text:
Stackoverflow reputation - worth mentioning in personal statement?
It is going to be my last year in school, and I am thinking about studies abroad - I would love to study computer science. Lately, I started participating more in Stackoverflow, answering to PHP, MySQL, and HTML questions. If I manage to answer to a decent amount of questions(now I have 26, I am thinking about ~75-100) would it be worth mentioning in my personal statement (not the number, but that I am participating in the community, providing university with my nickname used here). I have other experiences that I am planning to write there:

I have taught people online of how to use microcomputers
I have taught people of HTML basics
I am writing my extended essay on computer science (I am attending IB diploma program)
I am currently working on quite a big project for my school using not spaghetti code, but a normal MVC architecture and OOP (at least, I am trying)

Is participating in Stackoverflow community worth mentioning among these (or maybe it is even stronger than what I mentioned?), or not?

I doubt that it would count for much. However, in an interview it might be worth mentioning that you contribute here, but also that you've learned a lot exploring the wide variety of issues raised on SO.  Also, reputation is relatively easy to build on very large sites as long as you don't say dumb stuff. There are a lot of users, so a lot of voters. And if you are an obsessive user it might be a negative.

I don't think these numbers mean much. According to SO metrics, I have reached 285000 people on here and 161000 people on math.stackexchange (and no one ever thanked me, lol). I think I accumulated more than 10k reputation on each of these sites and gave most of it away through bounties. I am neither a seasoned academic nor a mathematician. I think there are better ways to improve my chances when it comes to applying for faculty positions or industry research positions than giving my SO stats. Plus a lot of my stats come from asking dumb questions.

Voting to close as off-topic as this is a question about undergraduate admissions.

Seems like a good idea to me.  Don't get me wrong, StackExchange participation isn't some huge achievement, but it seems like a pretty reasonable sort of external engagement for a student hoping to enter undergrad.  I mean, don't applicants normally list school clubs and whatnot?


text:
How to reference sources when I only took the ideas?
I am writing my essay where I analyze how different text search algorithms work and compare their efficiency in specific situations.
I did not actually take even a sentence from where I have read about the algorithms, everything is written by myself, how I understood it, but of course I did not invent those algorithms, and I want (and I think this is a compulsory) to actually refer to those sources, but how do I do it? Should I simply create a footnote even though my essay does not contain any sentence from that source? My essay is going to be passed to some plagiarism checker, therefore, I do not want any problems with "fake footnotes just to make my essay look stronger" or something like that. We use ISO 690 citing style.

How does your case differ from usual references? Few references come with a quote.

A citation does not imply that you copied language from the source. In fact, copying language from a source without marking it as a direct quotation would be plagiarism with or without a citation.

You should make it clear in the text who invented the algorithms, and cite next to the names, usually. Write something like:

The XYZ search algorithm [1], works by...
Foo et al. [2] propose an algorithm which...

And if I, for example use this article, which explains how one of my analyzed algorithms work, but I rewrite the ideas how I understand them, I need to simply refer to that article as a citation or could I say that I "took ideas" from it? like:
Ideas taken from Author name, title, http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~dekhtyar/448-Spring2013/lectures/lec03.448.pdf, etc...?

"took ideas" is a bit vague. I'd say something like "As explained in the CSC448 lecture notes by Alexander Dekhtyar, the Rabin-Karp Algorithm works by..." Or, if you're taking some comparison/analysis of multiple algorithms: "In his lecture notes, Alexander Dekhtyar classifies search algorithms into X categories, ... [I adopt this classification in this essay because it is useful in the following manner...]"

Essentially, be clear on which ideas you took.

Would only add that the citation should come at the first reference to the idea that is being used. I'd note too that a plagiarism checker will have lots of false positives. It is hard to discuss complex ideas with no intersection of phrasing with the original, even in scrupulous scholarship.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Should I do handover of tools and methodologies I have developed?
In some months my contract at a research university will end.
During my employment I have developed tools and methodologies that are of interest to the research group.
At present, I am the only person in that group that has in-depth knowledge on several topics.
Nonetheless, my employment will likely not continue.
My priorities are to finish up research papers, so that I can apply elsewhere.
I expect to be asked to hand over the knowledge that I developed.
Now my question: To what extent should I cooperate?
One the one hand, cooperation seems like the decent thing to do.
I am dependent on my employer's recommendations, and do not want to burn bridges.

On the other hand, I would abolish my employer's need for me, which feels like self-sabotage.
I have offered on several occasions in the past to hand over that knowledge and to collaborate.
Now, frankly, my highest priority is to get output, and not train somebody (or multiple people).

You will get very different answers from people who view your position as a job versus people who view your position as part of an academic endeavor. You'll probably have to decide yourself which way you want to position yourself.

How can you self-sabotage if you and your employer are already aware you're leaving?

This is where it gets murky. On more than one occasion, people within that group, and also those that can make hiring decisions have indicated that they would keep me because of experience and general helpfulness, if not xyz. Xyz being complications. Self-sabotage would be to remove the experience part. For me, continued employment would mean stronger papers.

I don't understand. Why did they pay you? Was it just for your happy face in the coffee lounge? Or was it for your work?

@BryanKrause I am not so sure the answers would be that different. Failing to handover work product in industry is unprofessional, and may have negative effects on reputation, references, and future employment prospects. I would expect the same to apply in academia.

@PatriciaShanahan I'd agree with you except for the plethora of highly upvoted answers at Workplace that pretty much suggest you're all on your own, you owe nothing to your company, unless they assign you to transfer work it's their fault for not cross-training, etc. HNQ questions here have received the same sentiment.

@BryanKrause The "you're all on your own" sentiments from Workplace are generally in the form of "don't feel bad about quitting," not about intentionally sabatoging a knowledge transfer, which is the position that OP is considering. I don't think I've ever seen anyone advocate for that kind of behavior.

@pipinstallMonica OP says they offered on several occasions to hand stuff over. That sort of thing often brings out the knives on Workplace: "You offered and now it's your employers fault." See https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/9128/how-can-i-prepare-for-getting-hit-by-a-bus for example. I don't see OP suggesting they intentionally sabotage anything, just that given their limited time it's better for them, but hurtful to the lab, if they focus on tangible output.

@BryanKrause OP said: To what extent should I cooperate? There's a difference between an employer not taking steps to reduce the bus factor and an employee not complying with exactly those steps. Whatever happened in the past, frankly, doesn't matter because the university is still OP's employer.

@pipinstallMonica I entirely agree with you, I was just warning that the suggestions will depend on how people view the situation and the relationship between employer and employee in this situation.

Yes, I'm afraid you do need to hand over all work product that you created while employed. You were part of a team and if you try to subvert the team by withholding things that arise from your employment on the team you are trying to blackmail them into keeping you employed. I smell a lawsuit here.
But you should cooperate fully just as a way to boost your own future career. How do you want to be spoken of in this field? Do you hope that people will want to collaborate with you in the future? What value will your tools have if no one wants to come near you in the future.
And without you or your contribution, the team will find someone who can provide an equivalent service. You may feel indispensable, but you are not.
Sorry to be so harsh.

+1 for the second paragraphs. In most fields lawsuits are perhaps unlikely, but you want to be known as a professional researcher who helps people, not as one of the difficult people who try to make themselves indispensible.

I think this was the harshness that I needed.

Glad if it helps. Good luck in your career.

@MorganRodgers, that is a different situation, as you can continue to collaborate with anyone, no matter your employer (with few exceptions).

Right now you are feeling "indispensable", although since you're leaving this position, you're apparently not that indispensable.
Hoarding knowledge to protect your position is an old technique, but as an academic, I would say that it's backwards thinking.
For one, your goal as an academic should be to grow all of humanity's knowledge. So as a matter of general principle, you shouldn't be hoarding.
But there's also something in it for you: if you developed a genuinely useful tool that other academics will want to use, write a good paper about it and get it published beyond your current institution. Such "utility publications" can accumulate very large numbers of citations and make a name for you in academic circles. For example, CRISPR is basically a "tool" but it's considered an absolute breakthrough in molecular biology.
Done right, sharing your knowledge can boost your career to new heights, while hoarding knowledge will at best keep you at your current level.

"Hoarding knowledge to protect your position is an old technique" and it is also a technique that has failed many times. (It has also worked sometimes, but I wouldn't bet on it working out in this situation)

In the end, you'll have to decide for yourself.
Properly handing over is decent, required by employment contract, and probably best for you (via professional reputation)
As you are already recognized for your helpfulness, don't sabotage that reputation.
Don't be surprised if your supervisor isn't interested in a proper handover, though.

Long version: Here's what'd do/did do.

To what extent should I cooperate? One the one hand, cooperation seems like the decent thing to do. I am dependent on my employer's recommendations, and do not want to burn bridges.

Cooperating is not only the decent thing to do, properly handing over your work is also one of your duties as employee.

On the other hand, I would abolish my employer's need for me, which feels like self-sabotage.

Overall, I don't think so - I think good cooperation is also in your direct own interest.

Sure, there may be (are) employers/supervisors out there that decide on the basis of such need.
My experience with academic employers is that they'd rather abandon the tools, though.
The more so, the less they can judge the importance and quality of the tools (see also Why do many talented scientists write horrible software? - which does not imply anything about the quality of your tools, but this is roughly what I'd expect someone without in-depth knowledge of your code to estimate).
This means: even if they objectively need you they are unlikely to realize how much*.
Meaning your actual advantage on keeping that knowledge for yourself is probably close to zero.

Now consider the potential advantages of leaving with good cooperation:

This is part of building up your professional reputation. Of course, you may decide for a path of least resistance and not throw in more work than you can get away with. But if you want to build up a recommendation of integrity, being dependable and reliable and writing reliable software etc., this is a chance to get a step further in that direction.
Your next employer/supervisor may be interested in your attitude towards collaboration - after decently handing over your work, you have a "hard data point" that you can refer to.
Academia is a small world - your employer's recommendations (or warnings) possibly won't end with the letter of recommendation you get now. People talk at conferences, etc.
My experience of employers abandoning tools is that this can actually be
to the extent that they may not even want the work handed over. In that case, you'd win two ways: you did the decent and correct thing and offered handing over. And you don't even need to actually give up your advantage in knowledge.

One anecdata point: Personally, I can say that I have ongoing collaboration with a group I left almost 10 years ago, and other former employers/groups are now my customers (I'm freelancer now, though still associated with academic research projects).
And I have customers of whom I know that they'd not hire me if I had not that professional reputation of integrity.

 those that can make hiring decisions have indicated that they would keep me because of experience and general helpfulness, if not [...] complications.

Don't sabotage your helpfulness!

* I'm speaking as a chemist who programs as part of my work. If you are computer scientist in a CS group, the chances that your good code is recognized as such may be much greater for you than for me. Similarly, my supervisors would have been more likely to recognize the need to keep someone looking after instrumentation that they understand better than they understand software quality.

There are already several good answers. Cooperating is indicated here. People in your academic area will talk to other people. And you will eventually want a job or a grant or a LOR.
There is one aspect I didn't see covered. If the university has left the knowledge transfer very late, and they are expecting you to spend your own time after the end of the contract, then that's out of bounds. You can and should expect to be paid during the time it takes to prep and give the knowledge transfer.
Maybe you can be kind and cooperative about it. If it's an hour or two that might be forgivable. Especially if you have a good relationship with the people at the university that you worked with. Even if it's a day, it might be OK, if you are generally feeling good about the experience.
But if they are wanting weeks of your time after your contract, then they need to show you the money for your time. It is a very bad precedent to work for nothing.

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


text:
Does registering in Editorial Manager® and indicating that I am available as a reviewer increase my chances of being invited to review manuscripts?
Do editors check the database of registered users in Editorial Manager®, their keywords and ORCID records when selecting reviewers? I believe the majority of reviewers are assigned based on the references of the manuscript, the editor's personal preference and knowledge and the list of suggested reviewers. However, will merely registering in Editorial Manager® increase my chances of being invited? I am an early career researcher, with a few publications and some reviewer experience. The question refers specifically to journals that use Editorial Manager®, but it can be applied to other journal submission systems.

This depends on how the editor finds reviewers. Some (most?) editors select reviewers the way you described: from the references, the editor's personal contacts, etc. Others search the system. Editorial Manager allows the authors to select the subfield of their paper, which in turn can be matched to reviewers' interests. An editor who's searching the database for reviewers then can find you if you register.
One thing is certain: registering in Editorial Manager won't lower your chances of being invited (unless you have a track record of writing bad reviews, since your reviews will be tracked by the system).


text:
Should I publish a linear programming method despite my advisor's advice?
TL;DR: I developed a way of solving systems of equations which is up to 25,000x faster than base methods. I want to publish but my advisor doesn't think it's worth it.

I work as a data scientist with hyperspectral data. In this area, we treat every single pixel as its own system of equations. Because of this, we need to solve potentially thousands of systems of equations. Obviously, if we use traditional tools this is exceptionally slow and potentially not worth our time. However, each problem is relatively small, think 1 variable with ~100 non-linear equations.
I came up with 2 separate systems to solve these equations much faster. The first one adapts MATLAB's fminbnd so that every single one of these problems can be solved at once. This allows the function evaluation to take advantage of vectorized processing which in many languages, particularly research based languages gives a drastic speedup. See the MATLAB codebase. In addition, this allowed us to use GPUs to solve the problem resulting in a much larger performance increase. All told, this allows us to have a ~300-1000x performance speedup.
The second system is meant for solving much larger systems of equations. This uses the same idea but with a Levenburg-Marquardt implementation. This utilizes MATLAB's pagefun and with an aggressive implementation, this beats out the best global solver I could find by a factor of 25,000 for the same results (this method also allowed me to obtain an order of magnitude improvement for my results with a 4000x speedup).
While these results are impressive, my advisor wants me to focus on my primary research and wants me to present those results. I'd like to present both results as I believe they are both valuable to the body of knowledge but my advisor has always been honest with me and I feel like I should follow his lead.
Should I publish this linear programming method despite my advisor's advice?

This has appeared in the review closure queue,and I'm voting to close for two reasons. 1. The details of your work are off-topic, as this SE is about academia, not mathematics or computer science. 2. That leaves a question of "should I do as my advisor says or not", and nobody can answer that as nobody knows the situation as well as you or your advisor. So it's an impossible question for this site.
Good luck!

I understand if you close it as the question could be construed as asking for specific math/programming help. If I just asked the question w/o context there would be no helpful answers as no one would have any idea about the situation except for the likely chance that I was just an arrogant grad student who thinks he knows better than his advisor. I chose to include details to help give an understanding without the intent to ask for help with my research. I believe I've developed something useful and am confused as to why my advisor isn't as excited about it as I am.

It's not that you're asking for math/programming help but, rather, that your question can only be answered by somebody with an in-depth knowledge of your specific area of study. Essentially, a large part of "should I publish this" boils down to an evaluation of your work.

That's because it doesn't actually decrease the number of calculations, just makes the calculations more efficient via optimized linear algebra libraries most current methods don't use.

At any rate, the question's already been answered.

@Servaes To somebody who's actually solving equations, a massive improvement in the constant hidden by big-O notation could be very significant. Asymptotic complexity isn't the only game in town.

@Servaes Case in point

Are you really sure that what you're doing is novel?  This is the question you need to ask when publishing.  It sounds like the science is your field of expertise and not the algorithms.  While your solution is perhaps faster than the solvers you have tried, that's not evidence that it is not known in the literature.  Did you do a literature review to make sure this is truly a novel approach and not just fiddling with implementation?  From what you've described, I'm guessing the answer is no.

It is good to have publications. It is also good to follow the advice of your advisor for many reasons. Advisors have some say over your future, of course, so caution is indicated, at least, in every case.
Note first that it has been many years since I was current with the algorithms of integer and linear programming. I suspect you are more current and your advisor more so, so be a bit careful in analyzing what I say below.
The field in general is quite mature and the existing algorithms are very sophisticated. This was true 30 year ago, in fact. If the field has settled down since then there is little urgency in publishing now, as it is unlikely that you would be beaten to publication if you wait. You can make your advisor happy and, indeed, make progress on your main work without abandoning what you have.
However, I think that a real advance should be questioned and you should be the one to question it. In particular, it may be that the reason for such good results is that your specific problem has characteristics that make this possible and your algorithm is nicely tailored to a special case. The possibility of that actually opens a door for your future work. If it is true, then knowing and describing that special case would be very useful, along with the algorithm.
Also, if it is, indeed, a special case and you have tested only with the confines of this case then your results may not apply generally. It would be good to know, before you publish, whether this is true or not. And it would be especially good for you if you are the one to discover this. Fortunately, you can test your algorithm on a wider class of problems found in the literature. Thus, you can, perhaps, rule out the situation in which you have an anomaly. But your primary work should likely come first.

Thank you, the main reason I'm unsure is that I'm not talking about the algorithm itself but rather the idea that linear programming can be vectorized for cases in which the function evaluation can be vectorized. Currently, there are ~10 functions I'm working with and this ideology applies to all of them largely because I am using traditional methods developed 50 years ago but in a way that makes them incredibly fast on modern computers. You are right though, I should respect my advisor for a variety of reasons while also testing the viability and usefulness of my method.

@Durkee, there have been a lot of books since, but 25 years ago, I found this book to be indispensable on the algorithms. https://www.amazon.com/Linear-Programming-Books-Mathematical-Sciences/dp/0716715872

I prefer Gärtner and Matoušek for theory and geometric intuition and Vanderbei for the (baseline) practical details.

I do not know, who is "right". Your contributions look quite impressive, though. So I am trying here to come up with arguments that might lead your supervisor to his/her decision. I deliberately omit politics and strategising.

Your new method seems to work very well on your data. Does it work well enough on other kinds of data? It might be the nature of your data that allows for such speedups. While this would still be of interest for your actual narrow topic, it might not qualify as a broad solution.
You use MatLab. This is probably the correct tool for you to use. This might be not the right tool for the general claim. (In other words, you'd be more or less desk-rejected if you present your MatLab solution to the specialists in linear programming. I am not sure, this would happen, but this totally might happen. Your supervisor probably knows more.) Thus, you'd need to re-write your code in C and/or in CUDA, with major and non-trivial investments towards memory alignment, pointer juggling, low-level optimisations, bandwidth optimisation, and what not. Writing fast low-level code takes a lot of time. It might be that this time is better spent doing other things.
This is a part of a publication build-up for a thesis, right? The way your supervisor envisions your thesis, this linear programming thing has no place there. (This is quite strange, as typically, as long as it is related (and it is) and successful, it does not really matter.)
Your supervisor has little expertise in that other field, does not feel like he/she can provide sufficient guidance, and would rather give up on that direction completely. This is also quite untypical, even if own expertise is lacking, one would typically be acquainted with colleagues,  who are experts in that particular area. If a PhD candidate slowly wanders to that area, one might even think of a joint supervision.

So, to re-iterate. I do not know the rationale of your supervisor behind his/her decision, but it might be one of these. Do you have a good and informal enough relationship to simply ask why?

This method should work well for other data as it wraps around traditional linear programming methods and vectorizes them. The main thing is utilizing existing vectorization tools(MATLAB's strength) to solve many problems at once. You are right, I simply do not have time to code this up properly in C and/or CUDA. My publication record should not be a problem as is and my advisor would rather us publish fewer higher impact papers as opposed to many low-impact papers. As for the general direction, my advisor has little knowledge on the field and most has been independent.

I'll ask him when I see him again and inquire with some of the university's applied math department as I need some guidance there anyway with my Levenburg-Marquardt implementation. I'm Electrical Engineering so this is definitely not my or my advisor's field.

Communication is best solution, I guess. As for Levenberg-Marquardt, there is a levmar lib out there: https://github.com/bkloppenborg/simtoi/tree/master/lib/levmar-2.6

Loops can be slower in MATLAB, so using matrix operations to apply a particular algorithm to all the values is going to be faster than looping through the values and applying the algorithm individually. Since the number of calculations doesn't change, you haven't come up with anything scientifically novel, you have just found a way to use MATLAB more efficiently.
When I profiled your demo code in MATLAB, I noticed that the built-in fminbnd spent  a lot of its time fetching a termination string and loading the optimisation settings structure. Maybe if this function was streamlined to the bare bones it would be much faster. The point is, these things are all just implementation details of same algorithm. Unless you are coming up with some previously unknown way of leveraging the CPU or GPU instruction set to speed up things I don't think the implementation is scientifically interesting.
So, your advisor is correct. You should focus on your primary research. The vectorisation has technical merit, speeding up things is a huge help (I spent hours and hours in front of MATLAB doing similar things, speed up roots for me please hehe). So I think you should properly document your code (no "I don't know what is going on here" easter eggs) and share it on File Exchange so that other people can take advantage of the tricks you have learnt. (GitHub as well, which has greater exposure)

Hard pill to swallow but you're probably correct. Tbh, it does irritate me how scientifically novel things are praised but technically novel things are not. For most of my research, the technical elements are what makes everything viable but all anyone cares about is the raw science.

Figure out why your advisor recommends against publication.
If we assume that your advisor is a reasonable person, then he's probably against you publishing these results for concrete reasons. Why? Does he think it's not significant enough, not extendable, pointless, etc? If you can provide great counterarguments for your advisor's objections, then you have a good chance of changing your advisor's mind.
In some sense, your advisor is your first peer reviewer. If you can't change your advisor's mind, then you're not likely to convince an editor or reviewer either.

I will expand on a point that Oleg Lobachev mentioned in his answer:

Your new method seems to work very well on your data. Does it work well enough on other kinds of data? It might be the nature of your data that allows for such speedups. While this would still be of interest for your actual narrow topic, it might not qualify as a broad solution.

In areas where performance is important (including but not limited to mathematical algorithms), you will often find that standard benchmarks have been developed in order to compare different methods. These may include a range of difficult cases in order to get an idea not just of the method's speed, but also of its robustness.
If you have a new method that you think might be better than existing methods, I'd recommend looking for a relevant set of benchmark problems and testing it on those to get a picture of overall performance. You may find that it performs well on some problem classes but fails on others.
If you're lucky enough to find that your method reliably outperforms the market leaders, then that's a major advance and you should look to publish, or alternatively explore the possibility of commercialising it, depending on how you feel about such things and any restrictions that might apply.
In this case, something like Hans Mittelmann's "Benchmarks for Optimization Software" might be relevant. As an example, this page compares solver performance on a set of 46 linear problems. Gurobi, CPLEX, and Xpress were able to solve all 46 of the benchmark problems, with Gurobi being the fastest of those three by a small margin. MATLAB-R2018a solved 42/46 and was about ten times slower than Gurobi overall, according to the metric used.


text:
How to cite raw data shared by a client?
My capstone student project is a consultation report. How do I cite a raw data sample (extracted from Google AdWords) shared directly by my client? No preference between APA and MLA, it's my only source for the report.

In a similar situation (supercomputer benchmarks that never appeared in a complete form in print), I cited the guy who was so kind to share them to me as:

Yon Tihiy, in a private communication. 2018

Obviously, you guess that above was not his real name.


text:
Citing multiple images scraped from website
I scraped a few thousand images from an open source online collection (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection --> Open Access Artworks) for a coding project. I want to cite the selected works from the collection with one Harvard style citation for my code report's bibliography. None of them show up in the report itself, they're just research materials. Does anyone have a suggestion for this?

In this case it turns out that the Metropolitan Museum has made available a large number of public-domain works under the Creative Commons Zero license. Legally, I think this means you don't need to cite anything, but you'll probably still want to, both in order to be a good scholar and to encourage the museum to keep expanding their digital collection.
Individually citing thousands of individual images is obviously excessive, especially when they don't show up in the paper. Instead, I would suggest citing one or more of the datasets they have made available on GitHub. You might not have used these directly, but if they include all the images you've used this makes for an inclusive reference. Also, they write

Attribution
Please consider attributing or citing The Metropolitan Museum of Art's CC0 select datasets, especially with respect to research or publication. Attribution supports efforts to release other datasets in the future. It also reduces the amount of "orphaned data," helping to retain source links.

For reproducibility reasons, you might also want to include a list of all the pictures (or their accession codes) in some kind of electronic Supplemental Material.
For completeness, if you want to cite an individual image, their FAQ states

How should I cite and credit a CC0 image that I've downloaded from The Met's website?
CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) does not require any attribution or credit, but as an educational institution, the Museum hopes that you will include a citation. All the information necessary for proper citation of a CC0 image is available on the Collection page for that object.
A sample object credit line format is as follows: "The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York," followed by the specific information identified as the "Credit Line" on the Collection page for each work of art. The citation could also include the URL www.metmuseum.org.

Great response. Unfortunately with the report deadline, I settled for a makeshift Harvard image citation, clarifying that it was a 'collection' of images available through the open source page URL. The images were not available through the meta data set on their Github, though I did use that data and cited it separately. It probably would have been good to include a list of accession codes, perhaps in an annotation, and I'll keep that in mind for the future. Thanks!


text:
Citing directly in research document
is it possible to reference a citation directly?
Example:
"the expected values considering the gain and the cost of each behavior as in [9]"
or should one instead explicitly mention the authors?
Example:
"the expected values considering the gain and the cost of each behavior as detailed by Gürcan et al.[9]"

This is field dependent. In math, it is commonly accepted to treat the citation as a grammatical object. In some fields, this is not done.

Not only field dependant, but also which standards APA, Harvard etc.

As others has correctly noted, this is journal/publisher dependent (assuming it's for journal and not for thesis; there will typically be a set of very well defined rules at the university for thesis).
Having said that, if you are unable to find specific information, don't worry. The journal office will typically send it back telling you exactly what changes to make. This step would happen before it goes to the editor, so it is unlikely to negatively impact review.

As the comments have noted, it depends on the field and the referencing style. A journal will have a "style guide for authors" which will refer the appropriate referencing style as well as any idiosyncracies particular to that journal.
You will see such variety as authors being cited as cost of each behavior as detailed by Gürcan et al.[9] or cost of each behavior as detailed by Gürcan et al. (2009) or cost of each behavior[9].
If the document is not for submission to a journal then you could check previous or example submissions/documents, and in the absence of any of that you could adopt the referencing style "normally" used in your field. Or ask a colleague/collaborator/supervisor for advice if you are still unsure.

First, it is indeed journal, style, or field dependent.
Papers that refer to works as 1 or [4,7,12,13,20] are difficult to read and communicate very little sense of timeline. This may be appropriate but I personally believe this method should be avoided where possible.
To answer you directly, your citation attempt in the question is certainly feasible from some journals and fields. I would do what is best for your paper's voice as it communicates to your readers.
I believe my stated position is consistent with that of Dr. Gerald Brown, a National Academy of Engineering (NAE) member and professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. See below. I welcome differing perspectives and views from other disciplines.
Brown, Gerald G. 2004 "How To Write About Operations Research," PHALANX, Vol. 37, No. 3, p. 7. Accessed 27 July 2018.
http://faculty.nps.edu/gbrown/docs/Brown-%20howtowriteaboutor3.pdf


text:
Google Scholar: how to request indexing of well-known conference
I realized that Google hasn't properly indexed the well-known "Extending Database Technology" (EDBT) conference of 2019. The proceedings are uploaded via OpenProceedings and are usually indexed by Google Scholar.
Is there a "proper way" to request (re-)indexing? I am somewhat surprised to see that for many papers only privately hosted and outdated Arxiv versions are listed, while the EDBT conference is one of few exceptions with its fully open proceedings.

You can't! The algorithm is quite complex, eventually it will get indexed automatically.

https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html#crawl

Well, "eventually" three years later? :(

@HermanToothrot obscure \neq complex. Do not bow to the might reputation of the bigggest advertising company of the world, Alphabet.


text:
Is it normal to feel a bit unmotivated at the start of PhD programme for not getting the exact topic of interest for my PhD?
I am a second year PhD student in Canada. My first year was spent pursuing courses and getting a hang on the PhD topic that I am supposed to work for the next 4-5 years.
I always wanted to work in nanomechanics of materials, however, after applying for a year, I got accepted in just two programs ( one in the US and other in Canada).
The position in Canada was the most aligned to my interests (computational mechanics) and thus chose to come here for my PhD. However, a point to be noted, I did not get the exact research topic that I wanted work on, it's close but not exact.
This was disheartening at first, so when I started my PhD in Canada, I was bit unmotivated and wasted time feeling sad about not getting to work on the exact topic of interest.
I was not very enthusiastic about my research topic last year and wasted sometime thinking about what might have been. Is this something PhD students usually face?

As far as I am concerned, I don't know personally someone who is or was in the same situation as you. However, being 4 years in in my own Ph. D. and knowing a lot of people who are doing one or finished one, I can maybe bring some perspective to your situation.
Among people I know and including myself, I've seen two typical situations upon starting a Ph. D.:

either the student doesn't know exactly the topic (s)he will work on and only got a broad field to investigate,
either the student is actually deepening a topic (s)he worked on during a master thesis (this is my case).

The first situation seems fairly common in my experience and is arguably worse than yours. Not knowing what you will be working on for the 4-5 next years is probably more disheartening than having a topic that is close to your interest but not exactly matching what you had in mind at first. Sometimes, people change of topic every 6 months (because they didn't find anything with the previous topic they were working on) in the beginning and don't seem much more advanced 2 years after starting to work on their Ph. D. thesis. In fact, most people I know who stopped their Ph. D. started off like this (note that this isn't a rule of thumb; I've seen people in the same situation finishing their Ph. D. as well).
The second situation sounds, of course, ideal. You start your Ph. D. already knowing what to do; sometimes you even get to publish what you worked on during your master thesis right from the start or by slightly re-working it/expanding it (depending on how your master thesis was received). However, this doesn't necessarily shield you from other issues you can encounter while doing a Ph. D., such as:

having trouble to explain to friends and family what the heck is your thesis about (don't underestimate this problem, and if possible, train yourself to explain your topic in the simplest way),
getting sometimes the feeling that your research doesn't really interest people in your own field (because people keep asking you during conferences what's the endgoal of it, because your paper submissions get rejected because reviewers have trouble understanding what you're doing, etc.),
doubting about whether you should finish or quit your Ph. D. when you're halfway through it, even if you managed to publish some papers (a phenomenon which has been dubbed as "the Valley of Shit"),
having irregular schedules (except if your university enforce them), sometimes working all the time (even the week-end) for some weeks and sometimes not working much because you're unsure about what you will do next (or because you want to slow down a bit), which can also be a problem on the social side,
etc.

What I'm trying to say with my points above is that doing a Ph. D. is a difficult task anyway, even if you manage to get the best possible topic, and it's perfectly normal to feel unmotivated at some point. Doing a Ph. D. isn't just an intellectual challenge.
Also, be aware that the way you progress in your research can lead to developments you wouldn't have expected at first. In my case, for academic reasons, I had to write a kind of big planning for the first years at the start of my Ph. D., but I can guarantee you it looks nothing like what I actually did up to now. I don't know much about your research topic, but you can already keep in mind that you might not always work exactly on what you expected to, and you might even reconnect with the topic you first had in mind or go into completely different directions. I hope this helps.

Agree with Jef's reply.
It sounds like you are stuck and ruminating as well which is preventing you from moving on with your current PhD. Many people work on a topic that they are less interested in and move towards their area of interest in their post-doc or free time. The distance between computational mechanics is not very far from nanomechanics of materials...
There are great resources to tackle rumination and the possibly obsessive thoughts about what could have been. Definitely consider visiting your student counselling or see your primary care person. Having a professional assessment can help get a better overall feel of where you are at the moment and how best to move forward.
Rumination that is impacting your PhD is serious and deserves time and effort to process. Imagine all the opportunities that you are missing now just because you are interested in nanomechanics. Maybe the skills you could have learnt from computational mechanics could have made amazing advances in nanomechanics but you were unable to appreciate it at the time...
https://www.healthline.com/health/how-to-stop-ruminating


text:
Where can I find research papers to read? (not currently in academia)
I have graduated from university and am no longer enrolled. Even while there, I didn't really have any experience finding and reading research papers written by others.
Is there an online database where people post their papers so that others can download to read?
Looking for a list of these databases/websites. Paid is okay too.
Update After reading the comments and answers below, I'd like to add that I am looking for research papers in the Computer Science / Computer Engineering / Electrical Engineering fields, and that I have graduated a few years ago from an undergraduate Computer Science program. I have not attended graduate school nor pursued a PhD.

But the question is also exceedingly unspecific: It doesn't even list a particular field.

After reading the comments and answers below, I'd like to add that I am looking for research papers in the Computer Science / Computer Engineering / Electrical Engineering fields, and that I have graduated a few years ago from an undergraduate Computer Science program. I have not attended graduate school nor pursued a PhD.

This is going to depend a lot on your discipline. Some disciplines are very good at keeping papers and preprints publically available. For example, most math and physics papers get papers put up on the arXiv but this is rarer in other fields. Some other fields put papers up on SSRN, but some fields don't up up almost any preprints.
It isn't clear from your question if you've completed just your undergraduate or did some graduate work. Given your statement about not having looked at papers before, I'm guessing this mean that you have either finished just an undergrad or finished a master's but nothing beyond that. If that's the case, I'm also not sure that finding papers will in general be useful for you. It might help to clarify why you want to find papers and what your goals are.

After reading the comments and answers below, I'd like to add that I am looking for research papers in the Computer Science / Computer Engineering / Electrical Engineering fields, and that I have graduated a few years ago from an undergraduate Computer Science program. I have not attended graduate school nor pursued a PhD.

Some journals give free access to articles after publication for limited time.
If you need older articles:

google scholar crawls open copies and arXiv
researchgate (ask directly the corresponding author for a copy)
reddit/scholar
sci-hub

Read the according thesis if available, but often thesis are publicly published on university servers

It’s worth noting that downloading papers from sci-hub (usually) constitutes copyright violation. It’s unlikely that Elsevier is going to go after him for downloading things for personal use, but it might get him in trouble with his employer for violating their network usage policies if he did so at work.

You don't specify a location, but where I live, using my public library card (i.e. free membership to municipal library), I have access to thousands of journals from hundreds of publishers via the library's subscriptions from EBSCOhost and ProQuest aggregators.
These include several hundred journals under the subject heading Computer Science as well as several hundred under Engineering. My library's subscription includes only a handful of ACM and IEEE journals, so if you want those, your best bet is to go directly to the source. However, if you're looking for a broader selection of international academic journals, I recommend consulting your local library.
Another library suggestion, if the public library doesn't work for you, is to contact your alma mater to see whether there are any library services available to alumni.

There are a lot of paper databases out there you can use to find some papers to read:

ACM: https://www.acm.org/
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/
IEEEXplorer: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/
ScienceDirect: https://www.sciencedirect.com/
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/

But not all the retrieved papers from these services are freely available. If you have access to some University network, probably most of the paid papers will be unlocked for you. Most of the Universities around the world have agreements with major publishers.
If you are interested, I've made a tool to help me to find papers for my research https://github.com/jonatasgrosman/findpapers. You just need to write a query, and the tool will automatically search for matches on many databases for you :)

If you're confident that you know the foundations or you're willing to put in many hours to catch up, then kudos to you! Literature review is a grueling process and you're going to find that it's going to take you a while for you to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Since you specified that your background is in Comp Sci and Elec Eng, you'll find plenty of high quality papers in ieeeXplore and elsevier. If you do generalized searches like in google scholar, you may get mixed results since that pulls in papers from all over the google-space. But you can get lucky and it might be easier to start out from there.
Good luck!


text:
Students requesting to switch partners mid term
I'm a TA in a graduate level course. Students in the course have to hand in a weekly assignment which is done in pairs.
A few days ago, one of the students approached the professor and told her that they are not getting along with their partner and requested to join another pair of students, in practice creating a group of three students and leaving their current partner on their own. The professor asked me and the second TA for our opinion in this matter.
When we inquired further, the student stated (roughly) that they think the partner does not take the course seriously, does not put enough effort and expects them to do all the work. They also stated that success in this course is important for them and that they wish to work along with a similarly motivated student. (They named a specific student they would like to work with. That student already has partner so it would make a group of three students.)
While the request itself sounds legitimate, we are reluctant to comply with it, because we are not happy with the idea of students working on assignments in groups of more than two since we think this is unlikely to lead to situations where all students in the group put in a reasonable amount of effort. Also we are concerned of what will happen with the current partner of the student if we comply.
Thirdly, although we have no proof on this matter, both the professor and I independently had the gut feeling that the request might (mind you, I said might, again there's no proof and we may be totally wrong here) also be related to racial tensions.
A possible solution we were thinking about is to have a conversation with both students and see if we can make them work together in a more productive way.
I will be most grateful for any tips as to how to make this conversation  productive and as pleasant as possible to the students involved.
Also if someone has any other thoughts on this matter such as creative solutions or convincing arguments for/against the obvious solutions such as refusing the request, complying with the request, doing some reshuffling in the pairs in order to be able to comply with the request and still guarantee all students are working in pairs, I will be most grateful.

How were pairs initially formed? Was it by student choice? Professor assigned? Would it be possible to ask a group of 3 to do extra work beyond what is asked of a group of 2? Or for a lone student do be resonsible for less than that of a pair?

Students were allowed to choose their own partners. The course stuff was not involved in teaming up the students, and we do not know how these two students came to work together. Likely they just happened to sit next to when another or something similar.

How do you handle an odd number of students? How do you handle drops? All of these are related to your question. Also, you need to implement something like periodic peer evaluation. But you need to be sophisticated about it. And the answers here that suggest periodic shuffling are probably your best bet.

@ Buffy: Can you please elaborate about the idea of peer evaluations and how to implement them? Do you mean something in the spirit of what AlbinoRhino suggested? Is there written materiel about this that I can consult?

Peer evaluations mean you get each student to answer a set of questions or rate each team member against a scale and evaluate the responses of how each team member is performing or perceived to perform compared to their colleagues. Best done electronically instead of by paper... Working out how you "sum" the values is a good exercise... dealing with errors and missing info...

See this question of mine and at least my own answer to it:https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/q/3408/1293

@ Solar Mike: Thank you for the explanation. In general what would be the objective of such evaluations (may be a bit off topic but you got me curious).

@SolarMike, actually, you can be more subtle. Students often balk at giving negative feedback about peers and the results are too likely to skew positive. OR animosity will overcome judgement.

@user1614062 did you read my comment?

@Buffy had some students give very clear negative feedback which was totally justified...

@  Heutl: Not yet. I posted this question among other things in order to get advice and what exactly to say to the so-called "bad" student.

Does the work have to be done with the same pair for each assignment (for instance if work for one assignment depends heavily on the results from the previous one)? If not, do you have a pair-reshuffling procedure?

Pairing up students at the beginning of the semester means students don't necessarily know their pair and can't assess their work ethic before pairing up. Being stuck for an entire semester with a pair who doesn't do their share can be rather unfair. If the assignments are independent, consider allowing all pairs to change over the course of the semester.

Could you create a group of 4?  While it would create less "work" on each of their parts, you could then have 3 different accounts of a single person not pulling their work and potentially have more background to approach said person.

@usernumber even if you know your partner beforehand, stuff can happen, that means a partner drops out of the course, is less motivated than usual etc. Imho if there is the need for paired working then there needs to be a way for individual assessment, i.e. people clearly attributing parts of the work to themselves and getting credit based on that or you need randomisation components that help level the impact of individual members of the group (simplest: larger group, shuffling)

The problem is not well posed: it is completely nonsense to pair up students in case you really want to give them the grades that each one deserves.

I'm surprised that you hadn't foreseen this. Many students have complaints about their randomly-assigned partners - and frankly, many of these complaints are legitimate. I recommend switching partners weekly. This gives three advantages:

No one has an unfair advantage (in grades or workload) from having been assigned an awesome partner, or an unfair disadvantage from getting a bad partner; such things tend to average out.
Students can learn to work with many different types of people
Students can "grade" their partners and provide feedback -- by the end of the course, the students (and you) will have a statistically-significant measure of each student's ability to work in groups (I stole this idea from Randy Pausch's book).

At any rate -- you have come this far, it may be too late to switch your paradigm this time (though maybe not). If this is the case: I don't think either of the options you presented are fair -- first, because groups of three and one are unequal, and second, because there are likely more lopsided groups in which one member is suffering in silence.
What I would suggest instead is to ask all students whether they'd prefer to keep their current partner or to be randomly assigned a new partner. You can do this confidentially, and maybe give some wiggle room, saying that you may break up pairs even if neither member requests a switch. You can then shuffle those pairs in which at least one member requests a new partner.

If I was a student with a bad partner, a random reshuffle among pairs that request it would mean there's a 50% chance I'd replace the partner I want to get away from with another partner someone else wanted to get away from. So it's only wise to join the reshuffle pool if my partner is below the average of the reshuffle pool. The stable equilibrium of such a system would be a pool only containing the pair with the absolute worst partner in the class :)

Calculating the stable equilibrium implies a game of complete information, and implies that each partner has an absolute "goodness" rather than a compatibility score. :-) Regardless, I agree this solution does not fully address the unfairness -- "the rich stay rich" while those with lazy or low-achieving partners only have a chance of getting someone better. But this dominates the strategy of doing nothing, in which "the poor" will definitely stay poor. It's also not manifestly unfair like allowing groups of one or three would be

+1 for citing Randy Pausch. Truly a great book!

As this is a weekly assignment, then I would consider randomly shuffling all the students every two weeks or each week...
This forces more communication and reduces the effect of any single poor pairing.
It also prevents the "stars" coagulating together permanently and exposes them to the skills of needing to manage teams/partners who are at different levels. It is a useful skill, to get the best out of others.

I would add to allow student to choose to work alone from the start. So called 'stars' will dread be pulled down to a more incompetent level but would still work fine alone.

@deags having had to put 230 students into project teams so that the faculty have fewer projects to mark along with the 20 minute presentations that have to be watched we did not go the individual route... But this is something we built up over 15 semesters of running our project... BTW anywhere between 120 to 240 students per semester...

That gives an interesting POV from the faculty. Will frustrate many capable solo students though. Perhaps allowing only 1-3 students per group to go the solo route would be a mid-point. While the practicality for the teacher to assign groups cant be denied, its also not fair for students to be forced to deal with leeches or to not give them a way to deal with them.

@deags and how do you deal with leeches at work? do the managers sack them?

@Heutl Although logically sound, real-life "group work" doesn't look like that.  A project manager will divvy up the work, the manager will allocate the resources, and the group member does what he is assigned to do. Academic group work looked nothing like job collaborations because 1) students have no idea what they're doing -- 2) there is no proper chain of command.  If I have a problem with a colleague, I go to my manager, I go to HR, I escalate.  I NEVER have to convince them to do work or "try to get along".  If they do no work, it's actually "not my problem".

@Heutl The key thing is, if a real-life work colleague really does no work, I'm not responsible for his output. My teammate, at my level, is my manager's problem, not mine. I cannot be penalized for my co-worker's incompetence. In the academic world, somehow it becomes my problem if my teammate doesn't do anything due to the "group grade" BS. It makes no sense to me.

@Solar Mike Working with other people (not necessarily in groups) is indeed an important skill, but learning to fend off leeches and ass**** is equally important. At work people complain to the manager/HR and then people are moved or set to work apart. Not to mention school group work ignores that some of the students (most likely the stars) are not going out to be employees but will want to work on their own projects and business.

@Heutl There is another factor to consider. Stars very likely are the ones that will end up working alone or with peeps they want because they are likely to start their own business. Not everyone out of school is set to be a employee. Even people going into the gig economy will more likely be working relatively alone.

@deags there are many "stars" that like the practical part they are doing and wouldn't want to start a business that distracts them from it. And the typical problem with "stars" in companies is that they have a really hard time working with others - which often makes them not more a star than their colleagues who may not be as awesome in the technical skills but can work together without causing offence to the level that people do not dare to ask them stuff that would be important to clarify. So yes, especially the stars would need to learn team work.

@deags which in general - unless management skills are part of the course - indeed doesn't mean their grades should be affected by partners who are less committed than them.

@FrankHopkins That way of making "stars" fit into a team isn't exactly how you get them to perform at their best. Steve Jobs have a bunch of stars around him that are really hard to work with, not to mention that he himself is actually a complete arse and is notoriously hard to work with! You do something he doesn't like he'll blast you in your face and drop f-bombs. Bill Gates isn't as illogical, but man, he can drill your technological knowledge until you're sweating bullets.

@Nelson Steve Jobs is no longer with us, so past tense should be used...

@Heutl , they are not necessarily so, but they might as well be............, any student even. Forcing people to work in groups arguing having a future need to deal with other employees ignores the reality that job conditions are changing and that not all student wish or will become employees but rather be the ones creating business.

@Nelson completely agree. Well, Jobs is dead, but there are also plenty of other real life examples of such, and forcing a star to work with less capable people will only hinder the general operations. It's amazing how this stuff seems to be some sort of work taboo for many teachers even though it affects all the students.

The student made a request for a reason, whatever that reason is,  and ignoring her reason is possibly hurting her education. What I mean is this:
I've been teaching at the university level for decades and what I've learned through the years is that students don't come to me with requests to break the status quo, to be different from everyone else, to do things in a way that will mess up my original plans for the class, unless there's a pretty good reason. At least not most of the time. And I've learned through the years that it's more important to give them the benefit of the doubt and be responsible  for the needs of the respectful students, even if I might accidentally allow a very small number of slackers to slip through in the process.
Afterall, I'm an authority figure in their eyes.  You are, too. You're an authority figure. It was probably difficult for that student to approach you and request a partner change. Therefore, something is probably messing up her education. She probably needs that partner change.
For all you know, one of the partners in the pair, possibly the partner the student wants to drop, may be, for example, an alcoholic. He may be disruptive, causing the two to argue almost violently everytime they talk.  Or maybe one of them is sexually or racially biased, so that someone on that team is repeatedly getting hurt very badly. Maybe there's even sexual harassment. Or maybe they're too mismatched academically. Maybe when they try to work together, one makes the other feel stupid and there are serious arguments. Maybe a much  less academically  skilled student in the partnership is becoming seriously depressed.
The point is, the possibilities are endless and you don't know all the facts. You never will, even if you ask the students.
Years ago, one of my students killed himself. He was a high performer on a team of three who complained a lot about the other members of his group working on their project. He was taking several other courses in addition to mine, but after his death, which was about 2/3 of the way through a statistics course I was teaching and which he had been in, I began rethinking group projects.
Since then, I allow students to select 1- or 2- or 3- person projects and then to pick their own groups. My classes run the gamut: a few 1-person projects are done but most projects that are turned in are 2-person projects. A couple are 3-person projects.  The difficulty levels are matched to the number of people working on them. Occasionally, a student requests a group change. I always allow it, no questions asked, without delay.

Working with the same pair for a full semester is already an interesting proposal.  When I was a teacher I made sure to randomize pairs.  It taught them good communication skills and not to trust anyone directly at their word :P
Reshuffling rarely hurts, it exposes the students to working with various people, an important skill in almost ANY field.  I do not know the difficulty of the subject nor how the average student performs, but if the class seems to generally understand the assignments, I believe reshuffling every few assignments or even every assignment would be a good idea, even if this student had not made this request.  As long you do not suspect it will tank anyones grades because the roles are so established at this point that the class could not adapt.
I would be wary of making a group of 3 and a group of one.  This seems blatantly unfair, not only to the one, but to all the normal pairs of two.
I would not have the talk with the two of them, its not your job to intervene in that way unless the motivated student asks.  Otherwise it is their responsibility to talk with their partner about this.
And I would not switch partners specifically for the two groups so that each group is two, but the motivated student gets their request.  You will then be obligated to fulfill similar requests to be fair.

Thank you for you input. I would however appreciate if you can explain what exactly you suggest in practice? Reshuffling the entire class just in order to deal with this request without explicitly creating a precedence?

Announce that you would like to encourage learning to work with a variety of people, and in that spirit, you are shuffling the partners.  Do not give students a choice of partner, just shuffle randomly with no previous pairs allowed. Also ask for feedback on how assignments felt after the switch. A few very short answers such as rating on a scale of 1-10 the difficulty with previous partner vs new, if they feel they learned something new by working with another person, etc.  Also keep an eye out for the response from the new partner of the "unmotivated" student.

Allow both students to present their work alone or in pair rather than to change teams or make trios. That way, if one of them really is doing all the work then  that person will be happier to not feed of a leech while the other will have to start working or fail the course.

I would let the person go off and do the project by themself, but I wouldn't let them join another team and unfairly have 3 people to a team while others only have 2.
If the 1 person really is doing all the work, and the other team member isn't doing anything.. then the 1 person will be more then happy to go solo on the project. (Many group projects can be done solo anyways, it's just professors are pushed to have more group projects, so they shove out a project that can be done solo, but as a group project, just to tell their administrative oversight committee that they're meeting "group project requirements").
I had a group project in grad school where me and 2 other folks were in a team, but I was doing all the work. I told the prof mid-semester that since I was already doing all the work, I'd rather just do the group project all by myself and leave those other two folks hanging then keep doing all the work and letting them partake in the grade I was doing all the work for.
Prof was ok with that idea.
Because it wouldn't have me go join another team and throw off the balance.
Colleges these days seem to be inundated with group projects, because businesses have told colleges they're getting a bunch of grads that don't seem to do well in project teams. So, colleges have ramped up group projects to give students "experience" in group work.
But, college group projects are not like real work projects.
In work, there is incentive to do your job. If you don't, you get fired.
In college, there is often no incentive to work, because if you have at least 1 person in the team willing to do whatever it takes to make a good grade, and there's no punishment system in place to punish slackers, then slackers will just let the hard worker do all the work while slacking off.
So, if you haven't already got a peer review system in place, you need to put one in place. This lets each member of the group project grade the others. So, if one slacker is in the group, everyone else will give them an F. And, you have to decide how that works into the final project grade. EG: usually a professor will count the peer review as 50% of the project grade, and will then give their own grade to cover the other 50%. But, if a professor sees everyone giving a slacker an F, they'll probably skew their own grade to an F as well and average it out. But, the professor uses their 50% part of the grade to "Curve" the grade if needed. (Because colleges seem to yell at professors for flunking classes, even if the student is a slacking POS.)
The problem with peer review is when you end up with a group of slackers and 1 hard worker. The slackers can gang up on the hard worker and threaten them with a bad peer review score if they don't bust their hump. If that's the case, you'd hope the hard worker would tell the professor. But, it might not happen. So, you can still have 1 person doing all the hard work, but a bunch of slackers forcing them into the predicament.
I had one class where the professor let us fire a team member mid-semester AND do a peer review at end of semester... all to proactively take care of slackers. If the slacker was fired, they had to complete the project on their own and automatically got an F on the peer review. This lit a fire under a lot of students' rears, because nobody wanted to get fired.
Problem then was that the project could easily be done solo.. there wasn't enough work to go around. So, everyone in the group was worried about being fired and trying to jump on any work they could do.
(To handle the "demand" for group projects, a lot of professors are simply taking their class project, which they used to have students do individually, and just have them do it as a group now. So, you have projects that are pretty simple to do, and thus a hard worker can do it all, which just means slackers look at it and go "meh, I know one person can do that, so I'll just hang back until that person gets on it.")
Basically, college group projects are designed to promote slacking and reward it. Professors that think a student will magically rise up and show management skills by "whipping everyone into shape" are delusional unless they give the students a punishment mechanism by which to give their threats to the slackers some teeth.
The fact that your professor doesn't have anything like this in place yet is a bit alarming.
As a TA, I'd say let this person do the project by themselves (but not join the other group).. so they can cut the slacker loose... and also get with your professor to get a peer review system in place STAT.

Talk to your Professor more and ask her to get advice from someone with more experience, because this is a big an potentially challenging issue and you hint that it may rightly or wrongly be about race.  If it were me, I think I would have a meeting with the other student (since you have already talked to the first one) and then have a meeting with them together.  Basically you need to help them to come a place where they can work together effectively and maybe help them analyze in a calm why why the pairing is not working.

Is the other student even aware of an issue?
Has the first student discussed it with them?
Is there miscommunication or cultural incompetency?

You have no idea.  I think you can always point out to them if they really seem to be having a conflict that it is essential in life that they be able to work with people that they don't like or whose personal styles they find irritating.   But I think that you/the professor should contact whoever runs the teaching and learning center to get some advice about how to talk about this.
Also, I think this is a lesson learned about overreliance on group work for the purposes of grading.  Group work is very important for building team work skills and also can increase learning if done properly. But you should always have an individual piece that is the majority of the grade.
I think that too many of the other answers are immediately jumping to the let them separate solution especially when you have not even spoken to the other student involved.

Talk about it with the lecturer/professor in charge of the class as a whole.
As a TA, you're in a relatively subordinate position, so naturally when dealing with these sorts of policy-related issues, asking your boss for advice would be a natural first step. It's possible that there's already a policy or procedure in place, in which case you should follow their advice. If there isn't, however, I'm going to give you a policy that many of the classes at my university use:
Allow students in malfunctioning teams to use a variant cover sheet that includes statements of contribution.
So, for instance, where a normal assignment cover sheet might simply include the names and student IDs for the students in the group, the variant cover sheet would also provide an additional column where they can list each student's contribution to the work - for instance, in a three person group, one student might be listed as a 0% contribution while the other two are listed as each contributing 50% towards the assignment.
Then, when it comes time for assigning marks for that piece of assessment, you take those statements of contribution into account - someone who contributed 0% of the assignment gets 0% of the marks for said assignment. Normally, knowing that they might be penalized this way encourages students to contribute a fair share towards their group assignments.

@Heutl I think it's more intended for non-competitive grade structures. It's more about curtailing students who go "I don't care about contributing, I'll get the same mark as the rest of you" than about rewarding overachievers - the overachievers don't get extra marks, so this is a purely punitive method of punishing non-contributors in malfunctioning teams. The vast majority of teams wouldn't use it, since they get no benefit from their teammate getting penalized.

Do you have experience with statements of contribution in practice? I feel this will probably create more problems, as students will almost certainly insist their own contribution is worth more than others feel it is. Students who didn't do much would be especially problematic, as they will almost certainly not accept a 0% contribution (and probably insist on an equal contribution). You may have more luck having them break it down into parts instead of percentages, but even that's not perfect and may still cause a lot of problems.

I am also a student and we often have to work together in groups. My comment is therefore based on personal experience. In group work we have often divided the work so that one does the whole assignment alone and then the other does the next one. If then all of a sudden there is a new mix, this system can no longer function. Maybe a team member has already put in a lot of work and relies on his partner to do it soon.
I think reshuffling is a good idea, but I think you should implement it with the next course.
The easiest thing for now will be to offer to do the work alone, but encourage to get help from other groups.

*you should advise the professor to implement it with the next course

Others have answered quite well in usual terms, but let me put a different perspective here:
Forget about being a teacher, imagine you are their manager
In classes, relationships are usually disposable. In the workplace they're not.
At university, bad teachers usually get away with being abusive of students. Slacker or poorly behaved partners also get away with the full grade awarded for the group.
Maybe not radically or instantly, but both those perspectives change at workplace. Suddenly a colleague has the perspective of being with you for many years rather than a single semester. Also, if you are a manager, the main goal is to ensure that the mission is delivered a the end of the day, week, month or period, and while it ideally shouldn't matter who is delivering, it is also your responsibility to individually evaluate and provide feedback for team members. You'd be responsible for giving raises to good performers, and possibly assigning someone for a promotion. But, if the CEO wishes to cut costs, it would be your job to pick who's getting fired, even if against your will. And keep in mind, firing someone is much more drastic than failing a student in a lecture.
Also, it is a manager task to manage teams: Ensuring each team has the necessary resources (people and tools) to complete the job assigned to them. If there are conflicts in the team, i.e. two people don't get along, you may chose to avoid assigning some people together for a while, but the current task needs to be completed in the time frame. Also, if someone actively refuses to work with a given person, this refusal attitude needs to be curbed as much as it damages the company.
In management, you should be able to identify and act over excessive misbehavior without being requested to do so. That because at one hand, you need to show you can actually punish someone who fails to deliver or act properly, at the other, you don't want to create a "snitching" mentality. You would also want to avoid taking a person's word against another at face value.
This is hard in academic settings where people may be working in pairs, but all you see is an end result over a pdf file. It is also unhelpful that managers should rarely have to manage more than 10 people, while classes rarely have less students than this.
But notice that failing to do so creates much bigger problems in the workplace: Good employees may quit the company. Abused employees who cannot quit might develop mental health issues, and former employees might sue the company. Failing to curb racist actions or abusing your employees may result in a lawsuit against you. And unlike the university where usually the advice I give students is just "pass the class and leave it alone", in the workplace, people do quit their jobs and seek lawyers to settle past quarrels.
So case in point: Avoid running away from manager responsibilities.
Approaches that would be usual in workplace scenarios:

Talk to the other person. Start with "how are things going?", then maybe move to questions that are more specific. Maybe he has complaints of his own. If you are good enough, you should be able to motivate this person to work better, without creating a grudge against the colleague.
If conflicting reports arise, consider testing for authorship, a few technical questions may be simple to answer if you've done the work, but difficult if someone else did it.
Do not accept when one person asks for another to be punished. It's not their call and you should curb this initiative. If one student asks to form a trio, he's already asking to be rewarded with no merit to earn it. If he asks for another student to be left alone, he's asking you to punish this other student. In your case I'd propose for the student "I'll let you work alone, and your colleague can form a trio, would that solve your problem?".
Despite the previous advice, people do need to feel confident to report actual problems. So if one student has a complaint about the other, you should be a good listener.
Check if the allegedly problematic student causes problems elsewhere. It's one thing if two good performers have a localized quarrel, but you'll often find people that make trouble everywhere they go. Don't be blind to this, it helps judging the case in hands.
If, and only if, you can conclude independently from a single person report that there is a rotten apple in the basket take corrective action. That is, if you can see by yourself or there are enough non-involved people that support the claims about one person misbehaving, or slaking his/her work, then you should warn or possibly punish this person.

As a student, I significantly prefer getting to choose my partner(s), especially if assignments take more than an hour a week.
The best solution I have seen to deal with requests to change partners was a form where two people would fill it out to become partners and leave their old partners. The old partners who were being left had no say in the matter, however they were highly encouraged to pair up with each other (they could continue alone if desired).
You also couldn't change partners more than twice (most students never changed partners). This was for a course where we spent ~10 hours a week on the assignment.

I'm missing a crucial bit of information here: as TA(s), do your observervations of the students indicate that the non-performing student in question does indeed underperform to an extraordinary extent?

If not, i.e. the performance difference is inside what is to be expected => I'd say that's the normal range within which students have to learn to collaborate.
On the other hand, there may be situations where the disparity between student performance is so large that you decide the group should be separated for didactic reasons.

I'd say that different levels of disparity between/within groups may be expected in different courses.
Two extreme examples I encountered as student:

As student I once had excercises where the rules explicitly favored teams that would have strong and weak students rather than the strong students ending up in strong groups and the weak students forming weak groups. This was very much on purpose: strong students were expected to explain solutions to weak students.
In such a situation, the complaint doesn't make any sense and should be ignored.
But I've also had the experience of our group being seaparated - however, I didn't ask for a reassignment, the head assisitant told me they had observed that my colleague a) caused me a lot of additional work by frequently messing up the experiment, and/or b) didn't do anything themselves and obviously did not understand what they were doing.   So they had decided that our group should be split into two one-person "groups".
This came along with assigning us also different experiments which were suitable for single experimenters (and involved a bit more work for each of us than what we were supposed to do each as part of a two-student group). AFAIK, they had decided that the would be better for both of us: I was relieved of what they considered an unfair amount of work, and my colleague being forced to do their own experiment (and getting a TA closeby pretty much all the time) would learn far more than in the group. I may add that this was a chemical wet lab practicum with lots of time critical steps which left no time for additional explanations if one didn't understand what they were supposed to do in the middle of an experiment: in that case, the other had to work twice as fast in order to keep the sampling plan (and there usually was no time for redoing the whole experiment).
As TA, my experience with student groups was mostly also (wet) lab practica where groups did different experiments TAs belonging to experiments. One would occasionally get and hand on the information to "look with group x that y does their proper share of work", just like the information that "y in group x needs disability accomodation z".

in most countries the vast majority of university teachers dont have assistants. If OP has that this is of great help though.

@deags: I may have mentioned that my experience is from Germany: these assistants can be anything from PhD student/TAs to assistant professor, the head assistant usually being PI or assistant professor level (here, professor is more like an endowed professor in the US, so usually only the one or two heads of a department are professors). I do not assume that OP has an assistant but rather that they are assistant (as in TA) - and thus probably have the responsibility to look after the students also in terms of their performance (which I think is why the professor asked them for an opinion).

That is interesting. For the most part, I've seen that there are no assistants whatsoever (USA does have assistants and your case adds Germany) and each teacher needs to manage her students alone. In my language a professor is synonym of teacher , and the division is between full time ones or hour ones . Full times are part of a union mafia (common case in LATAM) , but even them have no assistants. What they normally do to get help is to get the 'group chief' for the class to help out in exchange of extra grading points.


text:
Graduate Research After Retirement
I will be retiring in a few months with a successful research career in industry (>100 journal papers, >300 conference presentations, >50 patents).  I am interested in doing research in an academic lab after retirement.  My current expertise is in applied plasma physics, but I am interested in doing research in either astrophysics or biology.  Any suggestions on on how to find such opportunities or how does one get involved in research in a new area when one is 60+?  I won't be concerned about compensation and I am well adept at the numerical, statistical and mathematical methods employed in research.

Please don't work for free, you might displace a new researcher who actually needs the money. If you find a position and don't want it, go ahead and donate it somewhere but working for free in research sets a bad precedent.

Seconding @AzorAhai's comment: I think it is important to not inadvertently displace young people by, in effect, massively under-bidding them. It's not that "old people" don't have a right to compete due to age, but that "low-balling" (usually because one implicitly has vast extra resources) is an economically and socially disruptive activity. Don't do it, is my advice. But, yes, in other regards an ideal, low-stress situation for you (and for people who'd otherwise have to worry about assisting you in your career).

@AzorAhai i would say don't work for free period. In research or anything. As a musician, the expectation of free work is near universal. Tangentially, at school they had posters up all over saying "friends don't let friends play gigs for free" (or something like that)

@user94036 Also true!

What country? In some places it may be tricky due to work regulations.

Wouldn't you displace someone else by not working for free? If there is money for one researcher, either you hire one paid or two with one unpaid. I don't get the assumption behind telling op not to work for free.

@DonQuiKong and the third option is to hire the unpaid one and spend the money somewhere else. With ever shrinking research budgets in many fields, such a situation is more likely than not.

This is harder to answer because you seem to want to change fields. Otherwise, and if you are near to a research university, you could just ask to be allowed to attend research seminars in the field you already know. You would probably be welcome and could give some help to various students with their own research.
However, to change fields, there are things you need to know to get to the research frontier in the new field. I assume you know this, of course. The ideal way, assuming that money is no issue, would be to apply for another degree in the new field. If it is close enough to your current interests it would probably be expedited to some extent.
But the way to get good advice is to visit some place that you might be interested in and talk to researchers there. I'm guessing that this would be easier with a university than elsewhere. Even better if you already have some research ideas. But note that the request is a bit unusual and many places don't have the time or inclinations to do things that don't fit a given mold.
Top research universities differ quite a lot in what is possible. Some might be extremely rigid about rules and requirements and others might be extremely flexible. So you may need to look around a bit.
There is one additional issue, however, that might get in your way. If anyone starts to think that by working for "free" you are displacing someone else who might be early in their career, you won't be terrifically welcome. You will need to finesse that.


text:
How do i choose a paper as a reference paper in my thesis?
How do i choose a paper as a literature review in my thesis?i mean,there should be a order of choosing a paper as a literature review in our thesis.
For example,i do energy harvesting optimization in communication as research.So i think there are some conditions that the paper ,i choose to be  literature review, should satisfy
1.Communication
2.Energy harvesting
3.Optimize something
4.Because the system model is a little bit similar,so part of our method is similar
I found that my classmate will choose one of literature review paper paper,which their system models are the same , and write what the system method is,what method does it use?what is its advantage and disadvantage.however,because my model is the newest,there is no one use the same or similar model,so i don't know how to choose the good paper as my literature review paper.
I think now i have two options to choose
Option A : Satisfy 1.,3.,and 4. conditions above,however,our system is still not the same,just a little bit similar,and something we want to optimize is not the same!
Option B : Satisfy 1.,2.,and 3.conditions above,and something we want to optimize is not the same!
Which option is better for me when i want to choose a paper as literature review paper?i think there should be an order of choosing,so i can know which paper should i consider first.

A literature review needs several papers, not just one.

@SolarMike maybe my problem is unclear,i have edited it

Yes! literature review needs several papers, not just one.but my classmate will choose one of it to describe,and say what method does this paper use,what is its advantage.However,i don't know how to choose that one

You need to ask your thesis advisor this question.

As mentioned by @scaaahu, it is better to consult your advisor on this matter. However, note that your literature review should be so coherent such that readers of your thesis should clearly understand what has been done in your area prior to your research, what was the gap that wasn't filled and how your research fits into this context.
For instance, if in communication, you study cognitive radio networks; energy harvesting you have used stochastic geometry; and optimization, you have tried to optimize the access probability of cognitive devices, your literature review should reflect all these elements if possible. Then, if not you move a little higher (for instance others have optimized transmit power, not access probability), then you include that and emphasize that access probability optimization has not been addressed which constitutes your problem. Then it might be necessary to include other research which has used energy harvesting in cognitive radio but has not used stochastic geometry if you find that pertinent to your research. Sometimes, that could depend on how you would like to formulate your problem and the kind of objectives that can be achieved by each method.
To understand how to order these in your thesis, I suggest you also look at very good papers that have been published in your area and how they coherently present the ideas and concepts within the introduction and literature review.

i agree with what you said "literature review should be so coherent",the option A and B are actually "uncoherent",so i don't know how to choose that paper


text:
Building a local database from Web of Science and Scopus search results
I would like to build a local bibliography database (possibly with SQL) with the data exported from Web of Science (WOS) search results. I can export these online query results in a BibTeX file and process this file offline with my favorite scripting language.
Now, the problem is indexing the data. WOS provides each BibTeX entry with their own "WOS Unique ID" (often times, but not always, provides DOI), however, researchers' names are not uniquely identified. This is a problem because researchers often have different names in different papers and other BibTeX entries.
I really need the capability of indexing authors on my local database, to interface it with my scripting language. Ideally, WOS would allow exporting the query results datafile with some "author IDs". This would solve my problem, but can it be done for free? Is anyone aware of some other method I could explore to go about this problem? Thanks a lot!

Just to note that Google Scholar, ResearchGate, etc all have the issue of resolving author name ambiguity, so I don't think you're going to find a solution that easy. You can try to use ORCIDs or authors with Google Scholar profiles or such, but this is going to be a lot of work and involve a lot of cross referencing between databases.

I'm not entirely clear what your end goal is that you specifically need WOS, but Zotero stores all the data about publications you import into a SQLite database (Mendeley does as well, but it's encrypted with a hidden key).

@anjama WOS is a useful and curated tool for the kind of searches I use to build a database from BibTex files. I can search all the papers from some Institution in a given year for instance.

@anjama Can those programs work from BibTeX files like JabRef? And can any of these programs (Mendeley, Zotero, JabRef, etc.) take the input BibTex and look for similar author names automatically, while poping up a request for the user if the such and such author names could be considered the same and "merged"?

Author disambiguation is a big problem in most plattforms / citation databases, and an issue in much bibliometric work. I don't think you will find a quick fix. Orcid (which WoS sometimes provides) is aimed to partially solve this, but depends on researchers actually having and using Orcid. Scopus currently has a better functionality in finding publications from standardized author records (i.e. "all" publications for an author, after their algorithm for merging authors have been applied), and this is also exported in e.g. their CSV format in the field "Author(s) ID".
See for instance these exported records from Scopus, with overlapping authors (and therefore author-IDs):
'Author(s) ID'  EID
24802234300;6602122539; 2-s2.0-84861411180
24802234300;55923304700;6603273826;6602122539;  2-s2.0-77955097159
16229637800;6602122539;24802234300;7003423871;  2-s2.0-51749084398

So if you want to build a local database from an online bibliometric source, which include some form of unique author ID, I think Scopus would be a better starting point. Web of Science has their own identifier included in exports (ResearcherID in the RI field) and Orcid IDs (OI field), but only for researchers that has those IDs, which is usually the minority (both across papers and within individual papers). One downside with Scopus is that there export does not include Orcid from what I know (at least not in the open web interface or the basic API), so it may be harder to integrate with other data sources.
Note however that all identifiers are not always included in all export formats (goes for both Scopus and WoS) so you should focus on e.g. csv-exports (which include the identifiers I mention above).

Great, thanks! I'm now a fan of Scopus. Do you know if these "Author(s) ID" are provided in the same order of the names in the "Authors" field?

I think so from examples I’ve seen (it is e.g true in the example data above). I’ve mainly worked with WoS data (since we have local access to it), so I’m not that familiar with all the inns and outs of Scopus data though. Generally, address data is cleaner in WoS, but Scopus has come further in this type of author data.

What do you mean by "address data"?

@bibliotech I mean the author affiliations, e.g. “Stanford, Dept. comp sci, Stanford, USA”.


text:
UK MSc to US PhD
I'm currently a student at a UK university studying towards an MSc in Statistics, and I had some questions about how graduate schools in the US would view this type of program.
As I'm much more familiar with the US system, I've noticed that it's increasingly uncommon in the US to get a master's degree and then apply to a PhD - usually people just go directly to a PhD from a bachelor's. The courses that I'm taking here, from what I can tell, seem more like first year PhD courses than undergrad ones. Would I appear as or more qualified than typical applicants in that sense when applying in the US? How would the graduate admissions committee view the coursework for a European MSc in general?
Another difference I've noticed is that many UK MSc programs (including mine)  have a significant dissertation component which can sometimes result in publishable work. Is such material typical of undergraduates in the US who are applying to PhD programs? Would graduate admissions committees also look favorably on this kind of work, or is it not particularly relevant in their eyes?
Thank you in advance for any and all replies.

Yes, you would likely be seen as more qualified for admission, other things being equal (grades, letters, etc). But there are other people who earn an MS in the US and then apply for a doctorate. The situation isn't seen as strange or unusual.
The main tasks you will need to complete is successfully passing comps and writing an acceptable dissertation. The coursework you have (and may take in future) prepare you for both. Any research experience, especially resulting in a thesis, is good preparation for the research underlying a dissertation.
But you will have the same sort of competition from qualified applicants in selective programs. Nothing you suggest here would be a negative, I think.