texts: Asking a company for permission to use website data for research

texts:
I'm a researcher, and I want to scrape a website (specifically, TripAdvisor) to collect data in order to use it for a research project. However, in reading the website's terms & conditions, I found that the company prohibits the user from:

  ...copy any content or information of this Website using any robot,
  spider, scraper or other automated means or any manual process for any
  purpose without our express written permission.

  -- Prohibited activities, bullet (ii)

As such, I want to contact the company to ask for permission. I've had a difficult time finding any information on how to contact the company in order to ask for permission to use data. That said, my question is, when making these sorts of requests to companies, what is the best way to ensure that I am contacting the right department/person?


texts: Is it possible to get a PhD based on research papers I have written?

texts:
I am working as a young scientist after finishing my masters in physics in India. In last three years, I have published 12 research papers (Quantum theory) with my collabrators. I am facing problems in registering for PhD in my institute.

How can I get a Doctrate degree based upon my  research papers without registering for PhD. ??

Is there any such degree in India or abroad which can be awarded to me based upon my research papers ??


texts: Which are considered as trustworthy good quality  journals , the ones indexed in esci by web of science or are the ones indexed in scopus ? There are some journals which us indexed in esci and not in scopus and vice versa. Any lead points on this ?


texts: I have submitted a paper that I have written at a well-known journal and the current status is: Assigning additional reviewers. I have just submitted my paper last week. I am wondering why this is the case because from what I know, initially the associate editor assigns 2-3 reviewers and when they complete their reviews, if the editor feel that the reviews were not sufficient may assign additional reviewers. So why is my paper being assigned additional reviewers at the beginning of the review process? Thanks.


texts: How to deal with coauthors that have left academia

texts:
Researchers might take different paths other than staying in academia after completing their PhD, postdoc or even later. This happens for a number of reasons. The most compelling of all is that there is not enough room for everyone, but it could happen that these people lose interest in research, find a good opportunity in the private sector, or (more often than we'd like) get burnt out.

For a typical researcher, there is a body of work that they have done and is susceptible to be published by people who they were collaborating with after they have left. However -beyond possible personal satisfaction- they do not have the motivation or time to publish this work anymore. This leads to poor communication between the authors that stay and the person that left, usually motivated by the latter not replying (perhaps reading) emails concerning the work or taking too long to do so. These people will usually be fine with having their names on a new publication even without the need to go through the manuscript before submission (this might also be true for reckless researchers in general, but that's another story...) because they might not be concerned about their (former) career in academia anymore.

How should this situation be dealt with? Is it ethical to submit a paper when a coauthor that left academia has not actively taken part in the preparation/proof reading of the manuscript, considering he/she has contributed significantly to the work?


texts:
When using photographs for papers (assuming they've been taking by the author), to what extent can they be retouched and (a) be used without mention of retouching or (b) used but require mention of retouching?

I imagine that levels adjustment and cropping would generally fall under (a), but other types of processing give me more pause.  For instance, while stitching photographs together seems innocuous enough, it often necessarily involves interpolation.  And if some interpolation is acceptable, where would the line be drawn?  Power lines in front of a building or dust/scratches on older photographers seem like they'd be okay, but restoring a larger block area seems more dubious.

To what extent might these practices vary by field?  (I imagine astronomy and architecture probably have quite different standard practices)


texts: Can I release my drawings with creative common licence before using them in non-open access journal or proceedings?

texts:
I spend quite a lot of time drawing images for my research projects, I really don't like that when the editor publish these images I lose the rights on them. So usually I release them on the web under creative commons licence CC-BY before submitting the manuscripts where I used them.
I was wondering if this procedure safeguards my intellectual property on the images and the possibility to be reused.


texts: Problem with undergraduate research supervisor, how to proceed?

texts:
Setting

I am currently an undergraduate student in chemistry and I have recently started working on an undergraduate research project in a known laboratory in the US. I am very passionate about the topic, however I have problems with my supervisor, who is a PhD student.

Problem description

When I came to the lab asking for a topic to work on, the Professor assigned me to one of their students, which appears to be common practice, so I did not question this. However, I found out later that my supervisor (the student) was the only person in the lab working on the topic, and that she herself had only started working on it not long ago. After several days in the lab, my supervisor has not revealed what the eventual goal of my project will be, and from the way she behaves (stressed out, impatient towards me asking questions, which is an additional problem), I suspect that she might not know herself (quote: "we'll figure out along the way"). This is severely frustrating. I am aware that research is an open-ended endeavour that might be changed as new situations arise, but I thought that undergraduate research should be something self-contained, with a clear goal and time-frame, and usually well-thought out by an experienced researcher? I am aware that one possibility to resolve these issues could be to simply talk to my supervisor. However, there appear to be some barriers, which leads me to my question.

Question

How can I approach the situation without ruining my standing in the laboratory and appearing like a complicated student, even though I am not? I would love to continue on this or a similar topic in this lab, but the current situation is very unpleasant for me.

I feel like I cannot talk to my supervisor directly as she seems impatient and stressed out, and at the same time inexperienced with supervising undergraduate students. I fear that this could make the experience even worse, with my supervisor getting angry at my criticism.

The other option I can conceive of would be to talk to my supervisor's supervisor, and ask for some kind of intervention from above. But this could also backfire in many ways, possibly making me look complicated and unwanted in the lab altogether.


texts: How is Study Abroad regarded by PhD admissions committees?

texts:
Does study abroad help enhance a PhD candidate's profile or does it not carry much weight at all?  Let's say I took "regular" coursework while on study abroad for a semester, like a core course and not something research-focused.

Would my having lived in Prague or Florence or Shanghai be something that PhD admissions committees consider favorably?

The field is applied mathematics, statistics, or operations research.


texts: How to motivate students to take a "gauge" test that helps us with statistics but does not contribute to their grade?

texts:
I am TA-ing for a college class of general physics with currently ~60 enrolled students. We initially (at the beginning of each semester) give them the FCI test ("force concept inventory") that gauges their knowledge/intuition of forces and underlying Newton's laws, and then we repeatedly issue the test at the end of the semester to gain some statistics of how much they learned during the class. The goal is to have some standardized test that probes the gain of knowledge during the semester, so judging just by the final or midterm is not possible (as those cover different topics in physics each time). The test is usually not incentivized by any points or grade at the beginning of the class, so the incentive to take it at the end is a question we face every time.
They know this test doesn't contribute to their grades, so not anyone might feel compelled to take it (this is somewhat similar to the course evaluations). However, for the statistics to be accurate, all those still enrolled should take it. Consider:

if only a part of the class takes the test, the statistics might be skewed
if only students who feel strong in physics take it, this would skew the test upward
if only those who are weaker in physics take it, it skewes the results downward

We might need to somehow incentivize taking this test, but all solutions that initially seem like a no-brainer, might create a new problem:

providing small amount of bonus points toward the final grade for participation might incentivize it to students who are doing bad in the class, while those who are doing great (well within the range to get an A) might decide to pass, thus removing the best outliers and skewing the results downward

providing small amount of bonus points just for the participation might make people take it, but not take it seriously, i.e. totally invalidating the results of the test

I thought of maybe issuing the test during a normal class time, but this seems to me like cheating the students into taking it

appealing by our needs to get this important statistics that will help the future students yada yada, can motivate better students into it, but maybe the most disgruntled, overwhelmed and/or tired students might just decide to skip it, skewing the statistics upward.

What should be the wording of an announcement reminding them of this test to get most of the students to take it while not make anyone feel like it's okay to skip it or not take it seriously?


texts: Will my chances of obtaining a student visa in Canada be reduced if I mention I applied for permanent residency?

texts:
I have been accepted into one of the top 10 engineering universities in Canada. I am starting to fill in the forms for a student visa, but my permanent residency application is still in the pipeline. If I mention this in the form, will my chance of getting a student visa be reduced?

The same form also requires me to mention only one post-secondary degree. Can I mention my bachelor degree instead of Master's? My current program offers me a Master's degree but in completely different field, which is my actual motivation to join the course in Canada.


texts: Register in IEEE A ranked conferences - Student or full registration?

texts:
I am trying to follow up with the instructions to register my paper for the conference. However, the system is not allowing me to finish the process.

I just emailed the editor and he answered after a while, seems quite busy to explain. So I am assuming that if I asked him again for an explanation would take a lot of time too.

'' That error message is telling you to need to pay the full registration. In the instructions at "Fees and Registrations" appears that each student needs a full registration for its paper in order to be able to pay the student's fee. For example, if you wrote your paper with a professor, your professor should pay the full registration so you can pay student's.'' can any help what that means?


texts: Is it ethical/lawful to recolor/scale the logos?

texts: Is it ethical/lawful to recolor/scale the logos when importing them to presentation slides to make the logos meet the template standards and fit the theme colors?


texts: Difference between 'Related work' and 'comparison methods' sections?

texts:
I have a method and I want to compare this with some existing ones. To my understanding, these existing methods can be regarded as 'Comparison methods'. But where should I briefly describe these comparison methods? putting them in 'related work' will be appropriate??
To me, related work section describes overall picture of research field. But in my recent paper, reviewer told that I should compare my method will all methods that I put in related work section. This is confusing.
So what is the difference between these two sections?
And, some papers put related work section in the end of paper. If I follow this and put comparison methods in related work, then how can I perform 'results and discussion' without briefly explaining those methods. Please help me get out of this confusion (CS and SE background)


texts: What is the advantage of having a 'doctor europaeus' certified doctorate degree?

texts:
Universities in European Union countries have the possibility of issuing a PhD degree that is certified as "doctor europaeus" if the PhD student fulfills a certain list of 4 requirements, although this university reports a slightly different list of requirements.

Regardless of the requirements, is there any advantage of having such certification? I am referring to practical advantages, for example a certified degree can be accepted in other EU countries with less bureaucracy. And career advantages (for example more prestige or points gained in postdoc grant applications).


texts: "Looking for a postdoc" ad inside a conference talk?

texts:
I got my PhD one year ago; I am looking for a position (e.g., postdoc).
I am going to a fairly attended conference, and was pondering about how to make audience aware that I am on the market.

An explicit, dedicated slide (maybe at the end)?
A verbal statement?
A caption on my T-shirt? :)

Would you find any of this appropriate?
What would you advice me to do?

EDIT
In case you think it's not a good idea, I'd be interested in knowing why.
Otherwise, I'd be interested in any additional implementation advice (how to formulate that, or whatever comes to mind).


texts: Does a supervisor have to read a thesis of his PhD student

texts:
A friend of mine who is doing a PhD has finished writing the first draft of her thesis. In her school, it's a common practice that a supervisor will read the first draft and then provide feedback and suggestions for improvement.

However, my friend's supervisor is too busy at the moment and explicitly says that he won't be able to read her thesis in a month or so. The supervisor suggests my friend to wait for him. But, since my friend already has a job offer and wants to submit the thesis as soon as possible, the supervisor allows her to submit it now without him reading it.

When my friend was writing her thesis, she sent some chapters to her supervisor. He read some but not all of them.

My question is whether a supervisor has a responsibility to read his/her student's thesis. Moreover, should my friend submit her thesis now even her supervisor hasn't read it yet.

Updates:

My friend is doing her PhD in the UK, which means the supervisor is not in the examining committee.
My friend let her supervisor know about the job offer more than a month ago and they both agreed that the supervisor would try his best to find a time to review her thesis. However, it seems that the supervisor cannot find a time, so he lets her submit now if she wants.


texts: How to avoid and address a lack of gender diversity in grant proposals?

texts:
I just got reviews back on a grant proposal.
On the whole the reviews were positive, but one reviewer criticised us because the five PIs are all male.
The proposed project arises naturally out of a couple of strands of work that we’ve been doing recently. The PIs are the people who’ve been involved in that work, plus the CTO of an industry partner. We’re in a niche area of applied math, and neither of the institutions involved have female staff eligible for the grant scheme working in the area of our proposal.
I support efforts to fix gender imbalances in academia, and I would have preferred a mixed-gender team. However, I’m not sure what I could have done for this project. The options seem to be:

Propose a fundamentally different piece of work with different participants. However, this would likely not be of interest to the industry partner, which is central to the viability of the proposal. Our original idea would then presumably not get developed.

Expand the proposal to bring in female colleague(s) at another institution. However, the funding scheme essentially only provides the salary for one postdoc, so the benefits for PIs at additional institutions are limited. The obvious candidates are all a long-haul flight away, so day-to-day engagement would be challenging. I’m uncomfortable asking people to do work on my proposal when I can’t offer them much in exchange.

Ask someone to put their name on the proposal “for show”. Clearly offensive and counterproductive.

Does anyone have any advice on how to best reconcile diversity considerations with practical realities in these circumstances?
My question is more about the general issue – and whether there is anything I should have done differently – than about how to respond to these particular reviews.


texts: Scholarships for mathematics international students

texts: I'm from Colombia and I'm ending my undergraduate in mathematics and my GPA is 3.3/4; I only know Fulbright scholarships and the scholarships that offer DAAD, my favorite fields are PDE's and Analysis. What other complete scholarships are you know? Is possible to win something with my GPA? Sorry for the weird ask but I don't know another place to ask this question.


texts:
I start my master studies this fall in quantitative finance/economics in Europe. Since this will just take 3-4 semesters I want to take a look ahead and obviously PhD is one option to do.

So I am wondering if it makes sense to go to the US for PhD, since I will have already a master's degree in two years. I read a lot about the US PhD's which can be started after bachelor and therefore are somehow like a European master & PhD combined.

I saw some PhD programmes from well-known US universities and their curriculum contained almost just courses I will already have in my master. Wouldn't that be a waste of time to repeat them? Specially compared to my country (Switzerland) where a PhD duration is between 3-4 years.

Every input/personal experience will be appreciated.


texts: Sending a *digitally signed* email to prospective employer/supervisor

texts:
I have been digitally signing (and encrypting, whenever possible) my official emails for sometime. While I am not extremely paranoid (but serious, certainly) about cryptographic security, I also think signing the email is a signature [pun intended] that I take such aspects seriously. On a like-minded recipient, this could therefore make a good impression.

On the other hand, if seeing the

  -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

  Hash: SHA1

header has a high likelihood of annoying or confusing the person (to the point of them simply deleting my email), then I certainly do not mind sending an unsigned message.

I recently started applying for jobs (in the area of quantum information/communication to be precise) and was wondering if I should, in my first email contact with a potential employer or (postdoc) supervisor, also sign that email?


texts: How should one choose the research interest as an international student at current university?

texts:
I am currently a sophomore engineering international student at a relatively well-regarded university in Asia. I am planning to do an undergraduate research with a professor whose research area aligns with my interest. However, I was having quite a hard time deciding which research group I might go about. The following is my thought, in sequential order, after thinking about many factors:

So I noticed that a lot of EE research groups I'm interested in (most are in traditional EE fields) have no international students in the lab. Even some lab websites do not have an English page, and for other labs, I'm afraid the environment wouldn't be friendly and that I wouldn't be learning a lot. (Yes, I've surveyed some of those labs. And I also agree that we should be able to conduct the research independently, but learning from professor and colleagues is one thing to consider.) So the final goal would be to study Master degree at other university, not here.
The best plan now would be to graduate from here and apply Master degree somewhere else, probably in Europe/U.S. where the environment is more international. But I'm aware that my record is not outstanding to get accepted by a well-regarded (or maybe second tier) university in Europe/U.S., as I have two B+'s and one B0 in EE courses, quite a few B's in humanity courses (we are required to take ~8), and the rest are mixed of A's.
So this means that I have to do something to compensate for my bad-looking transcript, and I would go about doing research.
As most EE labs I'm interested in have no international students, I try to look for other EE labs that I'm less interested (or even neutral), but have internationals and more-supportive professors. Usually these are fields in modern EE, data analytics, robotics, and machine learning, and professors tend to completed his degree from top universities from U.S., and was told to be supportive to international students.
In short term, if I choose this modern EE field, I might be able to do research in a supportive environment and might finally get a good letter of recommendation to apply for Master degree at a university in U.S. This is not the field that I was aiming at first, it is just a way that I might escape, knowing that if I were to continue Master degree here, in the field that I'm originally interested, I would be suffering through a bad time. In long term, I'm not sure for this path, as machine learning, data analytics and robotics haven't been my interest in the past. Just it is a field that a lot of EE students are now moving into and there are supportive professors.
So I'm in the midst of choosing research area, weighting between the field that I'm interested but no international community and kind of inactive (I could be wrong) at my current university, and the field that I have less (or neutral) interest but has more international community and supportive professors which may finally give me a chance to pursue Master degree somewhere else.

Summary: How would one go about choosing research lab (as an international student) at a current university, if there is a conflict between your interest and other factors? The field you are interested in but lack of supportive environment, such as no international students in the lab or not very welcome, and the field that you are less interested but has more supportive environment for international students? What other factors would you consider?


texts:
I am a PhD student, working on Applied Math while my wife is a software engineer. I plan on going to academia after PhD and will start to job hunt soon.

A few weeks ago, I thought of an idea that hadn't been done before. I wrote a crude C++ code to implement the idea and it worked well. I believed that with my theoretical understanding of the problem and an expert coder, we could make something really impactful and incidentally, my wife knew how to. So, we spent some evenings together writing the code (she didn't know math, but I abstracted each step so she could help implement). The resulting code is fairly sophisticated and does an excellent job. I was wondering, now that I write a paper about it, would it look weird if my wife was listed as a co-author? Her contributions were definitely sufficient to warrant co-authorship by any definition.

Let's step aside the legalese of it (my advisor doesn't care and her company might but let's leave that aside). I am asking more from the standpoint of how it looks on one's CV, job application and possibly, tenure.


texts: What's the difference between cover letter and application email?

texts: I am applying a position, which requires applicants to send cover letter and other materials by email. I think that in the application email I would present almost the same content in the cover letter: my interests in the job, my achievement, etc. So I am wondering that whether a cover letter as an attachment is still necessary or not. Any more information needed in the cover letter?


texts: Do citation counts explode like news in social networks and when did this start?

texts:
From facebook/youtube it is known that if a video/post gets a distinct amount of likes, at some point the overall like number of this video is going to explode due to a network and avalanche effect.

I was recently wondering while thinking about bibliographic metrics like h-index, how much  such effects apply in 21st academic publishing and also up to which decade (before internet existed, before strong networks in internet existed) this effect might also retroactive have pushed for instance publications of the 95-00 more than 90-95 years, also the real impact actually was not much higher. Probably this effect can be identified in time by looking when number of worldwide citations exploded, although the number of researchers just grew steadily.

Is the bibliopgraphic science investigating such questions? Any books or review papers I could read. I'm especially wondering which open source data sources there are to tackle such questions, if there are. Best I could google is this:

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/bibliometrix/vignettes/bibliometrix-vignette.html

I'm asking as I'm wondering which citation count is actually necessary in some fields to see if a paper really had an impact on the community, didn't penetrate it, was mediocre. This will depend on community size and field. But I'm wondering how to estimate it, kind of Fermi-problem.


texts: What to include in an "explanation letter" after being falsely accused of cheating?

texts:
I am a student at a university in South Africa. 300 out of the 400 students in my class, including me, were recently accused of cheating by receiving a paper before an exam. We were given the letters of suspension for 11 months without valid evidence or proof that we cheated. I did not cheat, and this is really messing up my plans.

My lecturer said that each student will have a chance to write a letter or affidavit to share their side of the story, but he said that winning the case is unlikely. So my question is how to proceed. In particular, what approach should I take in this letter?


texts: Role/importance of letters of recommendation for PhD-applications in Europe?

texts:
In the US PhD prospects apply to several universities and those select an amount of applicants from that pool according to how many open spots the universities have for that term. Criteria for admission are GPA, GRE/SAT and research experience documented by 2-3 letters of recommendation.

In Europe the application process is often times quite different in the way, that not a selected number of applicants get admitted each year, but each available research/teaching assistants position is treated individually. Because the requirements differ vastly, a lot of the times the only formal requirement for application is a 'good' or 'very good' masters degree and/or experience in field x or with technology y.

I wonder, are letters of recommendation expected, if so how many, and how important are they actually?


texts: Talking to supervisor about PhD projects

texts:
I am an international PhD student, in the last lap of my PhD, and have a little more than a year to defend my thesis. My work is in theory, and our simulations take a lot of computing time. As we are working on wrapping up my first paper now, I want to only focus on projects which will lead to publications since our Faculty requires 4 papers(published and/or submitted to journals) to be able to defend one's thesis. I have tried to talk to my supervisor about this, but he only spared 13 minutes listening to the project ideas I have had and did not get involved with ideas or give any input.
I am guessing there is a bias how he handles my involvement in his projects since a relatively new PhD student(who is a local and have been in the department since his Bachelor's) receive a lot of his attention. It is not about that my supervisor should be more involved in my prospects, but at least he should give it as much attention as any other. He also holds many other positions, one of them being department head and trying to solve a serious work-environment issue in the department in a different group. So he remains quite busy in meetings since the last few months.
So, what should be my way of communicating my career prospects in the year to come with him and my team so that we can work towards achieving them in a specific time frame? I do lack the field-insights which my team has and in that respect, they can help me a lot to plan efficiently.


texts: Asking a PhD interviewer about preparation

texts:
I am having a PhD interview at a university in the US. The application procedure didn't involve submitting a research proposal, so I am not very sure what kind of questions I should expect.

A professor contacted me to schedule an interview, I wanted to ask what kind of questions are expected, because I do not know the project they think I fit in, in fact, one of the purposes of this interview is to tell me about the project.

So is it okay to ask the interviewer what to prepare?


texts: Wish to go against my supervisors in the half-yearly review report. Is it suicidal for my PhD?

texts:
I am funded by the university for my PhD, though I had approached the supervisor myself, particularly because he had decent publications in good journals. I am an international student. I have finished exactly 1.5 years of my PhD and my funding is only for 3 years. I am working on an Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning problem.

I work on a topic which is more academically exciting than of much use to industry. I did not know that before I started my PhD. Let is call this area A. I confess that I was told I will be working on this area. Though I must mention that along with A, B is another topic which was mentioned and I am working on both, though A is where my supervisors "specialize".

Now my problem:
1. A is not really going to get me a job as a respected scientist in industry after my PhD. So I MUST consider A with other ideas from other popular methods -- and I take the burden to prove that my idea is correct.

A has been overused in my group and I am already getting reviews for my paper that it is very similar to other works from this group. I get to believe that I am doing a shadow PhD in previous student's work who has graduated with "flying colors".
I am not a fan of A myself, particularly because it lacks mathematical foundation and my supervisors have no intention of letting me pursue such a direction, nor are they capable of providing me guidance in this area.

I am not looking for an academic career, but wish to be a researcher in industry. So I need to make my research relevant.

Now, when I approach my supervisors (three of them, one of them added by my primary without even asking me, to help him!) telling them that I want to work in B more than A, and also wish to include C in my research I am met with stiff resistance. The argument being this is not relevant to the conferences in A. If presented in a conference of C, people will ask too many questions etc. I would appreciate a proper discussion in being shown that C is not technically useful or viable or something like that.

This clearly is not scientific research. So I am considering raising this issue in my half-monthly report. But this will surely make the supervisors work against me and they would naturally not provide help whenever they are required to. What are your suggestions?

Note: My supervisor has friends in all the journals and conferences he publishes. He does not send a paper to a new conference where he has no friends!


texts: I have an accepted conference paper with a major error in it, should I ask for it to be changed?

texts:
I have submitted a paper to a conference with a scientific error in it.

Essentially I have a concept and I have claimed it works in two conditions. Actually it only works in one of them. Technically, my experimental results are correct, but its only a small test and when extrapolated to full scale the error can be found and also actually predicted theoretically. The overall concept is still correct however for the other condition and I am still working on it in future research.

Should I ask for the paper to be changed? The conference isn't until 25th August but the submission deadline has passed.

I don't want a public document where people will repeat my experiments and find that some of what I have claimed is incorrect.


texts: what are the best tips on how to market yourself for both academia and industry

texts:
I have a phd in computer science and I am applying for academic jobs. However, my specialization within CS is currently getting so much attention from the industry. I don't want to waste opportunities for collaborations and consultations with industry.
so what are the best tips to market yourself for both academia and industry? having a personal website? what to include in it ? and are there specific academic platforms that I need to be on to reach industry?


texts: Independent research after grad school while holding a somehow unrelated career. What are the potential caveats or problems?

texts: I recently graduated from a master's degree while working on an interesting but niche intersection of machine learning and biology. This area is of my personal interest and I believe it can impact the world in the future but it is not readily marketable. Therefore, I decided to choose a position in a tech company as a software engineer, with works and responsibilities that are unrelated to this niche area. I don't want to give up my efforts in my previous research area and want to continue doing research as a personal passion in my free time such weekends or when I come home from my daily work (which btw I enjoy very much). I find this idea particularly interesting as I would have more freedom to think freely without feeling the pressure of publish or perish and I think it would make the research even more enjoyable to me compared to when I was in grad school and under pressure. However, there might be potential issues and caveats that I am blindsided to them, so I wanted to ask the people here about the potential downsides or considerations in doing research as a part-time or second career.


texts: How does the acceptance rate affect papers decisions?

texts:
Some conferences do maintain a percentage for the number of accepted papers to the total number of submissions.
Does this mean some good papers will be inevitably rejected just to maintain the acceptance rate? How conference chairs deal with the acceptance rate? or it is not related at all to the acceptance/rejection process.


texts: Research Methodology for Developing Novel Tool

texts:
I hypothesize that by combining the results of two areas of research in the field of machine learning (say field A and field B), the production of digital goods in business area C could be automated to a large degree. To the best of my knowledge and research, this has not been done or even tried before. My research would be concentrated on investigating the applicability of machine learning to create goods C.
What I'm struggeling with is to find a proper methodological approach that can guide my writing in this. My approach so far is to identify what constitutes a good in area C, then narrowing down a definition that focuses on the core properties of C. Out of that, I could extract requirements, and then map these to existing solutions and research in the fields A and B, to eventually build a demonstrator. However, I can't justify my approach, besides asking "how else would you do it?".
Q1: Is there a methodology that could be applied here, for instance, Design Science?
Furthermore, how do people handle the danger of running down the rabbit holes? Each of the fields (A, B, C) would be worth their own paper, yet here I have to combine 3 areas without going to much into details of each.
Q2: Is there a good guideline how to combine different areas of research without explaining each individually in length?


texts: Is it rude to visit a professors office during the summer if they have not responded to my email?

texts:
I understand that a somewhat similar question has been asked before, but my parameters here are slightly different. Essentially, I have been emailing a professor since early April about joining their lab. They have responded and inquired what sort of projects I would be interested in. They also remarked that they would be interested in meeting after the semester is over. Well, after final grades were input I sent an email and... no dice after two-ish weeks. This is no surprise, given that I know a student who got a response from them months after sending an email. The thing is, I am trying to join their project over the summer and well, precious summer days are about to start passing pretty fast.
In summary, I am moving close to campus next week, and I am wondering if it would be rude or brutish to go to their office location physically to follow up. Is this a bad idea? The difference between this situation and the last person who asked is that this is during summer and COVID times. I also just finished my freshman year if that matters.
EDIT: as a corollary, I could also try calling the office. Though that almost seems more incessant than showing up in my opinion. Thoughts?


texts: Publishing independent proofs of a theorem in the same journal?

texts:
In the comments here, a user suggested that when two proofs of the same theorem are obtained independently, it is a common practice (at least in physics) to submit them to the same journal.

I was wondering what the benefits of this approach are and how widespread it is. (I'm particularly interested in mathematics, but insight from other disciplines is also appreciated.)

Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not asking why it's worth publishing independent proofs of the same theorem - that's something that can be taken for granted, at least in mathematics. What I'm curious about is the practice of specifically publishing the two proofs in the same journal (as opposed to different journals).


texts: How do I write a cover letter for a journal that has a double blind review process when I need to reference my previous conference paper?

texts:
My research area is in Computer Science.

I am going to submit a paper to a journal, that has a double blind review process. The paper builds upon our previously published work in a conference paper. It has over 40-50% new content, experiments and results, and less than 30% textual similarities. This is allowed by the journal (according to their website)

I need to reference the original conference paper in the journal paper and say the current submission has X,Y,Z content, which are new and not included in the conf. paper. I would also like to write a cover letter stating that this submission contains new material, over the original conf. publication, outlined in bullets. I would like to cite the conf. paper in the cover letter too.

The journal says, all indication of author names should be blanked out. Hence, their guidelines are a bit conflicting.

So how can I write the cover letter without giving the author names away ? How can I point to the original conference paper without giving away the author identity ?

Many thanks for your help.

EDIT:
I checked the journal website, it says :

"...Of course authors  have  rights  to publish in journals enhanced  versions of a their conference presentations. Such papers however should be submitter as regular papers. Obviously, the conference paper must be cited and it should be explained how the conference paper has been enhanced. The lack of this citation is considered a serious violation of ethics and as a
consequence the manuscript must be rejected..."

http://tii.ieee-ies.org/o/SubPostConf.pdf


texts: How to deal with discussion of poor performance due to personal issues?

texts:
I am an undergraduate student on an integrated masters degree, currently getting started on the journey of looking for potential PHD projects/supervisors. I have just written up my academic CV (by the way - this wasn't the point of this question, but one page or two? Do people care?), and I had a thought after putting the year-by-year breakdown of my grades.

My first and second year percentages are mid 60s, whilst my third year percentage is 77. This is due to the fact that during first year I experienced the onset of a relatively severe mental health issue (I hear voices in my head from people who aren't there), in second year I was undergoing treatment and trying to find what was/wasn't working, and by third year things were sorted out and I'm somehow "back on track".

I'm imagining the question "Why are your averages in first and second year so much lower than third year?" being thrown at me. This is a fair question, because third year is really quite significantly harder than the first two years, and I was also just back from a year long work placement which I undertook after second year.

How should I answer? I'm sure the answer "Personal problems" would be acceptable, but what if the question is asked "Would you mind discussing those?"? I have no problem discussing my mental health issues, and I no longer consider myself somebody who "suffers" from them, but I am aware of the possibility that in terms of PHD applications this can somehow be a red flag.

I also have no problem giving the answer "I would rather not discuss those, but they are no longer issues for me" or something along those lines.

I also thought "That is something which I would be happy to discuss with my PHD supervisor, if I get one, but is not something which is easily explicable in the time we have here." could be a reasonable answer. What would be the best way to deal with this potential scenario?


texts: Top 30 informal phone offer, what are the chance of not receiving the formal offer?

texts:
Say I receive a phone call from a US school among top 30 in my field, offering me a PhD position, stating that the formal proposal should arrive in a week or so.

Am I wrong in assuming that the chance of the letter never arriving are zero almost surely?


texts: Can images with a "noncommercial use only" licence be used in teaching and academic presentations?

texts: Can I use images with a "noncommercial use only" license (such as CC-BY-NC) in my slides, both for teaching and conference talks?


texts: Will the admission committee try to get in touch with the referees who wrote the recommendation letters? [Graduate admission]

texts:
I am currently in an institution wherein most of the academic body in my department (Electrical Engineering) have a rather poor (and that's putting mildly) mastery of English.
My concern is if I miraculously manage to get a letter of recommendation from one of them, will the admission committee try to get in touch with him/her for further inquiries? Because I don't think (It is certain) they will manage a detailed and meaningful discussion (which is what I think the committee wants) without some external help, which I highly doubt they'll even bother to seek.
So, to reiterate the question, does the committee generally try to reach the referees? What would you advice someone in a position like mine to do?
Thanks for reading.


texts: What does "paper rejected provisionally" mean?

texts:
I submitted a paper to a prestigious control journal. The editor provided the following review:

  The decision is that your contribution cannot be accepted for publication in [the journal] in its present form. It needs substantial revision in order to possibly become publishable. Overall the decision is paper rejected provisionally.

The editor has invited me to revise and resubmit.

Is "paper rejected provisionally" equivalent to "major revision" ?

Will you advise me to politely inquire the editor about it so that there is no confusion. I mean before revising I want to be sure that there is some chance that the paper can be accepted if I incorporate the reviewer's comments.


texts:
I am applying to a course in Quantitative Finance in a prestigious university in Europe.

I am wondering if it may be the case to block my facebook account; I don't want the commission to look at my profile or to gather information on me that I am not willing to give them directly.

I know that there are probably rules so that you can't discriminate based on age, sex, religion and stuff, but facebook accounts contain far more than that.

So I guess my questions are: Is it common for university to look at candidate's profile before accepting them? If it is, how much does this influence the decision?
Can my reluctance to give away some (personal) information be perceived negatively?


texts: Dismissed from PhD due to disability-related misconduct: how to answer question about dismissal?

texts:
I committed plagiarism at the end of my PhD. My psychiatrist found that the plagiarism is related to a psychiatric disorder (mental health problem). I have published many papers in top journals and this behavior was clearly out of character.

I was asked to voluntarily withdraw from my PhD program. However, I have a psychiatric explanation, and I have a psychiatrist who can vouch that my mental health issues have been resolved and there should be no further incidents in the future.

After taking time off to get treated and to recover, now I am considering applying to PhD programs again.

However, I am facing a question from most universities that I am applying to. Is there any hope for a student who committed misconduct that is related to a disability?

I am nervous about this application. Can anyone help me figure out how to deal with this issue in a proper way?


texts: Delayed manuscript publication by publishers

texts:
I am a PhD candidate in biology. I have a paper that I need to be published for me to graduate. It was accepted for publication in November 2017. I returned corrected proofs in December. In January the production team asked about "problems to be fixed" before final production and I immediately responded. Now, in February, the paper is still not available online.

I've noticed that there are papers in the same journal which were only accepted in the last days of January and now are already available online with pages and volume. I also noticed that there are papers still 'in-press' for a very long time already.

My concern and curiosity is why there are articles stayed as in-press (corrected proof without bibliographic information) for a long period of time while there are newly accepted paper automatically out with complete bibliographic information. for example below is two paper:

In-press until present: Received 6 May 2017, Revised 7 October 2017, Accepted 10 October 2017, Available online 16 October 2017.

Available online with complete bibliographic information: Received 23 August 2017, Revised 15 November 2017, Accepted 18 November 2017, Available online 6 December 2017.

What may be the reason for this?

Would it be right if I email the production team of the journal if it is possible to release my paper since I am waiting for it for my graduation application this semester?


texts:
I got my Bachelors of science degree in Computers and Systems Engineering from a top university in my country 2 years ago. I am now having a fully funded opportunity (as a research assistant) for a Masters in computing science (Thesis option) at one of the top 50 worldwide computing schools, located in Canada. My work will mainly be in the area of industrial automation as a cloud service. This topic is related to my capabilities and interests. However, I am more passionate with the field of robotics in general and specially the autonomous vehicles field (which still lays in the area of computer science). My main goal is to have a Phd in this field from a university like MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon after having my masters degree.

My main question is; is it O.K. to make such a change in the research topic after having my Masters? Or Should my masters research work be in the same specific area?


texts: Is it ethical to use data you overheard in a conversation?

texts:
I do research on particular elites of a particular society and rely heavily on interview data. In one fortuitous dinner, at the table behind me sat three people who are exactly the people I wanted to get access to.

Furthermore, they were discussing something that I am precisely investigating! I was attentive to their conversation (as they were, honestly, speaking very loudly) but by no means eavesdropping and their conversation - if viewed in the context of my work - can prove to be very valuable.

Can I use that data for my work? It does not seem ethical to me. But, if I do not use that data, I know I will be 'deliberately' weakening my research and not being true to what I do now know.

Thoughts? What would you do and what would you suggest I do?


texts: Canadian PhD application process for international students

texts:
I am an Australian interested in applying for a PhD (specifically in mathematics) at several universities in Canada. I have already got a Bachelor of Mathematical Sciences and a Master of Philosophy in pure mathematics.

I have put a bit of time into trying to verse myself in the various scholarship opportunities, PhD programmes and potential supervisors, but I am starting to think I don't fully understand the correct order to do these things in.

Is there a standard etiquette or order for applying to a PhD? For example, would you first apply to the institution, then apply for scholarships once you have an offer, then look for a supervisor? Perhaps all three should be done in unison?

In Australia (it is my understanding that) it is customary to get a supervisor willing to commence a project with you first, then apply for a scholarship.

Any advice on the correct pathway would be greatly appreciated!


texts: How and what do I present at my PhD coursework

texts:
I am a PhD Student & started my research few months ago. My research involves creating a predictive model for protein-drug interaction using soft computing techniques .The topic was given to me by my supervisor and was not my choice.

The problem is, I am a computer science student and have no idea about drugs or proteins or their interaction. My knowledge about the topic is completely zero. While I have read literature, I find the concept very difficult to understand. I find it difficult to search for technical papers of my interest. I would also like to mention that I have absolutely NO help from my supervisor, who also has no idea about the topic, despite being the one who told me to work on the topic.

Now I need to start with my coursework and it includes topics like drug-protein interaction and soft computing techniques. And, I have seriously no clue to how to go about my coursework. I don't know what topics should be included in the course work. My supervisor has just left me with the names of the coursework that's it. I do not know from where to start, exactly what to start and how to start. The days are just passing by and I have time constraints to present the same at the institute level. I am just going crazy thinking about it day by day and don't know where will I land up at the end. I don't want to leave PhD to whatever happens. My sincere request to you is to suggest something and help me out with it or anybody please suggest to me how to proceed.


texts: Aren't YouTube captions good enough not to violate the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990?

texts:
I read on Berkeley will begin removing more than 20,000 video and audio lectures from public view as a result of a Justice Department accessibility order  (mirror)  (published on  2017-03-06)

  The Justice Department, following an investigation, in August determined that the university was violating the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. The department reached that conclusion after receiving complaints from two employees of Gallaudet University, saying Berkeley’s free online educational content was inaccessible to blind and deaf people because of a lack of captions, screen reader compatibility and other issues.

If a University uploads a video of a course to YouTube, aren't YouTube captions good enough not to  violate the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990?

Related: How much does it cost to make a MOOC universally accessible, as defined by the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990?


texts: I have been asked about a rumor of a collegue, what should I do?

texts:
A colleague of mine (C1) from other University (U1) has asked me, by email, if another colleague (C2) from my University (U2) is moving from U2 to U1.

Should I tell to C2 about that rumor?
Or should I answer to C1 that I have no clue?

Of course, I do not have any idea of C2's plans but I have a closer relationship with him.


texts: How to state an unfinished PhD on a CV when applying for another PhD?

texts: I'm considering on applying for another PhD position, since I am not very happy with my current one, how should I state this on a CV?, could I just put it as being "research assistant"?. I am afraid to put I'm a current PhD candidate as that might look weird in the application.


texts: Is there a tool for visualizing the geographic locations of research?

texts:
Many e-journals search tools contain much metadata in their database. For example, they have the "location" entry required for some citation formats, which at least shows the location of the journal, but the might also store the original authors' university name.

Is there any tool that can allow researchers to either (a) search a term and see a map of where the articles are coming from or (in some similar form or other) (b) see a world map showing where research in a particular area is geographically concentrated?


texts: Applying to PhD programs as a Masters student with no Internship experience

texts:
I am a Computer Science Masters student at University of Washington and I am planning to apply to PhD programs in the US.

I started my Masters in September of 2015 and am going to complete it this December.

Since I came from Electrical Engineering background, I had to spend a significant portion of the past year learning the ropes(various kinds of algorithms etc) and in the process also got very interested in research.

I also worked under a professor on a project that received a small NSF grant.

The problem is I don't have any paper publications or internships. I didn't have an internship as I found it hard to crack the coding interviews since I wasn't very skilled in programming back then. Since then I have improved significantly.

And I will also be participating in another research project starting September 1st.

Extending my Masters course is really not an option since the tuition is exorbitant. So I can't take another year and do research.

Will the PhD admissions committee hold it against me that I don't have any publications or internship experience? If so how do I make a good impression on them so that they consider me for admission?


texts:
I am a resident of a 3rd world country in a south Asian country. I have completed my Msc in math from a place which is not well known for math. While an Msc student, I wrote a solo author paper on combinatorial group theory ( without any once's guide, completely myself).I submitted the paper to Journal of Combinatorial Theory series A. After referee's review it has been suggested to revise and submit the paper in an algebra journal. Then I submitted the paper to some algebra journal ( without revision) and it got desk rejection. I am not a native speaker in English and also have no experience of writing a research paper.Also there is no known professor of mine who works in this area. Now I have some questions...

Is it possible that my paper is considered as a crackpot ? I know that my writing is not up-to the professional level.
I am not belonging from a well known place and I am also unknown in research. Does this creat any negative impression ?
I am expecting to apply in graduate math program. Will admission committee take my paper seriously if I can not publish it by that time ?


texts: Why are papers accepted even if they don't release code or data to allow reproducibility?

texts:
Recently, we had a lecture about Reproducible research on of the slides was:

  Reproducibility: start from the same samples/data, use the same methods,   get the same results.
  Replicability: conduct again the experiment with independent samples and/or   methods to get confirmatory results.

  Replicability = Reproducibility + Conduct experiment again

  Replicability might be challenging in epidemiology (recruit again a cohort) or   molecular biology (complex cell manipulation).
  Reproducibility should be a minimum standard. One should strive to at least make his/her   own research reproducible.

I find many articles that use software and when they hint what kind of analysis did they don't provide the code nor the data. There are public free ways of storing data and code of studies, and even with a DOI.

So far, I thought that some data might not be freely available because it has some private information (my field is bioinformatics), or the authors intend to use it for further investigations and want to keep for themselves the data.

The same happens with the code is the intellectual property of the lab or principal investigator, but retaining the rights of the code don't goes against the replicability.

Why are these papers accepted and publicized, even if they don't allow reproducibility?

Related: Reproducible Studies? and an example of the problem it causes Can up to 70% of scientific studies not be reproduced?.

Edit:
Some other papers about replicability: 1, 2.

Excel case: in this paper we can see an example. Reviewers of Growth in a Time of Debt estimated
(note that this is not measurable/checkable afirmation) that the
analysis could bring the results presented.

(I couldn't find a description of the methods used for the analysis on the paper, but it is a different field of mine and I have skimmed through).
But in new methods without prior experience/validation how can one estimate it without looking to the analysis itself?
And in "old" methods, how bad would be to share them if they are already checked?
"Understand why replicability is important, and you'll understand
which guidelines and rules should be applied, and how to deal with
research where guidelines are skipped.":

Replicability is important because science is about finding objective mesurable relations. This makes the relationship independent of who performs the study. But this can be discussed/answered on another question :)

I am aware that we do our mistakes, (see my other question here on academia), but we should aim for the best behavior and the best science.
"Put another way, there are finite resources so the more you rerun
the same code the less scientific progress you make overall"

I don't think that we make less scientific progress overall rerunning the same code. Checking that we know for sure that A is true is far better than work for 3 years or more and then discover that A was wrong.
How many finite resources are/were used on studies based on those the ALS Therapy Development Institute couldn't replicate?
At the same time the induced pluripotent cells were hard to reproduce and replicate, but this isn't a software based, or the recent example of @tpg2114, 3 years to replicate their own study in 4 new settings.
Quality of academic software when sharing it, here it seems that it is better to share the awful, crapy code rather than hide it.
Necessity of the reviewer of the code and data was answered here. In short:

  Of course, the degree to which a referee is expected to verify the correctness of results varies greatly between fields. But you can always choose a personal standard higher than what's usual in your field. Just realize that good refereeing takes a significant time investment.

It seems that the comments are extending, and from the answers it seems that it is not the job of the reviewers or the journals, it might be a job for the reader (and of no one), or it doesn't worth it to make articles reproducible because it is too hard.


texts: How are the interviews for academic posts in Italy?

texts: I have an interview scheduled for next monday in an Italian university. This will be my first interview outside of the Anglisaxon universities so I was wondering if anyone in this group have an idea on the interview process in Italian universities. How long does it take? How many people are there usually in the panel? How many questions do they ask? All information would be extremely helpful!!


texts: Is a newspaper/magazine editor considered an author or an editor in terms of referencing?

texts: Should I reference him/her as a normal author or as an editor using the abbreviation 'ed.' (Harvard style)?


texts: Is it possible to publish without adviser?

texts:
I participated in an exchange programme as a PhD student for 1 year in another country. The very moment I got in the new institution I signed a contract according to which I have no intellectual nor material rights over the results obtained on the territory of the lab I joined.
The subject of my study has changed on the go so after the first 4 months I started different analysis compared to the one written in my project (project funded by academic exchange program).
After going back to my home country my local adviser asked me for the results I have. I refused to submit because I am not the owner and because I found out my adviser is sharing my work with another student for money. Almost 3 years later and after repeating some of the results in my home country I managed to defend successfully.
However I would like to publish my research from my exchange programme. The issue is this:

My foreign adviser is not responding quick enough to my messages - it took him 4 years to revise part of the paper. And I am planning on writing another two!!!
My foreign  adviser retired.
Apparently my both advisers made some sort of a deal to hand over my work to the student I described above.

What is your advise in that situation?


texts:
I'm currently writing a master thesis, which slowly became a real project which a "very big" institution is interested in using to create a product of their own. Eventually, I'll be involved in the implementation of this project (I'll be hired by them). My supervisor and my thesis partner (who is working remotely) still don't know about this.

I'm not sure how to proceed from here. Should I tell my supervisor and my thesis partner about this opportunity? Also, how can I write this thesis? Should I include them in the thesis? I need feedbacks and examples of similar thesis papers.


texts: Does papers under review/revision has any value for faculty application in mathematics?

texts: Does papers under review/revision has any value for faculty application in mathematics ? In detail, when reviewing faculty application does the committee checks the content of the papers or just checks the journals where it is published ?


texts: Find information about research grant calls from around the world

texts: I am based at a southern European university where little local research funding is available. Other than Horizon 2020, how can I find out about programs designed to sponsor research in any country?


texts: Best practice when summarizing (not reviewing) research literature

texts:
I recently started my PhD program and have already accumulated a vast amount of papers on my to-read-list. I never had troubles reading and remembering content of academic papers, but this pile is giving me headaches. So much so, that the comment and note functions of my reference management software (Zotero) does not seem to be sufficient to keep track of all the information.

Previous attempts to structure key findings in all this literature have resulted in fragmented lists that just add on to my confusion. I also tried mind mapping applications but feel like there must be some kind of best practice on how researchers structure and extract information on a larger scale (~150 papers).

EDIT: My goal is to quickly gain an extensive overview of my current field of research and its neighboring constructs, including unanswered or potential research questions, hypotheses that were previously investigated. What tools are commonly used beyond reference management software?

I'm aware that this questions has no objective true answer, but find it nonetheless important. Thank you!


texts: What is the reference manager that can show the list of annotations?

texts:
I am using Mendeley to organize, highlight and to synchronize my references. I think a feature where you can see a list of annotations/highlight that you have made will be extremely useful during writing.

For example one day you just remember, "Oh I have seen this in some papers, I don't remember which one but I remember I highlighted it."

Right now I have to guess and open one by one the paper to look for the annotations that I meant and scrolling the screen to look for "it", or by performing a search, both are not efficient enough.

Kindle has this feature. Everytime you make some annotations (on different books) they aggregate and put it as a list for you. When you click on that, it will go to the page on the book.

Is there any reference manager that has this kind of functionality?


texts: Citing different web pages by the same author in APA

texts:
I have been looking through the APA handbook and I can't seem to find a binding advise on this.

I have a couple of web pages in my reference list by the same author (a company), all without a date:

Nederbooms. (n.d.). *CGN core corpus | Nederbooms*. Retrieved on April 13, 2014,
     from http://nederbooms.ccl.kuleuven.be/eng/cgntb
Nederbooms. (n.d.). *Lassy small | Nederbooms*. Retrieved on April 13, 2014,
     from http://nederbooms.ccl.kuleuven.be/eng/lassytb

The problem is referring to these sources inline. How would I go about doing so? Let's say I refer to the first source. This is how I would do it - but I can't be sure.

  Most bananas are yellow, but some are green and some are even brown
  (Nederbooms, n.d., "CGN core corpus").


texts: RSS feeds of conference proceedings from dblp?

texts:
I am looking for a way to get RSS updates (to consume through Feedly) of proceedings of some major conferences in my area (computer security). I thought I could get them from dblp directly, since they already indicize everything, however I can't seem to find a way.

For the moment I have seen only this old project, which now seems abandoned, and the generic dblp feed of all conferences. This last one, however, is kind of too generic and  not really what I was looking for.

Does anyone know if there is any way of getting specific conference proceedings RSS feeds (posssibly through dblp but that's not mandatory)?


texts: How to choose to which conference submit a scientific paper?

texts:
Nowadays, in almost every scientific field, there are hundreds of conferences. Many call for papers emails fill our mail boxes.

Freedom of choice is great, but, how to choose to which conference send a paper?

Should I choose one...

based on the scientific relevance?
based on the scientific vicinity to your paper theme?
based on its prestige?
because of some official ranking?
because it provides the best food?


texts: Should I take consent before listing referee names?

texts:
I am about to submit my research article in a Mathematics journal and the online system is asking to mention three Referee/Reviewer names.
Should I take the consent of a few experts in my topic before I enlist three expert names as referees, by individually mailing them?
I think, I should take.
Any suggestions and advice regarding the question, please?


texts: Criticizing other people's figures on my webpage

texts:
A few months ago I started collecting papers that contain figures I think convey information in a very efficient manner (i.e., figures that I think are very well illustrated and that should serve as examples of how they should be designed).

Now, because I am a huge data-vis geek, I have been thinking about opening a page on my website in which I talk about how I think figures should be designed and which principles I expect students/coauthors/general public to follow when illustrating data. Consequently, I am inclined towards including some of those amazing figures I have been collecting and talking about them (i.e., why they are efficient and well designed). More controversially, perhaps, is the fact that I also plan to include some figures that I believe were terribly designed and explain in which ways they fail (some of those badly designed figures are actually mine).

While I will seek the adequate rights to post them on my blog (e.g., through RightsLink for Elsevier journals), I would like to hear about the morality of this practice, particularly due to the fact that I will negatively criticize other authors' work.

Is there any moral (or even legal) problem in criticizing other people's figures on my website? Should I expect any sort of retaliation if I decide to do that? I understand that this is largely dependent on the tone I employ, but I will make every effort to be as technical and objective as possible.


texts: How can (or should) I reference basic physics equations?

texts:
I'm writing my first paper, so I'm unsure about the guidelines I should follow. The subject is within the field of mechatronics and computer simulation.

If I use some basic physics equation in it (say Newton's second law), should I always add some reference that validates this formula? Or such basic equations don't need to be validated?

If the answer to the above is no, then what if I introduce a lesser known physical model (such as Coulomb's friction model)? Should I then add some reference explaining it in detail to the reader?


texts: Can an application for a PhD after an undergraduate program be considered for MS if the profile fits it better?

texts:
I am applying for a PhD under a professor whose interests strongly match with mine and I don't want to lose an opportunity to work with her. My profile is not so strong for a PhD as compared to a Master's program.

I want to know if letting the Admissions Committee or Professor know that I would accept the Master's program if they find me better suited for that will work. If yes, then which of these two should I inform and through which channel, SOP or e-mail?

I know this might vary in universities and the best way is to directly ask them, but I would like to know if this even happens in some US universities or not.

What I feel is that there are two extremes to this:

The applicant is not clear with which program is right for him
The applicant is dedicated to study/work with our professor

I don't know on where in between these two sides will the university place me upon reading my e-mail/application.


texts: Should titles in the references be in title case?

texts:
I wonder whether titles in the reference section be in title case, given that the publication venue's style files and publication instructions do not specify.

For example, which of the following should I use?

  [Collobert2011] Ronan Collobert. 2011. Deep learning for efficient discriminative parsing. In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, number EPFL-CONF-192374.

or

  [Collobert2011] Ronan Collobert. 2011. Deep Learning for Efficient Discriminative Parsing. In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, number EPFL-CONF-192374.


texts: Where do the references / sources for Definitions go in a thesis?

texts: I have been asked to historicise my terms, so i have a brief explanations for each definition in the front matter section. Where do the references for these go? With the references  with the main text? Or should I list the references in the front matter with the definitions? (It's a cultural history research study).  Thank you.


texts: Is web-presence important for researchers?

texts:
How important is web-presence to researchers? How does its importance vary by fields? (My interest is STEM, theory in particular)

I noticed that there is a pretty large variation in amount of web-presence even within a single field (I will use theoretical computer science/related math as an example). There seems to be 3 different levels of web-presence:

[High] Very active member of various internet tools (MathOverflow, cstheory, blogs, G+, etc) usually accompanied by a clear homepage with all the [Medium] info.
[Medium] A clear up-to date website that provides a clean bibliography/CV (usually with links to self-hosted pdfs), a repository of course-notes and teaching information, and list of students.
[Low] No personal website (or extremely outdated website).

Increasing your web-presence usually requires effort. Should you invest this effort? Or are you just wasting research time?

If you enjoy being active on the internet (so it is not a cost for you, but maybe a time-sync) is there any danger to having a high web presence?


texts: How to get pornographic movies for scientific research purposes?

texts:
Recently, I have being planning to design an automatic pornographic movie detector with the machine learning knowledge that I just acquired.

I am now in the stage of planning how to perform the system evaluation. The intuition is to just test the algorithms with some pornographic movies and some non-pornographic movies and compute the false negative/positive rates. I simply feel that for any evaluation method, I would have to obtain real pornographic movies to test the system!

Here comes the dilemma. As you know (or may not know!), basically all the pornographic movies are not free. I do not regard it as ethical to just download illegal pirated movies, as after all they are for a scientific research, which values copyright a lot. On the other hand, it is a bit awkward for me to request funding from my PI to buy the porn videos! Paying them myself is definitely not a feasible solution, either.

How may I handle this case properly?


texts: Is it unethical to accidentally benefit from online material in a take-home exam?

texts:
Many years ago, as an undergraduate, I was taking a physics class which had a peculiar exam arrangement: on Tuesday, the professor gave us a take-home portion of the exam which would be submitted on Thursday, but on Thursday, there would also be an in-class portion of the exam with a different set of problems.
In my case, I remember working out the solution to a difficult problem on the take-home exam throughout Tuesday and Wednesday. I had a solution, but I was unsure whether it was correct. Some equations didn't seem to make sense. At the same time, I was also preparing myself for the exam on Thursday. As usual, I read the textbook, but I also was in the habit of consulting other websites to help me whenever the textbook wasn't enough.
While doing this, I accidentally stumbled upon a Wikipedia article which explained the solution of a similar problem to the one I was working on in the take-home exam. It was not the same problem, but the general method used was sufficiently similar so that I immediately realized that my approach to the problem on the take-home exam was probably correct.
Perhaps the most ethical thing to do at the time was to stop consulting the Wikipedia article immediately. I have to confess that I didn't do this exactly: I couldn't help but glance at it a few more times. Coming across that article made me confident in my approach to the take-home problem, and it drove me to scrutinize my previously written solution more deeply. This led me to discover a simple algebraic mistake which I had made in my own solution, after which my solution made sense and was surely correct. In the end, I never copied anything directly from the Wikipedia article, but I cannot deny that reading it helped me realize my own mistakes.
On Thursday I handed in my work on the take-home portion, and did well in the in-class portion as well. I never told the professor about the incident. Internally, I reasoned to myself that when I came across the Wikipedia article I was not trying to cheat on the take-home, but simply preparing for the in-class exam.
Years afterwards, however, I started to have doubts over what I did was completely ethical. I did not exactly cheat - in the sense of copying solutions from the Internet - but I was indeed "inspired" to become confident in my existing solution because of something I found on the Internet.
Was what I did dishonest? Unethical? Did it rise to the level of cheating that should have been disclosed to the professor? Or was it just a fortunate accident, the product of an odd exam arrangement?
(Note that the professor did not have a clear policy on consulting materials other than the official textbook from Tuesday-Thursday during the take home portion of the exam. While it was generally considered cheating to search out solutions on the Internet for specific problems on a take-home exam, I did not consider it unethical to look up online resources when studying a course and preparing for an in-class exam. In this case, I was doing the latter and accidentally stumbled upon material which was more similar to the former. The fact that there was a take home exam occuring right before an in-class exam resulted in a gray area.)


texts: Is providing more references than the required number in my PhD application acceptable?

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I'm applying for a PhD program which lists "Two references" in their required documents. The general university online application portal lets me submit details of more than two referees though.

I really want to provide three references for this course. Technically I do have two technical referees in the system already, but while quite ok, I expect their references to be a bit flat and generic - given we worked together not that much, two years ago and in a different field. I know academic references have priority over professional ones. However, my technical project manager in my job (software), I know would write me an absolutely smashing reference (because I saw their annual review feedback of me). The PhD is in robotics so software experience is not irrelevant.

Is it acceptable for me to add this one more referee to the application, even though the program requires only two?

UPDATE: I've emailed the program people and they've replied that 3 references would be very much ok, especially if I think it will paint a clearer picture of me as a candidate!


texts: How to acknowledge a deceased advisor’s contributions to a paper?

texts:
One of my advisors suddenly passed away while I was in graduate school.  We had some discussions and ideas about future publications, but he passed away before any of the work was completed.  When the work was finally completed and published, I and my co-authors were therefore presented with an ethical dilemma about how best to acknowledge his contributions to the ideas behind the paper.  Should we list him as a co-author?  Put him in the acknowledgements?  Listing him as an author would give credit for the original idea, however, we would have no way of knowing if he actually approved of—and would want his name attached to—our methods and writing.

In the end my co-authors and I decided to list him as a co-author with a footnote stating that he passed away before publication.

I’m interested to hear from others who have been in similar situations and/or suggestions on what constitutes “co-authorship” when one of one’s collaborators passes away before the publication or work is complete.


texts: How to address a doctoral candidate who is ABD (All but Dissertation)? Is "Dr" appropriate?

texts:
How does one address a doctoral candidate who completed all his/here requirements except the dissertation? Would they be referred to as Doctor? Or is there another title?

In the past, I believe I've seen "ABD" added as a postnominal in a signature. For example, "John Doe, ABD". But I don't believe I recall reading how to address such an individual.

Related discussions (thanks Nate (or is it Doctor?)):

When can you call yourself doctor?
Proper way to address yourself


texts: How much info should I put in my CV under education

texts:
In an academic CV, how much information do you put in the education field for each degree (assume the person is a post-grad/early career)?
Option 1: Degree, Specialization, Department, University, Year, Advisor, Thesis

Ph. D. in Foo science (2012)
Some Named School of Science, University of Bar,
Thesis: Qux control in Baz networks
Advisor: J. Q. Public

Option 2: Degree, Specialization, Department, University, Year

Ph. D. in Foo science (2012)
Some Named School of Science, University of Bar

Option 3: Degree, Specialization, University, Year

Ph. D. in Foo Engineering, University of Bar (2012)

Option 4: Degree, University, Year

Ph. D., University of Bar (2012)

I've often seen options 1 or 2 and in some cases, where there is a bigger body of work (publications, grants, etc.) to speak for the person than their degree, I've seen option 3. Option 4 is rarer, but one common trait among those that I've seen it with is that they are now working in a field different from what they did their PhD in and do not wish to bring attention to that (lest it hurt any chances). For example, a PhD in Physics now working in Computational Biology. I think CGPAs are pretty silly when it comes to research positions, but I'm not sure if I'm the only one.
However, I don't know what the expectations of the person seeing my CV are. I don't mean random visitors to my website or corporate HRs, but other academics who might be interested in working with me. Granted, if they're an academic, they'll probably focus on my publications more, but there's also something that's expected from a CV.


texts: Could it be more productive to work independently after PhD?

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Picture the following scenario:
X finished his PhD. X is also quite rich and can support himself (as well as his research) independently.

What do you think about this:

Would X's time after the PhD be well spent if he would just work 'independently'? Would this make things more difficult for him if he ever wanted to move back to an institution?

Is it in a way, in this particular scenario, not actually a very good idea, to focus solely on research and not bother with teaching and all the administrative stuff? Wouldn't he be more productive? What would hold him back?

Note: I am assuming that X is in the Humanities, that is, he does not require a lab or anything & has access to a academic library / or has his own etc.


texts: How to keep plans for a job change quiet?

texts:
I am most likely leaving my permanent position at my current university for a permanent position at a new university. I have been given an unofficial offer and we have agreed to terms. I have been told it could take over a month to generate an official offer and contract and that I should not give notice until then. I would prefer not to broadcast the news widely since nothing is set in stone until I am given the contact. Obviously I do not care that much since I am asking here.

In the few days I have known, I have told:

My current department chair since he wrote a reference and my other references
A couple of close colleagues since I valued their opinions
A collaborator in my department since we were beginning to to write a grant together since the move, it is international, would cause major problems
I am now faced with having to turn down a prospective graduate student which would require me to tell at least the head of our graduate admissions committee and maybe the whole committee

I am clearly failing at keeping it quiet. How do you not screw over your colleagues, but still keep the job change quiet until it is official?


texts: Can I refer my sibling for a PhD position under my supervisor? How should I approach this?

texts:
I am an international student who is completing a master's degree. I am very happy working with my professor at the university. I am a good student. My professor and I have some successful projects and publications.
My sibling is looking for a Ph.D. position, and since my professor is a very reliable person, I would like him to start a Ph.D. under my professor's supervision at the same school.
He told us to introduce good students to him. I am wondering if it would be awkward if I directly ask my professor to hire him as a Ph.D. student. If so, how should I ask him? What is the best approach? Is it ok to ask this?


texts: Are two undergraduate degrees better than one master degree?

texts:
I have finish my BSc in physics. I want to work in a interdiscipline like biophysics or econophysics. Because these are mainly physics, one can study higher with spending little effort to understand biology or economy concept. However, I think that having a stable knowledge in other discipline would also help you better in researching. Since I have studied physics, mathematics isn't a problem, therefore I can skip it to shorten the study time, which means the amount of time I spend will approximate to the master degree duration (I hope so). Another point is I can be more flexible than one who only know his/her specialization.

The biggest disadvantage is I don't have a master degree, of course.


texts: Can I use the same paper topic for two different classes?

texts:
I recently enrolled in a Master's program at a new university. I'm in the process of finishing my Master's thesis from a previous program, so now I'm sort of doing both at the same time. They are in related fields (political theory/democracy/human rights)
One of the classes in the new program is quite similar to a class I had in the previous program. For the first class, I did a pretty good paper that eventually inspired my Master's thesis. The topic of the paper was roughly something like "Gender perspective on X".
Given that X is like a concept developed by a specific philosopher, the topic is quite narrow. I was excited about the opportunity to write a new paper on the same topic, introducing some things I did not address in the previous paper-- the new paper would focus more on theoretical aspects, etc. Writing such a paper would also definitely help me with writing the Master's thesis.
But having started to develop an outline for the new paper, I realized there will inevitably be some overlap.
Obviously I know I can't just resubmit the paper, and wouldn't want to. But how much overlap is tolerated? I would not copy sections or anything, but is it necessary that I completely omit everything I've previously mentioned? Can I even cover the same exact topic, even if the content and structure of the paper are different?
I have already gotten the topic approved by the new professor, and in the email, I said "In full disclosure, I have researched similar topics before, but from a different perspective". I'm afraid this was not enough.
Admittedly, I am doing this to save time and help develop my thoughts for the Master's, because the topic is something I am already familiar with and interests me. I'm afraid that this alone amounts to academic dishonestly.
Am I just being paranoid- are we allowed to develop our own thinking in this way, by returning to topics? Basically, is it possible to do this in an ethical way at all?


texts: Is it alright to cover some information in the defense but not the written thesis?

texts:
I will soon finish my thesis and I researched a lot in this technological area. Basically I want to say: “I have these n methods that all didn’t work out; that’s why I’ve decided to pursue this final method.” However I’m lacking time for extensively testing all these misleading alternatives, thus I could only state that I barely had empirically tested these hypotheses (which is a bad style to write down in my opinion).

Since part of the thesis is giving a presentation of it, I could imagine to mention all the dead-ends I went in before and describing the difficulties that occurred. But then again I'm not sure if its alright to present data in the presentation that the document never covered.

Hence, would it be acceptable to present the methods I didn’t dare to write down (because of the missing tests) as some kind of introduction to my final choice, or is it a total no-go?


texts: How can I show the admission board that I'm better than my academic record says

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I'm a last year student of a degree in mathematics ( and another in physics) in Spain.

I'm starting graduate education next year and I need some advices on how to improve my chances to get into graduate programmes.

Here in Spain the grading system is based almost entirely in exams in which I'm not very good at. I will explain this, since I don't want to sound like I'm complaining.

I have some concentration issues while working under pressure so I loose stupid points that matter a lot in the academic world. Somehow it is very hard to me to detect mistakes in these situations and fix them.

I'm writing this because working on my own I managed to get quite a high level in some topics that I'm interested in. This could be confirmed by some  teachers that spent some time talking with me.

I think I could function in academia for a number of reasons:

My supervisor thinks my thesis is promising and advanced.
I participated in summer schools (research oriented) having really good results. Some speakers are willing to write a recommendation letter for me.
The few hand out problems that I get to do here usually are marked as A.
Classmates rely on me when the need to understand some subject related to my interests. They appreciate my way of thinking.

I'd love to learn how to show this in my applications. How can I tell the universities that maybe I'm better than what my academic record says?


texts:
I have been offered a postdoc position at Cambridge University. That's great, because two years ago I wanted to go back to academia and went to see my PhD supervisor (I finished my PhD in engineering in 2007) to ask if he might have  or know of a postdoc position I'd be suitable for. The answer was no, so a few months later I got a job as a structural engineer in Tokyo and wrote the whole thing off.

Last year I quit the Tokyo gig and moved back to Europe, because I couldn't keep up with the working hours in Japan anymore. I was looking for a job again, when out of the blue, my PhD supervisor contacted me, saying that he now had a postdoc position. I applied, and I got an offer, although I don't know yet how much I will be paid.

Of course, as things always seem to go, I also got an offer to work as a programmer for an airline company, right here where I live. The pay is similar, and the training will be very good.

In my heart of hearts I would like to take the Postdoc, but I am very worried about what will happen after the three years are over.

I am 35, nearly 36 now, have worked as a structural engineer and programmer in the past. I have a family (two small kids) and need to be able to look after them all. Fortunately I have enough savings to be able to take a (small) hit on the salary whilst doing my postdoc, but... what I don't want is ending up doing the postdoc, and then being stuck.

The plan was to do the postdoc, then get a lecturing position. But I have read many articles lamenting how difficult it is for the majority of postdocs to find a long-term position. I could have done that in my twenties, maybe, but approaching forty that is pretty scary.
From a material point of view, I am already significantly behind my peers who went to work straight after they finished their masters degree and don't really want to fall so far behind that I'll never catch up.

My question is, how true are the reports of PostDocs being forced to move from PostDoc to PostDoc (especially in the UK)? Does anybody know of somebody who did something similar to what I am planning to do (and did it successfully)?


texts: Will this be a case of self plagiarism or will it annoy the referee?

texts:
About 2 months ago, I uploaded a fairly long paper (P1) to arXiv and it is currently under review.

Now, I am writing a second paper (P2) on a somewhat different topic. But quite unexpectedly, it seems that to justify a single small step in one section of (P2), I will need a result that I proved in (P1). Unfortunately, this result in (P1) needs several lemmas before it can be proved and the proof of it takes up about 5 pages in (P1).

I have two choices:

1) Do the small step in (P2) by merely citing the statement of the result from my recently uploaded arXiv paper (P1) : But as I mentioned before, the step for which I need this result is a rather small one. Would it really annoy the referee (eventually when I submit this paper) if he/she is referred to 5 pages in a long paper on arXiv merely to justify a small step?

Ideally, I would have liked to keep the papers disjoint, but it does not seem like I can get rid of this one small step in paper (P2).

2) Copy down the entire proof of the required result from (P1), probably in slightly abridged format. But even then, this is likely to add at least 3 pages to the current paper and so it feels unethical (like self plagiarism / salami slicing or something like that).

So what should I do? Are my worries about option 1 (annoying the referee) unfounded? If you were a referee, would you be irritated if I referred you to several pages in a long paper to justify one small step?

Thanks


texts: Is it possible to become a neuroscientist without first studying clinical medicine?

texts:
I am currently in highschool and thinking about what career path I should choose to follow. I am fascinated by the brain, and I would really love to study how it works, or how to model it with computers and mathematics.

After doing Google searches, I have found that some neuroscience degrees are obtained by studying medicine first and then doing some graduate work on the brain, other websites have told me that neuroscience is a degree in its own right that does not require medicine first. I am concerned about this because I cannot stand the sight of large amounts of blood.

I am just fine with the sight of brains and the way they feel and smell, so I would be capable of doing research directly on them, but without studying medicine. Is there a degree that focuses on the brain and nerve system that does not require treating patients or managing large amounts of blood?


texts: When trying to establish a connection with a STEM field professor, is it appropriate to ask them out for coffee?

texts:
I have a friend who is trying hard to establish a connection with a well-known professor at a generally top 5 school for STEM in the U.S. This professor is frequently at some good seminars around the area.

My question is: is it appropriate for my friend to ask out this professor for coffee?  She has tried several times - trying to meet him one on one before the start of seminars, some other scheduled times, etc.  This may be relevant, so I will note that she is female, and the professor is male.

He has turned my friend down with reasons such as "I'll be traveling and can't meet for coffee", or "sorry, but I won't be able to make it today."
Otherwise, the professor answers all of her questions and gives great advice to her, in terms of how to advance in the field.  Based on what she tells me, he is very polite and helpful.

Personally, I would never ask a professor out for coffee - let alone try repeatedly, after he or she has said "no" several times.  I would email to start some dialogue and perhaps meet in his / her office.  So I just want to know whether perhaps I should hint to my friend to stop trying to get him out to coffee and that maybe he's not so into the idea of letting students schmooze with him one on one.

I wonder if this is sort of specific to the STEM field academia culture, too; e.g.  if we were in film school or business school, I think it'd be much more "normal" to ask a professor out to coffee to try and build a relationship.