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Encouraging team-work while discouraging free-riding
I teach several courses for computer science undergrads, including algorithms, programming and game development. In all my courses there are weekly homework assignments. I encourage my students to do the assignments in teams of 2 or 3, both to practice team-work and to learn from each other's ideas. Most of them indeed submit in teams.  I have learned from my students that, in many teams, there are "dummy members" - team members that just write their name on the page without spending any work. The other team members are OK witih it, since it does not cost them anything - they do the assignment anyway, so they do not mind helping a friend. Additionally, these "dummy members" sometimes help them out in other courses.
I thought of several ways to prevent this "free riding". One is to require students to present their homework in front of the class. The "dummy members" will probably fail this presentation. The problem is that, in a large class, it takes a lot of time and it is logistically complicated. It also puts some students into too much mental stress.
Now I have thought of a new idea. In every weekly assignment, there will be 7-8 different questions to choose from; each team of n students will have to choose and solve n+1 questions. So a lone student will have to solve 2 questions, a pair will have to solve 3 questions, etc.
On one hand, the number of questions per student decreases with n. Therefore, if all team members share the work equally, they have an incentive to form large teams.
On the other hand, the total number of questions increases with n. Therefore, a dummy member is no longer a "free" rider - he/she costs the team by adding to their work load, so they have no incentive to let him/her write the name without working.
What do you think of this scheme? What other ways are there to encourage teamwork while discouraging freeriding?
The number of registered students is about 40-60 per class, though only about 20-30 come to class - the rest prefer to learn from home.
CONCLUSION: I have just finished teaching a course in game development based on the n+1 scheme. To further discourage free-riding, I also gave a bonus for students presenting their homework in front of the class. I explicitly said that the bonus is given only to the presenter and not to his/her partners. My idea was that, if only one partner works, then this partner will present and get the bonus points. To my surprise, almost all presenting students explicitly asked me to share the bonus points equally with their partners! For me, it is a strong evidence that there was little free-riding. It is highly unlikely that a student who did all the work alone will agree to give away the hard-earned points to a free-rider.

Could you possibly assign the groups of 2 to 3 members yourself? That way students can experience team-working with new members and you can group the dummy members together so that you force them to actually do work.

It is hard to know in advance who the dummy members will be - I find out only after the semester starts..

In "I want to be a Mathematician" (1985) Paul Halmos describes the Moore Method for teaching mathematics. It makes use of getting students to present their solutions to the class and Halmos discusses how to ensure that all students participate. The method may not be directly applicable to your case but it might suggest some ideas.

I assume that your goal is not just to catch and fail the free riders but to see to it that they actually do the work that will result in learning.
However, I'll note that having a goal of "sharing the work equally" is unattainable except over time and/or averaged over many different interactions.
The most radical suggestion here is to flip the classroom so that people do the active work of learning under your observation. Rather then passively "consuming" information in a group and then working to solidify it outside your view, the opposite occurs. Now, you can watch how people are contributing and you can encourage a true exchange of ideas and sharing of skills.
Note that for large groups flipping is much harder, requiring space and possibly help. But working in groups is easier to monitor than individual work in a flipped classroom, no matter the scale. People help one another and so there is less burden on the instructor and any TAs
But another idea that is less radical is to have students simply do peer evaluations of all group experiences. Students are reluctant to bad-mouth their friends, of course, so you need to use a scheme that they will consider "safe" in their social interactions. In pairs, you can ask two questions. First, what was your partner's chief contribution. Second, what was your own chief contribution. These are done separately. Note that both questions are positive and are less subject to simple opinion.
In larger groups, say five, I would ask to name the three most important members of the group and to also say why for each of them. The question about your own contribution is also needed. Note that a student who is never given praise is probably contributing less. But I didn't try to reduce these comments to numeric scores.
Knowing that others will have something to say about your contributions encourages them, I think.
To make this work you need to have a hand in forming groups so that the same people don't always work together. Different tasks can use different ways of forming groups, but some of them need to be under your control, even if it is just random assignment.
I would have students answer these questions on index cards so they can be sorted. Now you can look at a set of comments about each student and make judgements as needed, but you also get an idea about who needs coaching.
My own experience with this is positive. In one case, as student who was not standing out in the classroom was said by his peers to be an outstanding contributor to their project. I wouldn't have noticed it but for these comments and thought he was a bit of a slacker. In this case the work was done outside my view and so would have missed the interactions.

Note that both of these suggestions are for group work. One of my chief goals for groups was that team members could help each other learn. Not everything a student learned needed to come from me.

The main difficulty with flipping the class is that most students prefer to learn from home. The university encourages this by filming the classes. I also think it is good to allow students to learn from home if it is more comfortable to them. The second idea, of peer assessment, sounds very interesting. I have to try it.

Is a lack of reduction to numeric ratings robust in situations where a team has some exceptional members (they get everything done before others can contribute much, or their skills and standards for quality are almost unreasonably high). I suppose the team's performance will eventually be rated numerically in most cases of assessment.

@Buffy do you have any thoughts on questions which retain the positivity but allow for something like "did any workstyles or team members impede your progress on this project". Perhaps it could be framed as a reflection on how to be more efficient or capable in the future.
I've been on one team where someone was incredibly productive and had high standards, with a personal deadline far before the course deadline (they were going travelling). To them it seemed we (the rest of the team) were irrelevant; they didn't mind nor had any resent for our relative "freeloading" in that situation.

I’ve never heard of such a scheme, but it’s a cool idea and potentially worth trying.
One drawback I can think of is that it puts weak students at a disadvantage* that could be seen as unfair since it compounds the disadvantage they already suffer from by being weak - a kind of “the poor get poorer” effect. If we imagine a weak student who isn’t lazy or a free-rider but is simply not very good at solving problems and thus isn’t expected to make a large contribution to the group’s problem solving efforts, we can expect that stronger students would not want to include such a student in their group since by including the weak student they increase their expected workload. (That is, although your scheme is designed to make large groups more “profitable”, in this particular situation the effect will be reversed). The weak student may therefore end up being forced to be in a singleton group by themselves, and therefore having to solve 2 homework problems per week when stronger students only have to do 4/3, 5/4 problems etc since they share the effort with other (also strong) students in their group.
That’s the general idea - this could make for a fun game theory model to try to analyze. But probably we won’t know how it works in real life until you or someone else tries it.

Interesting. I did not think about the weak student problem. Maybe the exercises should be sufficiently diverse so that every student  can be "strong" in some of them. E.g, some exercises are more technical. while others require more creativity.


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Referencing and Plagiarism
If a specific sentence is not in-text referenced but the website used is mentioned on the reference page, is it considered plagiarism?

Yes, it is.  When you omit the citation, you are claiming the text as your own. Any time you use the words or ideas of another you need an in-text citation which points to a reference that has enough detail to allow others to find the source.  If you are using the exact words, you also need quotation marks.

Actually, I can imagine a situation in which the reference section might be "rich" enough to avoid issues (assuming quotes are used). "All of the ideas in Section 3.2 come from ... by ...". But it needs to be clear.

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Is it normal to have grad student instructors for upper division classes?
I'm almost done with my undergraduate degree (B.S. in a physical science) and, looking back, a good portion of my upper division major classes have been taught by grad students. Is this normal?
I hope the grad students are getting some sort of additional stipend for full-on teaching these courses in addition to their research since the department seems to lack professors.
Possibly pertinent info:
This is a public research university in the United States.

what’s “a good portion”?

One-third of my upper division major courses that are prerequisites for further study, and one-half of my upper division major courses that followed completion of those prerequisites.

US News and World Report has data from 697 ranked colleges. Of these:

544 schools (78%) reported that no graduate students were the primary instructor of any course. These include all except two "National Liberal Arts Colleges."
The 10 schools with the most graduate students as primary instructor were all large public research universities. These 10 schools reported that 18-26% of their TA appointments were as the "primary instructor."

Purdue University is listed as the school with the highest fraction of graduate students as instructors of record. Their policy allows the department to assign courses to graduate students; it makes no reference to upper division or lower division.
As another case study, the University of California reports that "as students progress through their academic careers and enroll in upper-division and graduate classes, they receive more consistent exposure to full-time permanent faculty and smaller classes." More specifically, the policy at Berkeley allows graduate students to teach lower-division classes, but they do so under the supervision of a faculty member, who remains instructor of record. However, Berkeley does allow graduate students to be the instructor of record for an upper-division course, though usually in exceptional circumstances only.
Summary: about 80% of universities do not allow graduate students to be the instructor at all. Of the other 20%, most are large public research universities. There is less data about the courses to which these graduate instructors are assigned, but Berkeley is an example of one school that will "formally" assigns graduate students to upper-division courses but not lower-division courses.

I'll add that even within these schools, it will vary a lot between departments. For example, Cornell University [an unusual case where it is both a big private & public research uni] mostly doesn't have grad students as instructors of record. However, the math department thought calculus classes of 30 students taught by a grad student might increase learning outcomes over a 200 student class taught by a professor. They were experienced TAs, and had master's degrees. These grad instructors were all supervised by a "Tzar" who had a PhD & taught two of the 30 person sections of the same course.

I think there's probably a substantial gap between the official and practical rates. It is simple to have an official "instructor of record" that has little to no involvement in the course. That said, in all the cases I know of where I was either a student or colleague of a graduate instructor, those people were far better teachers than a randomly selected professor. Unlike TAs which are handed out as funding sources these were all people who were seriously interested in education.

To your first point -- hard to say. The Berkeley example I gave seems to support this; their policy allows grad students to teach lower-division courses, but not to be listed as the instructor of record. But, it's possible the survey methodology accounted for this.

It is pretty common at the undergrad level. A doctoral student who has been a TA for several years might be assigned an undergraduate course to teach. It is probably less common for that to be an upper division course, but it could happen if they have the requisite knowledge and some teaching skills.
They may or may not (probably not) get an extra stipend for it. The experience alone is worth something and works its way into their CV.
I think that in Europe it might be very common. At least according to some of the people I've met there. But a doctoral student is probably considered a regular employee there.

Standard disclaimer: Europe is a continent not a country, and teaching practices vary enormously from country to country.

@astronat, of course, but I know people in several European countries from UK to Hungary and Sweden to Italy. And you are correct to say that it isn't universal.

It's more common to have a Ph.D student being involved in teaching advanced upper division courses than undergraduate courses. Teaching, say, student seminars on advanced topics like string theory is a task that a PhD student in that same topic should be able to handle without much problems. But you don't want to let a PhD student handle a first year classical mechanics course. Didactic skills matter a lot more when dealing with a large class of students fresh from high school.

I agree with your reasoning but I have never heard of a university that actually does it this way.

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I want to do a PhD but I think I need more supervision. Should I be more direct in setting up more frequent meetings with my PhD supervisor?
I began a paid position as PhD research assistant in Germany. Immediately after beginning the position, the principal investigator (PI) who hired me moved country and left the project (but remains part of the project as he secured funding). The ex-PI, new PI and I have meetings once a month to discuss progress, with little contact between these meetings.
I also enrolled on an associated PhD program and got assigned a PhD supervisor who is an expert in my area of study. I have monthly meetings with my PhD supervisor. There are therefore 3 people who are supervising my work, but it feels like I am without any supervision because these three people have overlapping and minimal roles. I am employed by a research institute and taking a PhD at an associated university. My supervisor and new PI are associated with the research institute.
I want to do a PhD but I feel like without any supervision I am in a post-doc like situation. I think I need more supervision/guidance mainly from my PhD supervisor, but it is not his role to discuss the work I am paid for, that should be the new PI.
Do you think I should be more direct in setting up more frequent meetings with my PhD supervisor?
Is anyone aware of how to best manage the paid positions that are quite separate from the PhD itself, and the multiple people involved?

What happens in these meetings? Did you say there that you think you need more supervision?

No, I get the impression the PI doesn't want to be contacted outside of these meetings. That's only an impression though, I will bring it up in the next meeting, thanks

I'd think the issue may not be so much the number of meetings but what happens in them. Use them more actively to get what you need!

@Confused_German_123 By removing the introduction, the question would not be understandable. I've thus reverted the changes, shortening a bit the text. If you prefer removing certain details to avoid being recognized, remove them but please try to keep the question understandable. If you wish, to improve anonymity, you can flag the question to have it disassociated from your profile. See https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/96732/how-do-i-remove-my-name-from-a-post-in-accordance-with-cc-by-sa

If I understand it correctly, your funding comes from one source, but your doctoral studies are somewhat (at least) independent of that.
You need to satisfy your PI and others in your funding stream that your work is good, but since this isn't a permanent position, your primary focus should be on a productive relationship with your PhD supervisor.
So, yes, frequent meetings with the supervisor but without neglecting the others, unless you can find a different funding stream.
Focus, primarily, on long term goals. If the job in the lab supports that, all the better, but the degree is primary.

Thank you for the response. You are correct about the structure, I'll aim to satisfy the PI and increase frequency of meetings with the supervisor. A reminder of the long-term goal is valuable, I often forget that aim in the current confusion.


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How much will a terrible freshman undergradate year affect academic future?
I wasn't able to attend university during my freshman year due to personal reasons, so I ended up only barely passing 1 class the whole year (didn't even show up for the finals for all the other classes). My 3rd semester went a bit better, passed half the classes and also passed half of the remaining from my 1st semester. 4th semester went pretty good as I passed all classes with As and during the summer I also passed all the remaining ones from the previous 3 semesters. Right now I'm in my final year and have a fairly good GPA but I'm afraid that my terrible performance during my 3 semesters are going to tank my chances of getting into a MSc and later a PhD program. Is it at all reasonable for me to assume that the admissions boards can look past that since I have clearly shown improvement and have a good GPA?
I'm currently studying in Greece but plan to move abroad (somewhere in the EU) for MSc and PhD.
Note: I was enrolled in all of the core courses during my first 3 semesters I just did not attend class and did not take any exams (no show).

Related: Can I recover after a really bad first year?

Your older work is far less important than what you have done since. If you have turned it around and people are willing to attest to that in letters of recommendation the first year will likely hurt you very little. I can't say not at all, but not as much as you fear.
For future stuff, focus on the future and on what you have learned enables success there. You are far from alone in this and many students have a slow start. It is good actually, that you found a way to do better. People may well recognize that.
You may have to answer questions in an interview about your first year, so expect that.

Note that the past is past and you can't change it. What you can do now is work so that the past is irrelevant to the future. Make sure you haven't missed any essential knowledge from the early years. Work closely enough with current faculty (projects, research, ...) that they will enthusiastically support your next steps.

Thank you @Buffy for taking the time to respond! I'm very glad to hear that 2-3 pretty terrible semesters in the beginning won't straight up kill my chances. Also I'd like to think that going for a MSc first is going to help me prove myself more and make it easier for the admissions board to overlook my slow start.


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UK visa- does certificate of sponsorship still necessary when your postdoc salary covered by a outside institution?
I got a postdoctoral scholarship from a Turkish Science Institution. It covers a monthly stipend for a year and travel expenses.
A university in the UK accepted me as a "postdoctoral fellow". The university does not pay me any salary, they just host me. The Turkish Science Institution will cover my expenses as a scholarship.
Is a certificate of sponsorship from the host UK university still necessary for a visa application? Do I need to apply for a skilled worker visa?
Thank you.

I think you have probably gotten the right answer already, but if you need more, you might want to ask on [travel.se] instead, they tend to be more knowledgeable about this sort of issue.

Your case is a bit unusual and you may want to consult an immigration lawyer. I am not a lawyer and this is not a legal advice. The admin team in your host University is likely specialised in Study and Work visas, while your situation may require a different type of visa.

I do not think that a Work Visa is right for you, because you are not going to work in the UK, in a sense that you will not be employed by a UK organisation and you won't receive a salary in the UK and it won't be taxed by the UK government.
I also do not think that Study visa is right for you because you are not going to study in the UK, in a sense that you will not be paying tuition fees to the University, which the UK government can tax.

Your situation may be covered by what was previously known as a Academic Visitor Visa. It now merged under the Standard Visa type, but there are still special instructions for academics. Please read the link and discuss it with your host institution and perhaps also with an immigration council.

Thank you so much, this info is really helpful.  I got lost in the UKVI website for days. Thank you

Yes, it is needed, as far as I know, for your visa application (you must have your sponsor on the visa I believe).
As for the type of visa, it is probably "skilled" visa, or "talent". But you have to ask your university's admin team.


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How can one win a teaching award?
How can a tenure-track professor strategically pursue and win a teaching award to bolster their tenure application?
Specific scenario: A friend works in a university that emphasizes teaching. This is her 4th year and she has 18 months until tenure review. Her 3rd-year review came back and is concerning:

Research and service meet the minimum requirement

Teaching record is mixed:

Initial struggles with adjustment and over-innovation
Serious pandemic-related setback
Current excellent student reviews and peer observations

The committee noted that teaching is the weakest link in her tenure package. It is hard to say if the next 3 semesters of good student reviews can balance this, but a teaching award could potentially offset earlier inconsistencies.
Given this context, what are the best ways/steps for her to secure a teaching award in a short time frame?
Note: Her university has a teaching award just for assistant professors. In order to be considered, she has to be nominated by a faculty member, then by the chair, and then by the dean. The question is not about the procedure, but about how to be nominated in the first place.

Are the current "excellent" reviews in the same sort of course that got the "bad/worse" reviews? Or is there a pattern such as bad in intro courses but good in specialized, for-majors courses?

Don't go for the "best " award, go for doing good . You cannot control awards, but you have some control over . If the current reviews are "excellent", find out what made them excellent. Also, if she goes from bad to excellent, that's a good sign (in any case, better than the other way around).

@cag51 Hard to see a pattern. She taught 6 courses in her first 3 years ranging from 100 to 300 level. She seem to failed quite badly in nearly all of them. My assessment is just that it takes time to adjust to a teaching role after 5 years spending in a research-only position.

This isn't an answer, and I don't know the American tenure system, but... in what world is this a problematic review? Paraphrasing, it says that this person had a rough start to what might have been their first teaching job. Then they hit some troubles due to Covid (who didn't?). And now they are doing an excellent job, at least according to student feedback. Sounds like a good news story!

She must meet the standard in all three categories: research, teaching, and service, with the first two being the most important. Ideally, she should exceed the standard in at least one of the three. However, her research performance is merely adequate. Therefore, her tenure case would likely be unsuccessful if evaluated today. Student feedback alone cannot resolve this issue. Something bigger has to happen.

"She seem to failed quite badly in nearly all of them" - then where is "Bad -> Worse -> Excellent" coming from? Excellent seems far from failing. Also from this description "Research and service are okay" seems worse to me than progress from "Bad -> Worse -> Excellent".

About 20 years ago, my college had the problem that the assistant professors who won the teaching award tended not to be promoted to tenure. We fixed the problem, but your friend should make sure her school doesn't have the same problem.

@AndreasBlass Interesting! Why is that? And what was the fix?

@Timmy As far as I remember, the fix was to give the teaching award to people just after promotion to tenure (maybe even before the provost and the board of regents had officially approved the promotion). I don't know about the reason for the problem. An obvious guess is that people spent so much time and effort on teaching that teir research suffered.

Has she considered asking her colleagues, the chair, and the dean what it would take to get nominated, or looked at previous nomination statements? But honestly, if the feedback right now is that only a teaching award would salvage her tenure case, it may be time to look for other appointments. This seems not-so-hidden code for "it's not going to happen".

Note that being a good teacher and winning a teaching award are not always the same thing. I’ve known some darn good teachers who deserved the recognition, but a few who did not. Way back when I taught a senior level course with a serious prerequisite. The prerequisite course was covered by either Prof X or Prof Y, both of whom had over 20 years of teaching experience. X won teaching awards based on student evaluations, Y got low to middling evals. Y’s students arrived to my class prepared, X’s didn’t. X focused on making the students happy, Y focused on their understanding of the material.

How can a tenure-track professor strategically pursue and win a teaching award to bolster their tenure application?

She can't. This is a terrible plan that is 99% certain to fail. It is simply not possible to realistically aim for such a goal. Awards are meant to recognize the most exceptional teachers from among a (usually) fairly large field of candidates. Thus, the probability of winning one, even with talent and supreme effort, is too low for this event to be worth staking one's career success on.
Your friend can, and probably should, aim to be an excellent teacher, and to demonstrate that she is an excellent teacher. However, if she wants a reasonably high chance of success she should think of ways to demonstrate her excellence other than winning a teaching award.
At the same time, it is also reasonable to pursue the teaching award with a "low expectations mindset", where if it happens, your friend can reap some (well-deserved) career benefits, but such that if it does not happen, her career does not get entirely derailed. Thus, it would make sense for her to alert her department chair and other senior colleagues to the award, give them information about her excellent performance as a teacher, and hint (or even state outright) her desire to be nominated for the award. She can also work on keeping an up to date and web-accessible portfolio of teaching material, with compelling teaching materials, to make it easy for people to see how hard she works on her classes. She can also mentor students from underprivileged communities, etc; there are many other steps she can take that would increase her probability of winning a teaching award. Some of them are the same steps she would take to be an excellent teacher; others are more about "marketing" (a social media presence? a YouTube channel? The sky is the limit...), but can still potentially help make the dream of a teaching award a little less unlikely to come true.
Bottom line: it's good to be ambitious, but the ambition to win awards cannot be a career plan in and of itself. Most people, even most people who achieve tenure in highly-ranked departments (many of whom are excellent teachers), do not win teaching awards.

It's also a terrible plan because pursuing it might easily bring back the original issues with "over-innovation" (whatever that means, but if shooting for the stars originally led to bad outcomes I don't think shooting stars that are even farther away is going to be the answer).

I largely agree but...it might be worth a little digging to see how deep the award's applicant pool actually is. A local award with a convoluted application process for a small prize might not actually be that heavily contested.

@Matt sure, it's worth making reasonable efforts to pursue the award, including getting information about how competitive it is. And maybe for some awards the chance of winning is larger than for other awards, but it's still typically pretty small. Conversely, if there is an award where the chance is genuinely high (say, higher than 1 in 4) then I'd say that winning that award would be a pretty unimpressive achievement and may not actually provide the benefits for OP's friend that she's hoping to get out of it.

First, you have to actually be an excellent teacher. My suggested path to that is to focus on student learning, not lecturing, and to dedicate yourself to teaching every student who has a desire to learn. Big job. Hard job. It might take you (them?) some research to see how to do that and to practice it. It would also, to me, imply, a fairly robust and active classroom environment, provided that the scale permits it. Lots of questions to and from students, perhaps. To do it well, you need to be available to students even outside of class. Even online.
One way to gain the needed skill is to ask a colleague known to be an excellent teacher, even someone who previously won the award, if they would permit you to visit a few of their classes and then discuss techniques with them afterwards. Repeat as needed, perhaps with other colleagues.
Next, you have to be recognized as such. One way to do that is to get involved with organizations in your (their?) field that focuses on education. In CS that would be SIGCSE, for example. Contribute to their conferences and such.
Locally, once you (they?) have "mastered" the task, invite a faculty member or two, and the chair if necessary, to visit your classroom and give you feedback on your presentations and interactions. Can you bring out the "quiet" students, who sit in the back? Can you make it interesting without it being chaotic? How do you respond to questions, especially seemingly hostile or disruptive questions?
But to me, the biggest part is dedication to teaching every student. Not just the best, not the average; all.
No, I never won teacher of the year, even after I learned and practiced the above. I won some other rewards, but that one evaded me. And, confession, at the beginning of my teaching career I was overly pedantic, thinking that the perfect explanation would resonate with every student. It took me years to learn that students in my classroom weren't like me: driven to study this field without compromise. They have other goals.

A note on scale. It is unlikely at the sort of institution you describe, but if a "class" has 200 students, then an "active classroom might be impossible to manage. In such a case there are hopefully enough TAs (8 or so) to manage breakout sections for students to get questions answered. One technique in such a case is to make the rounds of those sessions, visiting each one occasionally as an observer and source of information as well. A visible presence is helpful.

Even if the OP's friend fails to get an award, all this is excellent advice about how to improve the teaching portion of their tenure portfolio.

“ invite a faculty member or two, and the chair if necessary, to visit your classroom” do professors really do this?

@AgnishomChattopadhyay, in the US, yes. In fact it is sometimes mandatory for new faculty who are not yet tenured. But the visitors should ideally be excellent teachers themselves and willing colleagues.

@AgnishomChattopadhyay, It can be done in a lot of ways. Sometimes the visitors sit in the audience, just like the students do. However, they might also participate in the class somehow (e.g., give a mini-lecture on their specialty; judge student presentations, etc).

from what I have seen, most professors tend to be "busy" with their personal research or career goals and teaching is an afterthought. I can't imagine these people being very happy to attend a colleague's class and give feedback

How can a tenure-track professor strategically pursue and win a teaching award to bolster their tenure application?

I am with Dan Romik - this is a terrible plan. For it to work your friend needs to get nominated and receive specifically the next teaching award, with the background that she is currently not perceived to be an outstanding teacher (otherwise she would not have that issue in the first place). Unless your department gives out teaching awards like participation trophies this isn't going to work and your friend needs a new plan.
Teaching awards, like most awards, are to a large degree based on perception. Your friend first needs to do something exceptional, but then she also needs to market what she is doing. That is to say, she needs to make sure that her colleagues know about what the exceptional thing is she is doing, what the pedagogical concept behind it is, how well it works, etc. This is not a quick fix, it's a multi-year project with highly uncertain outcome (she may do something cool and novel, and students might hate it, or her colleagues may find it pedagogically questionable, or somebody else might be doing something even cooler, etc.).

Specific scenario: A friend works in a university that emphasize on teaching. This is her 4th year and she has 18 months until tenure review. Her 3rd-year review came back and is concerning:

Research and service are okay
Teaching record is mixed: (Bad -> Worse -> Excellent)

The committee noted that teaching is the weakest link in her tenure package. It is hard to say if the next 3 semester of good student reviews can balance this. But a teaching award could potentially offset earlier inconsistencies.

[From a comment] She must meet the standard in all three categories: research, teaching, and service, with the first two being the most important. Ideally, she should exceed the standard in at least one of the three. However, her research performance is merely adequate. Therefore, her tenure case would likely be unsuccessful if evaluated today. Student feedback alone cannot resolve this issue. Something bigger has to happen.

First of, I share the surprise that her teaching track record is even perceived as an issue. If she now indeed has "excellent" evaluations, wouldn't 3 more semesters with excellent evaluations mean that her teaching track record is great (with or without award)? I would be concerned about an institution that holds initial struggles against a candidate if there is such a clear improvement.
Of course it's possible that the "excellent" above is more of a euphemism for "excellent in comparison to her earlier evaluations", and in absolute terms it's now more adequate than excellent. But even in this case, I suggest it's probably more realistic to improve the research or service track record in 18 months than to bank specifically on winning an award.
If the committee report specifically says she needs to win an award or her tenure case is going to be in trouble, I would honestly be concerned that this is not an earnest suggestion and more code for "she should look for other appointments". "We will need something exceptional to happen to positively evaluate this case 18 months from now" sounds like the thing you would say if you already kind of made up your mind that this tenure case isn't going to happen.

I've gotten two real teaching awards in my career (and three silly ones.)  I didn't seek them out, but I'll tell you how I happened to get them and your friend might contemplate this.
Every semester, I'd identify two or three struggling students and take special pains to help them succeed in my course.  I'd catch them after class and engage them in small talk and also chat about their low grades and suggest that they come by my office.  I'd show genuine interest in their progress and special problems.  If there was something going on in their life, I'd let them vent to me.  If they needed extra worksheets or link to a video, I'd find one.
The result is that there were a small number of students who were immensely grateful for my efforts.  And a yet smaller number would run to the chairman and sing my praises.  Then when it was time for teaching awards, my name was ringing in the chairman's ears.  And things took their course.  I got both awards because grateful students made noise.
My motivation was that I was bothered by not being able to save everyone, and I salved my conscience by at least saving someone.  I wasn't out to get a teaching award.  But it was nice to be recognized for going the extra mile.
Someone is going to complain that I wasn't being "fair."  True, but fair isn't possible.  I tried to pick struggling students whom I thought I could help.  There are other types of struggling students that I don't know how to help.  It's the dilemma of two people drowning and having only one life preserver to throw.  To be fair, you'd let both drown.  Or you could save one.
And someone is going to ask "what is a silly teaching award."  Well, I worked at a school for a (short) while that handed out teaching awards like AOL CD's.  Everyone got several.  It's what you got instead of a raise.

I know of at least one full professor who moved from being frequently complained about to being the "best" teacher at his university and receiving a teaching prize by following the rules in the following paper:
Neath, I. (1996). How to Improve Your Teaching Evaluations without Improving Your Teaching. Psychological Reports, 78(3_suppl), 1363-1372. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1996.78.3c.1363

First tip: "Changing your gender, if female..." We may have some challenges in implementation.

As @Buffy says: "First, you have to actually be an excellent teacher." - it is a bit like when students ask how to get a good mark - first you have to really understand the material - that is the easiest way.
Other than being an excellent teacher:

If you want a teaching award, I would advise teaching on small
elective
modules and avoid full-cohort compulsory modules.  You will get
better student feedback if the vast majority of the students
actually  want to be there from the outset.  Teach smaller classes rather than
large ones so that you can have more of a personal interaction with
the students, rather than an impersonal ``performance''.

Be organised - make sure you are well prepared and have contingency
plans in case things go wrong.  If you are slapdash and disorganised
you will be implicitly telling the students that you don't care about them.  For instance at the moment I am uploading all of the   teaching materials for the coming semester onto Blackboard and I am  using timers so that e.g. gapped slides are automatically replaced   with the filled in version immediately after the lecture (likewise   solutions to lab exercises).  That way I don't need to worry about   this during the semester when I am busy and tired.

Be amusing/entertaining - I don't view this as part of being an   excellent lecturer and not everybody is good at this.  Your primary    job is to transfer understanding of the subject matter, but if you    can be entertaining it is a bonus as it will make it easier for the students to stay engaged.

Apply the golden rule - treat the students the way you would want a
teacher to treat you if you were the student.

Never had a teaching award, but only reliably do two of the four ;o)

Being amusing/entertaining isn't part of being an excellent lecturer, but it is a big part of being recognized as an excellent lecturer.  Which is what the OP is really interested in here.

@MarkMeckes exactly!

Every University has quite a few really good teachers.  Let's assume, for the moment, that you are one of them, maybe even the best of them.
So now, you're in competition with other people who might or should be considered for the same award.  How do you float to the top??
My observation is that one fairly successful way to approach this is to have some champion recommend you for the award, and coordinate assembling a competitive package supporting the recommendation.  This process starts by reading all the requirements for a specific award, and making sure there is a strong letter of support solicited from the right people who can attest to your excellence in every area described in the award.  This can happen with or without the prospective recipient's knowledge or cooperation.  For a teaching award, the letters would probably come from both colleagues (certainly any you've actually taught with) and students.
From what I've seen, the best chairs take this very seriously.  My own chair was constantly looking for opportunities for recognition for every employee on the department rolls -- teachers, researchers, office staff, students, ....  Making your group feel recognized and appreciated takes work.

Doesn't that mean that the award ends up being about something other than actually being a good teacher?

I wouldn't say that.  The application package must certainly convince a selection committee that the potential awardee exhibits excellence in teaching.  A coordinated application package just spells things out for the committee a little bit better than an uncoordinated package.
Do a little reading about some of the lobbying that goes on behind the scenes for Nobel consideration.  It's interesting stuff.

I think it is one of those is/ought things.  Unfortunately evaluating the excellence of teaching is difficult/expensive, so often proxies are substituted, such as "how much will your colleagues vouch for you" - however human nature means that might not be a very good proxy, for instance you may be an excellent lecturer that doesn't get on well with their colleagues.  Whatever the criteria, it will be gamed to some extent.  There are plenty of people that deserved a Nobel prize that didn't get a look in because of lobbying (e.g. Jocelyn Bell Burnell).

What you say is true, but this seems to be the problem the teacher has - getting nominated.

@DikranMarsupial -- yes, exactly, which is why I described a process that centralizes efforts to nominate the people that should be nominated.  Just a few days ago, at our faculty meeting, we even discussed taking this important role out of the Chair's hands and giving it to an Awards Committee (that doesn't exist yet).


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Is missing data necessarily seen as fraud?
I normally work on system identification, focusing on continuous-time fractional-order models. In many occasions I perform Monte Carlo runs to test my algorithms' performances. I became aware after a journal publication that one of my data files got accidentally erased, which means if someone wanted to see my data I would be able to provide them almost all the collected data (let's say around 85-90%), but not the totality of it because of the erased file.
How would you consider this situation on the ethical side? (Just to be clear: the file was lost after the publication was completed.)

If you regenerated the results, how different would your conclusion be?

the code able to reproduce a Monte Carlo simulation is not lost and, even though the results would not be bit by bit identical, the conclusions and tendency would remain intact

Seems a pretty big leap from missing data to concerns about potential fraud accusations. Is there more to consider here?

Thankfully not, I just tend to be really critical and dubious about my work.

If your code is still available and re-running it produces the same result within statistical error, I would not even consider that something is lost. After all, data files can be rather big and in certain situations they are even impossible to store. Moreover, for the majority of published papers some data are lost after a few years. so in the situation you described I would not worry about it at all.

@Vosoni: please avoid writing answers in the comments.

For a monte-carlo run in particular, saving the seed for your randomness might be sufficient. There's cases where it won't be (if you have multiple threads sharing a PRNG), but if it's controllable, that's a nice way to be able to regenerate the data on demand.

This is not a problem.

Monte Carlo runs should be "mostly" reproducible regardless of the exact seed chosen. So your qualitative results should still be reproducible, even if you can no longer do a bit-for-bit reproduction of the paper.
If someone tried to reproduce your results and failed, it would be nice if you had the actual data so that you could debug it. But this is (unfortunately) far from a requirement; many authors never respond to such queries. Worst case, someone could publish an article disputing your paper. I do not know how likely this is to happen in your field, but I suspect it is unlikely unless your paper is really groundbreaking and gets a lot of attention.
In any case, there is not really an ethical issue here. You did not intentionally falsify the data. While keeping stuff like this is a best practice, it is not an absolute requirement in the way that getting IRB approval is. And certainly you can't be expected to hold onto old datasets in perpetuity.

While I agree in general, note that certain sorts/levels of carelessness can be an ethical problem.

Well, if you're so careless that you're routinely publishing irreproducible crap and getting your papers retracted, that's just "being terrible at your job." Which I guess is a type of ethical issue.

the fact one file was accidentally lost does not equate to the method being irreproducible, as the programs and functions still exist and would produce similar results once more

Isn’t that exactly what I said?

Fraud would imply an intent to deceive.
If you can regenerate sufficiently similar results with a new simulation, it would be hard for anyone to argue what sort of benefit you would have derived from such deception.
You can avoid this problem in the future by uploading your data to some sort of archiving service at the time of submission. However, I wouldn't let yourself get too anxious over it this time.


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Why do journals ask authors to classify their submissions using taxonomy or a list of topics?
I am submitting a paper and the submission requires a taxonomy or topics . I am not sure about this requirement. Taxonomy with respect to a research paper

A taxonomy or topics will help the editor to find proper referees.

In addition to helping the editor, the author's classification aids future potential readers in finding papers of interest. It is a lot like the tags that we apply here to questions.
Arguably this was more useful in the past when full text search was less available, but it is, even now, a quick way to narrow down a search for relevant topics.

This helps the journal find an editor. Example: submitting a paper on the formation of the Solar System to a general physics journal. It's obvious the paper is in astrophysics, but that's it. Do you give the paper to someone who's an expert in planetary science? General relativity? Exoplanets? Stellar physics? This can be really hard to answer for someone who's not in astrophysics.
If the authors give subject tags, it's very helpful, since you can just look up the relevant section in the editorial board's research interest and invite someone there.

The need you to classify your subject using predefined codes specific to your general field. In mathematics we often use the AMS subject classification codes give here. I imagine that your field has its own organisations and one of those have published a catalog of codes.

@NajibIdrissi. I think we can conclude that the label used depends on journals in question. I have been prompted for the AMS subject classification since 2008 and   SIAM's journal on matrix analysis still refers to it in this way.

@NajibIdrissi. This discussion is very tangential to the original question. Downvote the answer if you think it will mislead the OP. I do not think bumping it to the top of the page with an edit is appropriate at this time.

@NajibIdrissi: I have found that much meaning is lost without face to face communication or prior knowledge of the people involved. I am going to leave it at that and enjoy my weekend. I suggest you do the same.


text:
Why publish a research paper when a blog post or a lecture slide can have more citation count than a journal paper?
I am quite surprised to find that a lecture slide for a course has 133 citations from highly reputable researchers across the world. The main contribution of the lecture slides (which seems to be the reason for the citations) appears in 1 line on 1 page of the slide out of 30 slides. (Citation count according to Google Scholar)

Another set of random course notes from lecture 12 of a course just happens to have over 100 citations, Reinforcement Learning and Control - CS229
This 8 page course note has 200 citations, which is more than many of actual research papers
Also, another summary of a blog post (less than 14 pages) has over 700 citations (From the paper: This paper originally appeared as a blog post on 19 January 2016.)
Citation count from Google Scholar. This paper isn't even published anywhere aside from Arxiv.

What is the point of even publishing a paper and going through the painstaking process of peer review and editing if you can just write some blog post or a lecture slide on some hot topic and accumulate citation counts (which is crucial for securing funding, etc.)?

For the peer review ?

The real question is whether journal articles are the best or only way of communicating on research, depending on what you want to say and to whom. I do not see the point of framing the question in terms of citations, though.

The document that you cite as a "course note" does not seem to be a course note.  It seems to indeed be a research paper.

maybe related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/112254/9222

@MorganRodgers I'd be interested in seeing a question/answer identifying different types of inaccuracies with Google Scholar citation count. Also if people send them feedback on that, are they fixing these or don't care?

@MorganRodgers: what, only the citee can merge duplicates (and then only if they have a gScholar account, and search for duplicates and initiate the request)? Then users have a disincentive to do it (lowers their own citation count) ;-)

@MorganRodgers: See my answer; OP's examples are not valid even with Google Scholar's counts.

This seems to be very-very field specific

@PeteL.Clark the text at least claims to contain errors and is definitely not peer reviewed.

@kap: The paper says it could contain errors.  One could say that about any paper.  And there are some research papers that are not peer reviewed.  Once again, the OP claims it is a "course note," which is not accurate.

Are formal publications and blog posts mutually exclusive?  Couldn't you release the same basic information in both formats?

It's not fair to only look at the peak of the distribution. For an apples-to-apples comparison, you need to compare peaks to peaks and averages to averages.
The two sources you mention are both in the field of machine learning. If we assume that they correspond to the blog/lecture notes sources with the most number of citations (i.e. the peaks), then we can conclude that these venues can generate at most ~700 citations. If you compare to the most cited machine learning papers, these 700 citations are minute. For example putting "machine learning" into Google Scholar yields:

Scikit-learn: Machine learning in Python (journal article) -- 14919 citations
Data Mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques (book) -- 34724 citations

What about averages? I don't know what the average number of citations a blog post or lecture slide gets, but I'd guess less than one, since many blog posts don't attract comments. The average number of citations for a journal article however is easy to find - just look at the impact factor. Putting in "machine learning journal" into Bing, I get journals such as Machine Learning (IF = 1.855 as of time of writing) and International Journal of Neural Systems (IF = 4.58). Clearly the average journal article gets a lot more citations than the average blog post or lecture slide.
tl; dr: What's the point of studying machine learning instead of playing soccer and earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a week? The answer to that question is similar to the answer to this one.

Scikit-learn is a software library, the vast majority of those citations are for people using the software, not reading the paper.  Likewise, the second example is a book.  Hardly an apples-to-apples comparison with the expected citations for a journal paper (although the top journal articles can get thousands of citations).

Machine learning is less likely to lead to permanent brain injuries, unless you facepalm too hard.

-1: This is not a technical question about citations. The real issue is the dominance of journal articles in scientific communication.

The instances you mention don't show that statistically blogs or slides get cited well.  Just that you find some instances in the universe of events.
Papers tend to be abstracted (chemistry does this quite well).  Blogs and slides not.
Science citation searches don't generally index blogs and slides (especially uncited ones).  Thus they can be difficult to find during a lit search.
Journals exercise a function of review and editing that drives a superior work product in formatting.  Blogs and slides are generally a mess in their referencing fro instance, compared to papers.  It's not just that editors and reviewers drive this but that authors tend to "up their game" when sending work product for review.
There is some benefit in review scientifically (more so for weaker papers, but still).
Papers help your career.
Nothing prevents publicizing a paper by blogging or presenting it in addition.  And usually the blogging or presenting will be superior because solid work has already been done previously.*
Narrative technical reports ("Word documents" or the sort) are generally superior to slideware in information density and quality.  [Read the Tufte contributions to the Space Shuttle disaster inquiry for some of this...Feynman had same issue with the previous disaster and the problems with slides versus sentence and paragraph reports.

*Small aenecdote to explain.  I took a course once where we had a true seminar (oval table discussion with small group) on foreign policy controversies.  Every Tuesday, we handed in a 2 page written paper before the discussion (on a set of readings).  Every Thursday, we just had discussion, on a new set of reading, but no paper was required.  The Tuesday discussions were stunningly better than the Thursday discussions.  Doesn't this make sense when you think how much better you understand something after writing it up properly?  The same applies for doing a presentation or a blog on a piece of science (after writing it up formally).

Papers help your career.

Slides and blog posts do not get more citations than journal papers.
You've given non-representative or invalid examples:

For the paper following a blog post: It's the ArXiv paper that has the citations, not the blog post.
For Andrew Ng's course notes: Sometimes, professors arrange for a course-note-taking semesterial project which is intended to eventually produce a textbook. When this happens, notes are taken much more seriously, beefed up a lot of after class, go through round(s) of review by the professor or peer students, follow strict formatting guidelines etc. This is nothing like lecture slides. Also, textbooks != papers.
The "Notes on Convolutional Neural Networks" document is not a deck of lecture slides nor a blog post. The fact that it has "notes" in the title does not mean it is just some scribbles jotted down - it looks serious.

... so your premise is unsubstantiated. Actually, it's incorrect as far as a I know.

Apart from the overgeneralization in your premise, which was pointed out in other answers:
Blog posts and lecture slides don't carry the scientific authority of peer-reviewed and professionally edited publications like journals. Peer-review and the services of scientific editors serve as a vetting process to filter out publications that don't hold up to scientific scrutiny. The vetting is performed by (usually two or three) qualified researchers on behalf of the scientific community. By contrast, the credibility of a blog post or lecture slide depends entirely on the reputation and trustworthiness of its author. Not only is this a less stringent criterion, it is also hard to assess for outsiders.

The principal contemporary reason for formally publishing articles is that governments and institutional administrators demand of researchers proof of their productivity. Being unable to assess such productivity according to their own criteria (in general because they have none) they attach simple metrics to research activity which they use to rank researchers. The principal metrics are money secured in competitive grant programs and counts of papers indexed by some supposed authority. In the current moment, publishing in journals serves mainly to achieve the second goal.
Formal journal publishing generally adds little value from an intellectual point of view and generates obstacles (paywalls) to dissemination of ideas. Something like the ArXiv achieves wide, free, dissemination of knowledge in a rapid and easy way. The author can write an article according to the author's criteria and distribute it as the author sees fit. Sometimes the refereeing process adds value, when the referees and editors behave in a serious fashion, but more often they do not or the process simply delays dissemination.

Yup.  In science, no refereed paper leads with certainty to no grant.

Peer review may not add value to every individual paper, perhaps not even to most papers; but it does add value to the credibility and validity of scientific publications on a systemic level, namely by filtering out at least some of the work that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

"Sometimes the refereeing process adds value, when the referees and editors behave in a serious fashion, but more often they do not" - do you have any data to back this rather sweeping claim up? Yes, there are problematic editors and reviewers, but in my experience across two unrelated fields, it is simply untrue that this occurs "more often" than that they are helpful.

@StephanKolassa: "but more often ... or the process simply delays dissemination". By quoting in such a way as to omit the second part of an "A or B", you have perturbed the intended meaning. I make no "sweeping claim". In any case, data about such secretive processes as reviewing is not readily available. I see very little evidence that peer reviewed articles are "better" than those distributed via the ArXiv (for example). Certainly they are less accesible and take longer to reach their intended audience.

the process simply delays dissemination — The peer-review process can only delay dissemination in fields that actively prevent faster means of dissemination (like conference presentations, technical reports, preprints, working papers, and the like).

The "citation count" from Google Scholar is not a real citation count. It is automatically compiled, includes lots of false positives, duplicates, etc.
Also it counts citations from things like other lecture slides, blogs, etc. None of these will count for anything when you are applying for funding. Any sort of funding/hiring/promotion that wants to look at your citation count is only going to count:

Citations of your peer reviewed publications
from publications which are themselves peer reviewed.

[citation needed] [citation needed] [citation needed] This answer is utterly inconsistent with my experience in computer science, which does take Google Scholar seriously, and which does "count" citations both to and from unrefereed papers (and, yes, even blog posts) in hiring, promotion, and funding decisions.

@JeffE: This may vary quite a bit by subfield and institution. My impression (from computer science, although oriented towards the applied end, and in Germany) indeed matches more or less the perception described in this answer, in that Google Scholar's citation counts should, at best, be used with extreme caution and are, at worst, little more than a joke. Issues like undergraduate seminar write-ups listed as doctoral theses or your citation count getting hugely inflated by counting all kinds of bachelor theses or coursework that you happened to supervise seemed commonplace. ...

... As you have made quite a different experience, maybe the accuracy of Google Scholar's citation count (or its complete indexing) differs greatly depending on how well the indexing software gets along with different data sources.

@JeffE my experience (also from CS) is that the institutions want to outsource the "taking it seriously" evaluation to someone else, so my local institutions refer to scopus or web of science for evaluating which publications matter, what are the impact factors and counting citations, so unless both my paper and the citing paper are indexed by one of those, then they might as well not exist from the evaluation perspective.

@MorganRodgers We don’t use the citation counts for anything but crude, high-level comparisons between people of similar academic ages in the same subsubfield (because citation patterns very too much to sensibly use it for anything else).  We also ask experts to evaluate the content (reference letters) and (whenever possible) we also read the papers ourselves.

Is your primary goal really citations? Or is your primary goal to contribute in a substantive way to the research in your field?
In my fields (Physics & Engineering) journals articles are where the details of new research can be found, and are accessible for decades or centuries. It is not a rare to find important information in older published works. This is how the knowledge of human kind has been growing for centuries, and as a method of structuring academic information sharing, it works.
Even more, if you want to contribute something to this world, journal articles and the peer review structure have the permanence to allow your ideas and contribution to connect with others. It is true that newer media methods also can do this, but journal articles are a very concrete way to contribute for the long term.
However, if you do not want to contribute to the grand project of increasing human knowledge, and are instead interested only in increasing your citation count, why bother with peer review?

In my fields (Physics & Engineering) journals articles are where the details of new research can be found, and are accessible for decades or centuries — I think you misspelled "arXiv".

Journal publishing is about branding. There are three ways to create a successful mousetrap:
(a) Design the best mousetrap in the world and hope that the news spreads by word of mouth. If it's really outstanding, then you might succeed.
(b) Establish a reputation as the best designer of household gadgets in the world, so that people are actively looking out for your next idea.
(c) Advertise your mousetrap in a catalog produced by a well-known retailer, so that a proportion of people will buy it even it it's nothing special.
Exactly the same is true if you're a researcher peddling intellectual ideas. A very small number of people are capable of succeeding using approach (a) or (b). For the rest, the only way to get anywhere is approach (c) - where the retailer/brand in this case is the journal that you publish in.


text:
Where to post a research request?
I want to find someone who is already or willing to begin researching the answer to this variation of the linear assignment problem as it has practical utility.
Is there a systematic way to find such a person? Is this web site the best answer or are there other alternatives?

In this specific case you might want to wait and see if your math question gets an answer, and if not, try asking on MathOverflow.

@Anyon: What features does this specific case have (relative to the general case) that makes you share this answer? With respect to the more general question, do you have any thoughts?

I posted an answer with my thoughts for the general case. The specific case strikes me as a research level question, and you're just more likely to reach your target audience on a site designated for that level. For good or bad, Math.SE has to deal with a lot of more "standard" methods and questions.

I don't think there is a systematic method that applies in all cases, but there are some things you can try.

You can use your own knowledge of what people are working on, or do a (more or less) systematic literature search to find out if someone already has worked on the problem, or at least a related problem. If the problem has a distinct name (or several), an hour or two with a search engine might be well spent. Once you find a relevant paper, explore its references, as well as the papers citing it, and so on.
If you don't find an obvious name, then you can still try contacting some of the relevant authors directly to see if they have a better idea on where to look.
Use your own network (including e.g. PhD advisor and other professors) to ask for more leads. (I use the word 'leads' because it really is detective work sometimes, but it does feel good when it pays off.) Be prepared for the "I don't know the answer, but you should talk to X" response, and then X saying "I don't know, but I think Y worked on this during the 70s", etc.

People you identify using these methods are more likely to be interested in the problem than a random person, or at least to have some ideas or insight. On the other hand, if you're not in the field it can be really hard to identify the right people, or even judge what problems are related. And, of course, this way doesn't find all those who are interested but haven't published on the topic before - like early-career researchers.
What else can you do?

It's indeed worth trying various websites (like StackExchange, Quora, various forums, ...). Particularly those geared towards professionals in a specific field (like MathOverflow) can be very helpful, but can also be a bit hit and miss. If you're dealing with specialized knowledge, that's just how it goes. Still, such sites can often help with less systematic, more field-dependent ways of finding the right person to talk to.
Various professional organizations may have "networks of experts", which are basically lists of people willing to talk to media or the public about topic X.
Finally, sometimes plain old publicizing the problem, or even offering rewards for a solution, can help attract talent - especially if it's a somewhat obscure problem with practical utility. As for rewards, if you're a professor this is called offering a student a problem to work on... If you're in industry, you could try to get a professor to do some consulting work, and so on.

If all else fails, you could always work on the problem yourself. Having done the full literature search and talked to various people, you might well have come up with some ideas on how to proceed.


text:
What does the publisher mean by “Manuscripts […] are not returned to the authors”?
I submitted a paper to the journal Mathematica on January this year, but I haven’t heard anything from them so far. I tried to write to the editorial office a few days ago, but did not receive any answer.
Then I noticed the following sentence on the web page of the journal, in Information for authors:

Manuscripts not accepted for publication are not returned to the authors.

Could someone explain me its meaning? I thought that, even in case of rejection, at some point they would let me know. Does this sentence mean that this is not the case?

"We're not done mocking submission yet!"

Back in the Olden Days, to submit a paper you would mail a hard copy to them. This notice says that they will not mail it back to you; they will only send you a letter with their decision. But nowadays, when we do things by the internet, this notice is largely an anachronism. However this journal does say it still can accept submissions also by ordinary mail.
Assuming you submitted your paper by Internet, I expect you will receive a decision on publication by email in due course.
As a mathematician, I always wait at least 6 months before I inquire about a paper I have submitted.

6 months may be an anachronism, too!
What if modern people, as well as modern research employment contracts, would include in their formulation a 10% of the time dedicated to peer review?
Ah...snap, I am daydreaming again!


text:
Is publishing in your university journal considered a conflict of interest?
Many journals are published by universities and research institutions. For example, Oxford University, Johns Hopkins University, Cambridge University, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory all have their own journals.
Since having reviewers from the same institution is often considered a conflict of interest (SE answer), is publishing in a journal that is published by your research institute also considered a conflict of interest, since the editor is often from the same institution? Is it considered any different from publishing elsewhere?
Additionally, are there any guidelines by universities or their respective publishing boards that touch on these issues?

Considered by who?

@Ian_Fin By other researchers? In general from what I understand, what is and what is not conflict of interest is more or less a community consensus thing.

In response to your edit, it's worth pointing out that the editors of journals aren't necessary faculty at the university whose name is used as the publisher. For example, the first Cambridge journal listed on the page you listed, Acta Neuropsychiatrica, is edited by someone working in Denmark, not at the University of Cambridge

@Ian_Fin Thanks for the comment, I edited the question to clarify.

At least 3 of the first five journals on that page are edited by people not faculty at University of Cambridge (I got bored looking at any more...). Are you entirely sure it's accurate to characterise journals published by universities as "often" being edited by someone working at that university?

I don't know those listed, but several research institutes publish their journals (internationally cited) exactly for the purpose of spreading their activities. One notable example is the Journal of Research of NIST.

In academics, conflicts of interest are generally thought of as conflicts that involve monetary issues. The fact that a publication may contribute to an author getting a promotion or tenure is not considered a conflict of interest. That said, if the university owns a stake in the idea being published, there could be monetary benefits to both the university and author. Authors, however, need to disclose their conflicts of interest, and it this case, they would be expected to mention that the parent company of the publisher also has a conflict of interest.
In these cases, as in all cases, it would be left to the reader to decide how to interpret the results and conclusions. It is worth noting that most editors (regardless of if they are at the same university as the university owned publisher) have a fair amount of autonomy from the publisher and if forced to publish something they disagree with, would likely leave in a vocal manner. Similarly, peer reviewers provide another independent form of input (although they can obviously be overruled).

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text:
Include Disability in Statement of Purpose
Should my disability be included in my Statement of Purpose?
Background:
I've recently received my masters degree in mathematics and I'm looking to transfer for my PhD.
I had an undiagnosed neurological disorder for most of my undergraduate career. It wasn't managed until partially into graduate school. It would manifest itself through frequent migraines and even occasional blindness. Consequentially, I would have semesters with low attendance and there would even be the occasional test that I wouldn't attend or that I would attend but be effectively useless.
When it was diagnosed I had it documented with the school's disability services, but I never requested accommodation.
My advisers think I have a shot at some decent schools without knowing about this.
Thoughts:
I don't want to be treated differently at a new school. Especially since it's well managed now and I don't need any accommodations. I also don't want my current advisers to think of me differently. However, it also seems absurd to avoid talking about something that has had such a strong impact on my academic career.
I've seen this question: Graduate school and students with learning disabilities . I didn't feel like it applied to me because I am not requesting accommodations and my disorder is no longer as serious of a problem to me.

Randomly bumped into this question, when I came here for reference from math.SE. I'm blind in one eye, not that serious as yours, but I chose to mention it on my resume/PhD proposal.

If your migraine returns before your first grad school final which you then miss, it is better for everyone involved knowing the reason why this happened. I laud your reluctance to ask for special accommodations, but it seems misplaced. Want it or not, these issues are part of your life. You should be evaluated for your potential, not for your potential when healthy. Discuss with your current faculty how to mention it in applications (I expect them to react "But you should have told us!") while avoiding to make it too much of an issue, in line with your personal philosophy.

Mentioning your disability in your statement of purpose can be helpful to faculty.  Often faculty are trying to ensure there are opportunities for students with disabilities.  To do that, they need students with disabilities to identify themselves.

Mentioning your disability in your statement of purpose can be helpful to faculty. -- No. By Section 504, admissions decisions come first, and then accommodations are explored as needed. The candidate does not need to talk about his disability during the admissions process any more than a job candidate needs to talk about his sexual orientation during a job interview.

@aparente001 We are in agreement.  However, faculty/institutions need to ensure there are opportunities for students during the admissions process, as well as during instruction.  Self-identification at the application stage or before is necessary in order for faculty/institutions to take action during the admissions process.

I don't get it.  Are you imagining some sort of affirmative action policy in the admissions process?

@aparente001 that is an option.  I would expect that for graduate programs it would be more common to adjust recruitment efforts based on applicant demographics.  But for a more concrete example, imagine if an applicant who uses a wheelchair wants to visit campus.  Appointments would need to be made in appropriate locations.

This is absurd.  The Statement of Purpose is not the place to bring up questions like where are the handicapped parking spaces or which entrance to use to get access to the elevator when visiting the campus.  And admissions committees do not have affirmative action policies favoring students with disabilities.

Look, women were traditionally waaay underrepresented in the high profile symphony orchestras.  When these orchestras decided to give women applicants more of a fair chance, they started having the applicants play behind a screen, so the gender would not be known by the committee.  And this has helped.

@aparente001 You are twisting the words in my example.  In your orchestral example, the effect of the screen on gender bias in the process is determined by checking the gender of the musician.  You are arguing that academics should not be allowed to check the applicant's status by learning about it from the application, which is often the only point of contact (though there may be other channels).  The diversity of the applicant pool is of research and professional interest to some academics.  Henceforth I will deescalate this conversation by not replying again.

If it were legal in the US (I can't speak for other countries) to require applicants to disclose a disability in the application process for college, grad school or employment, there would be a question to that effect on the application form. / About your concrete example -- I don't know what distortion you felt I made, but I'm starting to wonder if you're in a country with very poor handicap accessibility.  (In the U.S. we have the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA.  I'm not saying all public buildings are compliant, but we've come a long way since it was signed into law in 1990.)

@djechlin I did not say disclosure should be mandatory.  That would be orwellian.

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text:
What's the meaning of "first-page-first order"?
Recently I prepared to submit to a conference of IEEE. In the requirements of submission, it indicated that:

PDF and Postscript files:

must not have Adobe Document Protection or Document Security enabled,

must have either 'US Letter' or 'A4' sized pages,

must be in first-page-first order, and

must have ALL FONTS embedded and subset.

I have searched for the phrase of "first-page-first", but still did not have an idea of it (sorry my first language is not english).
If anyone can tell me what's the meaning of it exactly I would be very grateful.

While Strongbad's likely answered this correctly, consider contacting the conference itself to verify.

I am pretty sure this is just a ridiculously dated instruction. On some older printers, the pages were ejected print side up and new pages were added to the top. This means that the first page printed would end up being the bottom page of the document when you picked it up. If you then wanted to staple the document in the correct order, you needed to reorder everything. With these printers it was much more desirable to print "back-to-front" such that when you pick up the document from the printer everything is in the "correct" order. Some computers provided (and maybe some still do) the option to print "back-to-front" to avoid this. Some people conceivably, though I have never seen it, produced documents in a first-page last order to help with the printing. I think this instruction just means that the pages should go in the order you expect them in: the first page of your pdf should be page 1 and the last page N. In a first-page-last order the first page would be N and the last page 1, which would be really awful to read on screen.

Just as an aside, document protection/security is the bane of my life. I am usually called upon by my wife who wrangles conferences professionally (IEEE is one of her clients) and she often calls on me when someone foolishly submits their paper with document protection enabled and that paper then needs to be placed in the conference proceedings with a suitable ISBN and proceedings page numbering.

Sorry, I don't know the meaning of "modern archaism". Would you tell me, please? @jakebeal

@Andnot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaism

@jakebeal - Another closely related one is using a floppy disk icon for saving... when was the last time you saw one of those?

This clearly show the difference between PDF and Postscript.  PDF is a printer-agnostic description.  Postscript is a (usually very large) program to be executed by the specific printer.

@nivag You meant that "Oh I see" is a unusual phrase in modern english society? I learnt it from The big bang theory - -III

@Andnot, "Oh I see" is common, natural English. What jakebeal meant was that printing pages so they end up in reverse order is archaic.

I asked my wife, who is a professional conference manager and organizes IEEE conferences (the last one she did was the S3SConference) and her response was: "The first page of the submitted PDF must be the first page of the paper" and the clarification was "some papers get submitted with several cover sheets embedded in the PDF before you get to the actual content of the technical paper. I have to edit out the cover pages before they are presented to the selection committee which makes my job harder."
Purely an anecdotal answer, but that was her opinion based on her work.

Maybe these guys confused the conference paper and journal paper (the latter usually needs a cover letter). Thank you and your wife for this good answer!

@Andnot Could you clarify why you chose to accept StrongBad's answer? It's a nice bit of historical trivia but an unlikely explanation (at least I certainly hope so). Justin's answer seems to be more accurate and comes from a source with first-hand experience.

@Lilienthal While only the conference organizers can truly answer what they mean, describing no cover pages as first-page-first might make sense, but describing it as "first-page-first ORDER" is totally non-intuitive.

@StrongBad Good point, I hadn't considered the wording which does match your interpretation much better.

@Lilienthal - Classic Stack Exchange – there's a slight mismatch between the question in the title and the question in the question. I get tripped up by that every now and then, too :^)

@J.R. not anymore. When you see something like that, you should definitely edit the question title (or ask for clarification).

@StrongBad - I considered making an edit but decided not to. (With the edit made, people might opt to downvote this answer, which could now be regarded as more irrelevant and inaccurate – especially to a first-time reader who may not notice that the question was edited.) But I appreciate your exhortation to do my part to improve the site.

@J.R. I see that all the time as well, usually with several questions answering differently which makes editing it very tricky. Thanks for the edit though StrongBad.

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text:
Responsing to "How do you intend to fund your studies for the entire duration of your stay in ...?"
I am filling in an application form for a PhD program and I am supposed to answer the following question:
"How do you intend to fund your studies for the entire duration of your stay in ...?"
Actually, I cannot afford any part of the living costs and university fees but I don't know how to mention it in a academic, polite and well-structured fashion.

It sounds like you're hoping to do an unfunded PhD. This is, in general, a bad idea.

@Thomas, I haven't known much people that are self-funded especially for PhD.

If you can't answer "You will pay me," don't go.

@JeffE, Do I supposed to say this much clear and .... ?

Maybe I'm missing something. But if this is a US Ph.D program, this question is really "Do you want us to fund you" and the answer is always yes. As JeffE says, you should not consider entering a Ph.D program unless you're being funded. Apart from the financial constraints this puts on you, the funding creates a commitment (by the department or advisor) to look after you. If the funding is from a research project, then you're even more sure that your work will be linked to something fruitful.
While there are many caveats to what I just said (and they're ringing in my head right now), they're not relevant at the time of applying to grad school.
So please always answer "I expect you to fund me".

In some cases a PhD applicant may already have a scholarship or fellowship, e.g., from one's government or from a research agency such as the National Science Foundation in the USA.  But in general I agree that you should say "please fund me" if you need funding.

That's right, and if you have such a thing you should surely mention it because most departments will jump at the chance to get a good student for "free" :)

Is this really true in every field?

Probably not. I should have clarified that it's for CS.

I see two possible ways to interpret your question, so I'll give two answers:

If you currently don't know how you will fund your studies, but you honestly think you will figure it out: just write down your best educated guess (“I will sell shoes by night”)
If you think the cost of life is too high and you probably will not manage it: please reconsider your arrangements. The happiness in life that might results from a successful PhD experience requires to have the mind free enough for science, which cannot be achieved if you worry day after day about how to eat. It is a very bad idea to make that gamble.

@fx Thanks for your response. My case is almost the second one. How I can put the aforementioned intend in a academic structure. Besides, I would like to know whether I am supposed to ask a financial support in the response to this question or not.


text:
How to withdraw your paper from an open access journal where it has been accepted?
My paper got accepted in a mediocre open access journal. However later I found out that its publishing fees was too high.
What would be the correct way of asking a withdrawal of your article from the journal?

Just a little thing to add that may or may not be relevant: some open access journals have a policy of waiving or reducing the fees if the author doesn't have a source of funding for them. If you want to publish in this journal, it might be worth discussing this with the editor.

Why would you pay to get published? You have already "paid" with the time, any serious journal do not have fees (at least not in mathematics)!

@PerAlexandersson see Research in the Mathematical Sciences, Forum of Mathematics:{Sigma,Pi}, all good journals.

@PerAlexandersson In life sciences, the business model for all open-access journals is to recover costs via publishing fees. Many of these are very good journals (most of the PLoS journals, for example).

Most of the top ranked combinatorics journals do not have fees: I've never paid a fee. For example, the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, (founded by H. Wilf), is simply a web site.
It would not be too much to ask for the university to host it - there is no printing involved.

If it has been accepted but you have not yet signed any sort of agreement, then it's easy in theory: you just tell the editor that you have decided to withdraw the paper.  They might be unhappy, but you have a right to do this (both legally and according to academic norms).
If the paper has already been published, then there may not be anything you can do.  Retracting a published paper is serious business, done only in cases of serious error or unethical behavior.
If you have already agreed to some sort of license allowing publication and paid (or agreed to pay) but the paper has not yet been published, then you should move fast.  Legally the journal can go ahead and publish, and they may decide to do so, but your chances of convincing them before they publish the paper are higher than after they publish it.
There have been stories of unethical journals publishing papers that have been withdrawn and then demanding money.  If that happens, then it is serious misbehavior on the part of the journal (and proves you were wise to withdraw the paper).

No i haven't paid any money nor signed any agreement as of now.. And have mailed the editor so i guess that would be fine... just waiting for their reply

Thank you for informing us.
Since the paper has already been accepted, you can register it in any future publication of the journal.
Thank you.

i got the following reply from them can't i publish my article in another journal now?

@vini: Were your last two comments supposed to be in the opposite order?  If "Thank you for..." was their reply, then it sounds good to me.  My interpretation is that they are saying if you change your mind and decide you do want to publish with them, then the acceptance will still hold.  However, nothing is stopping you from submitting it elsewhere instead.

i just posted the reply i got from and i was saying thanks for your help :)

@AnonymousMathematician: +1 for the link, I am going through the same issue at the moment...

I don't know if you necassarily have to sign an agreement for an open access publication, as you do not sign over the copyright to the paper, but publish it under a creative commons licence. I have recently published OA in a mixed access Springer Journal, using 'the Dutch-method' (Dutch Universities have an agreement with Springer) and didn't sign anything.
It might well be that by submitting a paper you have already given the journal rights to publish the paper OA.

(just how old this conversation is, why was this on top of the stack??)