

I am wondering, if I write a software using this data, or I construct a more complex dataset including this data, what solutions are legally correct:

1: The software downloads the dataset at each user's own machine from the original source and processes it. However this is not always possible or not easy to implement.

2: Distribute a copy of the original dataset, or a modified version, with attribution to the original source. This is more problematic, I think, but I am not expert in law.

Asking for permission is an obvious solution, but in case of dozens of datasets, it is a tedious and long process to contact all the copyright holders, and wait for their responses. Also, some datasets are supplements of published papers. In this case, if the journal has a license, e.g. Nucleic Acids Research is published under Creative Commons, is this valid for these datasets?


texts: As a teaching assistant, how to make tutorials more stimulating

texts:
In my university, tutorial sessions in physics usually consists in the teaching assistant solving three to six problems in front of the class (less than 30 students per class). Some TAs try to encourage student participation by asking what the next step in solving the problem should be, etc... but the results are usually poor. As a student, I mostly thought that this format for tutorial sessions was a waste of time, especially since most TAs gave the corrected exercises after the tutorial session (as I think they should be doing). I usually stopped attending after a few weeks.

I now find myself in the situation of being a TA for the first time and I don't want to repeat the same mistake as my peers. I want to convince the teacher to let me try a more stimulating format for the tutorial sessions.

I initially wanted to use clickers and ask short multiple choice questions to students, but I may have to abandon that idea since 1) it might be too much of a change for the teacher to accept, 2) take too much time for me to prepare and 3) the university might even not have clickers.

Another idea I had was to go through a single difficult exercise with the students as an example and to leave them the rest of the hour to work in teams on their weekly homework while being available for questions.

What do you think about it? What are some good ways to maximize the usefulness of tutorial sessions and to make them stimulating for students?


texts: Can I talk to another professor about quitting my PhD before I talk to my PI?

texts:
Summary of my situation:

I'm early in my 4th year as a PhD student (Cell Biology), and I think I want to quit.  My program is 5-7 years, so I have at least 2 years left or I can drop out and claim a Master's and say that I have an extra year of experience since I qualified a year ago.

I have an exciting project that I'm interested in, but do not feel like my advisor lets me finish experiments before expecting me to start the next set.  As a result, I have very little to show for a lot of work.  The paper will probably be big, but it's far off.

I don't think I'm getting what I wanted out of grad school. I see ways that I can achieve those original goals in the future, but it will be a while and I'm not sure its worth the wait.

The stress and workload leave me racked with guilt, initiate panic attacks, and have sent me into depression (maybe? I'm planning on talking to someone at my school's student mental health center).  I know it's work related because when I do manage to take a day off, I feel perfectly normal, like my old self, but as soon as I walk back into lab it starts again.

Question:

Can I talk to another professor (someone on my committee, someone I'm familiar with in my department, or someone familiar with my project but not on my committee) to get advice about my particular situation, the advantages/disadvantages of quitting, and how to talk to my PI about it? Or would that be seen as going behind my PI's back?


texts: Is it ethical to get suggestions/corrections about my PhD work from a consultant?

texts:
I am doing a PhD in Mechanical Engineering. I have little experience with CAD programs, and I have to design an assembly in my project for manufacturing. As my supervisor is busy, and also not a specialist in CAD, I am thinking in hiring a CAD consultant of a company. Her tasks are basically to verify my CAD parts and ensure that everything is fine for manufacturing, and, if it is not, to send correction and comments about what to do to fix the parts/assembly and brief tutorial on how to do it.

My question is: if I do the work myself and only get suggestions/corrections from someone else, can I encounter any problems later, like having my PhD degree revoked?? I don't want to ask help from my supervisor, as I don't want him to spend 20 hours or more with my work.

Please tell me if I can do it; and if yes, if I need to inform someone, or put something on the thesis regarding it, or anything else.


texts: Is it Worth the Risk of Going into Debt for a Masters Degree Versus a PhD?

texts:
I realize that this sort of question has been asked before and I have read through some of the other threads but I figured I'd see if there are any more perspectives out there. I am currently a research embryologist for a small fertility clinic with a Bsc in molecular biology. I have about 2 1/2 years of experience and have been accepted into an Masters in Bioinformatics program. I am very excited to begin taking classes but l have recently begun second guessing whether I should have tried to get into a PhD program. I will not be able to continue working at my current job while I am in school so I will likely be paying for school with loans unless I'm able to find a job after I relocate.

Those of you who have Masters degrees, would you do it again or go for a PhD? From what I have found searching around the site many people say PhDs are more academically focused while Masters degree holders tend to find more positions in industry. Is concern over the cost of a Masters degree a good reason to consider a PhD instead or do most of you find you were able to offset your education costs with the job you eventually found? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance!


texts: Academic tassel at convocation: left or right for dual undergraduate/post graduate students?

texts:
Apologies if the question I ask is not suited for this SE.

At convocation, it is usually the culture for undergrads to wear the tassel on right and switch to left after being given the degree. For postgraduates, the tassel is supposed to be on the left.

My question has two parts:

a) What about people who are straight away getting their post graduate degree (in case of students who have opted for a dual degree program or integrated course)? Do they wear the tassel on the right (as they have never been given a degree before)?

b) When exactly should the turning of the tassel happen (for undergrads)? On the stage itself when receiving the degree?

Many thanks for any answers in advance!


texts:
Are there any valid alternatives to google scholar?

I am currently living in China. almost the whole internet is blocked, including Google. I tried to bypass the firewall, then google scholar tends to deny my access claiming that the traffic is suspicious.

Are there other valid alternatives to google scholar where I can easily search for random scientific papers from different fields and trace their citations Thanks!


texts: Can a PhD student publish a paper outside PhD topic without supervisor approval only by its own?

texts: I am a theoretical PhD student. Is it possible to submit and to publish papers in journals without supervisor approval? I am asking also from legal point of view, as well. I have talked to many people in my university and some of them don't have  a good opinion regarding single author papers since such a single author paper might have sufficient errors in it. However, the subject is not studied by anyone in the university.


texts: How do you measure success to remain motivated in academia?

texts:
I am currently pursuing a physics major in college. My question mostly applies to those working in STEM, but I am definitely open to hearing answers from others.

Right now, in college, most of the work I am doing involves solving math/physics problems. I have an easy way of measuring my success on this work: if I get the "right"/"correct" answers (or at least one that agrees with my professor's answer), I can say that I am doing "well".

This ability to measure success keeps me motivated. I was wondering what the analog to this in the real world is? When working in academia and pursuing unsolved problems, how do you measure your success to remain motivated? There is no answer key for you to check at the end of the day, so how do you know if you are "right" or "doing well"?


texts: How to handle dislike of/lack-of-interest in sub-specialty of research area

texts:
I am a PhD student studying in a field that I enjoy. Furthermore, I enjoy the area within the field that I am specializing in. However, my specialty generally has two major application arenas, which in some ways are disjoint. I came to the program knowing I would be working in one of them, sub-specialty A, despite having no prior experience in it. I did have experience in the other, sub-specialty B, but the faculty in my department who work in sub-specialty B either didn't have openings or didn't see me as a fit for their group (i.e. they didn't support my application).

I arrived planning to give sub-specialty A a fair shake, as I honestly knew little about it and for all I knew I'd enjoy it. After a semester, I am finding it hard to stay interested in the research, and this feeling is compounded by the frustration of feeling like I have to start over in the field. It's also tough watching my peers work on problems of sub-specialty B that I find so much more interesting than my work in sub-specialty A.

I know a PhD is the start, not the end, of a career, and that what you do during it is not what you have to do for the rest of your life, but, that being said, I do have to spend 4-6 years working with this material.

How does one handle this sort of situation? Is it appropriate to bring up my concerns with my adviser? Could trying to bring in a co-adviser from sub-specialty B be a feasible way to bridge the gap between the sub-specialties? (NOTE: It's worth mentioning that this is literally the only problem I am having with my PhD; the school is great, the cohort is great, and my adviser is great) Have other people been in these circumstances? If so, what did you do about it?


texts: If you have severe problems with speaking, is it okay to use more text and equations on slides?

texts:
I understand that it is best to give a good oral presentation supported by slides with minimal text. Questions like this have been asked before, but in the context of a "normal" presenter.

My ability to communicate in front of an audience is however so impaired by my nerves during a presentation that I think I can communicate more information by making nearly self-explanatory slides.

What is your advice on this in case of unusual limitations or problems of the presenter? Problems such as:

nervousness up to the extent that language gets incoherent,
people who do not speak the language required for the presentation well,
people with voice problems.

I understand this question can be a general debate of taste or style. But in general the objective in communication is the exchange of information by means of imperfect/corrupt media. If it’s difficult to repair or replace the media, it seems to make sense to change the mode of transmission. In an academic setting such as a conference presentation, or even a keynote, how acceptable is it to make the talk supporting the slides, in stead of the slides supporting the talk?


texts: Will non-research but relevant extracurricular help me get into graduate school?

texts:
I understand that joining a sports team or student council won’t matter at all for graduate school. However, what about internships in industry, competing in science/engineering competitions, or being a tutor that teaches high school kids math and science?

Additionally, what if you’re given an engineering internship, but it isn’t directly related to your desired research? For example, I’m interested in doing machine learning in graduate school, but I get an internship where I get to help in the development process of making apps from a relatively unknown company?

And also, I’m trying to aim for a top 25 research university, should I just maximize my time by just doing research? If I were to spend lots of time for an engineering competition, but I only reach the semi-finals, would that be a waste of time? Should I still add that to my application?

Sorry if I ask lots of questions. I tried searching all over the Internet, and I can't really find any answers. Thanks.


texts: A Student turned in an essay answer to a question I haven't asked yet. What to do?

texts:
A student turned in a bunch of homework assignments, poorly organized and many not labeled.  One of them was on a topic for several weeks from now.  The student turned in a short essay for the assignment, which I have not given.

Notes:
Most of the course material was prepared by someone else and is normally used by several of us adjuncts.
I've taught this course prior.

English is not the student's primary language (interesting since the essays turned in are in very good English...).

Since I haven't given the assignment, is it plagiarism?  (What was turned in is straight up a copy of an internet source.)

Do I report them to the Chair/Dean for plagiarism?


texts:
I'm a CS master student. During my early days looking for a thesis I noticed two categories of projects:

Projects a about completely new idea.
Projects about improving an existing technical concept.

By the first one I mean completely new stuff (something I'm doing now as my thesis). Such projects require intensive thinking to formulate them and put them into academic contexts and logics. While a lot of the time will be used to try and test new things as well as justyfing and putting the results into proper academic context and logic, very few time could be spent learning advanced stuff regarding your field.

In the other kinds of projects one would need to improve the running time of an algorithm or its performance. Such projects would require the student to go into very deep stuff regarding his field and become really advanced.

Now that I'm doing the first kinds of projects, I started to feel unconfident about myself and my skills when I see how the skills of other students who worked on the second type became. The reason behind that is I feel that my effort doesn't show up to people when they will probably read my thesis. Because they won't see advanced mathematics and algorithms as in the second type. How should I deal with this personal problem?