text:
How soon to fire rude and chaotic PhD student?
From experience and from advice I have typically seen, PIs put students through a ‘trial’ phase between a month and a year, to determine if they are a good fit, and if not, they are let go from the lab.
Unfortunately, I recently hired a student who I find rude, disrespectful, abrasive, chaotic, etc., and immediately rebelled against the project idea I had assigned him without a good reason. And it is immediately clear to me I would not want to be around this person for even a short period, let alone the duration of the PhD. This contrasts sharply with other students I have been working with.
This person is coming in with a fairly strong CV. But if he is going to be an a-hole to work with, it doesn’t matter to me whether or not he is a technical genius.
How bad would it be if I told such a student I’m not interested in working with them further after a couple of weeks? I would have no problem doing that if this person was say a prospective undergrad or master’s student, but I am a bit hesitant to do this in such a short timeframe with a new PhD student. Any advice?

Could you add information on how this student is funded, and what the funding arrangements might be if they were no longer working with you?

I would rather not reveal that as it could be too identifying. The funding consequences are a secondary concern to me, as a difficult student can cause a sharp decrease in quality of life and lab culture, and I am more concerned about that. I am wondering if I am being too impulsive or if I should wait?

how old is the student? Sometime the student is too green and they even don't know what they did is considered to be 'rule', 'disrespectful'.

I'm a theoretical mathematician, and that means that (1) my students don't tend to work with each other in a lab (though they might collaborate with each other), and (2) my students are funded via teaching assistantships from the department, not directly through me, so the only consequence to a student of me no longer working with them would be that they would eventually have to find another advisor.  I would like you to make it clear that people like me have nothing to contribute to answering your question (which is fine) for the purposes of discouraging useless answers.

This student's behavior would be considered rude in any normal human to human interaction. Immaturity may be a reason. But my job is not to rehabilitate people into decency, it is to run a well-oiled lab.

Have you discussed this unprofessional/rude behaviour with the student already?

Moderator’s notice: Please do not post answers in the comments; post them as answers instead. Answers in comments will be deleted without warning.

Did you inform yourself of the procedures and the latest moment you can decide to not accept the student? Have you had a sit-down with the student to find out what they want to do (instead of your project idea) and - separately - to signal to them what is and what is not acceptable interaction?

How is student funded (we aren't asking identifiable funding sources) but even if they come with complete 'salary' support (via TA from department or other grant) that often is persuasive argument enough that whatever project they do needs the support and interest of the advisor (who has to keep the other direct or indirect funds coming to run the lab effectively)

How was this rebelling going on? How different is the student's background? Could there be a misunderstanding in how much a topic is assigned and self-determined in your two heads based on different education system background? The description also could fit a typical case of someone on the spectrum - can you rule that out?

Would "firing" them entail them dropping out, or them being assigned a new supervisor? (this may be a difference between countries, universities, disciplines, etc).
I would also be asking myself how this happened and whether there is a way I can improve my recruitment process to avoid it in future.

"immediately rebelled against the project idea I had assigned him without a good reason" - maybe they just are not interested in the topic. Why did they choose to work with you? Did you talk about where the research should go before they joined your group? I always make sure the interests of the candidate and myself align well before accepting people. If the initial phase deviates from this, I go out of my way to motivate why that is essential to progress in the student's desired direction. Never had a problem with that. The only time I had problems with a student constantly changing ideas.

It's hard to answer your question without a bit more information about the funding / setup. It seems clear that you have already made your mind that you no longer want to be this student's PhD supervisor, so the question is where to go from here, and that depends strongly on how the student is funded / employed. Is the student employed by your lab? Funded as part of a particular grant for a project you're working on? Paid by a private company? Not paid for their PhD directly but paid for being at TA? Something else?

Of note to those answering this question, the poster asked both https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/202726/44252 last year and https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/193390/44252 a little over last year, which may give a relevant insight to their thought process and/or concerns regarding the stated scenario.

Rebelling against a project idea doesn't fall in the same category as the other stuff you described. Mentioning it raises the question of what exactly you meant by the other stuff, and whether your description is accurate. Is the rudeness objectively rude (e.g., student calling you a moron), or are you taking things to be "disrespectful" that are less clear-cut (e.g., student refusing to obey what you tell him)?

How has the student been treated in other aspects of their life at the university? Have the emigrated? Moved city? Have they had difficulty integrating? How have they found the transition? Have they had trouble at home? Are they stressed? Have they had any guidance whatsoever? How bad would it be if I told such a student I’m not interested in working with them further after a couple of weeks? If the answer to previous questions are unknown or, they are but no action to address them has been taken on your part, then yes it would be very bad and unprofessional.

I think to meet the expectations of a mentor (this student is still your mentee until they are not), you owe it to them to give a chance for improvement.
That doesn't mean just wait and see how things go. It would involve you explaining to them the reasons that you are considering not continuing as their supervisor, including constructive/positive suggestions for improvement. For example, the feedback should not be "You are chaotic!", the feedback should involve suggestions for how to manage what you perceive as chaotic in a way that would work for you and put them on a path towards successful completion of a PhD. This is likely to be an uncomfortable conversation for both of you, but it's part of the job you signed up for.
As others have recommended, I would brush up on policy to understand what the official steps are because if there is some sort of formal probation status you might want to start that sooner rather than later.
Once you've definitively made up your mind, though, it seems to do everyone involved a disservice to wait any longer.
An exception to my statement that you owe them a chance to improve after feedback would be if they're an active threat or harm to other students. Your description does not seem to put them in that category, but you might make steps to protect others in the meantime.

I'd recommend to also checkout potential support available at the university beforehand, e.g. if the student mentions financial, cultural or psychological problems, it could be handy to know whether there are rules and/or support institutions available for such cases. Beforehand = before having the conversation.

+Many for "explaining to them the reasons that you are considering not continuing as their supervisor". There's a saying in business that when you fire someone, you shouldn't need to explain why! That is to say that every reasonable part of the "Why I'm firing you" conversation should already have happened, including unambiguous goals for what is necessary to avoid being fired. At the point at which the employee/student is fired, they should already know, going into the meeting, that they haven't hit the requirements necessary to avoid that outcome.

I would like to challenge the framing a little - this is a relationship problem.
In your question, you say "and immediately rebelled against the project idea I had assigned him without a good reason"
I don't know if this is different between countries, institutions, etc, but to my knowledge, in Australia, a PhD student is fundamentally in control of their PhD research, with the supervisor tasked with providing advice and guidance, rather than instruction.
Obviously, this is influenced by funding questions, and so the PhD student would naturally be constrained to some degree as to their research.
However, I notice your description of the student as rebelling against the project idea you "had assigned him". This sounds less like a PhD student learning to be an independent researcher and more like a PhD student being used as a cheap form of academic labour.
It may have merely been a choice of words, or this may be more typical in your country or institution.
I note that you said in a comment "But my job is not to rehabilitate people into decency, it is to run a well-oiled lab". No, it isn't. You are the student's supervisor for their PhD. In this role, your job is to mentor the student into an effective researcher. If this isn't the role you have in mind, then you shouldn't be supervising PhD students.
Now, don't get me wrong, this doesn't excuse the student being "rude", but it may explain it. The question to ask yourself is, how much reasoning and guidance did you provide to the student regarding the task you were asking them to undertake? How much control did you provide to the student regarding the task?

Let me use an invented example. Suppose you're running a chemistry lab, and your student's official project is about finding ways to manufacture a particular compound (this may be simpler than a real PhD in chemistry, but as a mathematician, I don't generally work in a lab). Suppose you have an idea for what could be a really efficient way to manufacture the compound.
Version 1: You go to the student and tell them to test this specific method, with a detailed plan - their role in the lab will be to gather the appropriate components, assemble the experimental apparatus, and run the experiment. When they're done, they give the results to another person to analyse to determine whether it was a success.
Version 2: You provide the student with the idea and task them with exploring it. You answer any questions they might ask, and ask them to provide you with a plan of attack before they put anything into motion. They come up with a variation on what you were thinking, and you give them the okay to proceed with the lab work.
In the first version, you aren't mentoring a student, you're instructing a lab tech. The student isn't a lab tech, and thus they are likely to balk at being treated as such.
In the second version, you are mentoring a student. You are providing oversight and guidance, but it's the student's research being done.

This may not be the case, of course - you might be properly trying to supervise the student, and they could be pushing back because they have issues with any kind of influence, or because they've got issues of some sort. That's something for you to figure out, before you make any irreversible decision.
And to answer the explicit question, I would say that, if you were to fire the student without at least making a real effort to guide them to be better (which takes more than a few weeks), then you are likely to gain a reputation for being unreasonable with students - if only because the student is capable of telling their version of the story.
There is no particular length of time you need to wait, but rather an amount of effort you need to put in. If you put in that effort, and the student doesn't respond, then it is likely that the student will come to the same conclusion as you - that it's not working - and you can arrange for either their transfer to a new program with a different supervisor, or for their ending of their candidature.

This. Most other answers seem to take the OP's appraisal of the state of affairs at face value: The Ph.D. candidate is the source of the problem, and the it's a a matter of how OP is to handle them. As you point out, this is likely not quite how things stand.

Good alternative viewpoint. Upvoted. That being said, there are difficult students. And I say that as someone who was the default "go-to" person in the department to handle difficult people.

@Trunk: To me it just seems unlikely that a person would start a PhD - probably uprooting their life to go live somewhere, for a multi-year commitment, to just, you know, act out and getting into fight with their advisor/supervisor. There's gotta be some kind of issue that OP is missing / not describing. It could be with the PhD candidate, it could be with OP, it could be with the compatibility of their characters.

+1 for "There is no particular length of time you need to wait, but rather an amount of effort you need to put in."

@einpoklum It happens. Probably more frequently in the US, since it is fairly common in some fields for students to go directly from their bachelor's program to a Ph.D. program, and the Ph.D. program may be the first time a student's success depends on more than just their academic achievements.

@WhatTheDuck: If that's the situation, then perhaps what's missing is some kind of relevant "socio-organizational" orientation for new PhD candidates - to help people realize the change of circumstances between undergraduate studies and employment as a researcher-in-training. It may not be complete panacea, but it would at least reduce the chances of this happening.

Letting go of a student is a costly action: you have committed resources (time and funding), and there is also a reputational effect to consider. You can only drop students so many times before people start wondering whether you might be the problem. This can make it harder for you to hire and retain future students; in my institution, bad mentoring performance has promotion and tenure implications as well.
If you drop a student only after a few weeks you better have a very good reason. Of course I don’t know your situation and this student may well be an awful human being, but perhaps it would be useful to have a serious conversation with this student? Something along the lines of:

I’m very excited to mentor you for the next five years, and you clearly have excellent skills in doing X. However, your attitude towards me and other lab members is not acceptable . I know you want to work on Y, but in my lab we work on X. If you realize that Y is what you want to do for your PhD then I strongly suggest that you spend the coming semester looking for a new PhD advisor. If you feel that we need to change how we work together I’m more than happy to hear you out, but do keep in mind that I have certain policies on how I run my lab. If these policies are not a good fit for you, then again I suggest that you seek another advisor.

While I do agree that having a protracted bad relationship with a student hurts you both, I do think that a few weeks is really quite short. Maybe they just need your assurance and support; maybe their partner just dumped them. I would give it at least a semester before making this call.

I have to say, not once in my professional and academic career have I seen a person who was rude and disrespectful a few weeks into a new job turn things around later.  There are lots of problems that can improve once a person gets more comfortable / the hang of their new position, but behavioral issues, I believe, are not one of them.

Given the information and attitude in OP's question I'd probably avoid the first line in the suggested formulation. It made me directly downvote until I read the rest which made the overall sentiment clear. But the first line would at this point be an outright lie - OP seems everything but excited to work with the student. Either an "I was originally excited" or directly a focus on the technical skills I would suggest.

@Trunk my answer is based on the assumption that we only see part of a story here, coupled with the fact that the OP is a new professor. It’s entirely possible that there’s a cultural gap, personality incompatibility or a million other fixable issues. Dropping a student not even a semester in is highly unusual. I’m surprised that an answer that can be summed up as “have a conversation and try and fix things, then drop them if needed” is seen as controversial.

@xLeitix I have, many times in my time as a military officer, seen someone that arrived with attitudes issues correct the situation and improve as a soldier and as a person. Obviously, the military is different than academia. Among other things I and my NCOs had options to... encourage correction... that are not available to your usual academic instructor or even boss. Nonetheless, I can testify that people can and do change for the better under the right circumstances and I'd be inclined to give people at least some chance in civilian settings before assuming they can't improve.

@TimothyAWiseman Yeah, I can see how that's true for the military, but I believe it's quite singular among "jobs" in that sense.

I would guess that it is better for both of you to do this soonest, rather than later. I'd suggest a face to face meeting with them to let them know that you will drop them within a week if they don't improve their behavior and attitude.
Doing it sooner permits the student to seek someone else before they spend more time in the program.
Have a chat with the department head about this also. You need to know how it will be received overall.
I once had to drop a Tai Chi student in their first class when it became obvious that they wouldn't trust me. I recommended another instructor with whom they might connect. Not the same, I know, except that this situation also requires a long term trusting relationship. Why let it fester.

Chat with the department head first.

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Unfortunately, I recently hired

I'm guessing that the employer is your university, not you personally - even if you interviewed him and even if you had secured some/all of the funding. You don't have absolute authority over him (nor should you).

a student who ... immediately rebelled against the project idea...

So, you and the junior researcher had agreed to work together: You had discussed some subjects, directions, plan for research, and agreed to pursue them. Then immediately he became intransigent and rebellious? I am somewhat suspicious of this description of events.

immediately rebelled against the project idea I had assigned him

What do you mean, assigned to him? You had just agreed on things. Did you now assign to him something against your agreement? You did not say he went back on the agreement, reneged, denied having agreed, right?

rebelled against the project idea I had assigned him without good reason

Without good reason, or without any reason? You did not tell us, but your phrasing suggests, that there is some "no-good reason". A person going as far as "rebelling" (rather than, say, being unmotivated, or not focusing enough on the task etc.) - typically has a reason which they find very good, enough to risk their whole Ph.D. candidature and relations with their advisor.
Given your attitude as a PI - as much as it comes through in your post - I would not be surprised if your junior mentee actually has a pretty good reason, or at least a legitimate one.
Now, if I were advising your mentee, I would probably say: "Oh, brother, you seem to have stumbled onto a condescending and authoritarian boss, perhaps you should just switch advisors" - just like you are thinking of firing him.
But - perhaps both approaches are wrong, and what you and your mentee (independently and together) should really do is Invest effort in communicating your grievances to one another in a way that is not perceived as mere confrontational hostility; and in receiving, parsing and understanding such communicated grievances from the other side.
If you both understand what each party wants, and is willing to give/compromise/accommodate vis-a-vis the other party - you can make an informed, reasoned decision about whether you should continue your supervision relations.

I find rude, disrespectful, abrasive, chaotic, etc.

It's possible that he is being disrespectful; but remember that respect must be earned. Have you behaved respectfully towards him? Have you acted so as to earn his respect? I wonder.
Also, perhaps other would describe your group as bland and regimented, and that person as being dynamic, spontaneous, passionate, forthcoming...

Reactionary personalities are amongst the most difficult to work with. In businesses we usually just fire them, regardless of their technical competency -because their personality gets in the way and they are not efficient anymore, and their technical competency goes to waste, since most work is strongly collaborative.
But a PhD is not your ordinary professional collaboration.
Is doing a PhD seen relatively more as a personal journey (of the student) with a map/compass (the supervisor)? Or is it seen relatively more as a production line of capital goods, where the student is the capital good under construction (designed and destined to be productive itself at a later date), while the supervisor is the manager of the production line, which in turn is part of the factory/University?
It matters how you see it but also how your institution sees it.
If the latter, find a a way to fire them in an appropriate way, and other answers suggested various such approaches.
But if the former, you are the map, you are the compass, not the captain of the ship. A probably useful approach in this case would be to demand (not just ask) from the student to come up with and justify and argue in favor of, their own project idea, if they don't like what you propose. They have to learn, or acknowledge, that if they want to be "their own person", they are obliged to shoulder the responsibility and the heavy burden, that comes with it. This also will put to the test their knowledge and ideas-generating potential.
And then, you will have objective grounds for assessment: if they propose something that you don't consider worthy, you have every legitimate reason to finish the collaboration. But you may like what you see, and then, maybe it will be worth the trouble.

"Reactionary personalities are amongst the most difficult to work with." <- It's quite possible that the Ph.D. candidate is thinking the same thing about OP.  "In businesses we usually just fire them" <- Or perhaps one could say, "in business, we have to form unions to stand up against them and avoid getting fired."

@einpoklum So if I understand correctly "reactionary personalities" to you are those people that stand up for their rights, and not those people that demand that the world adjust fully to their idiosyncrasies. Ok.

@AlecosPapadopoulos: On the contrary, I'm saying, semi-tongue-in-cheek, that perhaps OP has the "reactionary personality".

you are the map, you are the compass, not the captain of the ship this is beautiful and what I would hope is the standard framing that every academic supervisor puts themselves in.

@einpoklum Apologies. My post just elaborated on one scenario.

@Trunk That's the wise advise in the case... Still, the suggestion was meant to communicate to the PhD student that the Supervisor/University system is not there to ''serve them research ideas" until one is to their liking -but also to give to the PhD student the chance to commit to something the student is enthusiastic about.

If there is no good match between the student and you, and you really can't see yourself mentoring the student, then it would seem like there's no real point in letting it go on an instant longer than it needs to, as you're wasting time for both of you that could best be spent in other ways.
That said, how you go about separating is mostly a matter for your department and your graduate program.  Also, in some cases, any student might be better than no student, so you might think about whether you'd be able to replace the student in a timely way, whether you'd be burning bridges with a graduate program that may come to think you're too selective, and hesitates to send more students your way ...
My own opinion with respect to the last issue, though, is that planning to keep the student around until you can replace them isn't a particularly good option for the student, and the path should be avoided.

@Trunk-  I think you've got me correctly there.  I do an awful lot of project management having to do with my teaching role, so I'd like to think that I'd intervene long before getting to the " And it is immediately clear to me I would not want to be around this person for even a short period, let alone the duration of the PhD." stage.  This would be less likely to happen to me, because we use student rotations through labs to match students to willing advisors, and this situation is one of the reasons why we're sticking to the rotations.  All that said, stuff happens.

@Trunk With experience, you can learn to "de-viscerate" your responses to disrespectful students (or colleagues).

At this point, the goal is just as much about professional development as it is technical competency. While you may not be the best to offer social interaction development, I think part of what your goal is has to be ensuring the student's talent in a field you both care is presented in a manner that fosters teamwork. So "how you fire him" is with documented feedback, given as objectively as you can give it. Maybe even have a 3rd party involved. That way, you can make sure no negative biases or prejudices of yours are influencing the outcome. I'd suggest multiple meetings and then see if the relationship improves. If it doesn't, then let him go. Just make sure its not out of malice on your part. You don't want to drive a bright mind away from your field just because you two can't seem to get along now. Neurodivergence is real, so not every human is going to interact easily. It doesn't mean it is impossible, especially for a greater good.

+1 for "You don't want to drive a bright mind away from your field just because you two can't seem to get along now."

@Trunk Yes, the Greater Good. We all have sacrificed for that at one point or another (I hope). OP does not have to suffer dragging the student through, but they should not destroy the student's future by badmouthing them. There may be very well a cultural misalignment here rather than malicious intent on the side of the student.


text:
What counts as plagiarism?
Plagiarism is,

the "wrongful appropriation" and "stealing and
  publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or
  expressions" and the representation of them as one's own original
  work.

as defined here,
and

According to U.S. law, the answer is yes. The expression of original
  ideas is considered intellectual property and is protected by
  copyright laws, just like original inventions.

as mentioned here.
However, what is the definition for expressing ideas? What is the limit for person B(ob) to be have plagiarized person A(lice)'s work?
Clearly, Alice has to prove that she expressed it before Bob. But what counts as a proof?
Please consider the following scenarios:

Alice asks a question in StackExchange (or any other site), defining her problem in detail, and Bob somehow figures out what the answer is. Instead of writing the answer, he publishes the paper himself.
Alice writes a technical report (not a full paper) and publishes it in her website. Bob downloads the technical report, shares it with his teammates and soon, they publish a paper based on Alice's technical report.
Similar to (2), Alice has published a technical report in her website, defining a problem, with a first-attempt solution, which clearly can be improved. Bob, on the other hand, sees the technical report and finds a better solution. Then, publishes it. Now, Alice cannot publish her results because Bob's solution is better.
Alice spoke about the problem (or experiment) she is working on in an informal public place (e.g. cafeteria).  Bob heard it, and found a way to solve the problem (or carried out the experiment she intended to). He published it in a journal.

Important note: I am pretty sure, in all cases Bob has plagiarized Alice's work. What I am asking is, can Alice actually prove that her work is plagiarized? Especially, in case 4, can she show witnesses about her talking about the project first?
What if Bob was working on the same problem longer than Alice? Does just expressing the idea make it Alice's?

I'm not a lawyer, but I think what Bob has done in ever case you listed is legal, outside the case that he signed a non-disclosure agreement. This is why people are secretive about their preliminary results.

Plagiarism is not a legal issue, so it's completely unclear to me what you're asking.

Does Bob cite Alice's work and make clear the distinction between what she did and what he did?  If so, there is no plagiarism.

@NateEldredge, not plagiarism, and hardly any truly objectionable behavior at all.

Some issues: 1) The question in the title of your question does not quite match those in the body. 2) I think you are conflating expression of an idea and idea.

Plagiarism of ideas usually refers to usurping someone's entire idea, e.g. if Alice came up with an original idea, which Bob then tells everybody he came up with. In academia, the significance of this will be to do with career progression (Bob keeps coming up with great ideas, while Alice appears to have no original ideas of her own -- since Bob stole hers!) or the historical record (Bob's Law vs. Alice's Law), but usually it doesn't make a difference to the scientific work.

Summary: if Bob is the genius who can easily spot the answer to Alice's question or if he's willing to dig into the work for weeks or months, what he produces is (deservedly) his work.

Copyright is about works (that is here the form of expression of the idea), not about the idea itself. In order to protect a (technical) idea, Alice needs a patent.
Also in science, you can (and are expected to) use other people's ideas. But you must properly attribute their origin.
Assuming that the answer is not entirely trivial, it qualifies as work of its own. Bob's work that is. Question/problem and answer/solution are typically considered different ideas, and often the work to get the answer/solution is considered larger than the work of identifying the question (although that shouldn't be underestimated, neither).

Alice asks a question in StackExchange (or any other site), defining her problem in detail, and Bob somehow figures out what the answer is. Instead of writing the answer, he publishes the paper himself.

Thus, he can post it on SX where he licenses the use of this per CC-BY-SA. This means, Alice when writing her paper, needs to attribute Bob properly.
Bob is free to publish his answer wherever he likes. Thus, also in a journal. Note that the answer without Alice's question may not be quite understandable, so he needs to attribute Alice for the question (which is also CC-BY-SA licensed). In addition, in a scientific paper he needs to cite Alice's question.
There's nothing wrong with a paper "A (new) solution to Alice's problem".  In practice, I guess Bob could contact Alice to make a shared publication: at least in my field this could be a typical constellation of Alice Applicationexpert together with Bob Theoryspecialist. And even though Bob may be able to spot an answer, this doesn't mean he recognizes all that was behind the question.

Alice writes a technical report (not a full paper) and publishes it in her website. Bob downloads the technical report, shares it with his teammates and soon, they publish a paper based on Alice's technical report.

Here the question is what this "based on" means in detail: it may be anything from plagiarizing over derivative work, dependent work, to Bob's own work - depending on how close it is to Alice's report.
Whether derivative or dependent works violate Alice's copyright depends on the license Alice grants. If she did not specify anything, it is a copyright violation. (Plagiarized work is a bit difficult, because Alice could license her work in a way that does not require attribution by Bob - but in a scientific paper, he still needs to cite her properly. Plagiarism in science does not have the totally same meaning as wrt. copyright issues)
Side note: Many technical reports I know are actually more comprehensive than the respective paper.

Similar to (2), Alice has published a technical report in her website, defining a problem, with a first-attempt solution, which clearly can be improved. Bob, on the other hand, sees the technical report and finds a better solution. Then, publishes it. Now, Alice cannot publish her results because Bob's solution is better.

See above.
Note that Alice may be still happy even if Bob did not contact her, because Bob's paper allows her to concentrate her efforts on the application problem she wants to solve. It may also be that Alice still needs to write her paper, because Bob did not talk to her and unfortunately did not know about some implications of the question - so his answer is a good hint, but does not entirely solve the problem.

Alice spoke about the problem (or experiment) she is working on in an informal public place (e.g. cafeteria). Bob heard it, and found a way to solve the problem (or carried out the experiment she intended to). He published it in a journal.

I've tried to find solutions I need by talking/asking on conferences quite a bit. Far from anyone stealing my ideas, I typically hear that everyone would like to get informed when I find and publish a solution - meaning that noone is willing to relieve me of the work to find a solution.
In other words, in practice there's quite a barrier to this type of scooping because if Bob is not willing to cooperate with Alice, he needs to put in the effort Alice has already put in. Thus he goes for an uphill race when trying to be faster than Alice with the publication.
Also, are you seriously underestimating the amount of work that goes into preparing and actually doing an experiment? By the way, in many fields, Bob would get a much better experimental paper if he pooled his efforts with Alice and they got twice the sample size for their paper.
Again, if Bob performs his own experiment, it is his own. Then there would be two studies that more or less coincidentally show the same (well, if they actually show the same...).
Sometimes the time is "ripe" for some specific question - so this can also happen totally innocently. Scientifically speaking this is good, because experimental science nowadays has IMHO more problems due to a lack of replicate experiments than the other way round.
Again my experience is that in this case the studies will still not be quite the same.

How can Alice prove that her work was plagiarized
She needs to show that Bob copied her work without license and without proper attribution. That is, she needs to show

Which part(s) of Bob's work are the same as hers, and
that her work was done first.
The method that gives you best legal chances is: use a notary. That's very expensive, though. There are less expensive methods that should work in practice. E.g. if it is about the idea how to set up the experiment, Alice could show her paper lab book where she always neatly puts all her thoughts with proper date etc. Same if there's a record of a lab meeting/seminar where Alice presented her results. If it is about some part of the paper, Alice could also show when she checked these sentences into the version control server her group uses. Of course, if Bob than shows that their VC server got his sentence earlier, Alice is in trouble.

Probably the question cannot really be about plagiarism, literally, because most traditional senses of "plagiarism" refer to specific choices of language, rather than "ideas".
In the first three cases, Bob's behavior would be completely within the range of standard operating procedure. Public information is public. Yet, also, at the same time, many people would consider such behavior rude and mercenary. That's not the same as illegal or unethical, whether or not it is immoral.
(The fourth case is harder for me to simulate in my head, and I have no comment on it.)
Yes, one could imagine that mentioning a problem or idea publicly gives one some sort of right to it. However, in practice, this cannot possibly work, because it is extremely difficult to gauge what more is required to make an idea into something substantial. The only viable default is to imagine that whatever one says publicly is then truly available for all. One cannot control it, or guarantee "getting credit". Yes, the most virtuous people will give credit to the origins of their ideas, etc. ("Duh!")
If the real question is how to stake a claim on ideas in a fashion that prohibits others from doing anything with them ... as opposed to taking the idea, doing something, and giving credit for origins... I have no suggestion except keeping secrets.
EDIT: and, no, merely expressing an idea does not create "possession"... Not at all. But, among decent people, credit would be given. Can't rely on this, etc.

There's nothing wrong with 4 in general either, it's just scooping someone.  Of course it would be polite to inform Alice you know how to do it, and possible suggest collaboration.

@Kimball, indeed, a looming question is whether The Goal is scoring status points, or advancing understanding. I would claim (although it may be inevitable, given human nature) that while scoring status points may more powerfully motivate (some) people, it is inefficient in terms of advancement of understanding. But, as with other things, maybe the latter ideal efficiency is impossible "in real life". E.g., things connected to warfare nearly-universally garner more resource, more enthusiasm, ...

Fortunately, it is quite often also inefficient for Bob, because he typically first needs to catch up with the work Alice already put into understanding the problem/getting samples/setting up the experiment. That is, Alice may be threatened by Bob from an overwhelmingly large institute that is direct competitor to Alices small group. But small groups can look for a niche with entrance barriers (e.g. study samples that are hard to get). It would be very expensive to decide that just in order to scoop Alice of her experimental paper, n PhD students stop their project to do the Alice experiment.

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text:
I cannot find relevant information to use a tool for collecting data and the author isn't responding. What do I do?
I am conducting a survey to measure the impact of social distancing on family dynamics, for which I came across a tool that fits my study perfectly. However, I am not able to find information on the scoring key, manual and interpretation, and I'm unable to contact the author. I couldn't find any other tool or papers that have used the CHES questionnaire and I'm running extremely short on time. How do I proceed?

Pick a different tool?

The only option I see is to use a different tool. You think this one is perfectly suited for you, but actually it isn't, it's incomplete because you're missing the other half of it.
Typically other options would include looking for other authors that have used it or finding other papers that might describe the procedure more completely, but you've already said this is not possible. You've already tried to contact the author without success. You're running out of time so it seems past time to cut your losses and move on.

If the survey is useful, then use it to collect data, cite the author as appropriate, and develop your own scoring to suit your needs.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
"Open exam" exams?
Many of the students I teach do not have English as their first language. Also, my English tends to fall on the British (Australian) side of the divide, and I'm teaching in US institutions. Sometimes, this has led to misunderstandings of exam questions during standard exam conditions.
The pandemic has led me to move my exams to being oral exams (taken online via Zoom, Discord, or Teams). This allows me to correct these misunderstandings at exam time.
However, more recently I've moved to publishing my exam paper before the exam (making it "public" to the class).  I generally include far more questions than can adequately be covered in a given oral exam, but I make it clear that only a subset of the stated questions will be asked of the student.  I generally release the exam two weeks before the exam period.
This allows me to address any misunderstandings to the whole class well before the exam. My only rule regarding answering student questions about the exam before their oral is that my answers must be in front of the whole class --- either in class or on the class discussion forum.
Does anyone have an educational reference for this approach to exams? Or whether there is a term for "open exam" exams?

I can't help you with a name or reference, but I like it. Have you  talked about it at any educational conferences?

What's an exam paper, and what's the question here?

I certainly have seen a similar scheme when I was a student, though with written rather than oral exams (question list released ahead, actual exam on a subset of them), but don't recall it given any specific name.

@AzorAhai-him- An exam paper is the list of questions asked during the exam.  The question(s) is (are) identified by the question marks "?" at the end of the text above.

@Buffy Hoping to talk at an ASEE conference, but I want to use the appropriate nomenclature and methodology to talk about it to the right audience, hence the question.

It's unclear what problem you are trying to solve.  I do not think there is any nomenclature for this other than "oral exam."

@AnonymousPhysicist The bit that is different that I'm doing is publishing the exam well in advance.  Most oral exams that I've given or taken in the past did not reveal the questions until exam time.  The "problem I'm trying to solve" is to find out if this approach has a specific name / term.

In my country oral exams are fairly common, and were almost universal in conjunction with written exams when I was a student (some thirty-odd years ago). In a certain sense, almost all oral exams were "open" because students themselves would produce booklets with exam questions for many exams. Sometimes, it was a collaborative effort of a few students who would attend all exam sessions. Other students would then be usually able to buy those booklets from the "black market" or having them given by friends. I wouldn't be surprised to find such a booklet for my classes.

This is not answering your question, but only encouraging inquiring in this direction: I myself for many years now, in upper-division undergrad and in "required" graduate-level math courses, given "homework-example" documents with a promise that exam questions (timed, no resources...) would be taken from them. And that I'd be willing to critique attempted responses well in advance of the exam, as well as publishing my own conception of reasonable (if not perfect/ultimate) responses for people to compare. This does allow people to focus more intensely on a presumably-important subset of topics.

In some places these are called "prior disclosure", although googling "prior disclosure exam" doesn't suggest that this is a widely used term. You'll find a few institutional policies that have it.

@DanielHatton Understood. My aim is to give the students an excruciatingly clear idea of what they need to know in the course, to take that off the table as an excuse for not doing well.  Even with this approach, I've still had students fail my courses. This usually comes with self-knowledge for the student: the student turns up to the final and can't answer the first couple of questions and then suggests that they not waste any more of my time and just take the F.

(Too long for a comment, but not really an answer…)
I unfortunately do not have a term for this particular practice, but I've seen similar organization in two higher education institutions in the United State. The approach was as follow:

Release a "Homework", containing ~20 small exercises and ~3 longer problems,
Answer any question about it in front of the whole class,
Have a written quiz (1 or 2 weeks later) that contains ~5 of the small exercises (with, at times, small changes),
Later on during the semester, pick longer problems from the homework set and have the students solve them during exam (again, with possible small changes).

The "homework" were not due nor graded, but "smart" students would understand that the incentive to complete them was present nevertheless.
I'm not aware of any term to describe this way of doing, but I find it extremely beneficial, for multiple reasons:

it allows to clear any misunderstanding, as you noted,
it allows direct and meaningful feedback,
it helps soothe students' stress (after all, they "know" what will be on the exam),
it is an iterative process (if you missed / did not do too good on the quiz, you can still go back to the homework and practice again for the exam).

Excellent info, thank-you!

You're welcome. Good luck with your submission to ASEE conference if you indeed write it :-) Come back and post updates!

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text:
Are there studies of malpractices in Academia resulting from "publish or perish" policies?
Are there studies of "bad academic practices" in general, and documenting in particular whether or not the prevalence of such practices increases in institutions or communities with an increased pressure to academics to publish (either by adding money incentives to publish, or by creating job instability threats for those who "do not publish enough")?
Such a study would be considering (at least) the following list of unethical behaviors:

Student exploitation

publishing student's results without mentioning their participation, or (milder)
taking students and benefiting from their work (adding one's name to their publications) without having them benefit from your own work (i.e. without working on their publication).

Faking Results

altering the results in order to make them publishable.

Plagiarism

Copying results from other authors without properly acknowledging them (pretending to ignore such results)

Minimal Publishable Result

Intentionally dividing a general result in as many as possible smaller results, in order to increase one's number of publications
Refusing to merge two highly related/complementary results (each presented at a distinct conference) by the same authors into a single journal article

Complexifying of Results

"The result is quite simple, but you need to make it look complicated in order to get it published"

Self-Plagiarism

Duplicating one own's proofs or results without citing it.

Intimidation/Bullying

Threatening a colleague into avoiding some research topic

Collusion

"Add my name to n of your publications and I will add your name to n of my publications"

Publish in disreputable publication venues

For some of those (e.g. collusion), I have some ideas about how to approximate a measure of their prevalence in a given community. For some others, I am curious about what an online survey of academic's anonymous reporting would reveal. I could not find such work, when it seems something which could be useful to the academic community, and in particular to inform   decisions such as to give monetary incentives to publish to faculty members.

Re: 6. When I was in grad school there was a guy famous for this. He would publish papers with titles of the following pattern that were only different with copy-pasted adjectives:  Type A theories, Type A-B theories, Type A-B-C theories, Type A-C theories, etc. We knew this for sure because he would have the grad students proof-read  his English, and he would have us do three such papers side-by-side. Plus he would get each of them in a conference proceedings. So one actual paper wound up getting published as many as 12 times.

Any reason why the question would be considered a "shopping" question? Dixit https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3657/why-was-my-question-put-on-hold-for-shopping,
"A shopping question is a question that appears to seek help choosing, finding or assessing
an individual journal,
an individual publisher,
an individual university,
an individual academic program,
an individual field,
an individual research topic,
an individual funding agency,
a commercial online service,
or similar".
I fail to see a match with the question :(

I'm not sure what is wrong with #4 as currently described. If two distinct results were good enough to get published in reputable peer-reviewed conferences, merging them in a journal article could actually be viewed more like "pumping out papers" and forcing extra content, where the ideas might have been communicated clearly already. There could be many a good reason to "refuse to merge two published papers" -- maybe the author is still working on this, and does not feel like wrapping it all in a journal makes sense before a latter point in the project?

On the other hand, a practice that is typically considered negative and somewhat reminds of your #4 is what is colloquially known as "salami slicing". Here the situation is reversed -- instead of publishing a piece of work as a single (journal, or conference) publication, the contents are purposefully chopped up and padded, and published as a series of bite-sized chunks. Rather than "refusal to merge", the problem is "eagerness to split work up"

@penelope What would distinguish "salami slicing" from "Minimal Publishable Result"?

@penelope I understand your point about #4. I was referring to a conference presentation  with authors A,B, followed by another conference presentation with authors A,B,C, extending the first one, where it would make sense to merge them into a single journal publication, but one of the author (e.g. "B") refuses "by principle". But then maybe it is only an instance of "Smallest Publishable Unit" in the end.

I guess the difference between the situations we are describing is the time when the work is completed. If a research team completes a large chunk of work, and then decides to publish it as a series of small publications, that could be a questionable practice and be called salami slicing/minimal publishable result. However, if some progress is made on a topic, which is then published, the further extended, then published again, etc - this sounds like the normal course of research to me.

In fact, if the original work was published in a conference paper, and then a small extension was published in a follow up conference paper, I would argue that there might be a good reason for not wanting to "merge" them as you say. Maybe the extension is not substantial enough to merit merge&resubmit - journal pubs should add new material and not just be the sum of their parts (if based on conf publications). I would also find it very sensible to complete the project/work on a topic before wrapping everything up in a journal - and then merge 3-4 conference publications into a journal

This seems like a good question to ask a librarian at your institution.

Will be hard to find evidence for most of your points but for 4)

More papers but fewer breakthroughs:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x
Publishing low quality research right before deadlines:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3083692
ERC fails to promote risky research:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w30320#fromrss

Might also help:

Number of retractions per year (however not split by reason):
https://towardsdatascience.com/on-retractions-in-biomedical-literature-1565e773559e and https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.362.6413.390

yes, albeit I have been thinking about such a study for several years, it's seeing the recent nature article which prompted me to think that such a study SHOULD be done (not only could be done).

Regarding collusion: the paper Citation gaming induced by bibliometric evaluation: A country-level comparative analysis shows that academics in Italy started citing each other much more frequently after a change in the national regulations tied career advances to bibliometrics.

Dr Andy Stapleton cites a few in his video
6 Dirty Tactics Found In Academia & Universities | Watch out!:

submitting to multiple journals
paper mafia
citation pushing
delaying peer review
author intimidation
quantity over quality


text:
Reasons for an academic to need administrator rights on work computer
Questions related to this in a not specifically academic setting have been asked elsewhere, notably Should developers have administrator permissions on their PC? and Should dev be admin on their computer? My question relates to my job as an academic at a (UK) university.
I moved to using Linux at work so that I did not have to have my computer managed by my university's IT service. This is purely because they are poorly resourced/managed and so addressing small problems takes a very long time. I might, for example, have to wait several weeks for a piece of (free) software to be installed. This imposes unacceptable (to me) delays on my research. They are now changing University policy such that all PCs connected to the network are managed by IT (reasonable), backed-up (reasonable) and local admin privileges are restricted to those who can demonstrate a genuine need for them (reasonable, but I am unwilling to go back to not being able to make progress because of them).
I am confident that one way and another in the end I can persuade them of my need -- but I would like to avoid the delays, meetings, and aggravation this will involve.
What are good, unarguable reasons, that I might need local admin rights. I'm currently thinking 'compiling code written by my co-author' but I might need something more concrete. They will not know enough about my research to know what I might actually need or not.

Linux can be configured to allow the ability install and run software as a unprivileged user (in at least some cases even using a package management system), so just that need is probably not a very strong argument.

What is wrong with the reasons in your second paragraph? And why would you ask us for a "single best" reason, when we can't really determine whether this reason applies to your situation.

@101010111100 Good point. I have edited it to say "good reasons" instead of single best. For whatever reason, IT refuse to accept that their support is not good enough, thus this argument is hard to make in practice.

@dmckee To clarify, it's not that I don't think that with suitable support I couldn't manage without admin privileges-- rather, that I don't want to put my research at risk because IT are under-funded/poorly managed, etc, and thus don't in reality offer suitable

Are you allowed to run virtual machines in which you have admin rights?

@CodesInChaos -- to my knowledge not connected to the network.

@dmckee I think you are wrong. There's a lot that you can do as non-privileged user, but not all. For example: You want to use a database engine. You can download the portable version. But it turns out it needs some library to be installed. You install this library locally, but it turns out this library needs other library. This library can only be compiled using C++ compiler. You don't have this compiler installed. You try to compile C++ compiler using preinstalled C compiler, but the version is wrong, so you need admin to install newer one. You waste a lot of time instead doing research.

Can you connect a non-managed PC to the WiFi network?

@StrongBad Yes. Using Eduroam. I do this with (University) OSX laptop which is also going to become 'managed'. The alternative I suppose is to use a personal machine but then I would a) have to buy it and b) have to pay for the necessary licenses which would be very expensive.

related but not full-answer-worthy: https://twitter.com/walkingrandomly/status/791559409457631232 twitter poll of academics. 79% of polled HAD admin rights, 16% didn't have admin rights and considered it a problem, only 5% didn't have admin rights and didn't mind.

@nuoritoveri It’s standard practice among my colleagues to set up a user level system from scratch to avoid these issues. We’re working on clusters so — of course — don’t have admin rights. None of the things we do require admin rights. The one annoyance is that I currently cannot change my login shell but this is just that: an annoyance, not an actual issue.

Have you considered just letting them do what they want, and then opening a support request every time you need something done? Just aggressively (but politely) follow up on every request until it gets completed, and complain up the chain of command if it doesn't get done in a timely fashion. If you really need the rights, that's the best way to prove it.

@barbecue  i suspect that eventually this policy will slowly be dismantled due to exactly what you describe. But, it would be very costly to me to be subject to it in the meantime, and the meantime given their past record could take a while!

When I write scientific code to test my theoretical results or to implement a method I am studying, I become, for all intents and purposes, a developer. Therefore all the arguments from the related StackOverflow question come into play, which was overwhelmingly answered with 'yes'.

Either there's something which you need to do, and can't do without admin rights, in which case you know what it is. Or there isn't, in which case you don't need admin rights.

@jwg In a well functioning system sure, but in the system I face, where obtaining rights once I give them up might take over 6 months (that's what it recently took another colleague under the old system)  if it is possible at all , it's reasonable to want to avoid all of the loss of productivity associated with that possibility.

So far, I have only come across one reason for needing something close to administrator rights on a fixed department machine: using scientific software.
When you start using a new scientific piece of software, you often have its source code, and need to build it first. Typically, there is no documentation of what exact packages in your Linux distribution are needed (as this changes over time, and there are many Linux distributions as well). So the process is:

Try to build
Identify the cause of error (installing new software, updating the compiler, ...)
Fixing the cause of error (requires administrator rights
Repeat steps 1-3 many times until done.

You can only move towards the respective next issue when one has been resolved. It is unrealistic to assume that you can give an admin a list of required packages upfront,
Without admin rights and an admin reaction time of, say, ~6 hours, this process may easily take a week. With admin rights, the process will be much faster.
BTW: When you start using scientific software professionally, there may be more packages that you need to install (LaTeX, screen, ...), so the process continues.
If you tell the IT people that this is the (unavoidable) process with most scientific software, and you will need to work with ~10 such tools during your PhD, then you should have a good point. On a technical level, there may also be the possibility for "admin light" access, namely by whitelisting your username for "sudo"ing a package installation request. Perhaps that is an option as well in your case.

This is an excellent suggestion -- admin light rights such that I am able to install scientific software would address my key concerns. Although I would still be at their mercy for anything else (6 hours is very optimistic -- my last request took 2 weeks!).

Sorry but none of this requires admin rights on a Linux machine. On OS X, sure. The only conceivable use of admin rights might be to change the default shell so that no default configuration is loaded but that’s strictly optional.

@KonradRudolph even if this does not quite cut it for my Linux machine, knowing that it will for my OS X laptop is also very useful.

I had to hand-hack my .tex install.

"Repeat steps 1-3 many times until done." I am getting back-flashes.

Not sure why this is up-voted so much - as various people have pointed out you DO NOT require admin rights to install software in Linux and in fact it is very bad practice to have admin rights for no reason... I work in IT and people doing stuff like this is the main cause of viruses/ransomware running rampant. Permissions should be the minimum required.

@Milney: because this might not be something the IT is willing to do on a per-user basis. It might be easier for them to give administration rights straight away. If I were the original poster, though, I would also argue that I can be trusted. I have not seen any colleague facing problems such as viruses despite all of them having root access on their machine.

@Milney No, but we need a decent packaging system that allows users to install software, otherwise a simple sudo apt install somesoftware may turn into hours or days of reading the instructions, compiling, missing prerequisites and dependency hell. Can we at least agree on this? Guix, mentioned above, seems promising (but I am not sure how it handles dependency conflicts with the local package manager). Give academics such a packaging system and I am sure no one will ask for root access anymore.

@Milney The rationale behind this answer is essentially what Federico wrote. You can of course install your own version of gcc/clang locally together with all required libraries. It just takes a long time (dependencies) and when something during the process doesn't work (compilation error messages, etc.), it is terribly difficult to find the culprit, especially since libraries and programs may use build tools that you are not familiar with (e.g., how do you tell Cmake where to find a custom-built library? Lots of documentation to be read to fix this). [...]

[...] Requiring a researcher, who actually wants to do research to get familiar with all the Linux build tools means days or even weeks of time spent that could be spent on research. Sure, the necessity to learn this may arise later, but I've also never heard of someone getting a virus from an "apt-get install" without adding custom package sources.

@DCTLib Some programming language-specific package systems (Haskell's Cabal, Python's pip) can install packages in the user's home directory. For others: it's not that hard or error-prone to configure build tools to pass "-I${HOME}/include" and "-L${HOME}/lib" as flags to the compiler resp. linker, or set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH appropriately, etc. etc. As Milney points out, there is absolutely no need for root privileges to use dependencies. It makes it easier, yes, but often only because software distributors don't write the installation manual with security in mind.

In other words, you need to perform developer task, effectively meaning you need the permissions that any developer would need.

So why not get them to give you permission to use apt-get then? Note: This is NOT the same as ROOT

@Milney Yes, this is what I proposed in the very last paragraph of the answer.

@DCTLib Indeed, i upvoted your answer, I was reiterating this to the other people in these comments who are still insisting root access is needed in their responses for some reason

Actually, I don't think the most important thing to convey to the powers that be is that you have a valid reason to have admin rights.  More important is to convince them that you will handle the admin rights in a responsible way.
The trick is to convey the latter while ostensibly writing about the former.
Think about it from their point of view.  They are tired of distracted professors causing security risks and decided to draw a clear line in the sand.
In your one or two paragraph request, you need to come across very knowledgeable and with excellent judgment.  Also indicate you would ask for help if in ANY doubt about anything.
It would be ideal if you could find an ally on the inside to support your request.

I sympathise with their problem, they need to protect both themselves and overconfident users. I can easily imagine were they resourced/managed I might be more willing to trust them to manage my PC for me.  I have had such rights, under the previous system (which required me to demonstrate that I knew what I was doing, to waive some rights to technical support, and to take responsibility for things going wrong), for over 10 years. But, the new policy is now much more restrictive, and they are not better resourced.

Ex IT manager here... If someone tried to convince me they would be responsible, I would ask how?  If they didn't come up with a good reason on the spot I would be done talking to them.  This isn't really an answer but a comment, and one that could cause the OP more issues.

"handle the admin rights in a responsible way" without exception includes NOT installing unapproved software on the system. Especially freeware. So the OP should definitely not use the "install software" capability in any of their substantiation for needing admin privileges. Which unfortunately, seems to be the only reason the OP wants admin privileges. Thus, the OP probably needs to learn how most of the world works and live with the delays or learn to plan ahead and request installation of SW well ahead of it being needed.

@Dunk Yeah... You're not an academic, are you?

@Dunk What do you mean by freeware exactly? The OP is talking in large part about Linux. We're not talking about installing freeware, as I understand it, but primarily free software.

@Dunk - Even in private industry, there are companies where software engineers are not assumed to be idiots and are given admin rights on their computers.  Obviously, even in enlightened work environments, if someone is seen to exercise poor judgment, then he is given a shorter leash.

This is exactly how it works in the University where I am at. I don't think IT really cares why I need admin rights per see. Other than being able to articulate the reason being a good indicator that i know what I'm doing.

When I was in this situation it was important to stress that I would NOT ask any questions; the only support I could get after getting admin rights was getting my computer restored to its original state. That was fine with me. Otherwise they are afraid of getting too many questions on things they never decided to support.

@cfr - Re:"We're not talking about installing freeware".  The OP said "have to wait several weeks for a piece of (free) software to be installed.". From Wikipedia - "Freeware is proprietary software that is available for use at no monetary cost."  What part isn't freeware that we are talking about?

@aparente001 - It isn't a matter of thinking the software engineers are idiots. It is a matter of protecting the network and most software engineers don't know the vulnerabilities present in the various applications that are out there. That's the reason for getting IT approval for being able to install applications. They are supposed to be subscribing to services that keep track of applications and known vulnerabilities. Obviously, the assumption that "software engineers" are not assumed to be idiots is inherently wrong, judging by the large number of data breaches that occur all the time.

@Dunk Freeware, like open office, linux, gimp, LaTeX, TeX, python, Octave, Torch, Java, CDK, CellProfiler, Abalone, Chromium, Cling, BSD?  The fact is every network can be compromised; you cannot have a reasonably large organization with a firewall of "unsafe" between it and the internet, and actually expect to make everything inside secure.  Vulnerabilities appear in all software.  There is no true scotsman.

@Dunk 'Free software' is not the same as 'freeware'. The definition you quote applies to freeware. It does not apply to free software. Free software is not proprietary. Linux is free software. It is not freeware. The same is true for GIMP, LaTeX, TeX, Python, Chromium, BSD etc. (Not sure about the others listed in the previous comment, though Java certainly can be free.) You are talking about free as in beer. I understood the OP to be primarily talking about free as in freedom. The LaTeX packages I've published are free software, but they are certainly not freeware.

@blankip : Also an IT ex-manager.  If an under resourced IT shop told me their panicked, draconian policies were going to be deployed responsibly and efficiently, I'd ask "How?"  If they came up with the same answer they had been using for years defending their inability to respond in a timely fashion, I would be done talking to them.  "I'm right because I'm right" is very popular stupidity in underperforming IT shops.

@cfr - being that there is no 'authority' who decides what is 'freeware' and what is not then I can't disagree with your definition. All I can say is my definition of 'freeware' is looser than the Wikipedia definition.  Too me, any software that can be downloaded and used for 'free' which includes Linux, GIMP etc....is freeware.

@Dunk You were the one who quoted Wikipedia's definition ;). You asked which part of it didn't apply. As far as I know, that is the generally accepted definition. In any case, if you mean 'freeware' in the broader sense, your claim that freeware is generally a source of trojans and malware is obviously false. If the OP really means 'Windows' when they say 'Linux' and 'freeware' when they say 'free software', then your claim has merit. Otherwise, not. Note that RHEL is freeware according to your definition, even if you pay for it because you can download the code etc. for nothing.

@Dunk Note that the network itself is subject to all kinds of applications running on it because users can connect their personal machines to eduroam. So the situation is quite unlike those in some settings where there really are protections in place to exclude non-approved software or non-approved machines accessing the network. Typically, a non-managed machine will have a similar level of access, whereas managed machines have direct access to internal resources. From the OP's comments, this seems to be the case currently. So it is really unclear how managing all university machines helps.

@Dunk Oh, please. I'm just a software dev, but if my department had to get IT approval for every library we use, we'd never ship. We literally have about 6 or 7 times as many devs as IT has people (and most of our IT doesn't have the skill set to support devs).  Even if you did that, it wouldn't stop the devs from writing code that can be breached, which is where most vulnerabilities come from. I'm confident that the role of academics is similar in regard to needing to cobble together tools to solve their problems. Approving everything is a higher cost than most orgs can afford to pay.

@Dunk And if you're talking about things like Heartbleed, Shellshock, and other recent, very visible vulnerabilities, most of those are in extremely standard software that IT would install as a matter of course without anyone even needing to ask. (A number of them even come installed in the OS out of the box.)

The following makes excessive assumptions about what your work entails, but...

Get computing time on an external HPC resource (in the UK that would be Archer or a field specific resource such as DiRAC), as you need compute resource beyond that which your university can provide.
Say to the university that, as HPC systems run on Linux and they update software on their own release cycles, it's necessary for you to have your own Linux-based system that you can update to match so you can effectively develop and maintain the code to run on the HPC system.

This argument is much more convincing if you've already got point 1, or a history of using HPC or similar computing resource, of course.

At my institution, anyone in the C.S. department can get admin access under the assumption that we need to develop, compile, and test new software (including assessment of various packages). I just got this access last week, in fact. Support/request from the chairperson helps.

Indeed, this was previously our system too!

Normally, you only need sudo access to your package manager in order to be able to develop, except when you develop kernel & drivers stuff.

There were several mentions of sudo, but what keeps you from doing sudo su -? They could restrict it to a particular program, but then it would either be not very useful or bypassable (for example sudo gcc -E ... -o /etc/sudoers). With package manager access you can always: remove something, replace the kernel, install something that has install time configuration and allows writing arbitrary files. And installing/compiling programs and libraries in your user directory should not be a problem.

I am an academic at a UK university. What you are requesting is not unusual and others have given good answers. There is however another solution which we have for research computers which is that the users have admin rights on their local research machines and have limited internet access on a different subnet which gives these machines the same access to internet resources as guests but does not give priviledged access to internal university systems. This provides the level of internal network management and control which is necessary these days but gives flexibility for researchers. It does also mean that a researcher who also does teaching/admin may need a separate desktop computer as well as their research computer.
The other issue you have to realise is that admin rights are a privilege not a right in this environment. If they are misused you can expect to lose them. I have known this to happen where researchers have set stupid root passwords on their machines or where research students have downloaded illegal cracked software rather than asking for properly licensed installs.

The situation is currently as you describe, my machine has limited access to shared drives, etc, and I have control over it.  I'm happy with this compromise. But, the new policy is much more draconian.

Writing from the perspective of an IT professional (and former academic) who worked for a major University creating a managed operating environment to try and stop this thing - there isn't one.  There is a faux-administrator access that gets around virtually any legitimate use of real administrator access so that's probably the best you can (should be able to) expect.
The amount of pain to IT support caused by incompetent administration of computers is incalculable.  The number of machines they had to deal with that had been compromised by viruses, malware, bootleg software and a whole host of unpleasantness that you can probably imagine that is a consequence of attaching admin level users to minimally filtered and monitored high speed internet connections.
In order for a University to protect itself from criminal proceedings, it has to be able to control the computers attached to its' network.  The "good old days" sadly are over and it is no longer acceptable for academic staff to run torrent software committing massive levels of IP violation / theft from a university owned computer.
Your fundamental problem is not that you need Admin rights.  What you need is not to be delayed when installing software.  So, what that means is you need a better funded IT department.  That is what you should be pushing for.
The IT department should have the resources to "package" software quickly.  This means preparing it for safe installation and uninstallation along with any dependencies - like Linux package management but centrally administered.  Good package management allows for self service installation so that would mean you'd be piggybacking off of the efforts of the whole University - if anyone else requested a piece of software, it would then become available to everyone and if it was free you could self install with a click.  If it wasn't free you could provide approval to release the funds and get it installed automatically.
On a more practical note, if you absolutely have to play with admin level privileges - do it in a virtual machine.  Preferably on a cloud based server.
Commercial IT is moving heavily in this direction and if my experience is anything to go by the computer science academics are very out of date in this regard and are not preparing their students for the real world.  Look at tools like "Docker", "Bitnami" and "Eclipse Che" to see various examples of the sorts of tools that are available to pretty much eliminate the need for bare metal admin access.
EDIT
A few more points.
1) Academics (generally) do not appreciate how proactive you have to be to secure a network.  It's poor use of their time to scour CERT looking for reasons to patch stuff so they don't - with unfortunate consequences.
2) If you have admin access, you will be able to cause much more damage.  Click on an e-mail link from a non-privileged account and it's no big deal.  Click on one as root and your account be sending a phishing e-mail to the entire University address book within half an hour - causing man-weeks of clean-up for the IT department.
3) There really are no real legitimate requirements for full admin access these days that I can think of:-
Compiling software -> Isolated VM
Running old software -> Virtualized bubble (research "App-V" for example)
4) The advantages of a properly managed desktop are not just one-sided.  If your IT department gets it right you will be able to:-

Log into any machine on campus and access your data (and your data will be regularly backed up and reside on a secure fail-safe infrastructure). No more USB sticks with critical and confidential data on them.  No more academics in tears because the only copy of their work was kept on a single external HDD that failed.
Have access to that data from a home computer should you need it.  Possibly with some caveats (having the right anti-virus installed maybe).
Have a LOT of available space if you need it.
Therefore if your machine fails you will be up & running less than fifteen minutes after the delivery of the replacement (depending on how many non-standard packages you have installed).  Boeing has had this for YEARS.  It saves them a fortune.
The ability to install (and uninstall) common software without involving IT.
Access to temporary (isolated from the internet) VMs in a secure University owned cloud with admin access to do tasks that absolutely need it.  You should be able to stand up a virtual PC in less than 5 minutes and then discard it when you're done.
This technology can also be used to create virtual teaching labs with just the software you need for the class rather than expecting your IT staff to get 9+ units worth of required software to "play nice" with each other in the two weeks before the first semester starts.
Need a long-lived VM to do significant compute over several days/weeks/months? - service request.  Possible cost to you if your need is excessive but the cost will be competitive with AWS or MS Azure equivalents.
Less stressed IT support because they're not overloaded cleaning up the fallout from the latest phishing scam so response times should be much better.  In fact, you should have a published service catalogue from IT detailing what services they offer, how much they cost and how quickly you can expect a response.  This is all standard stuff they should have time for if the environment becomes more controlled.

Seriously, this is a positive move.  Embrace it, support it and you will be better off.

Push for a better funded IT... and an unicorn for commuting. You'll likely have the same luck. I am administering my own machine, and I have never needed IT's help, freeing their time to deal with the people that need it. Plus, many academic packages are free for academics, so I can download and compile a copy, but the license prohibits its redistribution, so the university wouldn't be able to include it in their repository.

@Davidmh I know it's unlikely that the Unis will come to their senses but we can hope ;).  Unfortunately in my experience for every academic that can competently administer their computer, there are at least two who think they can - and can't and even more who lose interest and don't patch regularly.  You know, all those boring ITIL things that you pay IT to do so you don't have to :).  Generally speaking the costs incurred by giving admin to categories 2 & 3 far outweighs the savings by letting 1 do it their way...

continued... Also, the cost of having a completely chaotic out of control environment dwarfs any other cost.  The Uni IT here is probably set to save several IT support person's full by doing this.  Hopefully they redistribute them to improve support call response times.  Then the original complaint evaporates.

-1. Your ideas appear completely out of touch with reality. You talk about "compromised" computers and assume bad faith in everyone using your network, where in reality a machine not owned by the university has absolutely no difference with an average compter connected to an average ISP. ISPs deal with the "completely chaotic out of control" environment 24/7 with no issues whatsoever. The correct action to dealing with insecure computers is to isolate them from the secure network.

@ March Ho So your "in touch with reality" remedy is to "isolate them from the secure network" - good luck with that.  Try that stunt at a major university and you'll find one of the computers you've locked out for being an Estonian spam relay is owned by a personal friend of a senior member of the government who then calls your VC to complain about you, personally - or so I've heard ;).  Also, ISPs have no responsibility for you intranet or the software you run - just the pipe.  Uni IT is responsible for everything from your keyboard to the final pipe out of the campus.  TOTALLY different.

@mcottle users can always install a VM with root access and do all the bad things that you want to prevent them from doing, and having it as unpatched as they may want to. (And you cannot forbid using VM since they are, sadly, a very common ways of shipping academic software). Cloud based solutions aren't an option when you need to process TB of data.

@Davidmh - You're actually way better off with your heavy compute in the cloud.  Cheaper, faster, more flexible in our experience.  Our cloud compute had direct access to our NetApp vFilers.  You saved your "TBs of data" to your home directory (mapped to the vFilers - available everywhere not just your computer - login cross-campus all good), dialed up the Cloud compute and pointed it at your data.  It had fibre channel access to the vFilers and was darn near as quick as an external HDD.

How does not having admin rights (or having them only in a VM) prevent me for running torrent software? 2. If a workstation in your network can become an Estonian spam relay, then there is something very wrong with your firewall configuration.

@FedericoPoloni 1. By blocking VMs from the internet. 2. Not mine, theirs :)  If the reason for admin is to compile software, you can download the source from your locked down desktop, save it in a shared location the VM has access to and compile it in situ.  That's not a reason anymore.  In windows-land you can even package an application and run it in a virtual bubble with admin access.  So the user doesn't get admin - the app does.  All this talk about admin is SO last century and shows a) how out of date academics are with IT state of the art and b) Why it would be mad to give them admin

Point #4 is nice in theory, but good luck on that in practice. I've been an academic at some great institutions, but IT is always underfunded and outgunned, particularly for personal machine support. My last institution could adequately be described as the best private school in the state, and while we had amazing Linux sysadmins that managed our research servers, all of our personal machine support started with a call to a help desk staffed with undergrads and took days to weeks to resolve simple issues.

@David Yep, but if you get the environment under control, the same amount of IT spend gets you much better service.  The roadblock is usually a bunch of academics wanting something they don't need (e.g. admin access) and then having a hissy fit that would have shamed my three year old when they're told they can't have it.  Logic does not come into it sadly.  At least 80% of the University would be much better off with a locked down desktop as I've described and exceptions who do need something special can usually be accommodated without giving away the keys to the kingdom.

@mcottle I've been in IT and I've been in academia. Throwing out ignorant statements about who is the "roadblock" is a 100% guaranteed recipe for institutional failure. Believe me when I say that I've dealt with academics throwing hissy fits. But, the function of the research university is to enable research. Research is what pays the bills and keeps everything going, and IT throwing up roadblocks to effective research is never a valid solution, even on the theory that things will be OK once everything is "under control". If the current IT situation does not give you #4, you don't have it.

@David it's chicken and egg isn't it?  In a corporate, an SOE can be imposed by the CEO and all resistance is steamrolled.  After the dust settles, most of the original holdouts realise they're actually better off.  Unis don't work like that so you have to fight for years trying to persuade, wasting huge amounts of money trying to save even more.  My point is that if you have a well managed IT environment, the impact on research is actually minimal.  The reason Universities don't have them is ignorance and politics.

@mcottle The reason that universities don't function well is because the people there are stupid and stubborn? You sound like you have very little experience with either university IT or with corporate IT. I'm not sure which.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

The ability to install (and uninstall) common software without involving IT. But it's the uncommon software that's precisely the problem (software to analyse data from a piece of kit that only outputs a proprieatary format).  This is made worse by the fact that they don't even provide a lot of common FOSS like GIMP, inkscape in many places.

I similarly disagree with this comment.  As the head of the technology department at two different universities I was given full admin access to our entire network both times.  IT never had a problem with me, especially since I could troubleshoot issues on the spot without calling in trouble tickets.

@DaveKaye - The head of a technology department has to be an extreme edge case.  My point is that MOST academic staff do not need admin access to their computers and that on the whole it is more costly to provide it and clean up the messes than to lock it down and deal with the increased load on the support staff.  There will always be exceptions.  There will be very few of them that cannot be served by admin access to an isolated VM.  Also, look at the original question, OP was fishing for plausible reasons to keep root access to a Linux box because they couldn't think of any.  I rest my case

@mcottle, indeed most don't.  But some do.  Extreme edge case or not.  If the university IT is not responsive and an individual prof can handle his/her computer in a responsible manner what difference does it make?  I used to give out this privilege to any faculty I trusted.  Very quickly revoked if abused.  My point being "lock first, trust second" is a nice abstraction but I'm not sure how useful it is for computing in an academic environment where the needs can change from prof to prof, semester to semester and even day to day.

What bothers me most in this IT policy is the requirement that "all PCs connected to the network are managed by IT". Since you claim to have installed Linux on your computer without the help of IT, I doubt it is managed by university's IT service at all. Since you've had unrestricted admin access to to your machine for some time, there is no reasonable way for the IT to enforce any policy without reinstalling whatever system they are able to manage (even if it's Linux, it has to be installed by them to make sure you cannot get admin rights in spite of their restrictions).
Note that if your IT support is unprofessional enough to simply change your root password, you'll still have admin access to your system via sudo or by setting setuid attribute on commands which need admin rights.

The policy is that they are going to reinstall/reconfigure  Linux to ensure that they have the necessary controls. I agree that this is unreasonable!

How does this answer the question?

@DavidRicherby the implied answer I got from this is "Don't worry about it, they can't enforce the policy" but it definitely could be clearer.

This type of policy is usually enforced by firing those breaking it.

@StigHemmer I'd expect the machine to be removed from the network in the first instance.

The network at my institution is whitelisted, so only computers blessed by IT can connect. They can definitely enforce it.

@Davidmh How does this whitelist work exactly? If it's based on MAC addresses, then it's trivial to get around it.

The best reason for needing admin rights (ran IT for large company for 3 years) is that you have a program that needs to run and be changed often, and this requires admin rights.
What you have outlined in your second paragraph, well it is why we want to keep admin rights from users.  I would certainly not tell this to your local school's IT department, as it could cause you to have a harder time in gaining admin rights.  The most troublesome part is the free software bit (which many times could have attached trojans or malware), to go along with the fact that you might use your admin rights to turn off your security software.
You are much better off coming up with a specific piece of software that you must be admin to run or make config changes (often).  A better way to handle this - and this is up to your local IT's ability - is to set up a VM and have admin access to this VM environment.
For instance when I used to compile a lot, I liked to do so in my old XP VM environment with 512MB allocated.  This might take longer but I could do other things while compiling.
As for everything else you said, it doesn't make sense.  The risk of working on projects is losing information.  Find a way to back things up through drives or online.  I don't see how this has anything to do with your IT.  Acting like your IT's lack of ability is hurting your research or projects just sounds far fetched.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

What are good, unarguable reasons, that I might need local admin rights.

One bulletproof reason for having admin rights is that you develop and test new OS kernels.
Even if they only give you access to modify the boot loader you can get bonus points for writing your own system call that sets the current process ID to root.

Just say that you want to install Linux and that you will waive any requirements for technical support in writing to their superior and to yours, though you hope they might help if the need arises.

This looks like you did not read the question.  The OP is already running Linux, and wants to respond to a new change in University policy.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
Is there any term that describes the main example that goes through the entire research paper?
One of the comments I received on my journal paper was that it lacks a "running example":

the paper would benefit much from a running example that could be used in the introduction to motivate the idea and referred to in later sections to illustrate algorithms

I understand the idea of an example that works like a backbone throughout the paper and connects all the ideas and sections in order to make them easier to understand.
Now my question is, do we call it "running example" or does it have any other term? I would like to add a brief on the example at the end of the introduction, but I'm baffled with what should I call it.
Note: my field is computer science, but I believe this applies to some other areas too.

The term is "running example" - which you seem to already know. I don't understand the question.

@ff524 My question, is it suitable to use the wording "running example". For example (... referring to our running example, we can apply x .... etc).

Yes, perfectly suitable.

Running example, or illustrative example.

Alternatively, MacGuffin. (But don't use it in a real paper).

When I use a running example (as I frequently do), I just call it a running example.  I don't know any reason why that wouldn't be a good enough term.

"CASE STUDY"
Having done a quick search across peer-reviewed papers and so on there aren't many examples of 'running examples' jumping out...
Notably, the only paper in the search to feature 'running example' in the title clarifies its meaning (as a 'case study', which is the term I'd use and which is surely more readily understood...)

A Running Example for Use in a Class on Design of Experiments
by Kowalski, Scott
Classroom discussion is an effective way for students to interact and
  learn. A class on design of experiments usually covers many related
  design strategies. It can be useful to have one running example
  (similar to a case study) that can be used throughout the class to
  extend earlier topics to later more complex topics. This article
  presents one such running example that studies plant growth mostly in
  a greenhouse. The greenhouse experiment begins with a simple t-test
  and ends with response surface methodology. In between, most of the
  standard topics covered in a one-semester design of experiments class
  are discussed. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

You can also see, although it pertains to books more so than publications, that according to Google NGRAM viewer a "case study" is by far the more common term.

Please don't call it a case study. While lithic is correct that the term "case study" is frequently used, it is a quite well-defined research method that implies much more than just using a common example to use in a paper.

I think it's a matter of field here, as in computer science where an algorithm is tested (?) then a running example seems more suitable than a case study. In other fields, like biological ones, running example as a term probably makes very little sense.


text:
Should I include large tables in paper?
I am writing a computer science paper, and as part of what I did, I have a set of tests I used to evaluate my results against existing methods.
In terms of preliminary raw data, I have tables of hundreds of values of which I then take statistical parameters (e.g. mean and standard deviation).
From a scientific perspective I feel I should include the actual results that I got, such that if I forget something in my writeup, e.g. the mode, other researchers can look at my data and corroborate or criticize my results. Basically it seems good form to have all the data in the paper.
But if I do include the raw results I will get a good couple of pages that are nothing but numbers on a table. Which seems bloated for an article and I suspect reviewers won't like it I am not sure how I should handle this.

How do I distribute the CSV? Do I post it on github and provide a link in the paper and call it a day?

@Libor I think you should post your comments as an answer.

Talk to your editor. Their job is to help you disseminate supplemental information, while keeping paper to style and readable.
As Libor mentions in comments, modern journals accept wide range of supplemental materials, and either will host the files (CSV) or suggest the ways to deposit it

No.  Hundreds of values is too many for a table in a PDF document.  Imagine the frustration of someone trying to convert those numbers to a spreadsheet.
Depending on the situation, you might choose to present the values as:

A plot
A table in a CSV file
A database

Any of which could be published by the journal or a repository.
In some cases summary statistics like mean are sufficient.

Providing "hundreds" of values in a database format (e.g. SQLite) seems like overkill ... ?