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Use of automated assessment of programming assignments
(This is a reworking of Software for submitting and testing programming assignments.)
First, a bit of background. Many courses in applied mathematics have a programming component, where students are asked to implement algorithms (say, in Matlab) and possibly test them using a given set of interesting data. Although they are a valuable part of the education, these usually receive little love from the students (who, moreover, have rarely received a rigorous  training in programming). The result is -- with rare exceptions -- lazy hacks at best and "at least it looks like code" (often followed by my favorite, "it worked on my machine") at worst.
So I am thinking about having students submit their programming assignments via an automated assessment software. The idea is to give them instant feedback on their (repeated) submission with the goal of

saving the TAs from having to check every submission and (if they are generous) inserting all the missing semicola to make the code run, and
trying to increase the student's motivation to do more than the bare minimum by introducing some gamification elements (giving points for the fastest/most accurate code, for example, or a current ranking to encourage resubmitting improved solutions).

Hence my question (which is hopefully relevant to other disciplines as well): Has anybody tried such a thing? Did it actually lead to less work and/or more student involvement? Any hints on what to do, and what to avoid?
(I know there is the VPL module for Moodle, and we have an in-house system that can provide the necessary functionality, so I'm not asking for software recommendations here. That said, if some software provides a specific feature you've used successfully, by all means mention it -- bonus points if it's open source.)

Using a testing/measuring system to pre-screen the submissions, and to help score them, may make sense. But the TAs still DO have to check every final submission to make sure it actually solves the stated problem in a reasonable way, rather than only solving enough of the problem to pass the test or doing so in some excessively fragile manner.

@keshlam True, but if that can easily happen your testing framework is not good enough.

Testing frameworks, in general, are not good enough. Since testing the complete problem space is usually not practical, they're statistical bets on common failure modes... and if you overlook a failure, you're doing the student a disservice by letting their code pass. Moreover, you should be grading partly on code quality -- clarity, appropriateness, etc. -- and no machine scoring system yet invented does a good job with that, despite many decades of attempts.

@keshlam - to be clear, I wasn't planning on using the system for grading submissions; the assignments would be either pass/fail, or the system would serve as a gatekeeper to make sure the submissions to be graded met a certain minimum standard of correctness.

OK, in that mode it's more of an "automated TA's assistant". Makes sense. And extra points for extra work on performance, or on handling some additional set of cases, is a nice idea -- though I'm biased; I typically scored pretty high in those competitions.

You mean something similar to codingame?

TL;DR
We did something along this lines for Java-based programming assignments. Students and TAs generally like it. It was a lot of work for us.
(Very) Long Version
I used to teach software engineering at a large public university in Austria. We implemented a similar approach for two courses back there, for a 400+ students bachelor-level distributed systems course, and for a 150 students master-level course on middleware and enterprise application engineering. Both courses included large, time-consuming Java-based programming assignments, which students needed to solve individually three times per semester.
Traditionally, students would submit their solutions for both courses as Maven projects via our university-wide Moodle system. After the deadline, TAs would download and execute the submissions, and grade manually based on extensive check lists that we provided. There was usually a bit of huffing and puffing among students about this grading. Sometimes, TAs would not understand correct solutions (after looking at dozens of similar programs, your mind tends to get sloppy). Sometimes, different TAs would grade similar programs differently (the sheer size required some parallelization of grading and the tasks were complex, hence it was impossible to do check lists that covered all possible cases). Sometimes, the assignments were actually under-specified or unclear, and students lost points for simple misunderstandings. Sometimes, applications that actually worked on the student's machine failed on the TA's machine. Generally, it was hard for students to estimate in advance how many points their submissions would be worth. Given that those two courses are amongst the most difficult / most time-consuming courses in the entire SE curriculum, this was all but optimal.
Hence, we decided to move to a more automated solution. Basically, we codified our various check lists into a set of hundreds of JUnit test cases, which we gave to our students in source code. Additionally, we kept back a smaller set of tests, which were similar but used different test data. The tests would also serve as reference implementation - if the assignment text did not specify how e.g., a given component should behave in a given borderline case, what the tests expected was the expected behavior. Our promise to the students was that, if all the tests for a given task pass, and the student did not game our test system (more on this below), not much can go wrong anymore with the grading (it was possible to get minor point losses anyway for things impossible to test automatically, but those things could not amount for more than a small percentage of all points).
EDIT after comments
Note that I was saying more automated, not fully automated. Human TAs still look at the code. There is no grading Web service or something like that (this usually does not work, as keshlam correctly notes). On a high level, what we did is that we provided the requirements for students not only in written text anymore, but also in form of formal executable unit tests. The new process is roughly like that:

TA downloads submission from Moodle and starts tests (takes about 10 minutes).
While tests are running, TA browses over the code, does some spot checking of code, and checks a few things not covered by the tests.
When the tests are done, the TA notes down the results of the tests and his own observations.
If something severe happens (e.g., compile error), the TA sighs, takes a deep breath, and falls back to manually grading (and, likely, complaining a bit in our mailing list).

Advantages:

Students now have a good feeling about how many points they will get in the end. No nasty surprises anymore.
The TA effort for grading is now much, much lower, maybe 1/3 of the previous time. Hence, they have more time to look at problematic solutions and help students actually produce assignments.
The tests, good or bad (more on this later), are the same for everybody. Lenient and strict TAs are much less of a problem.
Working solutions now work no matter if the grading TA understands the solution or not.
Students get rapid feedback on the quality of their solution, but not so rapid that it makes sense to just program against the tests without thinking. One good side effect of the way we built our tests is that simply executing the tests for many tasks takes  10+ minutes (starting an application server, deploying code, ...). Students need to think before starting tests, just like they would if they would test against, e.g., a real staging server.
Students do not need to waste time writing test applications / test data. Before, one problem that made the student effort in these courses skyrocket was that students did not only have to program the assignments themselves, but also needed to write various demo programs / test data sets to test and showcase their solutions. This has become entirely obsolete with the automated test framework, significantly reducing the amount of boilerplate code that students need to write. In the end, we can now focus more on the actual content of the labs, and not on writing stupid test code.
All in all, our personal impression as well as student evaluations have shown that the majority of students appreciates the automated test system.

Problems:

The initial effort for us was certainly non-trivial. Coming up with the first version of the tests required a concerted effort of 6 or more TAs and 2 junior faculty over multiple months during the summer (not full-time of course, but still). Note that this was even though we utilize a widely used, standard testing framework - the effort was just in codifying our grading rules, finding and defining all corner cases, and writing everything down in useful tests. Further, as the assignments are complex distributed systems, so were the tests - we had to start application servers in-memory, hot-deploy and undeploy code, and make sure that all of this works out of the box on all major OS versions. All in all, writing the tests was an actual project, that required a lot of leadership and time commitment.
While, overall, our total time spent arguing about grading has decreased, it is not zero. Most importantly, as students can now see the grading guidelines clearly written down in source code, they seem to feel more compelled to question requirements and grading decisions than before. Hence, we now get a lot of But why should I do it like that? Doing it in X-Y-Other-Way would be much better! questions and complaints (incidentally, in practically all cases, the "much better" way is also much less work / much easier for the student).
While we were able to cover most of our original assignments, some things are impossible to cover in tests. In these cases, TAs still need to grade manually. In addition, in order to make our test framework technically work, students are now a bit more restricted in how they can solve the assignments than before.
Some students feel compelled to try to game our grading system. They spend significant efforts into finding solutions that do not actually solve the assignments but still get full points. In general, these efforts fail (as we actually have pretty sophisticated backend tests that do not only check whether the behavior is correct on interface level, but also look "under the hood"). Occasionally, they succeed, leading us to improve our tests.
Initially, we received some flack from a few students for a small number of bugs in our tests. The bugs were easy to fix and mostly not particularly severe, and most students understand that if you roll out a couple thousand lines of Java code for the first time, bugs will happen. However, some will take the opportunity to complain. A lot.
We had the impression that the number of copied solutions (plagiarism) was up the first time we rolled out the automated tests. Note that we had automated plagiarism checks long before, and nothing had changed in this regard, but apparently students assumed that cheating would go unnoticed with the automated testing.

Thank you for this in-depth answer! (I was certainly not planning anything on that scale, but then, I'm not a software engineer :) It was my feeling, too, that the success of such a project depends on the quality of the tests, but also that preparing such tests would improve the quality of the assignments themselves. Would you say that a significant portion of the benefit came from having a framework (including boilerplate code to make it easier for the students), even without automated testing?

Also, I found your remark about increased plagiarism interesting. I was not planning on including that in the framework, but it seems that it might be a good idea.

@ChristianClason I am not sure if I follow. In our case, the framework and the automated testing were basically the same thing. On a high level, what we did is that we provided the requirements for students not only in written text anymore, but also in form of formal executable unit tests. We did not have a special submission server or somesuch. Students still submitted via Moodle. After the deadline, TAs still ran the code against the tests and noted down the results.

Thanks, that exactly answered my question (and means I misunderstood initially).

TLDR
We used fully automated testing for programming assignments in a second-year course. We directly showed students their grade and allowed them to re-submit as often as they liked. Students loved it, and it freed up time for the TAs to hold far more office hours.
Long version
We developed our own in-house solution for a second-year Data Structures course. The exercises came with compiling skeleton code and interfaces for the test software to hook into. Students would submit to a web server running a Perl script, which would then compile the code alongside the testing framework, run a number of tests and display the grade. We did not provide the students with the tests, but did display the outcome of each test, usually in a way that made clear where the problem was, without revealing the exact test data. In addition, students were allowed to submit as many times as they liked. We explicitly encouraged them to submit early and often.
Advantages:

It allowed us to harshly punish code that doesn't work, or gives compile errors (we gave 0 marks for both).
Complete uniformity in grading. Fully automating the grading meant that solutions that implemented the same functionality would always get the same mark.
By being very clear about the requirements, and at the same time being fair by allowing them to re-submit, we significantly reduced complaints about grading.
We had one TA (myself) who was mainly responsible for developing tests, and one who maintained the submission server. This freed up the other TAs to hold many more office hours. We had TAs available 4 hours per day, every day of the week.
Students can correct (and learn from!) their mistakes before the grade is final. The good students in particular did not rest before they had a perfect grade.

Disadvantages:

Can promote plagiarism. We did not bother with any plagiarism checks, but this could become a significant problem, especially if assignments are reused from previous years.
Non-functional requirements are hard to test. While it is possible to test certain coding style requirements automatically, this is much harder than having a TA look it over. It is also much easier to game these automatic tests.
Can promote 'coding against the tests'. Some students did not bother to implement even the most basic correctness tests themself, instead relying purely on the server. For the next iteration of the course, we are considering basing part of the mark on whether student-written tests can succesfully detect our incorrect solutions. This will hopefully force them to think about testing their code as well.
Can shift focus from high-level understanding of the material to implementation details. Automated testing relies on the students being able to produce valid code. If the students are struggling with syntax, it can get in the way of higher-level objectives like the algorithms and data structures involved.

Conclusions:
Overall, both the students and the professor and TAs really appreciated this form of grading. The students received instant, unambiguous feedback about their work and the chance to learn from their mistakes while it still counted. At the same time, it allowed the majority of TAs to focus on helping the students understand the material, instead of tedious evaluation.
The Java testing framework is available on Bitbucket. Unfortunately, it lacks documentation.

Thanks; I especially liked the idea of "inverse problems" where the students write tests against provided implementations.

And I wish I could make good of my promise of bonus points for your open source framework.

Turns out I can :)

This is not exactly an answer to the question as posed but a few remarks I think you should consider before choosing an automatic mode of submission/grading.
I often give my students some assignments where programming is needed too (in the linear algebra course I taught I asked them to break Hill's cypher with the clue that certain words were somewhere in the medium length text and to create a drive (flight for extra points) simulation view in the classical perspective) though I assign such things for extra credit more often than as a part of regular homework.
My approach is that I restrict neither the choice of programming language, nor the operating system (I can program in 3 languages myself, but if you ask me to do it in some other one with substantially different syntax (like, say, Haskell), I will probably manage finally but I will just hate it). Also my solution to the "worked on my computer" problem is "bring your laptop and show me". If it, indeed, works, I have no objection.
I never ask anyone to do programming quickly (we all know that no program works as intended on the first run and that even if you know perfectly what you are doing, the debugging time exceeds the typing time) so I have no "do it in class" programming assignments. The way I make sure that the students get a quick feedback is just by assigning the tasks where, once you run your program, you see yourself whether it works or not. In some cases, like code breaking, it is apparent that if you get a meaningful text, then your approach and code make sense (I never ask for more than that because otherwise we should leave the students alone and start with shutting down all major software companies for their "sloppy code"). If it is crunching data, I supply a test sample, an answer to the test sample, and a real sample, so you, again can see everything once your code runs.
The thing I do when the assignment is submitted (full protocol, with most students whose abilities I know, I cut it down quite a lot) is to ask the student to run the code, to check the results, and to ask a few questions about the code itself afterwards. I always do an "oral examination" in this case because it is quicker and way more efficient in the sense that it allows me to correct minor stupid errors on the fly if the student knows what he's doing and just kill the students who do not with a couple of appropriately posed questions. The idea to try to read somebody else's code submitted in writing or to run and debug it myself has never even crossed my mind.
All submissions should be done during my office hours, not during the class time. I dislike the American way of assigning 20 problems of the same type each day and usually do 2-10 (depending on the course) each of which can be solved only if you combine several ideas in one program (of course, I explain which ones and how before the assignment). Such assignments are easy to check (either the code works, or it doesn't + either the student knows why that loop is there, or he doesn't) but not so easy to carry out. As to copying, as someone noted long time ago, "one's code is more individual than his fingerprints", and if you can copy a code changing its structure substantially, I just take it on faith that you can do it yourself as well if needed and don't really care.

good approach!.. but how many students do you have? not sure your approach works for 100 students class.

We used CourseMarker in combination with BlueJ for teaching first year students Java. There are three main criteria for marking: typographic correctness (layout, indentation, comments, etc.), semantic correctness (does the program run and do what it is supposed to do), and programming language features (whether specified programming constructs are present in the code). It is possible to supply a supporting code (a skeleton of the program, where students fill the gaps) or let the students start from scratch.
The CourseMarker administrator (in our case the module leader) can set up a marking scheme as a combination of the three main criteria and their sub-criteria. It is possible to configure CourseMarker to accept multiple submissions. Students can submit initial version of their program, receive immediate feedback, make necessary corrections and submit again. The feedback for the students can pinpoint the exact problem and its location, and provide suggestions for improvement. The feedback for the lecturers is statistical data about students’ performance.
We set optional training tasks for the student to self-study (no limit over the number of submissions) and a coursework, which was assessed (3 to 5 submissions for each part depending on its complexity).
There are also embedded methods for plagiarism detection, which compare student’s work for similarity. The comparison is not just semantic, it accounts for changes in the code that actually do not change the logic of the program. The suspect students’ work is reported to the lecturers.
The exam (also on CourseMarker) combined multiple choice questions, fill-in-the-blanks questions, and constructing flow charts and programming code. All the students answer the same set of questions but they are ordered in random manner for each student. The order of the answers for multiple choice questions and the layout of elements for constructing flow charts or programming code are randomised, too.
Benefits - instant feedback to the students, especially useful for unsupervised work (remember the students are beginners in programming). Actually most of the students installed the client package on their computers at home and correspond with the university server via Internet. From lecturers’ point of view, it saves vast amount of time - we didn’t have to check and mark students’ work.
The main drawback of CourseMarker is its rigidity. Normally a programmer can write a piece of code in various ways. CourseMarker can be set to understand and assess only a pre-determined pattern, which should be specified in the task description. Any deviations from the pattern would trigger reducing the marks. So I made a point to explain that there are certain limitations working in this particular programming environment but in other circumstances, there are other options to be considered.

CourseMarker seems to be dead-ish by now - or was it never public?

I've taught programming courses (Java, C and C++) with large numbers of students (>100) for the last decade or so.  We have come up with a system that works well for us, which doesn't currently automate the marking (although we can add that), but does reduce the time spent marking and reduces disagreements.  Basically it reformats the source code (using LaTeX) and presents the files in the order most convenient for marking, but it also compiles and runs the program, and add the compiler messages and output to the .pdf file that the student actually submits.  This gives the student a specific environment the program has to work on (no more "well it works on my computer/compiler" etc) and the student gets to see the program output on which they will be marked.  If you design the requirements well enough, checking the correctness of the output visually is usually straightforward.  If you are interested in using it, Mrs Marsupial (who implemented it) makes it available from GitHub.
The real problem with automated marking is that they are not (currently) very good at assessing how maintainable the code is (e.g. how well written it is), just assessing "technical quality" - does it work? - is it efficient?  We need to discourage students from fixating on "well it works"

They need to start from the outset looking to write good quality code that is readable by humans as well as the compiler, and so far all of the automated marking systems I have seen so far have not been very good at that.  I have been planning to add some technical quality checks to our PASS system, but at the moment I still need to mark and give feedback on code quality and that is the time consuming bit.

@downvoter, some feedback on the reasons for the downvote would be appreciated.


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Conferences and journals for network science?
I'd like to learn about the state of the art in network science and which problems researchers are actively working on. In particular, I'm interested in the applications, but the theory is also interesting.
I've found papers on scholar.google.com, and if I'm not mistaken most of the papers are published in application-specific conferences. For example, if network science is used to understand something related to cancer then the results are published in a medical journal. This is making it hard for me to get a consistent view and it's hard for me to get access to such a broad section of the literature (I'm not at a university so I keep hitting paywalls).
tl;dr: Where can I find conferences and journals that focus on network science?

http://netsci2013.net/ may be a good point to start.

@user34248 A note on your first link: "Please note that netsci2018.net is not sponsored or condoned by the Network Science Society." - http://www.netscisociety.net

I agree with Seteropere completely, "Network Science" is a very broad subject. I work with the theory of "dynamic networks" which involves a lot of graph theory, complex networks, and time series analysis, but also in protocol design for Delay Tolerant Networks which is another application you might like.
Take a look at this website, http://www.network-science.org/ it has plenty of links that I rate very highly. Including links to Alain Barrat's work (check out http://www.sociopatterns.org/ it has some wonderful illustrations of dynamic networks). There is also a conference devoted specifically to Temporal and Dynamic Networks http://tdn2013.wix.com/tdn2013#!contributions/cmc
Here are some of the tips I sent to a recent new student in our department, most are free in that there are no paywalls:

Look at the references on the most recent papers you are reading, and also look at the conferences and journals that the authors are involved in by visiting their personal websites. This will tell you where people are currently submitting to.
There are some websites devoted to finding conferences too, but don't rely on them. Some examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_science_conferences
http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/
Find a conference you like the look of, look at their calls for papers, and past proceedings to see what they are asking for.
Mailing lists! Sign up to (but don't spam) well known mailing lists. Again this will be dependent on the area you are interested in. In computer networking the biggest mailing list for calls for papers is probably the IEEE TCCC mailing list, http://committees.comsoc.org/tccc/mailing_list/.
Social networks. Sign up to Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin/etc. A lot of Phd Students, PostDocs, lecturers, research groups, and conferences are on Twitter. When you find someone or something you like, look for it on social networking sites, look who is following, what they are talking about, and get involved.

Good luck.

+1 for a concrete and useful answer, in particular linking http://www.network-science.org/.

I'm going to take this class and check the resources you mention: https://www.coursera.org/course/networksonline

I would say you are approaching it in the wrong way. Since network science (as Wikipedia defined it) is multidisciplinary concept, then I really doubt finding a consistent venue (conferences/ journals) for it.  This is specially true if you are interested in the application side.  If you are interested in the theory behind it, I see Graph Theory is the way to go.
I have worked in different applications of what so called network science including bioinformatics, social networks. I only knew graph theory (I had no clue what genes really are). So this largely depends on the application domain.
So simple steps to go:

Pick an area/interesting problem related to your expertise/background.
Read its literature.

If you saw a good paper related to your work, then keep an eye on the authors.

To echo both of the other answerers, "Network Science" is really, really broad as a field, which means that conferences, journal venues and the like can often be quite hard to find, as many people are interested in network science as it applies to their field.
One productive way forward is simply to ask people doing network science in your field where they present and publish, or do a bit of Google Scholar stalking.
For example, building off a colleague of mine's recent work:

Both Netsci '18 and the SIAM Network Science conference are likely good general conferences
But so is the Ecological Society of America for network science applications of biological systems, and Epidemics for...well...Epidemics.

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Is there any software to regularize British vs. American spelling in a text?
This is a minor but ongoing annoyance that takes up more time than I would like, and I am wondering if anybody knows of a solution.  I often write papers with foreign collaborators, and we tend to end up with a mixture of British and American spellings of words in our text.  We know it's a problem, and often agree on which to use ahead of time, but it's so ingrained one often doesn't even realize when you've made a mistake.  Thus, in the final proofing stage, somebody has to go through and manually regularize the spelling, which is really boring and time-consuming.
My question is this: does anybody know of software that can help automate this process?  It feels to me like it should exist, but I don't know of any...

What’s wrong with using a spellchecker?

This would be a great semester-long software assignment for undergrad computer science majors if nothing has been made yet! Edit: This would probably do lightweight work. A heavyweight application would use something like Java or .NET.

@Wrzlprmft spell check is okay at forcing American English, but forcing British English is a little problematic. For example, MS Word thinks, correctly so, that both localize and localise are correct in British English.

@StrongBad: Interesting, any spellchecker I have used in the last years (which does not include Word) corrects localize to localise (and similar) for British English.

I tend to edit mostly in Emacs, which generally happily accepts both spellings.

Emacs doesn't actually have its own spell checker AFAIK; rather it uses one of a variety of external spell checkers.  Two that I know of are ispell and aspell.  Each of those should have both British and American dictionaries, and you may be able check which one (or both) is actually being used.  But I think that may become off topic for this site.

https://github.com/compassghost/EnglishBridge/ is the initial run I had. It is bare-bones. Takes a dictionary in a CSV, digests it, and then goes through a .docx and replaces anything it finds with the opposite. I have to read some more documentation, but I've made it open source so people can play with it if they want. Don't expect anything pretty in the source yet.

@Wrzlprmft my point was that localize with a z is a valid spelling in British English.

I wonder if this would be a better fit at software recs.se?

@StrongBad I've no objection to migration since it certainly hasn't gotten any good answer here...

@jakebeal I edited your question for two reasons: 1) to edit its title and the tags; 2) to bring it in the front page as it has no posted answer for a long time. I hope this may help you find your answer.

"We know it's a problem" -- Is it? As they say, "the official language of science is broken English", so this seems a very minor issue to me, compared to what I read in many other papers. (Disclaimer: I am fluent in broken English myself, so I might miss many language subtleties.)

Can't migrate this anymore. More than 60 days have passed.

@FedericoPoloni I think that it is a problem, because I feel that native English speakers like myself are typically held (quite reasonably) to a significantly higher standard.

I voted to close as it seems off topic to academia -- really any collaborative environment has this issue.

Yes. There is an add-in for Microsoft Word called myWriterTools that will convert US to UK English and vice-versa. It also highlights changes so you can double-check. It isn't free however.
Alternatively you could use CTRL + A to select all your text in the existing document and set the proofing language to your desired version of English. This will then show the majority of errors as incorrect spelling (be wary of words such as license and licence though which may be used in different contexts) in Word.
Compass in a comment has mentioned an online converter US2UK that may be useful for shorter documents.
I have searched for a LaTeX equivalent but it would appear one does not exist currently.

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How can I fix previous name misspelling in publications and how should I avoid them in future?
I worked in a research laboratory last summer and some of my work was used in a paper that was published this year at a conference. This is my first paper and I am listed as a co-author, however, my last name was spelled wrong.
I have a capital “i” in the middle of my last name that was mistaken for a lowercase “L”.
Firstly, what steps should I take to correct this? Is it best to contact my supervisor from the lab and ask them to correct it or should I attempt to do so myself?
Secondly, in the future should I change my last name spelling to use a lowercase "i" in the middle to avoid this occurring again? I am an undergraduate student, but I am interested in pursuing a career in research.

Related (possible duplicate?): Name misspelled in first publication

"to avoid this occurring again?" You are of course supposed to read all papers that you coauthor! Just make sure that your own name is spelled correctly. Both in the version that you submit for publication, and in the page proofs that you receive from the publisher.

For fixing, I think the advice in the linked question is the way to go: contact the publisher and ask them to correct it.  This is what errata are for, and it's perfectly normal.
I think the harder question is what to do about the future.

On the one hand, the non-distinguishability of I and l are just going to keep causing problems (as can be seen from this very sentence!) and you rarely have control of fonts.
On the other hand, it's your personal identity at stake.  Do you really want to change your name for the sake of typography?

This is a problem that I see faced by a large number of researchers who don't have names that perfectly transliterate into English.  One of my French colleagues, for example, is very insistent on getting the accents correct on his name, while others just ignore it and let things fall to the lowest (anglicized) denominator.
You're going to need to make a decision based on your personal relationship with your identity.  If it's important to you, stick to your proper name and just know that you're going to need to be proactive in checking and correcting in every paper you deal with.  Fortunately, there's usually a proof stage for just this type of issue.  If you'd rather not bother, then by all means embrace the simple lower-case solution.
One way or another, though, you should settle on a decision by somewhere in the middle of graduate school.  Don't worry too much about some confusion in the early papers: if you make a career of research, the early papers will fade behind your later work; if you don't, it won't matter.

Don't worry too much about some confusion in the early papers: if you make a career of research, the early papers will fade behind your later work. that's not necessarily true at all. My first two papers are still among my most cited. What you do on your first papers does matter.

But corrections and errata are always still an option.  My main point is that it's a decision that needs to be thought about seriously, but that it's not the end of the world if you change your mind before you establish a long record.

@jakebeal thank you, this advice is exactly what I was looking for. I will definitely be more attentive to future proof readings, and I will also be taking some time to reflect on how I wish my name to be presented.


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How to deal with cheating when university policy is ineffective?
I am co-teaching a relatively large class with two other colleagues in a big university. Each semester, most students are amazing, trustworthy, and well-behaved and it is a pleasure to work with my students. But there is a very small group of students each semester who cheat and I don't know how to deal with them.
The university has a detailed, strict, and elaborate policy for dealing with cheating. We send students suspected of cheating to a special committee where they decide if the student actually did anything wrong. The committee demands a copious amount of evidence before it convicts any student, yet at the same time, the university policy is so restrictive that we cannot collect evidence. For example, we are not allowed to do anything that indicates or suggest a student may have cheated. We are not allowed to mark their papers, move them during exams, or even talk to them. This means that most students get away with cheating if they are sent to the committee. Students who have copied identical answers from a neighbor over and over in quizzes got away with it in the committee. This process is so pointless that the course coordinator does not report most of the cases to the committee anymore.
I don't mind that a few students get away with cheating but the universities' restrictive policy shuts all the doors to any further discussion with the students. I am not looking for ways to punish my students. I want them to understand why cheating is unfair to other students and, hence, unacceptable. I want them to understand integrity and honesty are far more valuable traits than getting good grades in college.
Any suggestion on how I can communicate these ideas and their importance to my students?

Edit:
I am sorry for not being clear. My question is not about how to prevent cheating.  It is bout how to have a conversation with cheaters.
We do what we can to prevent cheating. We randomly seat students, make two copies of the exams, assign a good portion the final grade to labs, and use various other techniques. This question is about reaching to the cheaters and having a discussion with them.

I think the obvious answer is to change the university policy. Any luck with that? Are the restrictions for legal reasons?

Changing university policies is difficult if not impossible and all the restrictions are for legal reasons. We absolutely don't wont to accuse anybody of anything unless there is reason beyond doubt they did something wrong. Even when there is indisputable evidence, we don't want to insult their dignity by singling out them in the class. We want to keep it confidential between the teacher and the student.

Am I right to think you just want to be MORE persuasive, and you don't think you are going to convince all students of this moral stance? Some people will still cheat if for no other reason than self-delusion and rationalization (it isn't a big deal, no one is really hurt by me getting a little higher grade, etc). Then there's the reality that people will do things they know are wrong that they know will hurt others because they believe it helps themselves. There may be ways to be more persuasive, but it's never 100%.

@BrianDHall: I totally agree that it is never 100%. But there are students who genuinely think cheating is not very different from helping a friend. Or they think cheating is just being smart. Again, this is big school with a diverse student population from different backgrounds.

@AlwaysAsking That's sensible, and indeed there are some cultures where what we define as cheating is not even considered a bad thing, as well as cultures where refusing to help a friend is a far graver offense, etc.

You say "For example, we are not allowed to do anything that indicates or suggest a student may have cheated. We are not allowed to mark their papers, move them during exams, or even talk to them." You then ask "It is bout how to have a conversation with cheaters." It seems like your university has a very clear answer to your question: you're just not supposed to be doing that, no matter how much that sucks.

What subject are you teaching? In some subjects there is content that can directly explain it - humanities, literature, psychology, social science, cognitive science, ethics, theology, history. You could get creative with math story problems... ;-)

Since you speak of "a small group who cheat," it sounds like most of the students do understand the policies and importance of honesty.  That remaining small group who cheats?  Nothing that you do or say is going to convince them not to cheat.
Likewise, university policies often make it hard to actually punish cheaters, because they begin with the presumption of innocence, which is generally a good idea.
A better way to approach the problem is to adopt a "layered defense" strategy of a number of small actions that reduce the cost/benefit ratio available from cheating.  Some of the sorts of strategies that I have seen include:

Increasing the separation between desks
Randomized assigned seating, which is likely to break up cheating conspiracies
Printing less questions per page, with lots of white-space for working the problems, so that an answer will not be visible for as long a period of time
Problems that are based on "showing your work" rather than obtaining the right answer.
Problems with many possible solutions, that convert copying into plagiarism.
Putting more credit into projects and labs, rather than exams.

None of these alone will solve the problem, but the more of them you can enact, the harder it is for cheaters to prosper.  Some of them may even help the non-cheating students, by forcing them to engage more deeply with the material.  The balance, of course, is that it all takes time and effort from the instructors and TAs, so you need to make your own cost/benefit analysis as well.

All your suggestions are good but they don't tackle the real problem. The real problem is that they don't understand why cheating is unfair. If they did, they would cheat much less. Being defensive or punishing them harshly doesn't make honesty an inner value for them. Once obstacles or punitive consequences removed, they would cheat again.

@AlwaysAsking I think jakebeal is arguing that you won't be able to convince them not to cheat ("Nothing that you do or say is going to convince them not to cheat."), so your only option is to mitigate the effects of their cheating. Some people insist on cheating even if they understand why cheating is unfair

The real problem is that they don't understand why cheating is unfair. If they did, they would cheat much less. Cheaters bend rules, which are meant to protect the interest of the crowd in a fair manner to begin with; how would the enlightenment on fairness change them? And, what is "fair?" Many people can compensate in their minds to justify their action. "I come from a broken family and I need to get away from this bad neighborhood, I need to get good grades!" "My mom has cancer and I spent most of my week taking her to therapies, I didn't have time to study!" etc. What would you do/say?

@AlwaysAsking Regarding the statement "The real problem is that they don't understand why cheating is unfair" -
As Penguin_Knight seems to be hinting at, the problem often isn't that students who cheat don't understand why it is unfair (or at least not any better or worse than other student), but rather because they place less importance on that fairness than the possibility of getting good grades - a possibility that in their mind increases with every 'successful' instance of cheating.

About labs - my experience with some undergraduate labs (in Physics) at one very academically rigorous and respected university was that they were extremely dishonest. There was a clear expectation by the majority of lab proctors and students I met, that people would fudge most unexpected/inaccurate results, go through the motions, and write lab reports as if we had had enough time and the equipment had worked flawlessly, even though both were usually impossibly inadequate. "Honestly" doing the labs was usually impracticable and would pretty much be punished by proctors and lab partners.

Putting more credit on assignments or anything take home for that matter is like putting out a fire with gasoline .If you suspect a student of cheating and have some grounds then you could give him a random 1to 1 oral exam and sort it out in 30 minutes .If he cant give plausible answers to the oral questions then he is a cheat.I*f you make the oral not too hard you could randomise them into your course.

Don't present it as a plagiarism/honesty problem so much as an originality/understanding problem. Problems need victims. The victim of my plagiarism problem might be a willing or eager one. Or maybe I paid him. Or maybe I don't care. The victim of my originality problem is myself, and my future, and my career.
Have them peer-review each other. Most students care about a professor's opinion, but they're stuck with each other for the rest of their lives, particularly if they're all going into the same profession to get published by the same journals or build the same industries. They can convince each other that tests are silly, temporary metrics and that cheating is no harm, no foul . . . but concepts of character and dignity will hit much closer to home for students who have to produce comments about each other's originality.
Have them produce questions about each other's codes, proofs, theorems, or whatever the subject matter is. If it's a technical class in which many answers are likely to look identical whether they are produced honestly or not, commenting on each other's work might be redundant. But producing questions requires creativity in every field, and answering those questions for each other requires basic conceptual understanding.

+1 I actually really like this answer because it doesn't presume that cheaters are just failed students you're unable to reason with.  Though that may turn out to be the case, it seems more productive to at least try and change them.  Introducing teamwork really accelerates the whole "the world needs people who can actually do their work, we can't have doctors who cheated" thing.

Serious question: why is cheating unfair to the other students? Do you bell your grades? If a handful of students get 90 who should have got 70, will all the rest of the students see their marks drop 1 or 2% to compensate? If you don't officially bell, do you do so mentally (class average on that midterm was 82; I had better make the second one a little harder) ?
If not, then how is it unfair to the other students that some cheat? It is unfair to themselves since they will have the mark but not the knowledge to go with it. They will probably blow a job interview or two. They may struggle in next year's courses that assume they know this year's material. They are hurting themselves compared to genuinely learning the material. They cheat for one of two reasons:

they don't care if they learn the material or not; it is of no value to them and they only want the mark
they are unable to learn the material in the time they can allot to doing so

If you want to change their behaviour, you'll need to change one of these two things. Either show them how what they are learning will be of value to them, or find a way to help them learn it better.
Examples of the first:

Today we will learn to normalize a database. This is a common technique when [whatever] and CSC 203, DSC 307 and most grad courses here all assume you're thoroughly capable at this technique
The next few lectures cover this history and motivations of the X technique. I've heard that students who know this material well do very well in job interviews for Y positions, because the interviewers are always asking about this topic
By the end of this term you will know how to ABC. This is the most common task assigned to new hires who've just graduated from our DEF program, which is why this course is required for all of you. While I hope you all get high marks in this course, what's really important is that you master the technique: there's about an 80% chance that you'll spend your first working year doing this, for an employer who won't help you if you find it difficult. The TAs and I are here to make sure you're comfortable with it by the time you leave us

Sure, this is work. As an adjunct myself, I don't always know what things I teach actually matter in what other courses the university offers - I don't have the curriculum memorized. I do have a little more insight into the job picture than some other profs. Still, you can figure this stuff out - ask the TA if you have one, for example.
Now the second part. Some cheaters are privileged self entitled brats who can't be bothered to put in the work. (My father taught someone who brought a servant to labs to do the actual physical work of the lab and couldn't understand why anyone would object.) Ignore them: whoever should have reached them at age 4 did not, and you probably won't now. But some are scared: if their average drops they'll lose their scholarship. They're finding it hard to keep up because they have a job as well as studying. Their parent or significant other is ill. They are hanging on to their position rather precariously and they do rash and wrong things because they think they have no choice. You can gain some insight into that mindset in another question: I was caught cheating on an exam, how can I minimize the damage? especially some of the earlier revisions where the OP explains why they decided to cheat.
So if you think someone has cheated and you don't want to use the official system, simply hand them a note that says "See Me" and a time and place such as "30 minutes before class, in our classroom" or "5pm today, in my office." When you have them alone say something like this:

I think you were really struggling in that exam. I have learned to spot facial expressions over the years and you did not have the material for this course cold, nowhere near. You may manage to pull off a decent mark, whether by guessing or some other approach, but I don't think you know everything you need to know. Don't think I'm calling you in to get you in trouble. I want to help you. What do you need to learn this material thoroughly? Would you like a one on one session to go over the test questions and be sure you understand how to solve them? I have some resources that provide the same material we cover in class but from a different perspective, would you like those? (Perhaps some prefer videos, some diagrams, some hands on practices etc.) Have you talked to the student resource centre about test anxiety, test taking techniques, studying techniques etc? Did you know that if you have demonstrable issues with, for example, multiple choice questions I can work with the student resource centre to construct an exam that's a more accurate measure of what you personally know?

The entitled ones probably won't even come to the meeting, but if they do, they will decline all your offers and get out of there as fast as they can. The desperate ones? You just might reach them.

I am glad that you mentioned "I was caught cheating on an exam, how can I minimize the damage?"(http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/30539/i-was-caught-cheating-on-an-exam-how-can-i-minimize-the-damage). This is good advice on how to deal with the cheater who receives help. Do you have any advice on who to deal with the students who gives help to the cheater?

Well, if less people want to cheat, less people will be asked to help... I suppose analogies about getting a cigarette for a friend who's trying to quit might be applicable, but I would focus on lowering demand rather than supply.

"...why is cheating unfair to the other students?" It cheapens their degrees. Employers will soon figure out that not all graduates of Acme U. can do what their degrees say they can do, and will look at all graduates of Acme U.with suspicion

I want them to understand why cheating is unfair to other students and, hence, unacceptable.

If I wanted to reason with a handful of cheating students, I wouldn't start by trying to convince them that cheating is unfair to others. I'd try to convince them that cheating is unfair to themselves.
Too many students have gotten into a mindset that they attend college primarily to obtain a degree. Instead, they should be there to attain an education. (There's a difference – and this difference often affects student attitudes and behavior.)
Students who aim to get a degree without caring about their education don't worry about how much they learn – they only care about what goes on their transcript. These students have no problem missing class, so long as they feel like they can get their hands on any "testable" material after the lecture. If they miss class for some reason, they will often ask, "Did I miss anything important?" (Translated, this means, "Did I miss anything I will need to know for the exam?" Sadly, it never seems to mean, "Did I miss anything that might come in handy for my first job?")
These students also have less qualms about cheating on an exam. It's all about getting a good grade on the test, which leads to getting a good grade on the transcript, which will lead to a good job down the road.
You might try reminding these slackers that they'll eventually be competing with students who did the work right and learned the hard way – and that some employers like to ask some tough questions during hiring interviews. Students who took their education seriously will probably have better success during those job interviews.
And even if they are lucky enough to bamboozle the HR interviewer and get a job offer somewhere, these students aren't necessarily out of the woods yet. Challenge them to gaze into the crystal ball, and imagine what will happen after that: when the company who hired them gets disappointed with their new employee, and more senior coworkers start to marvel at how that kid who had all those As and Bs on his transcript doesn't seem to know jack about anything, and can't write a decent memo to save his life.

I like this answer since it begins to address the fundamental issue, which I would argue is that students who cheat do so because the incentives are perceived to be greater for getting a high score than for achieving high understanding. I think a way to emphasize this is to increase the validity of the exam, e.g. make exam questions more obviously related to the kinds of things required in real life (even if we consider academia real life ;)

@Tim - I often do that on my exam's essay questions. I could ask, "Which is better, A or B?" or, "Compare and contrast X & Y." Instead, I'll couch those same questions in a word problem. "You're at your new job, and hear two people debating the merits and disadvantages of A & B. One of them notices you listening, and asks, ‘What do you think? What's your opinion on this?’" Or, "Your new boss calls you into his office and invites you to sit down. He says, ‘Don't tell anyone out there, but I've always been a little confused about the differences between X & Y. Can you explain that to me?’"

Your question was how to "communicate these ideas and their importance" to your students.
Sadly, you cannot.  These students will cheat as long as it works for them, as you have already observed.
You can cut down on cheating by using jakebeal's suggestions in his answer.
I teach in the field of computing.  The idea (of Jake's) that works best is supervised practical labs.  Give the students homework, but make them come to the lab and produce a program.  If they've cheated on the homework, they won't be able to do it.  When they fail the lab, which should be a significant part of the grade, perhaps they will learn why they should not cheat.  (My experience is that even that doesn't work.  It does help cheaters pave their path to the exit.)

You could have the students' assignment be to write a simulation where simulated cheating students eventually meet a variety of simulated ill fates. ;-)

@BobBrown While I appreciate the context in which your answer was offered, I have a quibble with your description of "paving a path to the exit" for anyone. As teachers, I feel we should be much more concerned with creating bridges to the entrance to our fields. These paths to the exit, even if they are well intentioned, can very easily turn into gating mechanisms that perpetuate the lack of diversity in technical fields.

@Tim: We'll have to agree to disagree with respect to serial cheaters.  While I certainly want to recruit the best and brightest to my institution, I do not believe anyone should be allowed to cheat their way to a university degree.  I don't believe diversity has anything to do with the subject.  Serial cheaters are serial cheaters.

@Tim: I've been reflecting on your comment.  While I believe professors should never tolerate cheating, it occurs to me that cheaters are paving their own paths to the exit, and I've revised my answer accordingly.

@BobBrown I appreciate your responses, and moreso your willingness to consider your perspective. I also completely understand the need you describe to have and enforce ethical standards, so I should also qualify my statements.

If you print the tests with the questions distributed randomly, so that question #7 on one test is question number 17 on another, and the correct answer to each question is also randomized, that seems to me a good solution to students looking at one another's answers.

It sounds to me that part of the problem is your university's policies, such as on collecting evidence and departments not reporting incidents. You may be able to collect evidence in a more roundabout manner (Can you make copies which you then mark up for evidence? Can you require that all graded materials be returned to you?). If you're still finding no way to effectively dissuade cheating and are getting no support form the university, you may need to consider looking for a different place to teach that actually cares.
One component of preventing cheating is making exams or projects where cheating is going to be very difficult. Having exams where students have to apply knowledge instead of just reciting memorized facts generally cuts down on students even being able to cheat (possibly with a fact sheet provided). Or, do like one of my art teachers did and actually assign a short portion of the exam period for collaboration. It'll honestly be a bit more like the "real world" if the end goal is application of facts instead of memorization.
As far as communicating good values to these students, I've had very little success at doing so myself. One statistic I've seen is that about 75% of undergraduates (and 25% of grad students) in one study self-reported cheating in college courses. For many students, the ends justify the means (consider tuition costs!). Ethics definitely would have to be presented to the class so they actually affect students' internal cost-benefit analysis. What will you be looking for that could get flagged as cheating? How would a future boss respond to fudged numbers or trying to submit someone else's work? How can applying yourself actually make tuition be worth it (or at least be less of a grievance)? How is this field applicable in the real world outside of the classroom?

If you are worried about whether students copy each other answers on exam just split them into groups, with each group having different (but similary difficult) questions, then arrange seating in such way that neighbours will be in different groups. This will make cheating much harder.
This arrangement is quite popular in Poland.

Or just put students taking different exams of the same length in the same room.   e.g. mix up 1st, 2nd and 3rd year students in the exam room.

There is no "just" to this at all. Exam schedules are super hard to do. Adding this complication would make it even harder.

Well it's not hard to set up at all. On my university on larger courses it is done habitually. Just give alternate materials to every other row.

I think, the real problem here is not the cheaters but the helpers.
You stress out that the cheaters do not understand that cheating is not fair.
Well, it does not have to be!
Because life itself is not fair and this is exactly the point of view of a cheater.
A student who lost his dad 4 days ago, a student who is sick and a student who is fully-fit taking the same quiz is not fair.
What I mean is, cheater could have his/her own reasons for cheating.
Hence, the problem becomes telling the helper that cheating is unfair.
But which part of cheating is unfair? Now let's say cheater C, helper H and a non-cheater N is taking the quiz.
It is unfair because a N either studied hard and took the same grade with C or did not study and got nothing even though C got a high grade. Well, in this case, H does not care what happens because he/she is helping a friend.
What I would do (actually did several times) is:

Ask questions that can be answered in so many ways and distribute the full points of each question equally between the same answers. e.g. if question is worth 10 points and 5 students have the same answer, each get 2. This also encourage students to improve their creativity. That will prevent helper to continue helping and cheater to take minimum benefit.
Give extra points to cheaters! When the results are announced, the helper will surely want to check his/her paper. But will not be able to find anything wrong and cannot ask to check the cheater's paper as well. Now, the hepler either will admit that he/she helped or will say no to further help requests.

In the long run, however, I decided not to care so much because university does not care as much as I do.

I love the suggestion of dividing points among similar answers. I think even encouraging students to work together to produce unique answers (i.e. "You can compare answers among yourselves") could be a really cool activity.

In my own teaching, I do not distinguish between "cheaters" and "helpers" in the way that you seem to suggest.  The helper and the helped are both cheaters.
That said, the helpers are likely to be better students (since they can help), and thus are likely to have further ambitions (graduate study, well-paying jobs) for which they can use your goodwill later.  My own attitude (and that of some like-minded colleagues) is that formal grades are always given as a matter of course when someone completes the work defined for a certain course, but my further mentoring, letters of recommendation for graduate school, support for local awards, etc., are optional at my sole discretion, and must be separately earned by demonstrated scholastic ability as well as appropriate conduct.
I thus do nothing with regard to grading when I know that a student has cheated (either as the helper or the helped) but have no proof, but that student will not later get a letter of recommendation, or a friendly tip about an exciting job opportunity at a great company, etc., from me.  My colleagues and I who serve on local committees for awards during graduation, etc., also vote down any student whose ethics are suspect.  This is not published policy as such, but good students know that this is how things work, and it keeps them in check.

I simply disagree with those who believe that there is nothing you can do and these students will continue cheating.
There can be many reasons behind this behavior:

some may fail to understand the importance of the course/topic
some may be desperate to get high marks because they are not in a good academic standing
some may have other issues, including family issues, etc.
some may be taking too many courses that they cannot allocate enough time for each
some may simply find it culturally acceptable.

I guess your best bet is to first identify the reason behind this behavior. Communicate with your students in a constructive way. Put yourself in their shoes and see what is the actual source. Only then you'll be able to effectively address these issues.
Clearly, finding the reasons is time consuming and requires a lot of effort from your side. But based on your question, I am assuming that you care about your students and are willing to take the necessary steps.
There are various ways to deal with each of the above situations. I'll be more than happy to briefly go over some of them if you are interested.

Thank you for the answer. I'd like to know how to deal with each of these situations, please.


text:
Is the personification of concepts or terms accepted in academic writing?

The subject of velocity therefore also concerns itself with the capacity to process real-time data...

Would the above sentence be appropriate in an academic paper, specifically the use of the word concerns?
This is a habit I consistently notice in my writing when explaining concepts or subjects: I write as if the concept or subject is a person and then attribute words that are usually used in conjunction with human capacities, i.e., I personify.
I am not a native English speaker so my instinct may be wrong, however, I cannot remember that we were ever taught it is wrong to write in this way.

To me the sentence could be made much more concise and to the point, which would also remove any personification. I also have no idea what the sentence is supposed to mean as it stands, but may be lacking specific background.

Many would replace this with something like "subject...is concerned with". Passive voice. Some people don't like passive voice, though.

@Buffy - in various fields the passive voice is explicitly preferred in style manuals. The APS (American Physical Society) Style Manual is one. My high school English teachers never liked it, and my English professor mother would just sigh and shake her head at their comments.

@Buffy: Many would replace this with something like "subject...is concerned with". Passive voice. – You could replace concerned with an adjective that is not based on a participle (e.g., angry) and the sentence would still work. You can also not add a by clause here. That’s not passive voice. — Some people don't like passive voice, though. – Yes, but this is mostly based on a style guide written by descriptivists who could not distinguish passive from active voice (Strunk and White). Like any absolutes, this is overdoing it. The passive voice has its uses, though they are rare.

@JonCuster: The APS (American Physical Society) Style Manual is one. – No, it is not.

@Wrzlprmft - perhaps in the current lousy online version, but the old printed style manual most certainly did. When I’m next in my office I can provide the quote.

@JonCuster: Okay, but please do so in [chat]. We have digressed enough. (Also, please provide the year of print.)

@Wrzlprmft - You are correct, it is instead the AIP Style Manual, Fourth Edition (1990). In III.A.9(2) "The passive is often the most natural way to give prominence to the essential facts ... But avoid the passive if it makes the syntax inelegant or obscure."

I cannot comment on your specific example, because I do not know what it is supposed to communicate.
As with almost any writing device, I think personification is acceptable if:

it conveys some idea better or more concisely than alternatives,
the target audience can be expected to understand it,
there is no loss of precision when it is needed.

Now, the audience of academic writing consists to a considerable extent of non-native speakers, and precision is often paramount. Therefore, the above conditions constrain the use of personifications much stronger than for other types of writing.
Still, there are many cases where a personification is appropriate, for example when you already rigorously defined some concept and now want to explain it by other means. Many such personifications have found their way into scientific terminology or everyday language to the extent that we probably would not even perceive them as personifications anymore. For example, consider the usage of inherit in biology, computer science, and many other contexts.
Also, I have used five personifications in this answer so far (mostly unintentionally): Your example communicates, personification conveys,  the audience understands, conditions constrain, and personifications found their way. Did you notice?
Example 1
This is from my own academic writing and slightly shortened to reduce context dependence:

These incompatible results show that the model suffers from an inconsistency.

This is a personification:
A scientific model cannot suffer.
If I had been forbidden to use personifications, I would have written something like this instead:

These incompatible results show that the model is inconsistent, which is a considerable problem.

Since I consider this rather clunky, I do not expect anybody to misunderstand my use of suffer, and this is not a matter of definition, I opted for the personification here.
(Now, to some of you “which is a considerable problem” may redundant here, but the paper’s target audience it is not, as evidenced by some of the feedback.)
Example 2
Again from my own writing and slightly modified:

SymEngine is aspiring to replace the pure Python core of the better-known SymPy.

SymEngine is a software package; it cannot aspire.
Without personification I would have written something like:

SymEngine is developed with the goal that it replaces the pure Python core of the better-known SymPy.

I consider it as likely that somebody stumbles over this more complex sentence structure as over my use of aspire.
For everybody else, the alternative does not add anything.
Again this is a high-level description where precision is not of the essence.

I consider the anthropomorphization of the topic of your research to be unscientific, and I discourage it.
Poor:

Reality doesn't care if you believe it.

Better:

Reality is unaffected by your beliefs.

If it is not science or not the topic of your research, then I might have no opinion.

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


text:
How to make a full article out of one straightforward, but interesting point?
I have an interesting idea, and did a fair bit of writing and research, with some good examples to display the idea. However, I still feel like the whole paper is too monolithic, like an extended display of one point.
How can I transform the project into something with full article potential?  I’m not sure if this would require changing some aspect of the original idea to add more potential to it, or if there are some writing strategies that can be used to surround the original idea with more substance.

well that is point of the paper!!! to be monolithic and straight forward

If you have made an interesting point and placed it in context,  you're done! There's no need to pad out the paper. Articles are allowed to be short and sweet. You may want to send it to a journal that specialises in shorter papers, or that has a section for "brief communications" or the like. Note that these are not necessarily any less prestigious than longer formats.

Note that these are not necessarily any less prestigious than longer formats. – not to mention that the highest-ranking journals have strong space restrictions.


text:
When did English come to lead in published research?
As any modern student knows, nearly all published research these days is in English. That's just the way of the world. But it didn't used to be that way. Many of the most pivotal pieces of scientific literature in the world, like the writings of Riemann, Cantor, Einstein, Galois, Schrödinger, (Gregor) Mandel, Linnaeus and many, many others were written in German, French or Latin. These days, publishing in a language other than English hurts your credibility, and is largely discouraged.
When did English become necessary for publishing scientific literature?

Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/56007/20058

As DSVA says, the answer is WW II.

I think the question need to be more specific (field + geographic region), as there was no definitive change.  For instance, publishing in math in French is still respectable and reasonably common.  (Though French mathematicians need to be able to read papers in English, even if they do not write much in English.)

English became the dominant international language of science across the first half of the 20th Century.
To summarize an excellent BBC article on the subject:

At the beginning of the 20th Century, there were three main language of science, French, English, and German, essentially corresponding to the biggest economic and political powers of the time (England, France, Germany, and the USA).
After World War I, Germany and the German language were essentially ostracized by the victorious nations, including an (unconstitutional) ban on the language in the United States. Europe was also generally weakened as a power.
The continued devastation of World War II and the rise of the US as a technological superpower cemented the collapse of German. French took longer to decline, but network effects and relative power had their impact eventually.

Thus, by the middle of the 20th century, English had become, in general, the dominant language of science. It was by no means absolute (and still is not), but its dominance has further strengthened over time. How long this will last and what will replace it are for anyone to guess.

The world will generally publish in the language that is most economically profitable because said countries will usually provide the most support and have the ability to actually turn research into something practical. This is the way it has always been. The USA was not always an economic powerhouse but right now they are. There was a time when things were written in Arabic, Greek, and Aramaic as well for the same reason.

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


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Will uploading a copy of my paper to Academia.edu harm the journal it’s published in?
A paper that I have just had published in a journal is already starting to generate interest. I am allowed to upload a copy to Academia.edu as long as it is not the copy-edited version (peer review came up with very few changes). On the one hand I want people to read it – and this will also promote my own interests as an academic –, but I also don’t want to take potential sales away from the journal, which I like, and whose staff have been very good to me.
Will uploading it harm the journal or could it generate more interest? I have linked to the journal in the paper page on Academia.edu.

Peer review isn't paid. Hosting a website is as cheap as 5 bucks a month. What do you think could bring that journal in financial trouble? The thousands of dollars universities pay in a flat fee to get everyone inside their intranet access to the journal? Paywalls are a relic of the 20th century, where editors actually had to do something for their money, e.g. print work ...

Just to name an alternative in case the journal's wellbeing is really a major concern for you: You can often pay them extra to make your paper openly accessible on their website. My institute does this wherever possible, even where we also publish an arXiv version. I think you could argue that this paying for an unnecessary service. But it is quite convenient for the potential readers.

The purpose of a journal is to disseminate scientific work. Putting your work on Academia.edu or elsewhere serves this purpose too. If serving this purpose means that the journal goes out of business, then that's too bad for the journal. More generally, any ethical organization that serves goal X should be fine with disbanding whenever goal X is better served without the organization.  If they are not, I don't think you need to feel sorry for them.

Slight tangent: academia.edu is hardly the gold standard in making your preprint accessible; it's a social network with its fair share of dark patterns. Use arXiv in any subject where it exists; HAL where it doesn't; your own site (github pages if you don't have one) if you want to make frequent changes.

@image Good luck getting hosting on the scale required for a publishing company for $5 per month.

You know, you are asking here just people on one side of the question.  Maybe if there were a forum for publishers, you could ask the same question and get the other side of the answer.

Why do you even believe that journals should profit from your work that maybe was also paid for by taxpayers?

@darijgrinberg I would be interested to know more about those dark patterns if you would care to elaborate.

@C26: Whoring for registration on download is a big red flag to me (there appears to be a way to circumvent it, but clearly there was an intent to bait users into feeding loads of data into the database). It also appears to play the IMDB game of auto-generating your profile for you by guessing your info, then hoping that you feel pressed to correct the record. ...

... That said, I admit that it doesn't rise to dark pattern standards, and I was thinking of researchgate. My apologies!

Making the paper accessible to everyone who can't look behind the paywall might hurt the journal's publishing company a little bit by diverting some demand. However, it won't really hurt the people you have been dealing with. Moreover, the journal has given you explicit permission to publish a pre-print, so you're not going against their stated request.
At the same time, you are providing a service to

yourself, by increasing the reach of your paper and the citations that it will receive
the journal, to the extent that the preprint will attract interest to the journal and to the extent that people will cite the journal version rather than the preprint
the public who would otherwise not be able to look at the research. This applies in particular to readers outside of academic institutions and to scientists from poor countries.

Please upload your preprint to a freely accessible repository.

This is a very good answer, thank you. I have a question - should the page numbers of the pre-print match those of the journal for citation purposes? This will be a little tricky to do.

@C26 It could make it easier to cite the pages as they appear in the journal without having to obtain the journal version, but it's not "technically" required of a preprint. In fact, preprints can differ quite considerably, even in substance, from their journal version.

I will accept this answer and upload my paper. Thank you [though of course I'm always interested to see others' inputs] too. I think it would be fair to upload it since, in addition to the first two points you raise, it does deal specifically with events in poorer countries.

You might also be interested in this question and answer: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21238/how-should-i-prepare-e-prints-pre-prints-and-post-prints-of-already-published?rq=1

Making the paper accessible to everyone who can't look behind the paywall might hurt the journal's publishing company a little bit by diverting some demand. Do you really think that's true? I've never seen an article I wanted enough to even consider paying the a la carte price set by a journal (since it's free to request from a library), and I don't see a single article having much influence on an institution's decision to subscribe.

@pjs36 I don't know. It's a good question who actually buys single articles, but it seems publishers believe there's a chance that someone will.

@henning Evidently, we're not alone in wondering! That'll teach me to use Google, before searching here...

I don't recall academia.edu being actually a free pre-print service... In the sense that you need to join in order to see what people upload. This is different from posting on your homepage, or arXiv, or something like that.

Adding a personal experience to @henning's excellent answer.
Many years ago (around 2001) I worked for a company that shall remain nameless, but was responsible for printing the majority of journals worldwide. Although I was only doing reprographics (ie, anything to do with printing / copying that wasn't the journals themselves), just before I left I did some sorting for long term filing (thousands of paper documents being sent off for microfiche scanning).
Being a somewhat boring bit of work, I did end up reading quite a few of them, including a rather interesting email conversation between an editor and the paper's author. Attached were various internal emails where they were trying to find a way around the insistence from the author that they wanted to make a copy available online for free.
End result was basically "the author removed the restriction from the contract before signing, and we can't find any way to force them to change their mind no matter how much we try, so just going to have to left them do it".
While I can't say if there were other similar circumstances with a different outcome, I was going through tens of thousands of pages over the course of several weeks, and visually scanning almost every one, and didn't see any others on that subject. There's obviously also the fact it was around 16 years ago, so things will probably have changed.
While there is a lot of money involved in the journal industry, after basic costs, it's pretty much all profit (that company is sitting on around a third of a billion pounds sterling in the bank, and has well over that in gross profit every year, with well under 50% costs for staff and publishing etc) - but if you want to publish it anywhere else it legally belongs to you, just make sure you only agree and sign to things that you are comfortable doing.

Will uploading it harm the journal or could it generate more interest?

You're overthinking this issue. The people running the journal, who have vastly more relevant information than you do to answer this question, already thought about it, and decided to grant you permission to upload your paper to academia.edu - period. That means there are zero ethical considerations here; you should leave it to those people to think about what's good for the journal instead of second-guessing their decisions, and simply do whatever you think is good for you (and for the rest of society, to the extent that that's something you care about).

TL;DR: It is incumbent upon you to make your papers publicly available online.

Scientific discoveries (or useful analyses etc.) should be readily available to researcher worldwide and the public at large, without restriction. We need it - for further research, for product development, for shaping our views of society and politics and so; and most us don't have that paid access to the journals. This is the over-arcing consideration, above those you mention in your answer. So even if...

I also don’t want to take potential sales away from the journal, which I like, and whose staff have been very good to me. Will uploading it harm the journal or could it generate more interest?

... not publishing your paper freely on the web means hiding your results from us - other researchers, people in industry, civil society organizations etc. - which don't have the access to that many journals, if at all. Making your paper publicly accessible would be "very bad to us", to use your own terms.
So - put it up there with no hesitation. And to the extent that the journal or its staff are expecting to have the right to prevent web access to the text - they should just rewrite those perceptions; they are inappropriate and invalid. They have an exclusive right to sell printed copies of the paper, and that's more than enough.
PS - Also consider alternative locations such as arxiv.org when relevant, your university's repository of publicly-accessible research materials, your personal website, or ResearchGate (similar to academia.edu but I like their interface better; they're both kind of annoying with their email nagging though).

I heartily disagree with your answer because you aren't comparing the cost to the publisher to the gain by the public, you're basically just saying "Screw the publisher, do what's best for the public". In that case, the ethical thing to do is not to work with the publisher in the first place.

@sgf: 1. I'm saying that there are overriding considerations which are more significant than the ones OP has mentioned. 2. Unfortunately, we cannot "not work with publishers". For the time being, a large number of the important journals or conference proceedings in many fields are controlled by corporations which do not make the work publicly available on-line for free. These are the cards life has dealt us and we have to make do. 3. There is no "screwing" of the publisher. It typically has the exclusive right to can sell copies of the journal and (maybe) make some money. Seems fair to me.

That's not what you're saying in your answer though (although I'm prepared to accept that it is what you want to say). What you seem to mean is that the loss to the publisher is negligible compared to the gain for society, but what you're saying is that there is gain for society to be had, so go for it.

@sgf: I added a third point to my comment... I don't perceive any loss to the publisher; it just doesn't get to do something it should not have been doing in the first place. Or you could basically put it this way: Anything in OPs or the publisher's world view that suggests the paper should not be put online is wrong/invalid/inappropriate, they should drop such foolish notions and make sure the paper is available online, end of story.


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Delaying grad school vs. going to lower-ranked school
I'm currently a senior who wants to get a PhD in physics. However, I may only have the chance to go to a school which has a strong professor in a certain area, but the school itself is not highly ranked.
My other option is, one of the professors I'm working with at my current institution is favorably disposed towards me, and could support me for another year while I do more research. If I did this, I will push out publications (including at least one first author) before I apply.
Another professor I know has told me that he thinks I should not waste my time, and get started on the PhD, especially since I might be able to hit the ground running there. However, I am aware that getting a degree from a non-top 10 school will hurt my prospects for future positions. I'm also keeping in mind that I could also head to this school next year as well if everything goes sour again.
What do the members of the community think? I would really appreciate more viewpoints on this matter. Thanks for your time!
Edit: I understand that questions asked here should be of a general nature, and not just apply to an individual's unique situation. However, I don't think this situation is all too uncommon, and this question may be useful to those who are looking for information in the future.

See my answer to a related question. My answer is specifically about theoretical computer science, but I suspect the issues are similar in other fields.

See also my answer to:  https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/147625/choosing-between-a-post-doc-and-a-faculty-position-at-2nd-tier-institution/147683#147683

I don't entirely disagree with the two previous answers: taking the offer you have now may be a fine choice.  However, I'd give serious consideration to strengthening your application and trying again.
One of the biggest differences between departments is the strength of the peer group.  You will ultimately spend much more time talking and working with your fellow students than with faculty, and being part of an amazing cohort is incredibly beneficial.  You'll spend countless hours in detailed discussions, going into far more depth than any faculty member is likely to have time for, and you'll organize student seminars and study groups.  Depending on your field, you may write papers with your fellow students with no faculty involvement.  In the end, you'll learn far more from them than from courses or meetings with faculty, and these relationships will last for the rest of your career.
If you don't have this opportunity, you can certainly still become an excellent researcher, but you are less likely to reach your full potential, and even if you do it will be harder.  To maximize the benefit, you need to be surrounded by lots of wonderful students, many of whom are just as talented, hard working, and ambitious as you are, and some of whom are destined for even greater things.
As a rule of thumb, as you move down the prestige scale the average level of the students drops off much faster than the level of the faculty, because there are many more students than faculty.  There can be exceptions, such as a department that attracts much stronger students in one subfield than overall, but you shouldn't count on it without concrete evidence.
Here are a few ways you can gauge the students in a department:

When you visit, do you have really interesting discussions with current students, which leave you feeling excited about further interactions?  (Don't take this too seriously, since if you're shy it may be difficult to connect quickly, but it's worth thinking about.)
Does the department regularly produce graduates whose careers you would be happy with?  (Take this one very seriously.  If you are aiming for a job at a major research university but few people from your Ph.D. program get such jobs, then either your goals are unrealistic or you'll really stand out compared with your peers.)

If the answer to both questions is yes, then that's a good sign, but otherwise you should be cautious.
Returning to the original question, this might help you judge the offer you have already.  For the option of spending another year where you are, I'd ask three questions:

How likely are you to get better offers next year?  Of course there's no way to be sure, but perhaps a mentor could help you make an informed guess.
Will you enjoy the next year?  It's not worth doing if you're going to be stressed out and miserable.  Besides, unhappy people rarely do their best work.
Will you look back on it as a valuable intellectual experience, regardless of its effects on your grad school applications?

Excellent answer. I am in this situation as of now and can confirm that my peers at my fairly little-known institute are mostly underwhelming and less than inspiring. One or two stick out and I enjoy engaging in conversations with them. However my overall feeling is that I am missing out on the engaging, creative discussions I know I had back in university (a top 5 uni in Europe) with detrimental effects in many areas.

Accepted for the level of detail; the other answers are also very good. This answer in particular seemed to feel applicable and got me thinking. Thank you for your response.

Doing outstanding research is what ultimately matters, not the rank of the university.  High quality research is not exclusive to top tier universities alone.  If you find an advisor with whom you can publish top quality research in your topic of interest, then go for it.  The rank of the university is less important than your advisor's ability to help you carry out and publish good quality research.


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What can I do after giving GRE and TOEFL exams?
I just gave my GRE and TOEFL examination this month. I am willing to apply for MS in Computer Science in the USA for the fall of 2014 course. The problem is that I don't seem to understand how to go about it?
How should I know which universities should I apply for? There are so many good universities in US that it confuses me. What are the parameters that I should be considering while deciding where to apply? I don't want to just randomly apply and get rejected. Is there a way to know it before hand - what things a particular university would be looking for in an applicant?
Most of the people have suggested me to select 2 ambitious, 3 moderate and 2 safe universities. I am referring to this list for all my analysis. But its difficult to know the standards that I  should use to decide what an ambitiuos university is. I mean should I consider the top 10 or the top 30 universities as ambitious.

Do you know how to Google? Search using the keywords "university USA" then go to those sites you find.

As I said the information is overwhelming. I don't understand where to start.

It would be really helpful if people could comment why they are down voting the question.

Tushar -- people are presumably down voting because this question is too specific (especially with the inclusion of your scores) for this site.  This site is primarily for academic questions that can help a wide number of people (see the help section for more concrete guidance.  I believe your question has merit, but is too specific in its current form (and may have been answered before, as well).

How did your undergraduate professors reply when you asked them this question?

@ChrisGregg Thanks for letting me know. Im new to this site. I will update the question.

@JeffE I never thought about asking them. This is exactly the kind of help I am looking for in my question. Thanks!

I undo the down vote because the edited version is much better.

Ask somebody experienced (someone who is already studying in good US university) to evaluate your whole profile. There are a few good facebook group for this purpose. They will suggest universities for you.

I would say that the Top 20 from that list could be considered "ambitious". That said, I'll also say that those rankings are NOT always all they are cracked up to be. You can get very good educations at schools that are not even on that list. It's not like U.S. News and World Report pays visits to campus classrooms and extensively interviews student populations – the rankings are largely based on statistics, and it's very hard to use metrics to evaluate the quality of an education. But schools near the top tend to have very good reputations

How should I know which universities should I apply for?

As JeffE mentioned in his comment, you should start by asking your professors, and others at your school what they suggest.  It sounds like you've already been given good guidance to shoot for a range of schools, but you should avoid simply picking from a list and do some serious research into the type of place where you believe you will want to study.

There are so many good universities in US that it confuses me. What are the parameters that I should be considering while deciding where to apply?

I would start by looking at the web pages of schools you are considering, and seeing what kinds of research the professors are working on. You may find that this is overwhelming, but I think you'll start to find some places that interest you.  I actually began my search by explicitly thinking about where in the country I didn't want to live for five years, and then went from there (not necessarily the best method, but it gave me some limits to the search).

I don't want to just randomly apply and get rejected. Is there a way to know it before hand - what things a particular university would be looking for in an applicant?

This is dependent on the departments you apply to, but in general (and this has been answered many times on this site): schools are looking for an indication that you have the potential to do quality research.  The best way to demonstrate this is by having research experience and by having one or more publications under your belt. Letters of recommendation are extremely important, and grades are important, but I would say grades serve as more of a barrier rather than an indicator (i.e., lots of people have the grades, but not all have the other factors that make good candidates).

Most of the people have suggested me to select 2 ambitious, 3 moderate and 2 safe universities.

This is a good start.  Some might suggest adding more schools (you never know), but this does get expensive and if you are relatively confident you will get into the "safe" schools and believe you will be happy working there, then you're probably on the right track.  Bear in mind that all PhD programs worth the degree do turn away qualified candidates.

I am referring to this list for all my analysis. But its difficult to know the standards that I should use to decide what an ambitiuos university is. I mean should I consider the top 10 or the top 30 universities as ambitious.

This does depend on your situation, and it's almost impossible to give an answer strictly for your situation.  If you have peer reviewed publications and get outstanding letters of recommendation, you have a good shot at some top universities.  But no one is guaranteed to get into any top-10 program, so don't be surprised if you don't get accepted even as an outstanding candidate.  Again, it comes down to doing some research and talking to people about individual programs.

Thank you very much for such a detailed answer. I am from India and so my professors are not so well informed about the universities in the US. I am a little skeptic about asking my professors here.