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Examples of teams of teachers?
There was another question In universities, how to team up with your colleagues? which talked about building relationships but what I am really curious about is:
Are there any universities which actually have teams of teachers?
I am not referring to simply two teachers sharing the same module. I am also not referring to teachers being friendly with each other. I'm referring to teachers actually being developed into a formal team. In a team not everyone has the same skills and those differences make the team stronger, not weaker. In teams there is a genuine interdependence. In a team, there are common objectives which you know have been met or not.
There are many examples of increased effectiveness of teams (and certainly plenty of books and articles written about them) but since teaching is such a solitary activity (meaning you do not interact with your colleagues while teaching) perhaps it is natural to ignore the idea of actually building teams of teachers.
Edit: When studying team dynamics, we can see that "real" teams do include some risks but my point is not about the weaknesses (which are typically overcome by the strengths). Teams normally operate an a higher level of efficiency than non-team-groups-of-people working together. A key element of real teams is that objectives are team objectives and individual accomplishments are not highlighted. For example, if 3 teams are all competing to get to the top of the mountain and we give a reward to the first person to summit the mountain, then we are really focusing on individual efforts (so each member would naturally think of themselves before the group as a whole). However, if you simply reward the team which first plants its flag at the top, then individual accomplishments are minimized and one member of the team is more likely to sacrifice for the greater good of the team.
Indicators of real teams (as opposed to groups of people who work together but are not a team) include: Interdependence, shared accountability (each answers to the boss but also to every other member), common goals, and members having skills which compliment each other in order to affect the common goals.
Do we ever see these qualities in groups of teachers?

Isn't an academic department a formal team of teachers (and researchers)?

@PeteL.Clark There are many different definitions of teams but in the definition I went by included the members being interdependent. I cannot say how typical my department is but I do not feel any interdependence with the other teachers in my department-they could be replaced tomorrow and I do not think it would impact me in any significant way.

If one of them gets hit by a bus, their teaching duty will have to be taken by someone else. The lecturer/TA can be considered an interdependent team too. I don't think I fully understand what you ask, though.

Then you have the team of professor/TA, or several lecturers dividing a subject by area of expertise.

@Davidmh I have edited my question in hopes of making it clearer. I've also deleted my previous comments to keep the question clean.

Are you asking for examples of "team work gone right" among teachers? If so, this article on how two teachers merged science and math into one "super subject" comes to mind.

In the more advanced levels, I have had subjects taught by several lecturers. Each one was teaching the part of the subject closer to their area of research and expertise.
On a more general level, there was a department of Astronomy and Atmospheric physics (climate and weather). Astrophysics subjects were taught by astrophysicists, and climate subjects by atmospheric scientists (do they have a cool specific name?). Inside Astrophysics, stellar evolution was taught by a different subset of professors than extragalatic astronomy.
It is also common for the senior professors to lecture, and the grad students to do problem solving. This is usually explained because a clear explanation of the theory requires experience and care; whereas solving exercises is a less critical task, ideal to build teaching experience. (Bad people that hate professors may say that teaching theory requires less work, and once it is done they can repeat the same for years, but solving exercises requires more work)
Edit:
Another example is the curriculum. Each subject is built upon the subjects taught before, with more or less coordination among the lecturers. Differential equations requires the knowledge obtained in Calculus, and it will in turn be used for Quantum Mechanics. If the Calculus lecturer fails miserably (for example, not covering the necessary material), the students will struggle through the following ones.

I had the same experience with my Anatomy course, which was in my second undergrad year of study; each division of the body (ie. Abdomen, Head and Neck, Neuroanatomy) was taught by a registrar who had specialised in that division.

whereas solving exercises is a less critical task — [citation needed]!!!


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How to create HTML Slides with audio for online lectures?
This follows on from a recent question about embedding audio in PDF slides. I don't like the thought of users needing to use a particular PDF viewer in order to hear the audio and I don't like the thought of needing proprietary software just to create the presentations. Thus, another option would be to create HTML slides. There are a range of HTML slide production approaches (e.g., S5, DZSlides, Slidy, Slideous).
Update:
I was thinking about  using pandoc to convert markdown into one of the slide formats. @Federico mentions the audio HTML tag. I assume that would be part of an overall solution. This presumably represents a basic answer, but I'd be keen to get some guidance about how this works on a practical level:

Are there any examples of implementing audio in HTML slides?
Are there any strategies for increasing the usability of consuming and activating the audio?
Are there any browser or operating system compatibility issues?

Thus, in a broad sense my question is
How can HTML slides be created in an effective and efficient way with embedded audio?

I've posted this question to the webapps chat room, maybe someone there will have some insight.

If I read correctly, in all those HTML slide systems you write the HTML file directly, it is not produced by some external tool. So I think you can simply put an audio tag in it. Or am I missing something?

+1 Thanks for that. I've update the question to try to highlight that my question concerns some of the broader workflow and usability issues related to creating such slides.

A different option would be creating a screencast. A screencasting program would record your slides as they play as well as recording voice (or other sounds) from the microphone. Jing is a free, though limited, screencast program. CamStudio is another free program. There programs you can purchase that include advanced features, including editing and post-production.
The benefit of this method is that your lecture is now a video file, which rarely requires any type of special software, and you can share them easily on youtube, vimeo, or social media.

I like the idea of a self-contained file. Hopefully any system would minimise the video file size given that the visual information on slides rarely changes. There would be pros and cons. Slide approaches allow you to create audio one slide at a time. Thus, if you make errors, you only need to redo audio for the slide. Slides also create a convenient navigational system for students/listeners.

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Advancement to Candidacy, PhD in Computer Science
As a PhD student in CS I will have advancement to candidacy soon.
I am looking for information which helps me on the advancement exam.
Particularly:

What does a committee expecting to hear from me?
What should I focus on during me presentation: should I tell them about work I have done or what I am planning to do?
If I need tell them what I am planning to do, then how to do that? I mean, research is vague, there is no clear guidance, and you don't know what will be in the end.

Any comments that help better understand what to expect and how to prepare are very welcome!

It's different for every institution, do you have an advisor?  Usually your advisor would be helping you to plan what you're going to present.

The only goal of the candidacy/qualifying/preliminary exam is to convince the committee that you deserve to pass the candidacy/qualifying/preliminary exam.  The passing criteria differ, sometimes radically, from one university to the next, from department to the next, from one research area to the next, and even from one committee member to the next.  It's the academic equivalent of Calvinball, only you don't get to make up the rules.  Do not question the mask.
The only way to determine how to prepare for the candidacy/qualifying/preliminary exam is to ask your committee members directly.  Individually.  In person.  I strongly recommend scheduling a one-on-one meeting with each committee member at least a month in advance of the actual exam.
Same goes for the thesis defense.

"Ask committee members directly": That's not always possible—in my department, the exams used to be conducted by random panels of faculty members that weren't chosen until a few days before the exam—for exactly the reason of preventing students from "gaming" the system. Also, in some disciplines, including many engineering fields, the qualifying exam is usually completed before the thesis committee is selected!

the exams used to be conducted by random panels of faculty members — Well, then to be safe, I guess you have to talk to the entire faculty one by one.  And yes, quals are usually held well before the student selects their their committee, but there's a separate qualifying exam committee (sometimes called a "panel", but yeah, it's a committee).

It's disturbing how many academic processes can be adequately described as a game of Calvinball.

Have a solid research proposal and present it well. There is no other way to convince your assessors.
In my case, I had to do a public presentation with the assessors sitting in the audience. It was not an easy exercise but I took on the challenge head-on (really, there was no other option). And I prepared, prepared and prepared.
I asked my supervisor what the likely questions would be and how can I make my proposal better. I attended presentations by other students and studied the vibes.
Just be aware that not everything always goes to plan. I had chosen a concept that was highly contested in the literature so had several question on how I would handle it. (One of my assessors was an expert in that area!)
Most importantly, show a willingness to learn. If you cannot answer a question, be honest about it. Say something like "Thats an interesting angle and I will certainly take your comments on board". And mean it. Be honest and polite.
Confirmation of candidature is to show you are ready to do advanced research. Your assessors would most likely overlook a few flaws in your proposal (no research is perfect) but may not
be that generous if they realise you are not ready. Believe me, they are amazingly quick at the latter.

+1 For I prepared, prepared and prepared. All you can do is to do your best.

Ask your advisor and the program coordinator. Usually, each institute has a guide for the candidacy exam. The guide lists some general requirements and the method of examining. The answers to your questions depends upon your department regulations and policies.

What does a committee expecting to hear from me?

They expect you to be expert in your field and answer their tough questions. Also, they expect you to agree with their opinions and not try to be too smart.

To say that they expect you to agree with their opinions is very bizarre. I'm looking for independent thought and the willingness to go out on a limb.

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Thesis peer review "service"
There are a lot of post about peer review of papers, but how about graduate/undergraduate thesis?
Is there somewhere on the vast internet, where one can submit his thesis for a peer review.
The reason I am asking this is because I am finishing my master's in engineering and so far my advisor has not seen my thesis even once. The only "review" I got was a friend who found out only grammatical and punctuation errors and I did the same for her. But the fact that we know nothing about each other's research stops us from performing a quality peer review.

I don't think a MSc thesis needs a true, full-blown peer review, but I might be mistaken. What you need is a good proofread. Maybe you can ask PostDocs (or even PhD students) from your department whether they could proofread your text from a scientific perspective? I always proofread the theses of my BSc and MSc students (I'm a PhD student) before I allow them to give them to ze big boss.

There is a full-blown, high-quality peer-review process for a thesis: it's called the thesis committee.
If you mean a service where you can get help improve your document before you submit it to your committee, that is something that one's advisor(s) tasks. Maybe you can actually get help from friends, colleagues, or in the most severe cases your advisor's friends, but there is not much.
The thing that may be closely related is that, in some systems (the French one at least), there is a person that is responsible for validating the PhD student's manuscript before it gets sent to the committee. Then, it's that person's responsibility (in theory) to do a basic check of your manuscript and your work, and decide if there is enough to gather a committee. I say “in theory”, because this person will probably get dozens of theses per year (at the very least) and can only perform the most basic checks. In practice, they most often do not check the manuscript content, but its form (does it follow the University's standards), as well as some simple indicators of your research (has the candidate published? how many times? did he attend conferences? that sort of stuff).

Your situation suggests that your relationship with your adviser has broken down. Fix it. I usually find  going out for coffee and just talking, not necessarily about your thesis, always helps.
You can always get editorial assistance but you want expert assistance. This is where your adviser comes in. Make it easy for him or her. Submit perhaps a chapter at a time. Then meet and have a good honest discussion.
Other than the above, search for a newly minted PhD candidate in your department, perhaps a former student of your adviser, and ask him or her to review your work. Believe me, this does wonders because of the motivation that the newly minted PhD candidate brings to the review. By newly minted PhD, I mean a person who has already completed his study.

+1 for “make it easy for your advisor”. Sometimes student submit very low quality work, or lots of it with only short to time review, … which makes it genuinely hard to give them the help they want.


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Principal investigator requests transfer of GitHub repository with my code to his account
I am a senior postdoc and have recently published a bioinformatics algorithm in an academic journal. For that publication, I was listed as the first author of the manuscript, and my principal investigator (PI)/supervisor as the senior author. Both of us were listed as corresponding authors.
As a follow-up we decided to submit an application note pertaining to that algorithm. Once again, the same authorship (and corresponding authors) was maintained. Additionally, the algorithm had been developed into a webserver that was placed on the PI's lab website.
The PI asked me to put the algorithm on Github. Accordingly, I created a repository on my personal account and later added the PI as a collaborator. I am a Github novice user but my understanding is that this would be sufficient to push/pull the repository and generally make modifications to it.
However I was very surprised that my PI specifically requested a Transfer of Ownership of the repository from my account to his account. The other solution is to fork the repository onto his account, but the PI doesn't like this solution on the basis that it makes it harder for him/her to maintain a copy in their lab.
So the questions:

Is the request to transfer ownership a fair request? My rationale is that since I created the code, the repository should be on my personal account! And since the algorithm is broadcasted on the lab website and the PI is the senior author, then he/she has been properly acknowledged and their ownership of the algorithm is also properly represented!
How will transfer of ownership affect my future career prospects and search for Assistant Professor jobs, especially as my field (bioinformatics) is heavily dependent on coding and algorithm development?
What other GitHub alternatives are there (besides forking and transfer
of ownership), which would still allow me to keep ownership of the
repository and have any changes directly synchronised to a copy on the lab account?

Do you hold copyright, or does your lab?

Its being deposited as an open-source package under CRAN with a GPL-3 license. My guess is that the copyright would be of the authors, or perhaps in this case maybe the research institution in which the authors work. Its a good question but I don't know how to properly verify the copyright holders in this case.

If they wrote the software as part of their job for an institution, then the research institution holds the copyright, and the research institution should get a Github organisation to store their code under. Personal Github accounts are for what people do in their free time.

@RemcoGerlich that is a common situation, but depends on the institution.

The other solution is to fork the repository onto his account, but the PI doesn't like this solution on the basis that it makes it harder for him/her to maintain a copy in their lab. This makes exactly zero sense. I can't even begin to guess…

@RemcoGerlich That also depends on the country. In Germany, the authors always have copyright which is not transferable. Right to publish and profit is another thing, though.

Keep in mind that you can maintain your own fork under your own account even after a transfer. So potential employers will be able to find the project via your account, and see your contributions.

@Lohoris I take it to mean "It makes it harder for him/her to maintain the authorative copy in their lab.

@emory ok, but it's still wrong: just push to both repositories… and he doesn't have to do anything: it's the OP himself who can push to his own fork…

If you've gotten first authorship on the paper describing the algorithm and someone else has agreed offered to maintain it, you've got a great setup. On the other hand, if you wanted to take your code in one direction and your PI wants the code base to go in a different direction, you've now got a competitor, although that's how open source works.

The PI asked me to put the algorithm on Github. Accordingly, I created a repository on my personal account and later added the PI as a collaborator. I am a Github novice user but my understanding is that this would be sufficient to push/pull the repository and generally make modifications to it.

It is. The problem is that a personal account is, well, personal, and not overly suited for professional activities, such as research projects. To this end, GitHub uses the notion of "organizations", which can also own repositories. AFAIK there is very little practical difference between having a repo owned by a personal account and an organization, only that having it under your personal account gives the impression that this is a project of yours (as opposed to a project of your lab).

However I was very surprised that my PI specifically requested a Transfer of Ownership of the repository from my account to his account.

From your personal account to his would be a little weird. From your account to an organization with the name of your lab sounds like entirely fair game to me if for no other reason than to maintain the "corporate identity" of your lab.

The other solution is to fork the repository onto his account, but the PI doesn't like this solution on the basis that it makes it harder for him/her to maintain a copy in their lab.

Well, if you end up having to maintain both forks your PI is correct. Forking is easy, but keeping two forks up-to-date is unnecessarily cumbersome.

Is the request to Transfer Ownership a fair request? My rationale is that since I created the code, it the repository should be on my personal account!

... and since you likely created it on grant money of the lab, having it under the account of the lab is at least equally fair.

How will transfer of ownership affect my future career prospects and search for Assistant Professor jobs, especially as my field (bioinformatics) is heavily dependent on coding and algorithm development?

If bioinformatics isn't completely unlike any other computer science field, then very little people in a hiring committee will care about code in the first place, and nobody will care about whether the repo that contains the code is yours, or the one of your lab, or even the one of your PI where you committed a lot to.

What other Github alternatives are there (besides forking and transfer of ownership), which would still allow me to keep ownership of the repository and have any changes directly synced to a copy on the lab account?

You can set up a Git repo with two origins, and you always push each change to both origins. However, that seems somewhat cumbersome for rather questionable gains.

Regarding the last question, with post commit hooks you can do that automatically.

Thanks for the detailed feedback. Some small clarifications though:

Currently I am paid from an external postdoc grant, so the PI is not directly paying me from his/her account.
I did request that he/she create an organization account. My idea was that a fork could be added to that organization account. My concern is whether ownership transfer (even to the organization account) reduces my rights and opportunities when I search for a job. As you correctly pointed out, having it under my account (and giving a fork) gives the impression that I am the creator of the code.
Thanks!

@YoungAcademic, as an employee of a university, and developed code in that role, your rights are a matter of unversity policy, regardless of where the repository is.  You are probably encumbered, and have little freedom to operate without involvement of your current university.

@YoungAcademic I would also suggest creating an organization. However, frankly, this is probably not the right fight to fight, as I cannot imagine the question having any particular relevance to later job searches. GitHub maintains who commited the code anyway, so who owns the repo is just a detail no matter what.

@xLeitix well, technically as author of a commit I can write anything, it's not like git checks if it's really you. I'd go the fork route.

@Lohoris: Indeed, git does not verify the identity. But why would a hypothetical different committer write your name on it just so that you can take all the credit?

@xLeitix: GitHub only reads the metadata in the repository, which can be altered, for instance, using reposurgeon. So it is technically possible for someone like the PI to rewrite all commits and make them look as if they were the author, once they gain control of the repo. I believe the only way to combat this sort of spoofing right now is adding PGP/GPG commit signatures.

@GeoffOxberry Let's not get carried away here.

@xLeitix: Let's also not be naive. Multiple people on this thread have assumed the integrity of the repo is inviolable, which is untrue. I believe the risk of misconduct here is low, but to act as if it doesn't exist ignores the fact that there are bad actors in academia, and fraud happens. Also, who writes the code is of material importance for non-academic job searches, and on grant applications, NSF and DOE (among others) are placing increasing emphasis on code artifacts, so it would behoove the OP to get credit for their code, if they can do so without alienating their PI.

From the perspective of a PI, I think the request to transfer ownership is fair. Your university (through a fellowship, or through a direct position) paid for the software's creation and assigning "ownership" to a github organization that corresponds to your lab seems like a reasonable approach to ensure that others in the lab will continue to be able to use and develop the software. As a PI who's in it for the long haul, one often worries what happens if the student or postdoc decides to quit the project or quit academia altogether (which is what most of them eventually do, statistically speaking) and what that will do to the continued usability of their codes; moving them into a central location that is controlled by the PI is one way to at least eliminate the possibility that the code might simply disappear at one point. That's not a judgment on the student or author, it's just being realistic and pragmatic.
As for the impact on your future employment: it makes no difference. First, git records who wrote the code, and it will continue to show you and not your adviser as the author of the code. Second, if you state in your CV/your website/your application documents that you wrote the code available at github.com/X/Y, everyone will simply believe this unless they have evidence to the contrary (in which case they can look up there who really wrote it -- and find that it really was you), so your word that you're the author typically counts for much more than where it is actually hosted. Third, in all likelihood you're still the one who knows the code best. If anyone wants to use it but doesn't have the technical skill to do so, they will still come back to you and ask whether you're interested in collaborating -- whether the repository is under your name or that of your former lab -- given that nobody in the lab likely knows as much about it as you do. In other words, you will still reap the benefits.
In summary, I think the request is fair. I also think that you're not losing anything by it.

I think this answer contains some good points in favor of transferring ownership of the repository from the OP's personal account to an organizational account. But as I understand it, the professor wants to transfer ownership to his personal account. I don't think you've justified how that would be fair.

That's semantics. Whether the account is called "Bangerth research group" or "Bangerth" makes very little difference in real life.

I don't agree. The name on the account is irrelevant, of course; the issue of who owns and controls it is very relevant. In fact it's the core issue of this whole Q&A. (One might, of course, argue that the whole question makes very little difference in real life.)

That's what I'm saying. The reality is that the PI would control both his and his research group's accounts from a practical perspective. Who has the legal rights to the code is an issue not affected by how you call the account.

His partner could easily delete the codebase from github and reupload it as it would appear to be only developed by him.

@easymoden00b: Exactly. Just rewrite the metadata.

Folks, the original question was whether the request to host the same repository in location A instead of location B was fair. The last two answers here now suggest that someone actually commit academic fraud by claiming some code was written by one person instead of another. That has nothing to do with the original question. It's clearly also not what the OP's principal investigator had in mind.

@WolfgangBangerth: The suggestion is merely that it is possible to commit academic fraud (specifically with an unsigned repo) once ownership of the repo is transferred. I think the probability of that actually happening is low, but nonzero, just like faking data in a paper has a low, but nonzero probability of happening. Since it is one potential consequence of transferring ownership (as opposed to forking), the OP should be aware of it, and it is relevant to the question. We can't deduce the intentions of the OP's PI from their question.

Firstly, if the code is GPLv3 this sounds like an non-issue. Anyone can legally fork the repository and work from there. If your PI wants his own copy he can just create it. If the repository gets transferred then anyone, including you, can create their own fork from that.
A fork will retain the commit history, showing you as the author. But the same is true for a transfer, the transferred repository will still show you've done the commits. So whether you fork or do nothing the net result will be roughly the same. It's just the first impression when someone finds the repository through Google. During interviews you can still show it's your work.
Practically, this is why GitHub organisations exist. I'd create an organisation for the lab and transfer the repository to that organisation. That way the location of the repository doesn't create an assumption about the person who wrote the code, but it is clear the code belongs to the organisation.
That organization could also contain any future projects of the lab.

One of the topics that has been hinted at in the other answers but not so directly expressed is the notion that your PI may have committed himself to providing such a GitHub repository as part of the application for the funds used to support the code's creation. Many grants now require data stewardship and code maintenance to be explicitly addressed as part of the application itself. Consequently, such a request from your PI may be an attempt to satisfy these requirements. (If I were him, personally I would have mentioned this at the time, but it's possible he may have thought such a notion was obvious.)

A very broad answer but: whether the PI's request is completely reasonable or not, it's a request that does you no conceivable harm. Whenever you work with other people (in the presence of a power/seniority differential or not) you have to make certain compromises and do things in a way which is not exactly what you would do if you were alone.
It sounds like you have a fruitful collaboration. I don't think this issue is worth jeopardizing it.
I say "very broad" because I fear I am missing some nuances of your situation.  For instance you say you are a "senior postdoc" but I don't know what the "senior" means.  I have never experienced any hierarchy within postdoctoral positions, and if anything, being long in the tooth is a bad thing for a postdoc: as the position is an inherent junior/temporary one, stretching it out too long creates the impression that you couldn't move on to a more permanent position.  Nor do I know what the "senior author" is, given that you have separated it from both the first author and the corresponding authors.  Such things do not exist in my field, so I wonder what it means in your case...


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Internship university asks to give up all intellectual property
I am a graduate student of university A, and I'm going to do an internship in a lab in university B.
I used an internship contract from my originating university A, which stipulates that university B can make a contract on a case-by-case basis to later exploit my work made during my internship. However, university B asks me to change this clause to transfer all intellectual property rights to university B exclusively, meaning that I won't be able to use it aftewards without approval from university B. Note that I am not paid by university B, nor having any other compensation for the whole duration of my internship there from university B, and I'm not hosted on-campus either, but I will get academic credits from university A.
Is this a common practice for lab internships? Can I do something about it? (I don't mind giving all the rights to exploit my work, but I would also like to be able to use it myself, particularly softwares I will develop).
/Final update: Thank you all for your great feedback. The issue was resolved quite simply by agreeing with my supervisor to put the developped softwares under an opensource licence. The contract thus won't have any impact whatsoever.

Repeat after me: NO.

@JeffE : No about what? Is this not common, or can I do nothing about it?

I think he meant that you should say "no" to such a contract. I don't see how university B has any right to your work - they aren't paying for you, nor do you receive any other compensation.
What exactly does university B provide then?

@Olorun They provide an opportunity to work in a lab that is on the state-of-the-art in the domain I seek to pursue my academic career. I think they're playing on their competitivity, but I'm not sure that's fair...

The world is full of unpleasant people who take every chance to exploit those around them as hard as they can. Offer a version which would give them the right to use your work however they wish but allows you to use your work as well. It's all they should need. You might still choose to sign but it lets you know that they're taking and will continue to take every opportunity to screw you.

@gabrous No, I will not sign over all of my intellectual property rights for an unpaid internship.

No, don't do it. Possibly the people don't realize what paperwork they push on junior people, but/and it might be time to bring it to their attention. Or, cross out the offending parts of the contract (!), initial them, and then sign. I've done this with some "copyright agreements", and, on some occasions, the people did not balk. Seemingly the relevant people didn't really care. That might be a point.

Is the contract saying that university B retains the intellectual property developed at that university, or is it saying even the work you do at University A should be transferred to them?

@user1938107: it's saying that the work I will do as part of my internship (implying at their university) will belong exclusively to them.

@gaborous In my Institute (in asia), this is a standard term, and there is no renegotiation of contracts, which would cost so much money in legal fees and opening holes of conduct rules.  No one would accept an intern coming, taking up the time of the researchers being taught something, then given a place on the research team work together, and then have university A or the student start claiming IP and tech transfer.  It just is not worth the trouble.

With that said, interns are all paid.  The exception to a paid intern is when the intern receives academic credit for their work from the original university they come from.

@user1938107 yes I will receive academic credit at my original university indeed. But where I come from, this is still unusual to not be paid, unless it's a very short internship, but that's not my case. About claiming IP, I don't want to claim them exclusively, I just would like to continue to use and develop softwares I will develop from scratch.

@gaborous I think you should update your question.  You are receiving compensation, it is credit from your university.

@user1938107 you're right, I have updated the question.

Can I do something about it?

There aren't any magical answers here, but aside from the obvious options of either signing the contract and accepting that this is a price you'll have to pay for a really good professional development opportunity, or refusing to sign the contract under any conditions and seeking an alternative internship at a more accommodating institution, I see a third option: negotiate.
There are many possible ways to go about this, but here's one: I assume you were accepted to the internship by a PI/researcher who thought that you had good qualifications and that his/her lab would benefit from your work and talent. This person could be your ally. What I would do is write them a polite email along the following lines:

Dear Professor Smith,
Thank you for offering me the internship at your fusion reactor lab. I am excited about this wonderful opportunity and am looking forward to starting in a couple of months, and have even begun doing some background reading on flux capacitor technology to make sure I can be as productive and helpful as possible from day one. I am writing however to express a concern about an issue that came up and that may prevent me from taking on the internship. I was informed by your Office of Research that your university is refusing to accept the standard internship contract my own university advised me to use (see the email I received from them, appended below) and are asking me to agree to a change in the standard intellectual property clause, which in its present form is designed to protect the interests of myself, yourself and both our respective universities, to an alternative version that transfers all IP rights to your institution. I am afraid I don't see this as an acceptable or balanced arrangement from either a moral or practical point of view. I am happy to assign any rights that would allow your lab to exploit and make use of any work I do while at your lab as in my proposed contract, but since among other activities I will be developing code that I may want to use in the future for my thesis research or other legitimate purposes, I do not think it is reasonable to accept the terms offered by your university.
For this reason, I am asking for your help in resolving this situation. If we cannot reach an agreement, sadly I may be forced to withdraw my acceptance of your internship.
Best wishes,
[your name]

The thing to remember is that while you are negotiating with a counterparty that's massively more powerful than you (which is why they feel they can get away with making such demands), you do have a bit of leverage: they want something from you. Whether you will succeed depends on the personalities of the people involved, how badly the PI wants you, how many other talented students are lining up to take your place, how unique are the skills that you have to offer, how rigid the university's bureaucratic machinery is, etc. If the PI is unwilling or unable to help, you will find yourself back where you started, so you'll still have the option of either accepting the terms you're offered, or giving up the internship.

This is good advice as an option, but its important to remember there might be nothing you can change, so you should be confident you will not take the internship before threatening.  My institute has the same agreement, anyone who works there signs the contract for IP.  If a student starts emailing about this and not wanting to sign, we go on to the next person.

@user1938107 I disagree. Note that my proposed  email is careful not to take any irreversible positions (by using words like "may" and "might"), thus leaving the OP a ladder to climb off the tree if the negotiation gambit doesn't work out (in such a case he/she may lose a bit of face, but nothing to seriously worry about IMO, and in fact may gain some respect in the eyes of the PI by impressing them as being an assertive, thoughtful person).

if my lab had a contract, and someone emailed that they dont think the contract is moral nor practical, if the contract cannot change, there is no reason to bring this person to my lab, as i would not want to have them feel like they are under an immoral contract.

@user who says the contract can't change? Besides, this is not an all or nothing type of thing. I see the email as the starting point of a negotiation in which the parties try to reach an arrangement they can both live with. Maybe it will turn out that at least a word in the contract can be changed, making a minor concession of some sort? Also the contract may not be written by the lab but dictated by a clueless university bureaucracy, and the lab PI could actually agree with the OP's position and help support it. There are many possible outcomes. Why give up without even testing the waters?

What I am saying is, if the contract is decided by the PI, or even if it is not, but there is nothing the PI can do, which is very likely in legal situations...in this case, if the PI agrees with the person or not, your letter has made clear they feel it is immoral.  For example, to enter my lab, the contract is standard, and cannot be changed.  If someone told me they feel the contract is immoral, and I know it can not be changed, I move on to the next person.  There is no reason to bring on someone who feels they are being put into an unjust situation, because to me, that would be immoral.

It is common for universities (at least in Europe) to have you sign-off the rights of your work when you are being paid by them. At least I had to do that as a PhD and a postdoc.
In your case, you will be working in a hi-end lab and they'll be training you, probably give you access to existing code and data, and not charge you for using their equipment. If there is already a large amount of code at the lab and you develop an extension to it (something that frequently happens in my lab) should you be allowed to use the entire platform later or not?
I would say that at this point of your academic career, you don't really have a lot of leverage, except refusing to sign and finding another lab. My advise is to sign the contract and go to the lab. Learn everything you can and do your best job. Once you leave the lab, ask the professor if you could keep using the code for your future projects, while citing his lab or some paper that you'll jointly publish. Most people will say yes.
If they refuse you to use your code, it doesn't stop you from using the ideas behind it as long as they have been published (article, thesis, etc.). In the past when dealing with unreasonable people, I rewrote a mathematical library that I developed to begin with, based only on the published papers. I even switched programming language and made many improvements the second time around. Of course, it was a wasted week...

If this is common practice, it should not be. It is exploitative.
If they will not negotiate down to something reasonable -- and they might; that contract has the air of being written by lawyers who did not explain it clearly to the lab -- do not take the internship. You can do better.


text:
Is it worth it to add substitute teacher work in a CV?
As a graduate student, i've had to substitute teach a number of times for a variety of classes.  I'm wondering if it is really worth while to add this information into my CV.  Obviously, it won't hold as much weight as teaching a full class.  But if it is worth mentioning on the CV, what category should I add it to?  Teaching?  Volunteer Service?  Something else?

I am going to disagree with Peter Jansson here.
If you mean you stepped in to cover a couple of classes here and there when the regular instructor was sick or out of town, I would say this by itself doesn't constitute a meaningful amount of teaching experience for professional purposes, and shouldn't be listed on a CV.  It may have been valuable to you, but I think it would look kind of silly on a CV.
If you were assigned as a teaching assistant for the course, you probably have a line where you describe your responsibilities in that role (grading exams, holding office hours, etc), and you could add "occasional lectures" to that line.
If you filled in for an instructor for a longer period of time, then you could consider listing it ("taught 3 weeks of Calculus 4").

Definitely. Teaching experience is always worth adding to the cv because it reflects that you have gained experience in presentation techniques beyond the usual scientific presentations. The difference to research presentations lies in that the latter involves explaining matters and making material understandable at a more basic level. On its own, such experiences may not be enough so document your teaching experience such as levels of the courses, number of students and amount of teaching. you should also gather evaluations of your efforts. I could add links on teaching portfolios here but a simple search on "teaching portfolio" will give you quite a lot of examples and your own university might also have links worth loking at.

I'm not sure this really addresses the situation at hand.  A grad student who fills in for an instructor for a couple of lectures is not going to have evaluations, etc, and I can't see turning this into a "portfolio".

There is always a first step on a journey. It is always good to keep track of all the teaching (or other activities that may be added to a CV) one has performed. Later in the career one can perhaps be more selective. To look into how to build a portfolio is never a bad idea.

+1. And don't just say you "substituted" for someone, use verbs to describe what you did: delivered a 45-min lecture on whatever to 25 graduate students, conducted a computer lab session on whatever topic, etc. Just "substitute" sounds too passive. And these experiences should be under the teaching section. As you get better experiences, you may consider revising these substitute gigs out.

I agree with Peter Jasson. It's worth mentioning in your CV unless you already have quite a bit teaching experience. You should put it under "Teaching".
You're a graduate student. Anything meaningful should be listed in the CV. Many years later, you'll find the substitute teaching looks funny when you're a professor. For now, list it unless you already have more than 2 pages long CV.
Here is my personal experience. I put my number of years teaching experience in my resume while in industry. A lot people were interested in that. It's was one of the most frequently asked questions in my industry job interviews I had. One time, I did ask the hiring manager why he was interested to know. He said it shows that I do know how to communicate.

In my case, I've already got 4 years of full time university level teaching experience prior to my current PhD pursuit.  Although, a lot of the classes I taught were very low level classes like precalculus, calculus, etc.  In contrast, my substitute teaching was for much more advanced (graduate level) courses.  I just wonder if including this info on my CV would look, as you say, "funny" because of my previous experience.

@Paul Your case falls into unless you already have quite a bit teaching experience category. Four(4) years of university level teaching is quite a bit. My answer is intended for graduate students in general. Most of them don't have that much extensive experience. So, yes, it does look a little bit funny if the substitue teaching was short. It's up to you.


text:
What is the work load of a journal reviewing editor?
I was wandering what was the work load of a journal reviewing editor? More precisely, if someone would like to apply for such a position, how much time is required to do the job correctly?
I am of course aware that it might highly depend on the type of journal and/or field of research, but I would like to have some general feedback / experiences / advices.
Thanks to all!

You are correct in that the total time will first of all vary between journals and fields but also slightly over time. I am chief editor of an international journal in the environmental sciences. The time each reviewing editor spends on a paper with our journal can be broken down as follows:

Must scan the paper upon receiving it for assigning reviewers (probably takes an hour, maybe less)
Assign reviewers (does not take much time but can be drawn out over time when reviewers decline to review)
Read reviews carefully and provide authors with guidelines on what to focus on (probably takes a few hours)
Carefully check the revisions and decide on the faith of the paper (takes a couple of hours at least depending on extent of revisions)
If the paper goes to major revisions you need to go through steps 2-4 again
If the paper is accepted then spend maybe 15 minutes to half an hour formulating a suggestion for final decision (depends on what might need to be written)

This can be summed up for one paper as probably more than half a day. Then the question is how many papers you are requested to handle per month/year etc. You can then easily multiply by the number of papers to get a reasonable idea of the total time you will need to spend.
To add to this, you will need to act whenever a paper arrives, so you are expected to be more or less on call all year. Most journals have systems for indicating when editors are away but that only works for assigning new papers; if you have started the process you will have to see it through ... and keep chasing late reviews and delayed revisions.
So although I cannot give you an idea of workload, you have some tools to figure out what will be involved. Knowing the number of papers you are expected to handle is the most important statistic to figure out. Then depending on your field, you may have a sense of whether my estimates for scanning and reading materials are reasonable. I am sure they will vary depending on discipline.

That really sounds like a lot of work. Are the steps 1-6 you have described more difficult if you are unfamiliar with the area (which must happen some of the time)?

Yes, the time will vary depending on many factors such as familiarity but also experience. You learn to read quicker without loss of detail. You may still need time to pick up the science issues but can spot more mundane errors in referencing etc. much quicker.


text:
Impact Factor vs 5-year Impact Factor
In ISI Web of Knowledge Journal Citation Report, we can find any journal Impact Factor (IF) and 5-Years Impact Factor (IF5), which is, as far as I get it, the Impact Factor over the last 5 years (well, the name is quite self-descriptive...).
What interests me is the difference between both indexes. I was wondering how to analyse this difference. If IF > IF5, does it means the journal IF is globally increasing?
And which one is more accurate while evaluating a journal?

The impact factor is calculated over the two previous years (the 2013 number is based on referencing for 2011 and 2012). A high IF indicates that many papers are referenced very quickly (within 2 years of publication). This indicates high turnover rates for the journal. If the longer term value is lower, it could mean what you describe but can also mean that work published has very limited life span. In many fields where publications are slow to produce, in my case they may involve field and longer term experimental work, it is hard to gain many references very quickly and hence the longer term indicator becomes more important and higher. This is also true for small fields where the number of publications is too small for a regular IF to make sense. In field that I am familiar with the five year factor is higher than the ordinary IF bit it will likely vary depending mostly on the nature of the field; if publications have a long or short time span.
There is another factor called the Cited half-life (The median age of the articles that were cited in a year) which in my field often exceeds 10 years indicating the longevity of publications.
For further reading look at Journal Citation Reports

How to compare impact factor over time
If you want to see whether the impact factor of a journal is increasing, then you should look at how the same metric has changed over time. You could choose the 2 year or 5 year impact factor for various reasons. However, you need to focus on only one of these  metrics at a time.
The scimagojr website has similar data that is publicly available based on slightly different sources to the ISI data, but it provides information on how indicators have changed from year to year. E.g., Cites per doc
Here's one example for a journal in my field: http://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=30073&tip=sid

What does a difference between 5 and 2 year impact factor mean
It's mostly caused by how citations to the journal are distributed over time. The citation half-life is a useful summary of this distribution. So, for example a citation half-life of 5 years means that half of all the citations that an article will obtain will be accrued 5 years after publication. The ratio of the 5 year to two year impact factor will be larger for journals with longer citation half-lives.
Importantly, fields vary dramatically in citation half-lives. Medicine, neuroscience, and nursing have short half lives, whereas psychology, mathematics, and the social sciences have longer half lives. So, using longer time windows for  impact factor calculation will reduce differences between disciplines, although there are other metrics that can used if you wish to reduce discipline-specific  bias.
Of course, it may also be that the underlying impact factor of the journal is increasing or decreasing over time, and this will also contribute (typically a small amount) to the nature of any difference between 5 and 2 year impact factor. Specifically, if the impact of the journal is increasing over time, the ratio of 5 to 2 year impact factor will be reduced.


text:
External advisor for graduate students?
Some graduate students (MSc and PhD) have a second advisor from outside the university (and even outside the country). In most cases I've seen, the second advisor is a collaborator of the primary supervisor.
Is there any institutional attitude towards having a second advisor from outside the university (and probably internationally)?
What are the terms of working with an external advisor? Does it need an HR contract, or institutional agreement? Who approves the qualifications of the external advisor to meet the university standards/regulations?

I believe this is an institution-dependent issue. Different departments and schools may have very different approaches as to what is formally allowed. In this day and age, however, collaborations, particularly between different departments or institutions, is generally looked on favorably. Whether it rises to an "official" arrangement or not, however, is clearly a different matter.
I don't believe that this is normally done via an employment contract; I think this is handled according to the regulations of the department—so the chair or graduate officer (or whoever normally approves student-advisor matches) would have to sign off on the arrangement. The responsibility for making sure all appropriate procedures are followed, however, lies with the advising team. (In general, this only matters with respect to the thesis committee and matters related to the thesis defense itself.)
The only other situation which might complicate matters is if both advisors are jointly funding the student; then the situation is certainly thornier. However, for such purposes, usually one advisor is the "hosting" advisor who has the primary responsibility for the student, which normally obviates the need for a complicated contract.


text:
Is there an open source tool for producing bibtex entries from paper PDFs?
In the desktop application for Mendeley, it's possible to import a PDF and have the bibliographic data automatically extracted (or perhaps looked up, I'm not sure).  This feature is more or less reliable.  However, Mendeley's code is closed source (they once promised to release the source, but then they were bought by Elsevier).  I'm looking for an open source tool that takes one or more PDFs as input and returns a bibtex entry for each.
I've found the following, but couldn't get either of them to work:

cb2Bib
pdfmeat

At present, the fastest alternative I know is to copy/paste the title into Google Scholar, and click the link to bibtex.  That's very nice, but I'm wondering if there is something more automated.

Have you tried Zotero? In its free version, it can handle a limited number of pdf's at at time but will extract the info from the pdf, provided it exists.

Be careful with bibtex metadata provided by Google Scholar. Though it is a great tool without a doubt, the bibtex entries may be incomplete and should at the very least be proofread prior to publication, assuming you are using those in a paper.

I got pdfmeat working just now on OS X. Had to modify path to FireFox cookies, and pip install what it complained it was missing. P.S. didn't know about that tool. Thanks for the link.

@PeterJansson Thanks; you should post that as an answer!

@mankoff I did the same and got pdfmeat to run, but for the paper I tried it just launched a totally nonsensical GScholar search and came up with nothing.

I think this is a duplicate of http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/42361/citation-manager

@StrongBad Thanks for the link; I agree!  If they are willing to migrate that here, we can delete my question.  Otherwise, perhaps it is worthwhile to have it appear on both sites.

@DavidKetcheson it seems like a big list type question to me so I am not sure it is a great fit here. I will check about migrating it here when I get a chance. It might be worth asking what to do in our meta.

@DavidKetcheson A quick Google search turned up at least 20 unique ways of extracting metadata from a PDF file. Not all are open source, but it seems like a number might be.

This question of mine on TeX.SE and specially this answer may also help you: website for easy creating biblatex code?.

@MarcClaesen, treat all BibTeX entries you get from elsewhere with suspicion. E.g. the BibTeX entries given by ACM for their publications are uniformly atrocious (wrong capitalization, useless fields, the works).

The question is now also raised at tex.stackexchange: http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/344081/9075

I use Zotero which in itself is a system for handling references, it comes as both a plugin to Firefox and as standalone. I use the standalone version to extract reference information from pdf and then export to, in my case, BibTeX .bib format. There are possibilities to export to other formats as well.

This doesn't answer your entire question, but may be useful (for example, you might have got the papers from a list of DOIs in the first place).
Assuming these are PDFs with CrossRef DOIs, if you can extract the DOI from the PDF, you can get citation directly from CrossRef's API. For the DOI 10.5555/12345678, the query:
http://api.crossref.org/works/10.5555/12345678/transform/application/x-bibtex

returns
@article{Carberry_2008,
    doi = {10.5555/12345678},
    url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.5555/12345678},
    year = 2008,
    month = {aug},
    publisher = {{CrossRef}},
    volume = {5},
    number = {11},
    pages = {1--3},
    author = {Josiah Carberry},
    title = {Toward a Unified Theory of High-Energy Metaphysics: Silly String Theory},
    journal = {Journal of Psychoceramics}
}

You could write a very small script to scan a list of DOIs and download the citations.

The month entry should be integer.

cb2Bib is a tool to extract bibtex entries from PDF files.
The following will command extract bibtex entries from PDF file  using cb2Bib command line
c2bconsole --doc2bib paper2.pdf references.bib  --sloppy

NB: My answer does not differentiate between open and closed sourced projects and I have not used any of the seemingly big list of solutions.
This SO answer suggests that the 2010 London Dev8D meeting, whatever that is, ran a contest for meta data extraction and resulted in pdfssa4met. I cannot find any documentation on the meeting and anything else that came out of it. The JISC ConnectedWorks project produced a review document that considered Zotero, Mendeley, Google Scholar, CB2BIB, Metadata Extraction Tool, pdfssa4met, pdfmeat, GNU libextractor, FITS, Apache Tika, XPDF, PDFTOHTML, pdf2xml, CiteSeerX, and Paperpile. This list seems to leave out some other solutions, although it is possible that they rely on the same underlying technology. This answers to this TeX.SX question suggests BibDesk and JabRef do metadata extraction. Papers also seems to do metadata extraction. This blog reviews the metadata extraction performance of WizFolio.
There is also Mr. dLib, pdfextract and TeamBeam which seem to have scholarly papers associated with them and therefore seem to be misssed by the JISC review (or developed afterwards). I also found exiftool.

Disclaimer: This is a short version of an answer posted at tex.sx. This solution is not perfect, but might be a good start. I am one of the authors of JabRef and like open source development.
JabRef is an MIT-licensed open-source BibTeX and BibLaTeX bibliographic manager actively developed on GitHub. It offers the functionality to import bibliographic data from PDFs.

Create or open a .bib file.
Go to "Quality" -> "Find unlinked files".

The "Find unlinked files" dialog opens.

Choose a directory using the "Browse" button.
Click on "Scan directory".
In "Select files", the files not yet contained in the database are shown.

To create entries for all files, click on "Apply".
For each file, an import dialog is shown

The dialog shows the XMP metadata stored in the PDF in the area "XMP-metadata".
If this data fits your needs, select "Create entry based on XMP data".
Typically, the XMP-metadata is not good enough.
Choose "Create entry based on content".
Click on "OK" to start the import
A dialog asking for the link is opened

You can choose "Leave file in its current directory" to keep the file where it is. Typically, this is that what one wants.
In case you choose "Move file to file directory", you can also choose to rename the file to the generated BibTeX key.
Press OK to link the file to the BibTeX entry
This happens for each file. After that, the "Find unlinked files" dialog is shown. Just click on "Close" to close it.

You might want to look at pdf-extract:
https://github.com/CrossRef/pdfextract
It doesn't seem to be very actively maintained, but promises to do what you want.

Thanks for the suggestion.  As far as I can tell, pdfextract is designed to extract references in a paper, so it wouldn't give you a bibtex entry for the paper that you run it on.

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


text:
Why are all authors credited equally with authorship regardless of level of contribution?
Normally, the credit of a scientific paper is equally distributed among authors. In the real world, it is almost impossible to write a paper with equal contributions of all authors. Usually, one author is the main one who is the idea maker or discoverer by subtle analysis of data.
In most cases, contributions of some authors are trivial, e.g., consultation on a specialized area, analysis of a part of data, etc. With this system, there are many famous professors who are co-authors for tens of hundreds of papers.
Why when judging the research records of a researchers, only the quantity and quality of papers are considered, and no one cares about how much s/he has contributed to those papers?

It's not perfect.  Have you got a better idea?

@NateEldredge not a practical one, but I met a promotion committee who needed a statement for contribution to each paper, as major journals like Nature recently add to each paper. However, it is just a note at the end of papers with no real considerations within academia. I also witnessed that some committees significantly credit the first author as the main author.

This is not true where I teach. We are expected to quantify and describe our contribution if we are not the sole author of a paper.

@JoeHass describe to whom? When someone posts his resume on personal webpage or submits for a job application, everyone just look at the list of publications and do not bother with his actual contributions.

We are expected to describe our contributions to the committee that governs promotion, retention, and tenure. Since you mentioned "promotion committee" I thought that was obvious.

@JoeHass In the above comment, I quoted that I've also seen such attention in promotion committees. My question was for general credit in academia. They may consider this for promotion, but I have not seen this attention for job applications. They just need a research statement and record of publication, and no one asks for the applicant contribution to previous research projects.

If you get an interview, they will ask.

@JoeHass that would be a subjective question with biased speculative answer!

What makes you think that subjective questions are not asked in an academic interview, or that subjective factors are not considered in academic hiring?

@JoeHass I mean that one with trivial contributions to many papers has a better position in academia, as compared with someone with major role (but a few) in outstanding works.

Success in academia is not determined solely by your published papers. At some institutions your publication record is not even the most important determinant. Your original question made many, many unjustified assumptions.

@JoeHass Just a personal example of interviewers asking about ones contribution to a paper: I didn't just get asked "How much did you do?" I was asked to "Please describe my contribution in some detail". If I just said that I did everything, that would have been an obvious lie, as I couldn't talk about details of about half a project. My part I could describe perfectly and explain how it complemented the results of the other part (that's the only thing I knew). They won't ask this for every one of your papers, but could ask about any of them.

as I couldn't talk about details of about half a project — Well, don't do that then.

@JoeHass So you are expected to say something like: "My contribution to this project was 47.391 %"...

@NickS The review committee has a spreadsheet that you fill out for every co-authored paper, and they give you some rough bins to choose from describing your contributions to the ideas expressed in the paper as well as your contribution to the actual writing of the paper.

I agree that using simple publication or citation counts is prone to a range of problems. One important class of such biases relates to differential levels of involvement of an author.
In terms of some basic corrections for this, there are ways that individual papers are evaluated to assess relative contribution.

In some fields being first author (and to a lesser extent, subsequent positions) suggests a greater level of involvement in a given  paper.
In a few cases, proportion of contribution is explicitly stated.
In some contexts, some form of proportional analysis is performed such that if you are one author among two, then the paper is weighted more than one author among ten (I've seen this in some university workload models).

However, generally, when evaluating the publication achievements of a researchers, a more holistic approach can be taken.

An overall program of research will be evaluated in order to assess a sustained contribution.
To some extent, over time researchers would be expected to play a range of roles from lead to secondary contributor. Therefore, often an overall sum of papers may balance out such varying levels of contributions. In particular, if you have a reasonable balance of first author papers and the number of authors per paper is similar to other researchers in your field, this may reinforce such a perspective.

My opinion is that, contrary to what you say about "one main contributor", in most cases, it is absolutely impossible to judge "the level of contribution" from any objective standpoint. Let's consider a (not hypothetical, just missing real names!) example.
A and B spent about a year thinking of a problem and devising a scheme for solution they could not make work.
A discussed the question with C.
C, who wasn't much interested in trying it yourself, passed it to his collaborator on a different project D.
D found an approach that gives fairly good result but not quite what was wanted and told it to C.
C passed it to A and B and during the two week visit of D arranged that A,C,D have a few discussions about it that resulted in some extra ideas but not a full solution yet.
Meanwhile B tried to combine what he knew himself and what he was told by C and obtained an even slightly better result than D (though still short of the exact statement wanted) but under more restrictive assumptions. He sent it to D.
D, upon reading B's draft, realized that the initial scheme of A and B could be made to work after all (what he was missing was in that note from B and what B was missing was a part of D's "general knowledge"), finished it off, and sent the solution to A,B,C, who have read and verified it.
Now, I suggest you try to tell the "level of contribution" of each person keeping in mind that
1) If not for C, D would most likely not hear of the problem at all and it is doubtful that he would come into direct contact with A,B.
2) It is possible that A and B would make their approach work eventually without D.
3) What was a "general knowledge" for D and allowed him to finish the problem off, would hardly come into the mind of A,B,C at all.
4) Without B's draft, D would, most likely, stop at the "partial result" he obtained first.
5) Both A and C participated in the discussion during D's visit and, while everybody remembers all the ideas that surfaced, nobody remembers (or cares much about) who said what.
6) A,B,C,D all argue that the rest 3 could surely do the problem without him, just in longer time, so the current idea of "author credit" C and D have is to publish the whole thing under the name AB CoD.

I have to disagree that all authors are credited equally. Since there are several ways in which authorships are counted, the position of your name will provide different signals. In my realm, first authors are simply assumed to have done the most, such papers count higher. Other authors are considered to have done less in falling order, unless stated otherwise. In some fields the last author is the "important" one. In some fields authorships come through contract, e.g. CERN consortia authorships (see link in the reply on coauthorships, the answer there may also be of help). Hence authorships are treated differently.
Ideally everyone should follow the Vancouver Protocol) in which it is clear that some contributions simply should not warrant authorship but rather a mention in the acknowledgement.
So in the end when judging the authorships of papers, each field applies their own "standard".

follow the Vancouver Protocol: "Editors may ask authors to describe what each contributed; this information may be published." After reading this, I lost quite a noticeable part of my belief in the assumption that those guys have clear idea of what they are talking about and are in touch with current realities and customary practices of collaboration.


text:
How do I deal with my family which doesn't respect science and math while I am doing a double science and math major?
How do I deal with two parents who don't see the utility of science and mathematics while pursuing an education in science and math (while depending on their income to fund my tuition?). They come from a blue-collar background and don't think learning arcane symbols has anything to do with innovation or make big bucks in today's world.
My parents wish for me to go off to the industry ASAP or do some freelance or make an app that get them rich quick. I want to pursuit further education beyond that of a bachelor degree.
In the summertime I am preparing for some course work for next semester, but they keep on telling me that I should sign up for some fitness class or make money. I appreciate their viewpoint, but I can't bring myself to balance between studying and concentrating on course work while doing things that are a waste of time.
What should I do?

Going to a finess class or finding a work is not a waste of time. There are people who can do them both along with studying for a PHD, so I am sure you can do them along in your undergraduate days, during summer. Also private tutoring may make you some money, while practising what you learnt in your university e.g. in Math. Many of us have done it during our undergradute studies and beyond (MSc or PHD).

Get a job. Get out from under your parent's money. Then do what you want. (But take a fitness class anyway.)

Second on the fitness class.  I've found that the better my physical condition, the better my brain works.

You call tell them about big data science, which is relatively close to maths and pays very well. You can tell them about how the finance industry and other big corporations are keen on science/math PhD (they are, including physics and biology!) and how such positions can pay very well.

I voted to close this?  I have no idea why.  I have no idea why; I have voted to reopen.

If the goal of your parents for you really is that you become the next Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, or Mark Zuckerberg, then letting you go to graduate studies and letting you hang with all the other smart people is certainly more useful than telling you to "start getting rich now". This is akin to wanting to raise an Olympian athlete, and, rather than making him train, shouting at him that he needs to run faster right now. Of course the assumption that any specific person will break through and get super-rich is unrealistic to the point of being ridiculous, but obviously it will be hard to convince your parents of that (at least short-term), so you may need to work with what you got.
While the idea of Nox is generally useful (find statistics and show them), it sounds like your parents may be the type for which statistics are too abstract and would probably not work very well. Rather, you can try convincing them with anecdotes of well-educated people who "made it" (became rich, to use the terminology of the question). Of those there are many - opposite to popular opinion, most startup founders etc. are not random people off the streets who were selling sandwiches before breaking through. Rather, most greatly successful ideas and companies have been developed by people with degrees from top universities in, yes, math and science. There is a reason why Silicon Valley is in the Bay Area, and it's likely not the weather.
Concrete examples include:

The company Google sprung out of a research project by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two Stanford graduate students. Sergey is now the 18th-richest person in the world.
Facebook was not a research project, but (at least so the story goes)  the original ideas have been developed by Mark Zuckerberg in a dormitory in Harvard in discussion with other students in breaks between computer science classes.
Bill Gates never finished, but even the founder and long-time CEO of Microsoft was in Harvard for some time. Incidentally, there he met Steve Ballmer, who became CEO of Microsoft after Gates - another case of a very wealthy and important person who happens to have great education.

There is one thing you should actually do: listen to them, even if just a bit.
Your parents are funding your education and are not entirely happy with what you do. They are also proposing to you to get a job during your breaks.
Try to do just that. To elaborate: I think there is a high chance that your parents will not be willing to help you later on (i.e. at M.Sc. level), thus you will need money.
Also, speaking from experience, the sports part is not to be underestimated. You do not have to be a pro-whatever, but going to the gym and keeping fit is certainly not going to hurt your brain.
Beyond this it is up to you to educate them. Look for statistics etc. which
show that having higher education is beneficial for a job and then make it understandable for your parents (basically it should be easy to imagine for them). The latter part is actually the hard part. It seems to me that your parents may have a warped understanding of how difficult it is to actually "get rich quick".
Do not think that trying to educate your parents will be a waste of your time. You might lose some study-time now, but if you are successful you stand to gain much more in the long run (i.e. tuition for masters) – do not underestimate this.

@JeffE that very much depends on the country you're in.

@JeffE I think you are biased. By (overstated) extension of your argument the only research to be pursued is one that pays for itself! In Germany for example it is generally expected to do an M.Sc. after B.Sc. and that requires living funds for 1 or 2 years (setting aside available student loans from the state).

Do we actually know that the parents are funding her education?  Though she doesn't give her location, in the US it is (or was 30 years ago) possible to get a degree without any parental support.

@terdon I suspect the OP is American based to the phrase "blue collar"

@JeffE Masters level degrees in my field are, by and large, unfunded.

You guys are giving examples of where you must pay for your masters degree, but that doesn't mean what JeffE says is not true. He is suggesting that if you are in a situation where you have to pay for your graduate degree.... don't.

@JeffE I think the OP is female, so maybe edit your comment (his->her).

Why would OP's parents need to support their graduate degree? The only graduate degrees worth pursuing are the ones that provide funding.  @Neo is correct: If you have to pay for your graduate degree, don't.

@JeffE in many countries--most, probably--there are no graduate degrees that offer funding. In other words, if you can't pay for your graduate degree, you're not getting one.

As long as your parents are in control of your tuition, you need to deal with the question of whether they approve of your choices.  If you want to make an argument to them that getting a higher education is worth it then here is a really useful chart:

STEM education in particular is even more valuable than general higher education (a good summary may be found in this report), though the percent benefit is less for higher degrees, where non-STEM folks tend to make good money and have very low unemployment as well.  Your STEM undergraduate degree, for example, is worth an expected 25% gain in salary vs. a non-STEM degree.
Now it's also possible that your parents aren't actually concerned about your ability to make money in the future, and so you won't be able to make an argument to them in this way.  For example, what they might really be concerned about is their own current debt (e.g., if they are on the brink of bankruptcy or foreclosure and hiding from you) or about non-monetary issues (e.g., if they are religious fundamentalists or anti-government conspiracy theorists).
If something like this is the case, and they aren't receptive to a respectful presentation of your case for STEM and higher education, then you're going to need to think about going along them as part of obtaining your STEM education, i.e., a price you have to pay, not unlike putting up with annoying dorm-mates, in order to remain at college.
Once you finish your undergraduate and move on to a graduate program, any good graduate program will give you a sufficient stipend to live on, and you need not be dependent on your parents finances or approval any more in any way.

So some advice and a personal story. TL;DR: Take advice tactfully, and make your own decisions.
I feel a connection between your brief explanation and my own life story.  I went off for business school and studied economics, only to get very depressed and decide to drop out to travel a bit. I eventually went back to school, graduated with a double bachelors in Spanish and sociology and am working on a masters degree right now. But let's focus in on the middle of the story.
My parents were very convinced that this 'travelling' would only be a setback, that I might die, and even if I didn't I would regret the wasted time for the rest of my life. I heard them and accepted their comments, but knowing that only I could know what was going on inside of me, I left anyway. I rediscovered what interested me, and in two years I was back in school.
How does this relate to you? Your parents are different people than you, but they are still people. This means they have opinions and views about everything, just like you do. They will freely offer all the advice you can put up with, but in the end it's you that has to make the decision for your life. Having them pay for your education can complicate things, and some of the other answers have some advice about that, but perhaps try talking to them. Explain to them that a) you do hear them, b) you have some of your own ideas, and c) you have a plan that will incorporate what you feel is the best of all the advice you have received, from them, from yourself, and from others.
Parents have opinions, and often, money. But your life is yours, and you have to make the decisions for you. Listen to your parents, and even ask them to go deeper into the whys of their advice. But in the end, make your own choices.

In this recent Numberphile video, James Simons (who, incidentally, build his billion-dollar fortune in large part by being really good at math) comments that in the United States, if you know enough math to teach it well at the high school level, you can probably get a job with Google, Microsoft, or some other big tech company. That is a pretty good career prospect, if you ask me. Depending on the type of science your other major is on, the same applies (for example, if you are studying Chemistry and get good grades, you can possibly get into a MSc program in Chemical Engineering, which will also open the door to a number of good careers in industry).
As xLeitix mentions, your parents have to understand that higher education is a long-term investment. You may not get rich straight away (very few people do, and they will be the first to admit that a lot depends on being in the right place at the right time), but you will be reaping tangible benefits for the rest of your life.


text:
GDPR and predatory/spam journals
As the new general data protection regulation approached, I got a ton of emails from services I'm using asking me to give my consent.
My question is, would the new law help me to get rid of the million emails I receive from journals that somehow got my contact information and want me to publish, become an editor, or speak at a conference?

To be clear, it is a theoretical question. I know that each day more and more of these journals appear and there is no way to get rid of them all. But I wonder if I could send them a standard text like "As you know the law.. please delete my contact information".
However, I'm suspect the new law doesn't apply to people that are outside the EU.

Yes, the law does only apply to EU citizens. The rest of your question is still interesting, though.

It matters to companies anywhere that are emailing people in the EU.

@Flyto It may apply, but enforcement would be difficult.

Thanks for your input guys. I always was under the impression that those journals may be in a gray area, but they need to hold up at least some "professionality". While it is hard to know the identity of the mysterious Nigerian Prince, some of those journals/conferences do exist. I thought it might be possible to scare them off.

It might help, if the people writing those emails are law-abiding.
However, since, a large proportion of such emails are trying to get money out of you by fraudulent means (publication fees or conference fees), they're probably not fussed about breaking another law as well.

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