text:
Shall I go for volunteers or pay for people who help me with my research
I am doing my PhD,
I have a scenario that requires the assistance of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to review and answer questions regarding documents used in my research. This process may take a few days from them.
While I can find some individuals willing to volunteer for this task, it won't be as straightforward as if I were to pay for their services. There are various considerations associated with each option.
Should I reward volunteers by acknowledging them in my paper? Additionally, should I instruct both volunteers and paid experts to remain available for any follow-up questions after the paper has been published?
I've never navigated this situation before and am curious about the protocol to follow in such cases.

Note that in either scenario you likely require approval of an ethics committee for either the payment or nonpayment.

Are there any traditions or precedents in your field? Have you asked your advisor for advice?

You need to talk to your advisor about this, and you very specifically need to ask your advisor to help you navigate your institution's IRB (Institutional Review Board) or equivalent.  They will help you determine whether these SMEs are considered "experimental subjects" and what regulations you need to comply with.

First, I agree with the comments. Proceed with caution, checking with your mentor, your department, and your university's IRB.
Second, I think whether a SME will want payment may depend on whether they are professors or from outside academia. I was never hired to be a SME, but I did work as a statistical consultant for grad students. I charged. That was how I made my living. (I also worked for other people). But ... You are asking experts for days of their time. Days? I think most people will charge by the hour. The fee will vary by location and field and level of expertise and so on, but, in the USA, I'd expect to pay at least a couple hundred dollars per hour.
It may also depend on what you are going to do with the research. If this is going to become a marketable instrument, that might affect things. Or if it is going to be a chapter in a book and the SMEs will get co-authorship, that might do so as well (at one place where I was employed, I wrote a chapter of a book. That was part of my job. But the main author was also employed at the same place).

Is this ethical that the implementations or statistical parts of a paper is done by someone whose name is not in the paper? I myself don't think so, since it can be misleading. The authors can claim claimed in the future job/educational interviews that they have done it themselves, the paper can be thought as the evidence. And even, some departments might just ask if one knows MATLAB (for example), and then think that he/she is familiar with the implementation of their paper and able to do their paper's implementation themselves.

On papers, I usually got co-authorship.  On dissertations, I insisted that the person get an OK from their supervisor.  It was usually no problem.

That's a good idea. In this way that seems totally right. But I sometimes hear that some people pay for implementations of their methods without mentioning their names as the co-author, that seems like an instance of plagiarism to me. Am I right?


text:
How to find a refernce for BigO complexity
I have a list of labels
A
B
C
...
...
Y
Z

I want to find the relation between every 2 letters
A-B
A-C
A-D
...
...
A-Z
B-C
B-D
B-E
...
...
B-Z
C-D
C-E
C-F
...
...
C-Z
...
...
Y-Z

I did the calculation and found that the BigO Complexity is $N^2/2$
Is there any academic reference I can cite for this?

May I suggest that you do not (yet) understand the meaning of big Oh completely? The number of all pairs taken from a list of n elements as you list them is $2\binom{n}{2} = n(n-1)$. Big Oh is a class of functions and the standard way of using it to characterize it by a monomial or other simple function in this class. In your case, the standard is to give the complexity class as $n^2$. Since the big Oh notation is introduced in classes on Data Structures and / or Algorithms, calculations like this usually do not warrant a citation. However, if you need one, look for a standard textbook on algorithms.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
How to access Google's research
My PhD research is about AI and the topic I choose is relatively new.
As far as I know, the only organisation that has worked on that area is Google.
by searching this topic there wasn't enough info of that it was done, techniques, methodology, statistics, etc.
I wonder if there is a certain process to follow so I can get access to Google's research?

Probably apply for a job there, and sign their NDAs

@AzorAhai will be more than happy to get a job there but I have doubts about the NDA as it is going to be in my research and published !

IBM and the computers / software for the chess competitions...

@SolarMike What does your comment mean?

@JiK it means that I don't think it is only Google doing AI...

@SolarMike "My PhD research is about AI and the topic I choose is relatively new" This does not mean OP claims AI as a topic is relatively new. It means that the topic of OP's PhD research is within AI and is relatively new.

@JiK Think the answer is more than relevant... also see https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/20-years-after-deep-blue-how-ai-has-advanced-since-conquering-chess/

@SolarMike The asker is researching some specific topic in AI. They haven't said what it is, but they believe that Google is the only organization to have done research on that specific topic. How can you suggest that this belief is false when you don't even know what the topic is?

@DavidRicherby so are you suggesting that the question is off-topic as it is too broad? I merely suggested that others may well be working on that topic...

@SolarMike The specific (sub-)topic is never mentioned by OP. Google and IBM are not the same entity, just because they both do research in AI does not mean they do exactly the same things, especially when it comes to new topics like the one OP is interested in. I also fail to see the relevancy of your first comment and the linked article. The only thing the article seems to prove is that IBM is doing research in AI which no one has denied.

@SolarMike The question is very specific: How does one get access to Google's research? The topic of OP's research is just background information to motivate why they want access to Google's research.

@SolarMike No, I'm not suggesting that the question is too broad, and I don't understand why you think I am.

@JiK Thanks, my PhD is not about AI in general, it is about a specific topic within AI that has not been researched yet ( or I could not find any material about it yet except with google) but they did not release the research, techniques and methodologies. I contacted google yesterday and they adviced that whatever published in this website is https://ai.google/research/pubs/ is what they can release if it is not there then they wont release. not sure in this case if I do my research will still that be considered addition to the field although it is done by google but not yet released!!

Google's publications are available here: https://ai.google/research/pubs.

I checked that link already, nothing on the research topic

Then either they haven't worked on your topic or they want to keep it secret. It's a private company, they do what they want with their research and sometimes they might want to keep a commercial advantage to themselves ;)

If Google haven't made this particular research public, you'll need to talk to them about it. They might not want to say anything. They might only be prepared to talk under an NDA. If so, your university will have policies for dealing with this kind of thing. As with all things PhD-related, your advisor's job is to advise you about this.  It's very common for research with commercial partners to have this kind of restriction, especially in the natural sciences and engineering.
Note that it's perfectly possible to produce publications based on NDAed material. However, you have to be careful not to disclose the things you said you wouldn't disclose, and you may need to clear the paper with Google before submitting it anywhere.

Or if you don't want an NDA, go buy Google. No one owes any researcher their secrets. If you want them, cough up.

+1 This is great advice. The researchers at Google are just as any other researchers. They very likely want to talk about their research with researchers at other institutions. They just have a different funding arrangement which places its restrictions, but they will happily try to work within them.

Also, to my best knowledge in big companies research results are confidential by default and sometimes the only reason for not publishing them is lack of  motivation to go through the paperwork needed to make them non-confidential, but interest by a PhD student might very well be motivation enough.

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


text:
What does count as "something new" in the field for PhD?
I am doing PhD in AI field mainly in natural language processing (NLP). My supervisor has told that I have to contribute something new to the field.
I started doing some trials in improving one case in the field of NLP AI and I have found a way that can improve that case 80% of the time.
I don't want to go into the details of the method that I found, as it is mainly technical.
When I told my supervisor about what I had found, he wasn't impressed and said that the method is not provable, which means it is demonstrated only by trying the cases, but without mathematical proof.
Is this enough for a PhD or shall I have to prove it mathematically?

Are you sure he meant a mathematical proof? If so, are you working in a more theory-oriented group? For an NLP "advance," I usually expect to see good results on a benchmark problem.

@cag51 what do you mean by theory oriented group?

Let me add to the answer of Bryan Krause.
First, a technique that is an "improvement 80% of the time" might be extremely dangerous to apply in practice. Even proving that the quoted phrase is true may not be enough.
What you would need to do, in my view, is determine the parameters that lead to its assured success vs its failure. That analysis is probably worth more than a proof, per se. Why is it sometimes better and why is it sometimes worse.
And of course I'm assuming that you have a good definition of "improvement".
Note that some AI/NLP practices have led to race-biased outcomes among other difficulties.

Your thesis committee, and your supervisor in particular, are the ones who decide if your research is sufficiently novel.
Make sure they are happy and seek their guidance if they are not. It seems your supervisor isn't happy, so work with them to find what you can add or what other direction you can take. You could provide a StackExchange answer with dozens of upvotes saying your work is a novel contribution and it won't get you closer to graduating.

I see that you are located in Australia. The requirement of most universities in Australia is that a PhD candidate demonstrate, by way of their thesis, that they have made "a substantial and original contribution to knowledge". Those words, or words very similar to them, appear in PhD part of the regulations governing higher degrees.
Contrary to what some of the other answers suggest, it is actually your examiners who will decide whether or not you have made the required contribution. Your PhD supervisor is, or course, vitally important in being able to give you advice about whether the work you are doing is likely to satisfy the criteria of "substantial and original" but the supervisor is not the final arbiter.
Among things that are worth noting is the fact that a method you develop might not need to be very good. In fact, you could conceivable make a substantial and original contribution to knowledge by showing that a method that is rationally justified, and looks a priori as if it ought to be good, is in fact terrible. If you consider a similar thing in the field of medicine, you might make a very useful contribution and important contribution to knowledge by showing that a compound which would appear to be an excellent candidate for treating a particular disease (e.g., spastic colon) has a serious associated problem such as leading in some cases to sudden cardiac death.


text:
what is Matching Funding in grant application?
I am filling my project Grant Application
There is one section in that application that i do not know what is it and what to write there.
14. Matching Funding
What is it? and what to write there?

The concept is very googleable. If you want an answer better than that, you should provide more details, such as the grant scheme name. https://www.dummies.com/business/nonprofits/grants/how-to-uncover-matching-funds-for-your-grant-application/

Matching funds (money) are

Funds not provided by the funding agency and
Funds that will will be provided to the project if the grant is awarded by the funding agency

Usually they come from your university's research office, but they might come from any other unit of your organization or any third party.
Read your funding agency's rules about matching funds and ask the program officer if you are not sure.  Rules vary widely, even within an agency.


text:
copy paste from another research (for figures)
I know that we should not copy paste any text from one research.
it is form of plagerisim.
but can I copy a figure/chart from one research and put it in mine (with mentioning the reference) ?

You probably can. It's the same as with all copyrighted material - you need permission from the copyright holder, you need to pay royalties, or you need to qualify for fair use.
Fair use has four general factors to think of:

What are you using the figure for?
What is the nature of the original work with the figure?
How much of the original work are you copying?
Does your duplicating the original work hurt the original's sales?

It's generally a tough topic - see the Wikipedia article for more details - but if you're taking a single figure out of another paper and using it in your paper with attribution, you are probably within the fair use regime and it's OK to use it without getting explicit permission from the copyright holder.

This is just for my PhD confirmation of candidature. I am just copying that figure from one research I found nothing else copied from anywhere

it is just illustrate the hierarichy of ICD9


text:
Can more than one person share PhD thesis?
I have a PhD research proposal and I came up with this proposal idea while discussing machine learning with my brother who is in the same field as me and has same degrees as me.
my question is can we (my brother and I) submit this proposal for the university so we both share the research?
do we have to provide 2 seperate research thesis?

Your question is a little bit more complicated because another author is your brother. I think it pretty much depends on your institute policy.

@scaaahu thanks, i think it is not possible to do so based on the comments i read in the other question you mentioned before

my question is can we (my brother and I) submit this proposal for the university so we both share the research?

Yes, assuming the university and supervisors don't object.

do we have to provide 2 seperate research thesis?

Yes (in general). You can work together throughout, but, ultimately, both of you need to uniquely identify your individual contributions. I'd suggest that one of you takes the lead on each work package and that work package is considered their individual contribution, whilst the other provides support. Resulting publications will list both of you, but such publications will only appear in one thesis. (There's some flexibility here, since you might both include material from some publication. Your supervisors can help you work that out.)


text:
What if the research was failure?
Planning to do PhD research about to find the link between 2 things.
What if there was no link between these 2 things?
does that mean all years of research is worthless? and no PhD degree?
is the PhD more about the results of the research or about the research itself?

You will undoubtedly explore many ideas before settling on one that you will write your thesis on. This exploring of ideas is part of the process.

It is useful to think of a thesis as answering a question. In your case that question would be: Are thing A and thing B related?
The setup of your thesis would then be:

You introduce the question
You than theorize why they might be related, and why they might not
be related.
You summarize previous research on thing A and thing B, and their
relationship
You describe the design of your approach (or approaches) to answer
that question, and what the advantages and disadvantages are compared
to what has been done before.
You describe the results.
You conclude by answering the question, in this case thing A and
thing B are not related.
You discuss some implications of that finding
You discuss some weaknesses of your approach and potential other
designs that might mitigate those weakness (but have other weaknesses
of their own).

It is definitely easier to write up, and especially publish, research with a positive finding. But the research is not a failure: You started with a question, and you ended up with an answer. It was not the answer you expected, but if you knew the answer before starting the research, then why do the research? So, this is not the end of your PhD.

+1 Research is about knowledge not proving a preconceived or desired result. If you learn something valuable, it is a good thing. Unexpected results may be an especially good thing.

This is one where the voyage is more important than the destination.  You might still be able to produce a thesis if you can organize in a systematic manner the various ways which proved to be unsuccessful.
It could also be extremely useful to identify further avenues which have not been explored due to lack of time.  If you can somehow prove there is no link that would be actually a positive result.
Finally, it takes skill to publish a negative result but this is far from unprecedented.  Again, explaining in a systematic way how you proceed and where you reached a cul-de-sac is actually quite valuable as it will prevent others from following the same path.


text:
Can a project be a PhD research?
I am preparing PhD porposal
the proposal itself is a project design plan.
Is that possible for a Project to be a PhD research?
My Project is about web portal from data science.

There is too little information in your question to really give an answer. What field? What sort of project -- more than the last sentence. A thesis isn't normally about implementation, though it could be based on an implementation. Something that can be shown to be an improvement over current best practice, for example. But it is the proof, not the implementation that forms the key to the thesis.

A "project" sounds like an implementation of something. A thesis isn't normally about implementation, though it could be based on an implementation. Something that can be shown to be an improvement over current best practice, for example. But it is the proof, not the implementation that forms the key to the thesis.
For example, in Computer Science, a thesis often starts with a project. Suppose, for example, that you build a more efficient Garbage Collector for a runtime programming system than any currently known. That implementation isn't the thesis. You need to prove, somehow, that it is indeed more efficient and show the benchmarks. That proof is what makes it research and results in the thesis. But the program you write (the garbage collector) isn't the thesis.
Think of dissertation research as being about knowledge. After the proof is given we know something that we didn't know before. Building stuff isn't, per se, about knowledge.
Caveat: I will edit this if more information from OP makes it advisable.


text:
What is the difference between Project's background and Project Significance?
I need to write my project's significance.
I googled to find examples on project's significance, but I found article referring to project's background and significance as the same thing.
https://orsp.umich.edu/research-proposals-background-or-significance
Do I need to write a background about my project in the when asked to provide project's significance?

It's the difference between who you are and where you came from. Yes, the two answers are intertwined, but they focus on different aspects.

And where you can possibly go.

Background: what (general) information should the panel know to properly judge the project. For example: What has been done before? How does your project relate to this previous work? If your project is about disease X, what is this disease exactly?

Significance is another word for "importance" or "impact". Why is the project important, for example: How many people are affected by disease X, and what do you expect to achieve when the project is completed. Better knowledge about the disease mechanism? A cure? A better detection mechanism? The structure of a protein involved in the disease (how does it help if we know the structure)? What they want to know is: How important is your project and how does it help to make the world better?

There is indeed some overlap between the two, but the requirement to write a section about the significance indicates that they want it to be separated from the background, without overlap.


text:
The right way to do academic writing
I am doing PhD in IT
I have Bsc in Math (there wasn't writing in my study)
and my masters was course based not research.
Today I got my paper returned with many comments
some of these comments are (boring, need more focus)
There are papers that I enjoy reading, as they have nice flow, they take me from one sentence to another smoothly.
When I write I put what I want to write in bullet points and then struggle connecting sentenses and have the flow from one sentence to the other.
I wonder if there is right way to do academic writing.
Shall I read many papers about the topic I am writing about then squeeze my brain to put that in a paper format.
or shall I take notes from each sentence in the papers I read and then connect them together.
or is there any other way to do the writing?
There must be a way most people use.
I appreciate any help here.

Since you're in IT, I can also recommend the following book: ''Justin Zobel: Writing for Computer Science"'.

Another literature suggestion: "Publish & Flourish" by Tara Gray.

There are no "tricks", and everybody has a way that works best for them. This often involves revising the text many times. A few tips many people agree on are:

Start with the easier parts (often the methods section if there is one).
Put the paper away for a few days, then read it as if you were a reader instead of the author.
Don't make complex or long sentences, unless you are really skilled at doing so.
Get help from co-workers: let them read your paper and take their comments into account. Iterate until convergence is reached.
People often refer to the text by Vernon Booth about academic writing. It is old but still full of great advice (just ignore the bits about typewriters).

Writing well often takes many years of practice as well as lots of reading. It helps to read both well-written scientific articles (and identify why they are so well-witten), badly written ones (and identify why they are not so nice to read), and also literature (books): the latter are written by the real experts: writers.
Writing is also a talent that is not given to everybody. Don't take this the wrong way, but it is very well possible to be an excellent mathematician or computer scientist without being a good writer. A possible solution could be to focus on your research and ask for help to write or revise your papers before sending them in: you don't have to do everything on your own, and there is no shame in asking for help from your colleagues or supervisor in writing the paper. Some universities even have dedicated "scientific writers" to help researchers write their papers.

The link for Vernon Booth's text seems to be broken

I start by echoing what @louic said. Academic writing is hard, and takes anyone years of pratice to perfect, so don't be down hearted that you are struggling when you've just started.
Two resources I have found helpful are Claus Wilke's virtual book on scientific writing (https://serialmentor.com/virtualbooks/) and Joshua Schimel's "Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded". Both focus on scientific writing (and biology in particular), but I think they should be informative for academic writing in general.
One thing to do with writing, if you are stuck on how you would connect the bullet points, is to think what you might say in conversation. What would you say if a new person in your department asked you to explain your reserach to them?


text:
Can we cite from viXra?
Today I just found this website viXra.org
the paper I looked at has author name but no other info about the author such as university or work.
in addition there was no references at all?
Can I still cite this paper in my PhD thesis?

Given the lack of references, do you really trust the paper and its contents? About vixra.

If you cite something, surely it's value is in its actual content?  (University affiliation is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce good research, after all.)  But given vixra's reputation for crackpottery—well-deserved or not—are you sure the content is good?

You should cite whatever you use. Citations serves a. to attribute the source of ideas or facts and b. to help the reader find further information. Whether the source is a good one or not is a completely different issue; if you use it, you should cite it.

You can, without doubt, but it might not be a good idea.
The first question is, of course, if the content of the paper is good.
The second question is, if you can find a more reliable source. Given the reputation of Vixra, almost any other source is more reliable, generally speaking.
I would suspect that, most of the time, when something is posted on viXra, either the content is not of high quality or you can find comparable material elsewhere.
But if you do happen to find a gem on viXra, certainly cite it. Just be very, very certain of the quality.

The quality of the content should not be the only consideration. viXra has a certain reputation and some of that would stick to OP and his thesis ... even if this particular viXra paper is perfectly fine.  My point is: I think you didn't emphasise enough that this should be a last resort.

Seconding @Szabolcs's comment: if I saw/read a paper citing viXra that citation would make me wonder about the judgement of author. That is, citing viXra, with its dubious reputation, will make people likewise doubt the author doing the citing. Arguably "not fair", but reputations precede us...

@Szabolcs Added a sentence to the third paragraph. Also consider writing your own answer if you think mine is misguided.

Why are people talking negatively about vixra's reputation? It's a pre-print repository that is doing the job that it is meant to do. A paper on ANY pre-print repository cannot be trusted because it hasn't been peer-reviewed. If anything, it's the overzealously moderated repositories that cannot be trusted since they do not honor or understand what a pre-print repository is meant for.

@Julia You should ask a new question about that, if it has not been already answered in for example https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/105518/

You haven't specified your field, so I don't know whether any of this applies.
If you want to cite the paper as bringing evidence for a theory you're proposing (or defending, or attacking), you should make sure that the content is good, and not blindly trust it - it's not peer-reviewed, and it's on viXra, after all.
If it contains a theoretical point that you agree with, or want to use in your dissertation, then not only can you cite it, it's your duty to cite it, just like any other source.


text:
Can i go to university without finished high school?
I wasn't sure if this would be off-topic or not.
Basically i have half finished high school here in Slovenia, it's slightly different here, i went to 3+2 program. I have finished 3 years but i don't wish to continue the extra 2 years, especially because they're not teaching me anything, in 5th year they teach about programming stuff i knew when i was a first year. And the extra two years would earn me a diploma for finished high school, not sure how the 3 years are called in English. So instead of wasting 2 years i thought if i could even apply for University in UK? I have a friend who lives in UK which would make it easier to move, but my question is if i can even apply? I've seen undergraduate courses and the requirements, but nothing there can apply to me? Or at least i'm not sure, is there some kind of exam that i can take or something similar?
Thanks in advance!

Did you receive a diploma at the end of the first 3 years? Does this qualify you for higher education in Slovenia? If not, I would be surprised if it was sufficient for other countries. You could always investigate by contacting a university abroad.
If you really think the extra 2 years don't teach you anything new and you know it all, is it possible to enter the final exams early?
From my experience, the first year(s) of university hit you like a brick even if you finish high school. You can use 2 years of 'boring' school for preparation (self-study, enroll in courses at a local uni).

Yes, in some countries. See my answer here [https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/87614/phd-or-msc-without-undergraduate-degree/87619#87619]  that also applies to your case.

@ShakeBaby The OP seems to not want to finish secondary education, while your example refer to finish who did not finish their BA. Those are very different things.

Homeschooling is widespread in the US; there is definitely some sort of pipeline for homeschooled kids to enroll in undergrad studies (probably involving SAT exams and the likes). While I don't know anything UK-specific, I wouldn't be surprised if something like this applies to you; the question must have arisen at some point for US->UK expats that were homeschooled.

@MaartenBuis Yes, but there are examples of that too.

I'm sorry but no, you can't. Every respectable university requires a high-school diploma (or equivalent degree) for students to enroll. Exceptions are extremely rare and apply only to highly gifted students in certain subjects.
However, you can self-study in your free time with more advanced textbooks and online courses. If your home-town has a university, you may be able to attend some lectures as a guest, without being formally enrolled.

Thanks. So it's either eating up extra 2 years or self-study programming and go to work directly. I'll look up if i can attend as a guest, that would be amazing.

There are a small number of distance learning universities that will take students on without formal qualifications, probably one of the most famous (and prestigious) examples is The Open University in the UK. You will probably have to take prerequisite courses in high school level material before you'll be allowed to do a Bachelors or similar.
"Brick and Mortar" universities, in general, will not accept you though.

That's very helpful, i didn't realize that they were Open Universities, i'll check it out

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


text:
Submit an article to a conference, which contains a section that has been already published
I want to submit an article to a conference, however, let's say 50% of the content of such article has been already published. The reason of such 'variation', is that after some suggestions, we applied some modifications to the methodology and the way to analyse the data, so basically a variation of the study resulted from that, but the core remains the same.
I actually never had the opportunity to present this study in a conference before or after the publication, so this is something that I'd really like to do; but I'd prefer to submit the 'second version' of the study, since I think that it is more complete than the published one.
I know that (if accepted) the entire article would not be published in the  conference proceedings (only the abstract), since its related to a published article, still I  would like to know if submitting an article that contains some part of a previously published article is something acceptable to do.
I'd appreciate your comments on this.

Why copy all the common material, rather than summarizing and referencing the earlier paper for details?

Thank you for your reply! That's what I actually wanted to do, but I found that there are some demands in the publishing world, such as submit something original, not published anywhere before and so on. Since those guidelines are quite general, I'm not sure how they relate to this particular case, if summarising and referencing would still be acceptable.

You could treat it as a new paper. Maybe after the conference, you could add more results and publish a paper from it.

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


text:
Ask opinion about situations in which researchers/non-researchers get involved in projects (externally) and the best way to avoid strange situations
I'm junior researcher so I'll appreciate your understanding on my very short 'experience' for the things I'm going to explain:
I'd appreciate your comments regarding two relatively similar situations I've experienced recently:
Situation 1)
Recently I was contacted by a professor who asked me to give him a hand with a student who would be working on one of the topics of my expertise. While I'm not affiliated to the University where they work, I'll be collaborating with them in few months (all fixed already), so I agreed thinking that the experience would be useful for me and to build some good relationship with them from now. From the firsts conversations with the student, an idea for a working plan came up, even if they had some previous idea of 'what they wanted to do', I definitely helped them to define the main plan. After the 'draft' of the plan was set, few days of silence went by, later on, I received an email from the student telling that from now on, he would be working with Researcher-A and Researcher-B in this project and he would ’probably' contact me for some questions in the future.  Since this is a multidisciplinary project, I knew that Researchers A and B would eventually have to join, but, I also had a bitter taste since I was 'kindly' kicked out of the whole thing.  I guess the best I can do now is to track the progress of this study and eventually request to be part of any publication that they plan to do.
Situation 2)
I had to contact a group of 'computer scientists' (a group 'devoted' to innovation, who offer their services to researchers independently -not belonging to any university-), to help me to build up a part of a project in which I'm not really expert (basically setting some experiment using computer devices and programming).  They said they knew somebody doing similar things and asked me to send them my working plan to get a better idea of the whole thing. Of course I just sent them a short & very basic description of the plan, with mostly the things that I'd need from them and some general explanation to help them understand the project. After that, I had no news from them for weeks, I tried to contact them several times and there was always something getting on the way (unexpected meetings and trips, incoming second calls…I never got a call back).  Later on, I saw in their website that they were recruiting students to help them to do something very similar to what I requested but with few variations. I don’t think that this was an advance of my work since they never reached to me to work on the details, I never received news from them about when were we going to start, what was the plan or anything! I’m confident that eventually I'll get them to help me if I push some buttons with the main bosses there, but again bitter taste here.
Regarding both situations: Is this common? What can one do to avoid these problems? How can a researcher (especially those not-yet affiliated) protect his/her ideas/work from people who would be somehow involved. I try not to judge, not in all cases there is bad intention, but in some way, they seem to bump into random situations and behave in tricky ways. I don’t know how both stories will end up, I trust that there will be someone in the head of both offices that will show some common sense, but I want to learn something from these experiences, what to do to prevent these kind of ‘bad moments’.
Thank you in advance.

Situation A is more or less common specially it comes to publications.
Generally in such situation,

Both the parties should have clear cut understanding of role of each other before starting working on the project.
Ethically, that researcher SHOULD knowledge you for your contribution in the project if she/he want's to get it published or submit to any grant agency.
If you have contributed sufficiently and you think you should be part of their publication, you can just express your opinion to professor and make it clear.
Do not 'assume' that they have kicked you out. There might be changes in their project direction and they might need some other set of skills.
Inform regarding this to your adviser. It is important to keep him/her in loop.

However also remember, sometimes whatever you have decided may not work out because experiments/analysis might need to get more help or reduce existing resources etc. Best thing to do in this case is talk to professor and see what is your role in this project. To avoid further such situations, always be clear about your role in project. Sometimes your role might change depending on direction or project or results you got. You should be flexible enough to handle such cases.
In the case of situation B, try to contact their organization/institute regarding this. See what is the purpose of that advertisement. As you had not provided them any details, they could have come up with similar thing by their own. See their website /publications if they had working on similar thing before. Be patient and contact them again regarding this.

Thank you so much for your reply! I think that next time I'll try to put the things clear from the beginning, and also part of my 'disadvantages' is being an 'external' researcher at the moment. Thanks again for your advice, highly appreciated!


text:
Should I change the title in my passport to Dr. after getting PhD
In many places, a title column is asked where I fill Mr. After getting my PhD can I "officially" change it to Dr.? Is this country dependent? I want to know about India, DrUK and US.

You can still sign a document with Mr/Ms/Mrs/etc. even if you passport says "Dr.". - As a general rule, I would recommend using the title only where it is (academically) appropriate (e.g. application for a research position, conference) but not where it would be simply boasting (e.g. hotel/airline reservations).

@DetlevCM: Well, there's always the places where people might belittle you, and having a Ph.D. might prevent that. I have a friend in Germany and she told me that it was very hard for her to find an apartment, until she got her Ph.D. and once people see "Dr." as the official title, it is far far easier to find an apartment. (And this difficulty is partially corroborated by a different friend who wanted to live in Germany for a while, and went there with literally huge wads of cash, but still got denied by some landlords because he didn't have a stable job.)

I heard, in Germany, that if you have a PhD then you expected to update your passport. I'm not 100% sure thu.

@TheGuy: You can, but you don't have to.

@TheGuy You have to get a new passport every few years anyway, so you are a lot cheaper off by waiting until you have to get a new one because the old one expired.

@Inkblot I'd say if people belittle another person for not having a PhD, it says more about them than the PhD-holder, especially as an impressive academic title or job title means very little nowadays. (There are good and bad professors, PhDs are a "dime a dozen" nowadays... and everybody can be the director of their own business.) Then again, it does remind me of an article from zeit/zeitOnline a long time ago about the Austrian love for titles, where being "professor so and so" might get you a table in a restaurant, but being "mr so and so" does not.

@DetlevCM: That is a gross misinterpretation of what I was saying. Nobody is belittling you for not having a PhD, rather they don't belittle you for having one.

@Inkblot Well, the alternative word to use then would be discriminate against non-academics. The result is the same. You have people who actively think people without a specific academic degree to be below them/not worthy of renting/etc. and are thus discriminated against. - And as I said before, this says more about the person applying the discrimination.

Obviously, the practice differs in different countries. Would you not tag the one you have in mind?

PhD is an academic degree. It is actually dependent on person and country whether to use the title "Dr." in passports and other relevant documents.
However, using Mr. would be wise to avoid a confusion between a doctor (MBBS, MD) and a doctorate (PhD). As per UK gov website, it is not advisable [1]
I have never come across anyone using Dr. in legal documents. Moreover, it is not really a necessity to include Dr. in official/legal documents. For example, I still see my supervisor (who is a senior professor with PhD in 1990s) gets official documents with his name titled "Mr.".

Even MBBS is an academic degree only no? They can put Dr on their passports, right?

Yes, it is. That is why it should not be used.

"I have never come across anyone using Dr. in legal documents." - it's not unusual here in Germany, and it sometimes gives you a bit of an advantage when dealing with banks and similar (in that they (irrationally, I'd say) assume they can give you a higher credit allowance etc.).

@O.R.Mapper Oh, I didn't know about Germany. This is quite interesting. Thanks for the information.

@Coder: If neither PhDs not medics can use Dr in title, why is it a title in the first place?

@vassalraja Of course they can use the title. Thats what they have earned after several years of dedicated research and studies. But, is it really a necessity to include them in official/legal documents? As I said it depends on individual preference and place of stay. I still see my supervisor (who is a senior professor with PhD in 1990s) gets official documents with his name titled "Mr.".

The link you provided says that professional titles such as Doctor are acceptable without limiting it to medical doctors. It merely says that academic and professional qualifications are not allowed. So you can't have "PhD" or "MD" in your UK passport, but you can have Doctor/Dr. included as an observation.

@O.R.Mapper Even more so, for better or worse, here in Austria, where people even sign with their MA.

I agree with JAB, perhaps @Coder can edit if they agree.

I'm down voting because the line you wrote about the UK gov guideline is not true. If you edit accordingly, please tag me and I may upvote.

I agree with the @JAB, user2768 and The Doctor on the misinterpretation of the rules in the linked document. On my reading the rules forbidding academic qualifications refer to the post nomnial letters, e.g. BSc, BA, BEng. The title of Doctor, bestowed upon completion of a PhD or simmilar, is allowed as a professional title. The PhD is differnet to other academic qualifications as it gives you an academic qualification AND a change in title.

That said, I don't think titles appear on passports in Australia.

As far as the USA, their passports do not have a title field  for marital status (Miss, Mrs) professional titles (Dr, Rev, etc) or for titles or nobility (Dame, Sir, etc) so it’s a moot point for American passport holders.

For what it's worth, titles are not entered on Irish passports either.

Nor in italian ones

I think it depends on you whether you use Dr. or not. Getting a PhD is a very important and difficult accomplishment and you should feel proud of it. If you want to use Dr in any circumstance including in your passport (if allowed) go for it. If you don't feel like it then don't. I don't get why people would be worried about being confused with a MD A MD is a Dr just like anybody else, it has no higher or lesser importance. If someone gets confused then they can ask you what you are a Doctor of. My suggestion is use it whenever you feel like it, you worked really hard for it.


text:
Why do grad programs ask for date of birth?
In the spirit of this question about photos on CVs, I'm wondering why applications to grad programs seem to universally ask for the applicant's date of birth, usually right next to the applicant's name.
This is in sharp contrast to the standard practice in "industry" (at least in the US), where no age-identifying information is requested until after you've been hired, and even then the information is restricted to HR.
A few discriminatory practices such as requiring date of birth on the CV or dissertation seem to be finally going the way of the dinosaur, but this obvious point of potential discrimination persists. Why?

DOB is often used (for better or worse) for identification and authentication. e.g. when I call phone company about my bill, they ask for my DOB.

Some companies use "special date" instead of DOB. In principle, you can give the phone company any date you want, because it is just for identification. But could you do the same with an application?

@Elizabeth not everywhere. Here they ask for DoB as that is part of your social security number, and that is what you will be registered with. That said, this does not seem in any way necessary for applications, and I can't think of any good reason to require it (and as you point out, plenty of reasons why it should not be there).

I have been on the other side looking at applications for summer students. I felt like I would rather not have that information glaring at me. My guess is  that someone in HR designed the application form without thinking.

For a grad program, age matters a little bit because of little space there is in many programs. This is true of some high profile majors like medicine though not particularly true to others like Law. Public universities are tasked with graduating people who will contribute to society given that their education is A) subsidized and B) very limited in space.
This is going to sound mean, but a 60 year attempting to enter med school is not going to be a good candidate because by the time they finish med school and residency, they are unlikely to work more than 10-15 years before health complications and/or death. But if you take a 25 year old, they will likely use that degree for about 40 years. Mind you, this is not true of all universities and certainly, private ones are not held to these unwritten rules so ymmv.

"Mean" isn't the point. What you're describing is illegal discrimination, and the law is very clear about this. Furthermore, public universities are generally subject to more rigid antidiscrimination laws than private schools.

Specifically, in the US it is illegal to discriminate against people who are over 40 in favor of those under 40. (But it is not illegal to favor a 50-year old over a 30-year old, or 60 vs 50, or 50 vs 60, or 20 vs 30, or or 30 vs 20.)

@TomChurch Yes, you are correct. I should have been more specific.

@ElizabethHenning: no problem; it's just a favorite curiosity of mine that age discrimination is the only federally protected class that isn't symmetric.

This is primarily conjecture, but I think it's probably pretty close. I suspect that it is a combination of use as an identifier and use for scholarship/financial aid package determination.

Because age is the parameter to judge the experience of life and knowledge. To check your mentally able to opt the situation. For example when we go for nursery admission.

Age isn't a measure of experience or knowledge.

@Eppicurt I think at least it strongly correlates, at least with the first.

@peterh I would think a CV is a more appropriate means of measuring that. Being older obviously means you have more time to become more experienced, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you are.

@Eppicurt The expected value of the sum of more positive random variables is bigger.

Knowledge is not measurable --- by whatever means, call it age, or cv.

@peterh Using age as a proxy for anything is illegal discrimination, whether or not the correlation is valid.

@ElizabethHenning: actually it is not illegal in the US to prefer older candidates over younger candidates. (Specific states might have stricter laws, but I don't believe most do.)

@TomChurch I'm not sure that you can favor an older applicant as being "more experienced" solely on the basis of being older.

@ElizabethHenning: I'm don't think that is necessarily illegal.  Most anti-discrimination laws distinguish between direct and indirect age discrimination, and in the latter case (e.g., if the discrimination is based on a characteristic like "experience") it is allowed if the use of that characteristic is "reasonable".  The usual practice is that the discriminator bears the onus of proving that their reliance on that characteristic is reasonable in the circumstances.  So if it is reasonable to prefer a more experienced candidate, you can discriminate on this basis (in most jurisdications).


text:
Is it common for tutors to be concerned they might teach themselves out of a job?
I'm tutoring a student. They originally hired me after failing an exam, and now, after six months, they nearly scored an A in the finals (they should have gotten the 'A' too, but the lecturer set a bad question and then refused to admit there was no correct answer).
Naturally I'm happy they've improved by so much, but now I'm curious: strong students don't generally need tutors. They are more than capable of studying on their own. I could potentially be teaching myself out of a job. I'm lucky in the sense that I don't need this job, so I don't have to be concerned, but someone else might.
I'm wondering if tutors are concerned that if they teach too well they might lose their job, and if so, whether they hold back (that would be unethical??).

You are asking for a prediction of what is in the minds of unknown persons? No, not everyone is ethical.

@Buffy: there might well be research on this which Allure might be interested in... but asking for specific research is off-topic, and as you write, mind-reading is so as well.

Maybe tutors should keep in mind that, like in any service job, past successes help with marketing (often by word of mouth in this context) and justification when setting future prices.

I’d say that, no, it is not common. There are more students needing help next semester, and if you do a good job you will be in demand.

In my experience students are more likely to drop a tutor because they didn't improve! They become discouraged with their studies, leading them to drop out or change majors.

If you teach people that become better than you: you are a success! You are a great teacher! Congratulations!
You are worried that they will take your spot? Or someone elses? Is that the new academic ideal that we now embrace holding people back (or not giving them the best possible support) so that they may not overshadow their peers? There is a thinking school that favours that, and it will give you mediocrity and stagnation. Is this what people would be paying the exorbitant student fees for?
Healthy competition is a good thing; only when society tips over and tramples over the less fortunate, it becomes a problem. In academia, striving for excellence used to be (and should be) the norm. Striving for excellence does not preclude compassion for the less fortunate, but - in turn - compassion does not mean holding back the capable ones from achieving their potential.
Is it a problem if a student excels the teacher? Let's see:
Socrates: Plato
Sommerfeld: Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Peter Debye, and Hans Bethe (all Nobel Prize winners, unlike Sommerfeld)
Aristotle: Alexander the Great (not intellectually, necessarily, but on a wide scale of abilities)
John Wheeler: Richard Feynman
If you are a teacher who makes people excel, you are a success. No matter where, your skill will be always in demand. Even in industry, capable coaches are amongst the most valuable people there are, because they find and (in a way) "generate" excellence, not as a one-off, but on a regular basis.


text:
Why are so many professors' websites out of date?
Inspired by comments and answers to Do professors normally explicitly state on their web page that they aren't taking new applicants?

Given that most professors' websites are years out of date, empirically ...

Why are most professors' websites years out of date? What is stopping them from updating their websites?

Comments and answers-in-comments have been moved to chat; please do not continue the discussion here. Before posting a comment below this one, please review the purposes of comments. Comments that do not request clarification or suggest improvements usually belong as an answer, on [meta], or in [chat]. Comments continuing discussion or containing answers will be removed.

As an example, my "official professorial" web page is on my college's website. The institution formally controls what's published there, such that any change has to go through multiple layers of administrative oversight, approval, handoff to technical staff, ticket pipeline -- and then likely iterations on fixing errors that pop up through that broken-telephone game -- before being actually live on the site.
It's so much work, and uncertain to actually succeed, that many staff and departments just give up and don't bother except in cases of really huge overhauls. Frequently by the time you get around to making a change, the whole process has been reorganized, and then you need to add in some advance research to find out who the current lead contact is, what the process is, how they expect the change to be communicated, etc. I think if I were to ask my department staff right now, they wouldn't know how changes can be made.
Over time, anything that feels like PR gets more and more tightly-gripped by the college administration, and therefore harder to change, I'd say.

This is exactly the problem at my institution as well.  My solution is to have a personal website of my own - it is not very up to date either, but that is because I spend too much of my time on admin and teaching to actually do anything worth posting there.  My official university web page has a conspicuous link to my personal one.

Academics crave freedom. When that is quashed, they just move on to an area where they have it. I used to have a well-maintained and informative, even if not stylish, webpage. Then we moved to a corporate unified page which is much harder to maintain, and near impossible to automate content for. And that's that.

@CaptainEmacs - I'm not sure it is freedom per se, just a level of hassle that totally negates any perceived benefit.

@JonCuster I assume you mean "avoid lack of freedom"? The way it's written, I cannot semantically parse your comment in the context of mine.

I don't think that 'lack of freedom' impacts the decision to stop updating, more that bureaucratic obstacles provide enough friction to abandon the issue.

@JonCuster: for many, I think it’s both — the bureaucratic obstacles provide friction; they also restrict our freedom in what we can put up there, which reduces our motivation to overcome the freedom.

@JonCuster I actually agree with most of your statement. Except that enough friction becomes equivalent to lack of freedom.

@CaptainEmacs - I try to keep a distinction between intentional and unintentional (yet often highly predictable) outcomes. Censoring your institutional website restricts your freedom. Bureaucratic friction is part and parcel of human organizations. Saying it restricts your freedom is attributing the result to malice.

@JonCuster A seat belt restricts my freedom, and I do not attribute it to malice. A bureaucracy may have good reasons to restrict my freedom or it may be just due to misalignment, due to lazy bureaucrats, due bureaucrats that do not like to take responsibility, due to power-players or due to actual antagonism.  There is a whole spectrum, ranging from the benevolent to the malign. But it still may restrict freedom. It is substantially more easy to tolerate the cases closer to the former part of the spectrum, but it does not change the situation on the ground.

The well-oiled efficiency machine of academia...

This answer makes a good point but in many cases, in my experience, a professor's website is a personal website (sometimes hosted by the university but controlled by the prof, sometimes not) and these websites too are often years out of date.

@Mentalist "of academia" -> "of by far most large organizations". Here, fixed that for you.

Various reasons:

Sadly, course content is becoming a walled garden. When I was a student, many professors had a page with their own course notes; today the same course notes are more often hosted on a Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams class, or closed Moodle instance, and they are not accessible from people outside the university. I see this as a big loss.

The incentives in having a personal website are typically tied to hiring. A website is a business card; once you have tenure, you are swamped with other responsibilities and updating your page becomes less important.

Another thing worth pointing out is that today having a website is the exception, not the norm. Which other category of people has a personal website, today? I mean a true self-hosted website, not just a social media page. Programmers, mostly, but it could be argued that for them it's also a business card to get a job; it just gets updated longer because they job-hop more.

Indeed. At my univ, in math, there is more and more pressure to put any course materials into some proprietary software... which does not allow access to anyone not registered for the course. E.g., I cannot see my colleagues' course notes or syllabi! But I do still maintain all my notes of all sorts on-line, in PDF, linked-to from plain-HTML pages. I think I'm somewhat "grandfathered-in"... and, also, I do not know what to plan for after I retire, etc...

"Sadly, course content is becoming a walled garden." - I've also been observing this trend in the Netherlands. It's not only sad in general, I feel it's also actively worse for students. Since students usually only get access to the course information when the course starts, it has become harder to assess a course's content before enrolling :(

@paulgarrett For standard courses like calculus where I don't write notes, indeed I don't put info on my public webpage anymore and just use the university LMS.  But for advanced courses where I write up notes, I still use my public webpage.  I don't see this as a huge loss of resources, though I realize not everyone's like us.

@paulgarrett Of course there is still the persistency issue for informal notes etc you mention.  One option is to post things to AMS Open Math Notes.

@Kimball That option is available for math only, while the problem is broader. And unfortunately AMS is quite cold on open-licensing matters, so it is very unclear what one can or cannot do with those notes. The website states that visitors are "encouraged to download and use any of these materials as teaching and research aids", but the FAQ states that "Copyright for all notes resides with the original author", granting no rights.

I share the "walled garden" concern.  Between spring and summer terms, I've put the only course I'm currently teaching fully online and fully public on YouTube.  (If you care, search in YouTube for IT3123.)

@paulgarrett I don't see why any professor couldn't post the content to their personal site first, with each PDF containing the URL to the original source and a CC-0, CC-BY, etc. badge, and then deliver that content to the university (unaltered). If they want exclusivity, the uni should have to pay for such a contract, I think.

@paulgarrett get all your pages and notes into the Internet Archive, please! That way, if you win the lottery (or 'catch' the proverbial bus) and no longer maintain your site, then it will still be there for all of us to benefit.

(@DavidRoberts, thanks for your encouragement... such things are, indeed, an issue for the future...)

@paulgarrett how does that "pressure" manifest itself where you are? Several years ago I finally started using the internal LMS here as the place to post basic details about my courses that are of no interest to outsiders (e.g., syllabi, problem sets, and course announcements) and only because more and more students in my classes were expecting things to be in the LMS since all their non-math classes were using it. But I never felt any push to put my course notes behind some LMS wall.

@KCd, well, course listings no longer give links to faculty pages, but only the the "LMS"... and/so students don't realize that anyone might be doing anything outside the "LMS"?

@paulgarrett  I see. It's true that on my course homepages within the university's LMS I place copies of my course notes rather than use a direct link to their original location on my own website, but I also did that back when my course homepages were on my own website.

The other answerers have covered most of the reasons. Elaborating on two problem areas that I find personally compelling:
University administrators and history of this technology.
I started maintaining a personal web page around 1995. I was quite excited about it, adding material as I saw fit. Quickly started using it as a channel for distributing information and material related to my courses as well. The pages were crude (basic HTML of the era), but they were A) easy to maintain, and B) got the job done. Many colleagues in Computer Science, Physics and Math did the same (maybe STEM fields were quick to adopt this). One could learn enough HTML in a few hours. Over the years I added more and more stuff. After a 3 hours course on Perl I even added a crude Q&A window on the course page, but the students were not really interested, and they disallowed CGIs (the first blow). But it has gotten progressively worse.

Some smart guy started tooting for Moodle and such. They had some leverage at the administration, university digital services in particular. After all, we are talking about people who never taught a single course, but instead concentrated on demanding things like: uniform appearance, hiding content from outsiders. And because they weren't themselves doing the teaching, they had the time to press their agenda. Ridiculous. Pages of colleagues/friends from universities across the country - all out of sight. What a blow!
Then came the day the tech staff simply pulled down all the course pages on university HTML server, and declared that to be for personal pages only. A few dozen angry teachers were left in a limbo. I complained, and was given the address of that in-your-face "how did we do today" -page. I complained to the dean, as did many others. Soon enough both the deans of science and engineering schools made angry phone calls to the head of digital services, who presumably knew nothing about what his underlings had pulled off. Anyway, those web-pages were returned. But I could no longer rely on anything I kept their to be safe from whims of those bureaucrats. I had no choice but learn basic Moodle.
At the same time those young tyros started making demands that all the personal web pages need to be converted to Word Press instead of the familiar vanilla HTML. They would even include a link to a starter guide. You know, the one where it explained how anyone who has spend a decade learning UNIX can install it on their server. No local support would be given.

SCREW THEM!
TL;DR;

I have no desire to learn a completely new system for writing a web page every few years. That's not what I'm here for.
Keeping both Google and Microsoft (and Meta) from collecting personal information is too much work as it is, these changes make it worse.

I don't feel great about posting a rant like this. You can probably guess that the underlying sentiment has been brewing for a long time. Judging from the votes I'm not the only person feeling this way.
In the interest of fairness I would welcome an answer/comment from some university web administrator (or some such). Admittedly this answer may not be very conducive to a dialogue like that. But lack of dialogue from their side made the problem significantly worse than it needed to be.  Maybe that ship sailed :-(

+100 if I could.

My Why I Have My Own Web Site page says, in part, "Then, in August, 2011, the people who run the university web site apparently decided that teaching and learning would take a back seat to other uses of the web. They moved all the faculty material to a different server, with no notice, four days before the start of fall classes. All the search engine links broke, which was bad. Even worse, all the links in my distance learning courses broke. All that breakage could have been avoided by installing some "redirect" commands on the Web server, but they chose not to do that. {sigh}"

@CaptainEmacs: offer a bounty?

@JW Can I give the poster the bounty directly or how would I do that?

@CaptainEmacs: https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/bounty

@DanielR.Collins I do not think that addresses my intention. I did not wish to put a bounty on the question, but reward the response (and this is not my question, so I do not think I have a say where the bounty goes to).

@CaptainEmacs: "You do not need to be the asker of the question to offer a bounty on it...  After the bounty ends... Simply click the bounty award icon next to each answer to permanently award your bounty to the answerer."

My experience has been that many professors had their students make their websites using Dreamweaver or something similar, then the student would graduate, replace their laptop, or lose their software license. Years later when the professor wants to update their website they don't know how. (Or sometimes they host a website on an unpatched personal machine connected to the network, causing a security hazard.) Having a standardized, centralized system such as WordPress means I.T. doesn't have to support and secure every custom option for every professor.

@jeffronicus I'm sure concerns like that were behind some decisions. For example, I understand, why our I.T. pulled the plug off user written cgi-scripts. But I'm not net savvy enough to know exactly what kind of a security hazard my HTML3 pages form? And should they then not provide tools converting my structure of one html file (plus supporting links, images and pdf-documents) per course into WP?

I had to check it. I'm only using HTML1 commands :-) Not sure I want to learn anything more difficult.

Effort and reward.
Effort: Updating a website takes effort. Maybe a lot of effort (see Daniel's excellent answer), maybe a little less. But not everyone knows how to update their site, and there's no real reason to expect them to know how. Why should a professor of (say) history know HTML code and so on?
Reward: There isn't much. What does a professor gain from an updated site? Probably what changes the most often is publications and that can go on a CV, or, for other people who want to know what a professor has published, there's always Google Scholar.
Professors get paid to do research, teach, and win grants. In their spare time (hah!) they probably would rather go fishing, or read a novel, or spend time with their families than update websites.

What does a professor gain from an updated site? Don't research interests change over time? Prospective students might decide to contact/not contact depending on the research interests listed on the webpage.

@Allure - I suspect many professors think too many prospective students contact them already.

@Allure The general theme of the research typically doesn't change. If a professor talks about neurology on their webpage, they're not likely to have switched to plant pathology. The details may have changed (e.g. researching Parkinson's instead of Alzheimer's), but you can gauge that from recent publications. (And they're unlikely to be public about unpublished work, even if they're actively updating the webpage.) -- If you really want to know details about potential prospective projects, you need to contact the professor in any case.

One "reward" is that you can encourage uptake of your research by e.g. providing the code to reproduce the results in a paper, or software toolboxes implementing your methods, or on-line demonstrations (using javascript perhaps) of your research methods so that other researchers can have a play with them without any effort being required.  The research can be more than just the paper.  I also use my site for my hobby programming output (much more fun than fishing!)

I think a potential grad student would, after looking at a website, look for what the professor has done lately,, especially if the web page looks out of date.

True, but I think potential grad students are a small minority of the visitors (and they also may enjoy using the demos and other dynamic content).  It is a pity that I have time for dynamic content creation or to make the site look "up-to-date" (which I personally dislike), but not both (not that I have that much time for either these days).

@DikranMarsupial This only really seems to apply to software people. I tend to find that such people are much more likely to have more up to date websites (at least the "tools" or "software" sections) than other professors.

@IanSudbery indeed CS profs are probably also more likely to generate dynamic content which needs more freedom than content mangement systems (including things like squarespace) can easily provide - in my case most of it was written so that biologists could have a play with the bioinformatics applications I was working on.

@Peter Flom a prospective PhD applicant can look at the updated status of the professor regarding not having any active open positions and not waste his money (and effort) by applying and listing him as a potential advisor?

@R.M. well research interests can be obscure to people who aren't expert. For example, it's not a priori clear to me that Parkinson's and Alzheimer's are even related (I know they're both ailments of the brain, but I don't know if e.g. research that cures one will also cure the other). Furthermore professors often publish a lot of papers, so it's impractical to check all of them in detail; a reasonable question one might ask is "what recent paper are you most proud of" and that is something one would again rely on the website to say.

The real question is: Why do professors have a website in the first place?
Consider the value proposition -- and then how priorities and technologies change through their career and you get a recipe for out of date sites.
Professors have a website to 1) convey information to students and 2) advertise themselves.

A professor may have a website to post course related files.  This used to be the only way to provide supplementary materials and notes to accompany your course.  Their university may have adopted some centralized course management software (Blackboard, Moodle, etc.) and now require that such information is shared via that site -- which is only accessible to students.  Consequently, the old course pages are left to wither.

A new professor has many reasons to advertise themselves and their lab.  They want to attract good grad students and provide information about their work to potential sponsors.  They want their papers as accessible as possible (to drive citations).  These things (students, funding, papers) are all very important to the professor until they go through the promotion and tenure process.  After that, their need to self promote diminishes and you are left with old websites that are left to wither.

In addition to adopting course management systems, departments, colleges, and universities are fond of introducing and changing policies.  This often follows a familiar pattern.

No policy, motivated faculty make their own website as needed.
Administration (at some level) decides that the faculty need more web presence, so they institute a policy that all faculty shall create a page.  They provide a template with minimal information that is updated by a university webmaster.  They discourage the use of a personal page.  The institution page has minimal useful information.
Soon the administration drops funding for the webmaster, so the 'official' site starts to rot, but the policy remains in place.
This cycle repeats at different levels of administration.  In all cases, the faculty are prevented from making the website something personal, topical, and useful to people in their field.  Any motivation for developing and maintaining a website is destroyed.

In my area, people self-host their own papers/preprints and notes that don't quite warrant formal publication. It's really useful for the research process to have someone's output on a certain topic all in one place!

Most academics have more things to complete than they have time to complete them.
Some of this work is stuff they're immensely interested in doing (e.g. carrying out work on their key research topics); some of it is stuff they're interested in (e.g. keeping up with the latest research in their and related fields); some of it is stuff that is absolutely mandatory and has hard deadlines (e.g. teaching, marking, some admin); some of is required to keep their work going and has hard deadlines (e.g. applying for grants); some of it is important to keep their work going to a good standard (e.g. preparing and updating course slides); and then you get stuff which would be nice to do and has no hard deadlines (e.g. updating a website).
Which things do you think are most likely to get put off?

The question should be

Why are so many professors' websites out of date?

and the answer, somewhat tongue-in-cheek is: Because nobody has updated them. The reason for that is, generally, that people do what is fun and rewarding, which mostly excludes updating websites.

I don't think we need another answer that says "they have other things to do" except is also short.

@AzorAhai-him- Yeah, point taken. The additional angle I wanted to bring was that this is a general issue, nothing to see here.

My website never goes out of date. That would require that I have one in the first place...

@JonCuster you don't have a LinkedIn profile?

@Allure - not at all. I have the job I want until I retire.

As others have already said, this is not something that is entirely under our control. Depending on the institution, there may - or may not - be a person who is specifically tasked with keeping these pages/sites current. Otherwise, it can easily be more than a few years between updates. We, for example, have seen recent staff turnover in our department since the pandemic, and we - only just this week - have identified the person to whom we must now submit our updated CVs. That said, many of us keep our information up-to-date via other means - i.e., Google Scholar, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, etc.

Given most of the previous "complications" and issues already considered, many scholars tend to use nowdays other "technologies" instead, that are much easier to use. Among them I can see (my case) active presence in "social networks" such as Twitter / LinkedIN mostly. Once you register, it is much easier to publish anything related to your work there, and secondly, the platform's algorithm will take care that you get content you like so that you remain there.

Many good answers, one thing I would add is just the idea of pasr historical biases. People who have taught since 1996 are less likely to have their own GitHub. Compare them to young aspiring people in econometrics (like me, or those in software engineering), we (the newer blood) have much much more incentive to want to learn how to make our own website, and maintain it.
Back in ye olden days, you either didn't have a website (since presumably it was rare to have your own) or yours was maintained by those at the university, which as others have mentioned comes with bureaucracy.


text:
How do you teach a student to work faster?
I'm teaching a student who is quite good - whenever we work on problems together, they tend to get most of the solution pretty easily. Occasionally they might need hints, but it's uncommon for them to make no progress on a problem. They are not a top student and will not be winning any competitions, but they are a good student.
However, they tend to do surprisingly poorly in exams. Talking to them afterwards, it seems that they are constantly under time pressure, sufficiently so that they barely have time to finish the exam (and no time to check their answers).
How does one teach a student to work faster? The only way I can think of is to repeatedly do a question while timing oneself with a stopwatch. However, one would have to spread this out over weeks (or the solution is still fresh in memory), and that's not realistic since the syllabus keeps moving on.

@xxxxxxxxx I don't believe they're disabled in any way.

@Allure Things like ADHD might not seem disabling on the surface, but there is a reason there's still accommodations. They might technically be able to do something, but if the effort is much higher than what would be needed for other people, then it is in effect still disabling.

@TheEvilMetal But if she has ADHD (i.e. she is disabled in some way), I am not aware of it.

If time is a limiting factor on the exam at all you've probably designed the exam poorly. From experience nothing feels worse than obtaining a lower grade than you could have simply because you didn't get time to finish the test.

Focusing on going faster (via “training” or whatever) is absolutely the wrong way to go about it. Often the root cause is distress over what a test represents: graded performance where wrong answers matter. This is often exacerbated by people (parents!) expecting high grades. Talk with the school psychologist about ways to reduce her stress about exams. Do not add more stress via extra timed test taking — it will be absolutely counterproductive in every measurable way and destroy any remaining engagement with learning!

@xxxxxxxxx I'd the student never showed some proof of disability  that would impact their ability to finish in time, such as the mentioned ADHD, the professor can't, and shouldn't, provide the student any special treatment. Increasing the length of the exam for everyone might not be feasible for OP.

How do you teach someone to run faster, or lift heavier, or jump higher?
For the most part, you don’t. Sure you have to show them the proper technique, yet the highest impact is training and not teaching. Teaching only shows them a specific technique, training is what builds the general power and resilience.
Likewise, get slow students to train being faster. That is not about specific tasks but rather the skills behind any related tasks - even as the syllabus moves on, training with the current task builds the general skill to handle other tasks faster as well.
Depending on how your class is structured, you can tailor this to individual or all students:

Do more than one exam so that students are in the exam situation more but with lower impact.
Have frequent no-stakes tests with limited time. This may be something you do in class and grade if you have the time, or something students get to do on their own.
Encourage students to do parts of their homework on the clock. Effectively they will be inserting mini-exams for themselves into the regular schedule.
Encourage students to do other activities that have time constraints. This can be academic challenges or, say, playing chess with a time limit.

The general idea here is that students train being in situations of limited time. Whatever you can think of that achieves this should be helpful. However, as with all training, keep in mind that they have to do it - you can encourage and guide them but they have to go the way themselves.

When I was a student, we were told: Performance equals work per time. Professors shrugged off all complaints about limited time like this... I prefer your approach.

+1 for "training not teaching"

If they enjoy competitions, it might be a moment to raise that point - leading by excitement instead of fear.

I had a subject that I understood well but to get a reasonable grade, had to solve many questions so that I can do them fast and stay within the exam time limit.

Regarding timed homework, online quizzes at home worth little to none of the semester grade are a good way to do this, especially with exam style questions. Also acts as a great way for you and the student themself to have a live update as to their understanding, if the first few to answer do badly you know in advance to potentially prep a quick explanation over the weekend, and students know while still working on that topic, so they don't fall behind to correct misunderstandings the week after.

I think it would be important to take a closer look at the student's behavior when taking an exam (or possibly in individual practice problems).  Where are they losing time?  Are they just globally slow at everything? Or are there particular operations that cause them to lose time? Slowness may just be a symptom of a deeper problem that needs to be addressed.
I can illustrate with two related anecdotes.
Even in 3rd grade, I hated memorizing. I stubbornly refused to memorize the multiplication tables since multiplication was taught as just repeated addition. If I could translate my thoughts back then into my vocabulary today, my attitude was "Why memorize that which I can derive from first principles?" But the tests were timed and I failed most tests because I couldn't add fast enough.  To this day, I'm irked that the teacher didn't pull me aside and try to understand my problem.  She could obviously see the columns of digits that I was laboriously adding in the margin.
Fast forward about 20 years to freshman physics in college. For me, I loved being able to start with first principles (say, Newton's 3 laws) at the very beginning of a chapter, and then being able to prove their consequences (such as the path of a projectile being a parabola). That's how I handled exams. With few exceptions, I would start with first principles, derive the equations I needed to solve a problem, then solve the problem.  I failed to finish most exams because I ran out of time.  Finally, one day it hit me like a ton of bricks: Oh my god, the professor doesn't want me to understand the foundations of physics.  He just wants me to memorize the list of equations in the chapter summary and then mindlessly plug and chug on exams. Once I understood the game, my performance on exams improved.
I'm not saying that "failing to memorize" is this particular student's problem.  Only that if you have the time and resources, it would help the student to diagnose the slowness problem more thoroughly.  Where are they losing time? If it's global slowness, then (as others have already suggested) drilling is probably the best prescription.  But it may be a more focused issue that is causing problems.
On exams, are students expected to show their work?  If so, that might be a good place to start to see where they are losing time or going through unnecessary steps.
Have you asked the student for their perspective? You had mentioned that "Talking to them afterwards, it seems that they are constantly under time pressure."  I think you could inquire deeper.  The exams are timed. They are under time pressure. But we don't know if feeling time pressure is cause (e.g., math or test anxiety) or effect (losing time due to some other problem).

I think the advice is sound, but it irks me that memorising is portrayed as being at odds with understanding. I too prefer being able to derive knowledge from first principles, both for understanding and memory efficiency, yet memorising definitely has a place for sheer practicality - it’s just much faster and that ultimately enables things you couldn’t otherwise understand or do. (There was a nice Q&A on, I think, math educators SE on how not memorising things one has understood puts a practical limit on understanding, simply because time and attention are limited resources for humans).

@MisterMiyagi. I agree. If my 3rd grade teacher had told me why memorizing was important (See https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/9667/when-should-a-kid-have-memorized-the-multiplication-table/9684#9684) then my experience would have been different. At the least she could have said, "Trust me. Memorizing multiplication tables is important, even if you can't understand why yet." Memorizing and understanding don't have to be at odds, but teaching methods often favor rote memorization. For example, my physic prof could have included SOME derivation problems on exams.

Another advantage of memorising formulæ: it works in both directions.  That is, in addition to being able to replace expression A with B (which you could derive from A given time), it also lets you replace B with A (which you might not be able to do without memorising).  And there are times when A might be more useful (e.g. if it's easier to integrate, or matches or cancels something else in the problem, or its physical meaning is more obvious).  — I learned this with trig. identities, which are easy to derive when needed, but (as I discovered) hard to recognise if you don't know them…

I would consider the possibility that the student just has problems with pressure and "locks up" in some way. This might be especially true if your exams are "high stakes". If that is the case, and it is just a guess on my part, it isn't something you can solve as you aren't trained for that, I'd guess.
Time pressure and uncertainty might make it difficult to quickly come to an answer that "pleases" them.
Perhaps the student should see a counsellor of some kind who can teach them how to overcome it.
The thing in your post that led me to this guess is that they do fine with you when there is little pressure. They might even be taking cues from your facial expression and such when they have made a good choice and don't feel they need to consider other possibilities and go back and forth to choose an answer.
You could even describe the symptom to a trained psychologist/counsellor and get their advice.

I don't understand your 4th paragraph. You're saying the student may have a psychological problem and then giving an argument which describes a different reason for the students performance. If the student doubts their solutions too much in exams and doesn't have that issue during training because the teacher is too quick in confirming the approach then that's not a psychological issue...

Perhaps the student should see a counsellor of some kind who can teach them how to overcome it. Yes, but how does the counsellor teach this?

They are trained for such things. I doubt that you are as I am not. But you could ask one for pointers. Some sorts of anxiety require drugs, I suspect. Again, I can't diagnose, but a pro could.

Not holistic, but one approach taught for exam taking is to quickly skim the whole exam, then tackle the easier problems first.
This:

gets them done;
gives a positive boost for the rest of the exam;
helps context switch the brain towards the subject area (ie. warms it up for future questions);
and lets part of the brain mull over how to solve the trickier ones seen during the initial scan.

Other than that, have the student tackle timed practise exams. Practise, practise, practise. Best of luck!

An alternative approach --- you don't
Examinations can be useful tools for many things, but most work in professions that apply academic skills is done slowly and carefully (with some exceptions).  Speed can be useful in some cases, but it might not be all that important after leaving the university.  Your student is here encountering a trade-off between focusing attention on substantive mastery of the subject and training for greater processing and writing speed.  Both of those skills are potentially useful, but the latter is more important for examinations and less important for solving real-world problems in the professions.
Consequently, one possibility here is for your student to focus on mastery of the subject matter and simply accept that her exam performance will be hampered by her lack of speed, with consequently lower grades.  This means that her grades may not fully reflect her level of mastery of the material, but that might be okay.  Your student might still be able to perform well in the profession after graduating, and ultimately, she will need to be the one to decide the appropriate trade-off for allocation of her time between learning new material and training for speed.  (For the latter, I agree with the answer by MisterMiyagi.)

Yeah, though, admittedly, being really quick (and fairly accurate) certainly looks good, and is often useful, not all meaningful issue admit that approach. Awkwardly, schoolwork mostly seems to do that. Hard to escape it, I do think, though I've tried for decades to find a (humane!) way around it. E.g., replacing a timed exam by a weekend-long "take-home" exam is extremely dubious!!! ... as I eventually realized. I do not own my students' weekends, etc. :)

Agreeing and supplementing - it would be good to clarify the student's goal before trying to get them to work faster. At the end of the day working fast in exams is a goal of the game of schooling, not of education. It seems they already getting educated because they can do the work. Unless they are failing, or dismayed, this would only be a problem if they were targeting a career goal (like researcher) where GPA mattered.

There may be several different factors at play here — other answers raise other excellent points.  But one big possible factor is what’s known in the UK as exam technique — meaning a bunch of general skills that affect exam performance, including good time management, keeping calm under pressure, and so on.  Searching the keyword “exam technique” finds lots of good advice on the matter from teachers and academics, e.g. in the Newcastle University Academic Skills Kit, the Sheffield University Study Skills guide, these tips from Dave Pearce at the University of York, and these slides from Seb Savory at Cambridge University.  There are many more good tips in those than I can repeat here — they’re good reading both for students, and (even more) for instructors, as a source of ideas to offer students.  But the core points that come up most often fall mostly into time management and stress management.
Time management: The goal here is to make sure you’re using the time effectively.  Big-picture wise, the main aim is avoid spending a lot of time stuck on hard problems, if there are easier problems that would give you more points in the same time.
So to do that, it’s usually good to skim through the whole exam for a few minutes at the start — to give this, say, 5–10 mins for a 3 hour exam.  This lets you pick out which questions look easiest, so you can attempt those first.  It also primes you with the rough areas of all the questions, so that your subconscious can start recalling relevant background for them all.
After that first skim, then you usually want to start with the questions that looked easiest, and proceed to harder problems after.  If a problem turns out harder than expected — or if e.g. 1(a) and 1(b) are OK, but you can’t see how to do 1(c) — then don’t spend too long stuck on the hard part, especially if you’re not making progress; recognise you’re stuck, move on to another question, and come back to those skipped parts later.  Get low-hanging fruit locked down first!
Stress management: The main goal here is to keep yourself calm and avoid panicking — let the pressure focus your mind, but not distract or paralyse you.  There are various tactics for this, practical and psychological — of course, different things will work for different people.  Practically, things that often help include breathing deeply if you catch yourself starting to panic; having a water bottle or similar to sip from; and getting some moderate physical exercise beforehand (to taste, not necessarily strenuous, but at least say a few minutes of mindful walking before the exam). Psychological tips can include reminding yourself that you’ve been able to do practice problems on this material outside the exam, for reassurance; simply reminding yourself that being calm is useful, to help consciously aim for calm; and many more.
But the common thread throughout is to have perspective on the exam and yourself — don’t let it seem overwhelmingly intimidating; don’t idealise it and see it as an eternal perfect judgement on your abilities; don’t think of it in isolation from the rest of your day and your well-being.  You’re human, the examiners are human, your fellow-students are human; remember that, and do what you can to use and show your konwledge effectively.

The question provides little context, so I will add what I hope is a relevant aspect that I did not see covered in other answers. I would like to think I am a thorough thinker, but I have never been a fast thinker, whether in school or at work. What helped me perform better under time constraints is acquiring tools, practicing the use of these tools, and either following a recipe when to use each tool, or ideally develop a feel for it over time.
Early on in high school, I always struggled with essay questions as I tended to write somewhat disorganized, rambling, wordy answers that took too long to produce. Then I took a one-semester class called "Composition" and benefited greatly from it. I learned some simple general principles on how to organize different types of essays (say, a description, or making arguments pro and con) and how to eliminate superfluous information (such as, every sentence must directly support the thesis or must be discarded). My writing became crisp, even terse, yet covered all relevant points.
In mathematics we similarly have general tools, such as completing the square, synthetic division, or partial fraction decomposition. In my experience, some tools in common use in one country may be rarely taught in another, for reasons unknown to me. Becoming efficient in the mechanics of each tool requires practice, that is, repeated use. Recognizing when to use each tool is more difficult, and here recipes can help, especially in the initial stages. These could be either general principles as in Polya's How to solve it, or more specific ones for particular classes of problems.
In my thinking there is nothing wrong with recipes. Their utility is demonstrated in cooking, where various disparate concurrent activities need to be orchestrated to produce a meal, often in a set amount of time. With increasing proficiency recipes then lose their significance.