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Unconscious bias toward recommendation letters written by men?
This is an attempt to rescue a strongly down-voted question.
Are there any studies investigating possible unconscious gender bias in evaluating recommendation letters?  Specifically, is there any published evidence that recommendation letters with female authors are (or are not) less effective than recommendation letters with male authors?  Studies considering letters for graduate admission, faculty hiring, or promotion and tenure are all relevant.
Let me emphasize that I am not asking about intentional sexism, which I assume is sufficiently rare to be insignificant, but rather unconscious bias.  I am also not asking for anecdotes, but pointers to actual published literature.
Similar studies have revealed significant gender disparity in several related academic contexts, including recommendation letters for male vs. female applicants.  Other examples include:

Applications to lab manager positions
Prospective doctoral students emailing faculty
Judgement of publication quality
Teaching evaluations (See also)
Selection for mathematical tasks (See also)

Are requests in lieu of literature searches really on topic?

@keshlam that is basically what the [tag:reference-request] tag is for, yes.

It's hard to see how a test with recommendation letters from imaginary recommeders (varying the gender of the recommender) could be done.  In decreasing order of influence the recommender could be known personally to the reader ("Jack and I coauthored a paper together 12 years ago", or by reputation ("I've read lots of Jane's papers"), or by association ("Prof X. is at MIT, so I'll give this letter some credit even though I've never heard of him.")   A recommendation letter with non of these features wouldn't give a realistic test.

Are you asking about studies, for example, that use identical letters and swap the writter's name, or differences in how men and women write letters. While both are issues, they seem different,

@BrianBorchers Depending on the field, you could do the test with imaginary recommenders, but it's hard to see how you could mine the data from existing processes, or how you could run an end-to-end test on the whole admissions process.  In a system where people bid on folders they want to review, and some fraction of folders have all unknown recommenders, one could imagine seeing how bids correlate across recommender names.  Of course, most letters are PDF files, so not so easy to edit the recommender name.

How did the victims of bias  answer this question? (You did ask them, didn't you?)

@AK16 I see what you did there.  Given that the actual victims of any such bias aren't privy to discussions of the letters they've written, how would they know?  (Yes, I have discussed this issue with female colleagues, and some of them have expressed concern about possible bias; the question here is whether there is evidence that such concern is justified.)

Unclear. Following @StrongBad, is it about how men write recommendations vs how women write recommendations, or about how readers of one gender perceive recommendation letters of the same/opposite gender?

I couldn't find any recent (written after 2000, that is) study that directly addresses the issue of how the recommender's gender influence how the letter is perceived. However, I did find one interesting survey study (doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2389.2009.00453.x) that asked experts in personnel-related professions how they think about LORs. One item asked them to rate on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) the following statement:

I believe that applicant, referent, or reader gender may influence how one interprets the contents of LORs

The average response was 2.86 with an SD of 1.22. About 42% strongly agreed, and 43% strongly disagreed. Clearly there is some level of controversy when it comes to the role gender plays in LORs. The study did not, however, ask any question directly about the referent's gender, which makes it even harder to draw any specific conclusion for our purpose here.

Interesting catch. And RQ 14: I believe that applicant or writer gender may influence how one writes a LOR has interestingly 43.8% agree 39.8% disagree.

^ I would guess the part Zenon mentioned is the primary source of the controversy. As far as I know, it's fairly well established that there are significant gender differences in writing styles. Here's a paper on the topic and here's a website that guesses the author's gender of a given text based on the aforementioned work.


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Can one earn money from a product developed during research?
I have recently shared a video on LinkedIn about a project I was involved in while working as a part-time Research Assistant. Besides this project, I have a number of other robots that might be commercialized.
Having shared this video, I received several messages asking whether this robot will be soon on the market or whether we have an early adopter program.
This is something we have not even remotely considered. Can a product that has been developed in University be conceptualized or made commercially available by the University or the Research laboratory?
I know some people that started a company and turned their PhD research into a startup. But this is not something I am considering. In this case, the University is the owner of the product that has been developed and we are not allowed to take anything outside the campus.
If I invent something while I am working in the domain of the University, can revenue be created by selling this product?

The answer - at least in the US - is pretty well always "yes", it just depends on who has to sign off on the legal agreements and what they want in exchange for doing so.
The most common path is that institutions will have some equivalent of an intellectual property office, which handles legal agreements, licenses, royalties, etc. Most big institutions now have a requirement that staff must report any potentially valuable IP to them so they can protect and/or sell it and/or disavow it as it pleases them.
In R1 institutions, this isn't a rare thing - it's big business, with many regularly bringing in tens of millions or more in yearly revenue agreements.
However, in general Universities won't directly sell products. Instead, they will license out the tech to whoever wants to do business. It is common even for institutions to offer exclusive licenses to their own students/faculty to develop companies, provide seed funding grants, offer placement in incubators, and provide the licenses in such a way that there are no up-front costs and money is only owed back to the institute once revenue has gone beyond some threshold (often a few hundred thousand USD, but YMMV).
The big complexity is generally in how the project was funded and what the IP agreements everyone almost inevitably signed somehow indicates. Contracts where the government was involved in granting can get a bit more complicated, but generally the whole system has grown to be very accommodating in favor of people finding a way to bring more money into the system. Go figure.
Of course, a University rarely if ever sell the products in any kind of direct relationship. Instead there is a system of licensing and so on that moves that over to private companies, with the institution getting a piece of the action.
Some systems are more generous than others (and others more aggressive in claiming ownership over as much as possible), so you'll need to check with your local intellectual property office if you are interested in knowing more precisely how things work in your neck of the woods.

The first two answers here give generally valid advice, but don't mention patents and patent law. You can monetize any idea unless someone else holds a patent and you don't have a license to use it. So, for things that can be patented (inventions) it is generally a good, if expensive and time consuming, idea to do so.
Many universities have, in their general rules, a claim to be able to patent, in the University name, anything invented there. This may apply to you or not. The rule is a mixed blessing/curse since it is expensive to obtain a patent and lawyers are required. But the university, while holding the patent, may either give you a license for things you invent, or separately license the invention and share proceeds with the inventor. But you need to check to see if you have implicitly agreed to this in your employment contracts.
The same might be true of funding agencies, but the rules will vary and they will/should be explicit in contracts. If you anticipate inventing things it is good to work out the details before you start if that is at all possible.
One can, of course, monetize an idea without a patent (unless someone else holds one). You can, with certain actions, put the invention into the public domain, making it unpatentable. Then anyone can monetize it. Much of the internet is like that, since the invention was generally US government funded and so, for most things, the public owns the result.
But, I'm not a lawyer, and so what I say is tentative, and perhaps a bit conservative, so you don't get into trouble. As BrianH says, see your university research or IP office for help and advice. They normally employ the necessary experts and can assist you. But, don't assume that you "own" and invention just because you invented it. Patent isn't very much like copyright, which is automatic.

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In computer science, is omission of negative experimental evaluation results research misconduct?
In computer science, a large portion of people develop algorithms, and demonstrate their effectiveness by running experiments to compare with other existing approaches in their research papers. In these experiments, as far as I know, there are two possible ways to purposely hide data:

Ashley has developed algorithm X and decided to experimentally compare it with algorithm Y. She compared them on benchmark set A, B and C. She found that on benchmark C, algorithm Y outperformed X, so she decided to not report on C. In the paper, she also only claims algorithm X outperformed on A and B.
Bill has developed algorithm P. He compared P with other algorithms Q, R and S on some benchmark instances. He found that P outperformed Q and R, but not S on these benchmark instances. He decided to not report the comparison between P and S. In the paper, he also only claims algorithm P outperformed Q and R.

Are Ashley and Bill’s actions considered research misconduct?

"Are Ashley and Bill’s actions considered research misconduct?"  Misconduct or detrimental to science?  I mean, "misconduct" typically refers to violating some established body of protocols, so while such behavior can be very detrimental to scientific progress, that doesn't necessarily mean that, say, universities or journals object to it.  Was this question meant to be more about if such practices are bad for science or if some specific body (e.g. universities or journals) prohibits/discourages it?

To note it, perceptions of this topic vary significantly by field.  In higher-stakes contexts, e.g. medical research, not objectively reporting the good-and-bad can result in lives being lost, such that that field's currently receiving more pressure to avoid these tactics.  However in lower-stakes contexts, e.g. pure mathematics, there's relatively little call for authors to provide criticism of their own work.  CompSci research on algorithms is kinda in-between; people implement algorithms for real-life applications, so it matters, but less directly than medical research.

@Nat Yes, I meant for research misconduct. I'm personally aware of the harmfulness of this practice, but I'm not 100% sure how people in the field accept this.

These are textbook examples of cherry-picking.

tl;dr-  In general, suppressing negative results harms objective analysis but can make the research appear more significant.  How people feel about this practice depends on their stake in it.

Pure consumers are the most likely to feel that it's misconduct.

Pure investees are the most likely to feel that it's acceptable/appropriate.

Others in the field likely have mixed feelings since they benefit from the practice as investees but are harmed by it as consumers.

Looking forward, there's a growing understanding that these practices pollute the literature and will need to be weeded out.  However, we're not quite there yet.
Pure consumers are likely to consider it misconduct
At one extreme, readers who have no affiliation with the research are the most likely to object.  Such readers might be trying to select an algorithm for their own research or business application; they want to know the good and the bad equally, so having the bad omitted is purely detrimental to them.
For example:

Ashley has developed algorithm X and decided to experimentally compare it with algorithm Y. She compared them on benchmark set A, B and C. She found that on benchmark C, algorithm Y outperformed X, so she decided to not report on C. In the paper, she also only claims algorithm X outperformed on A and B.

If a reader is trying to select which algorithm to use, then they'd likely want all relevant benchmarks.  Doubly so if Benchmark C is more closely related to their application.
Pure investees are most likely to consider it acceptable/appropriate
At the other extreme, those invested in the research effort itself are most likely to want to see it presented in a positive light.  Investees include the researcher themself; their supervisor(s); their institution; and any media services that report on their work (e.g., journals).
Pure investees are those who aren't also consumers.  For example, a university's promotional news team is a pretty pure investee, as they basically want to make the research shine.
For example:

Ashley has developed algorithm X and decided to experimentally compare it with algorithm Y. She compared them on benchmark set A, B and C. She found that on benchmark C, algorithm Y outperformed X, so she decided to not report on C. In the paper, she also only claims algorithm X outperformed on A and B.

If Ashley's supervisor feels strongly about the result, they may go into full-promotional-mode, including contacting the university's promotional team and others to advertise the work.  Ashley's supervisor and related promoters might wench at any criticism or negative analysis that might detract from their efforts, so they're more likely to appreciate the comparison using Benchmark C not being reported.
Fellow practitioners may have mixed feelings
Other computer scientists may have mixed feelings since they're consumers, but likely engaging in the same behaviors.
In practice, I've seen researchers acknowledge that they understand such behaviors to be detrimental, but still argue that not downplaying/omitting criticism would make their work appear unduly weak compared to other researchers'.
Overall, practitioners seem to generally understand that it's sort-of misconduct in the sense that it shouldn't be done, but that it's acceptable in the sense that authors often feel like they must do it to play on a level playing field with others who do.

I strongly disagree with the wording of this answer. Although "consumers" will not like the paper, misconduct is a strong word and should at least lead to a formal investigation, retraction of the paper, and possibly to firing of the author(s) in question. This is more in the realm of p-hacking. Personally, I think such "research" is terrible and unethical, but calling it misconduct goes too far.

@louic Definitely, if you're thinking about "misconduct" in sense of formally recognized misconduct.  Still, misconduct's a more general concept that applies outside the limited scope of formal proceedings.

Agreed. But we do not know which interpretation of the word OP intended - I just want to make sure it is clear: misconduct or academic misconduct is often used in the context of very serious misbehavior such as data manipulation or plagiarism. With your interpretation of the word "misconduct" this answer is great.

@louic What I meant for misconduct in the question refers to serious misbehavior, and in this context, data manipulation.

Depends on what you want present in the paper and what the methods are.
First, let me divide these comparisons in two groups:

Curiosity: There are several "ready to use" methods around, that you spend 5 minutes to fix it to run in your data and see what happens. Sometimes these tests are not even really related to your objective, but they are easy to do, so why not? You don't necessarily need to report everything.
Relevant tests: For each problem, in this scenario, there are state of the art solutions (you can't compare your solution if it is the only one). So you need to compare with the state of the art, there is no way around it.

If a paper "skips" on a state of the art mandatory comparison it is not going to get published in a good venue. Any serious reviewer will notice it, raise that question and give it a bad review. Major bad impression...
Personally, I reject papers that only say "we achieve 98% accuracy" without mentioning failing cases and properly explaining why, when, and how the method fails. Which everyone who will consider using the method needs to know... I even have a pre-formatted paragraph saying just that, I use it on almost every review I do... Research is not marketing!
More to the point: IMHO, it is perfectly reasonable to only include the relevant comparisons, regardless of the performance.

You say: "For each problem, in this scenario, there are state of the art solutions." There are? How do you know? This is only going to work for well-studied problems. Suppose the new algorithm deals with a generalization of a problem that has been studied before. Where do you find the papers on the state-of-the-art solution for that new generalized problem? Suppose an algorithm known to be mediocre for the special case does much better for the general case than anything else, and you don't report it. How do you think the referees are going to catch that?

@PeterShor by assumption of the problem/question. I agree with your scenario. But, IMHO,  in it we would be closer to "new ground" than the scenario the OP is hinting at, where there are several established methods.

Your comment seems to indicate that there's a clear distinction between new problems and old, well-studied problems. There's not—it's a spectrum, and I would even guess that there are subareas of computer science where most papers fall somewhere in the middle.

If the results are reported correctly , then reasons for the varied performance can be evaluated and more progress may be made.
If only selected results are shown then this can cause others to waste time re-evaluating what they think are “curious” results...
IMHO show all the results, as one particular dataset could have a particular variation ie a higher proportion of “odd” numbers which skews the results...

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Why would a prospective advisor ask if I'm meeting other advisors?
I am currently in the process of changing my advisor and hence looking for new prospective advisors at my university.  I got interviewed by one and she asked If I was in touch with any other advisors. I told her what the truth was but what exactly is the reason for asking this question?  What does the potential advisor want to know?

They may assessing how likely you are to be their student to help solidify their research plans.

One reason an advisor might ask this question is to know how time-sensitive the decision process is. If you're not considering other advisors at the same time, there is no competition and the potential advisor can spend some more time making her decision.
Another reason might be to gauge your interest in her research activities based on the other people to whom you're talking. Are you looking only at her field or are you looking more widely? Since you're coming from someone else at the same university, she'd likely be using such choices as a means of determining your level of interest in what she's doing. In other words, she probably wants to know if you're just looking for any advisor, and she happens to be someone you're talking to, or looking at her as a serious option.

This is a question I often ask prospective students when they ask me about being their adviser, whether it's for initial advising or to try to change. There are a few reasons:

It may give me a better understanding of precisely what parts of my work interest them. If a student is attracted to both my work and that of a software engineering professor, they likely have a different set of interests than if their other possible interests are privacy or machine learning.
If I know who else they're talking with, I can better help them find the best fit. That best fit may well be one of the other faculty members they're talking with.
If they aren't talking with anyone else, I can suggest they do so, and perhaps make a few specific suggestions.

It's possible she may want to discuss your academic future with other faculty members.  Bouncing ideas of other potential advisors to come up with the best fit for you wouldn't be outside of the realm of possibilities.
If the situation arises again, I wouldn't hesitate to inquire "Why do you ask?"

@einpoklum being direct is essential to effective communication.  If you want to know why a person asked you a question, then asking that person will get you an answer that anonymous question/answer sites can only speculate at.  After all, the point of advisors is to teach you, and any advisor worthwhile would be happy to share their reasoning with you.

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Can I submit just two great letters of recommendation if the application calls for three?
I'm getting ready to apply for a graduate program in biophysics at a few different universities. I'd just like to ask a question regarding the quantity and quality of letters of recommendations.
I'll first give some background about my current application. I have a 3.0 cumulative GPA (there is a valid reason for a few low grades early on in my career which I won't get into here, but my GPA has increased dramatically since then), my physics GRE score is a little low and my general is above the 55th percentile in all three fields.
I have two strong letters of recommendation. One from the director of my lab, and one from the head of experimental physics at my university. My question is regarding a third letter. Most applications state that 3 letters are required. I have two options for the third letter at this point; the first being from my advisor, who I've never taken a class with but knows me well, and the other is from a professor who said he'd write me one but it wouldn't be very strong as he can only discuss my character and, to quote him, "general interest in science".
I'm afraid that a third letter would hurt my application, regardless if two of the letters are strong. How damaging would two letters be in applying to a physics graduate program?
Thank you.

What do you mean by "advisor"? Is this a mentor for a research program? Or an appointed academic advisor?

Sorry, I should have been more clear. An appointed academic advisor.

I haven't sat on a grad admissions committee, but for many other applications, the story is that there are tons of applicants, and people look for reasons to not study an application carefully. Not including the required number of letters would be an example of an easy excuse to ignore an application.

When someone says they can only discuss your character and strong interest in science, that sounds like it's not going to be a great letter. If your advisor can write you what he says is a strong letter (and possibly give some context to your GPA), that might be valuable even if he hasn't had you in a class.

I voted to close this as “primarily opinion based” because I misclicked. I meant to close this as “off-topic: seeking personal advice”

If the application calls for three letters of recommendation and you only submit two, your application may be considered incomplete and may not be considered at all.
So if you don't have a third letter, you're going to have a problem. But if the third letter is weak, it will hurt your application, too, which means you're stuck between a rock and a hard place.

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Are there any online tools for student collaborative learning?
There are many disciplines where collaborative learning is the norm; group projects in engineering, working in pairs in bio & chem laboratories, writing papers in a variety of fields, and Team-Based Learning in medical schools (among other areas). Are there any software tools available that are specifically intended to augment collaborative learning? In my head, this would include capabilities such as:

Asking questions of the group
Enabling real-time group discussion
Sharing attachments

@downvoters - The question has been edited, consider changing your vote.

There aren't many popular ones specific to students. Many universities use BlackBoard, but despite having been in many classes where it was used, I've never seen students use it to collaborate. Students use the same tools everyone else uses... Skype, Github, Dropbox, Google Docs, etc.

I've been using Piazza with some success.  It provides a collaborative discussion forum for a course.  The best thing I can say about it: my students actually use it.  Caveat: it doesn't include the capability for students to upload files.
From the Piazza website:

The (Free) Efficient Way to Manage Class Q&A
How is this better than email, newsgroups, and discussion forums?
Students actually use Piazza, they love it. This difference stems from how we built Piazza. We've personally met with and spoken to thousands of students and instructors. The result is a beautifully intuitive and simple product that students love and use.

Also see why Piazza works.

Are there any software tools available that are specifically intended to augment collaborative learning?

This strongly depends on the setting (i.e., the aim of the learning experience) and consequently expectations the teacher and the students have.
For collaborative knowledge-base management and/or note-taking, e.g., Wikis are an effective tool. There exist a plethora of various flavours of wiki's for various purposes, depending on the exact requirements you might have.
If you are after e.g., collaborative writing, then tools similar to Google Docs might be of some use.
In the case you would be after something more complex, such as collaborative exercise sheets, that would be trickier of course.
It also might be useful to start from Wikipedia's entry on Computer-supported collaborative learning


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What does being acknowledged in a medical journal imply?
Comments on another question pointed out that many medical journals require "written consent of any cited individual(s) noted in acknowledgments or personal communications".
I find this requirement exceedingly strange.  In my own field (theoretical computer science), acknowledgements and citations of personal communications are just another form of citation.  Just as ideas/results/techniques/data from another publication require citation, ideas/results/techniques/data from another human being require some form of acknowledgement.  Otherwise, in both cases, the author is dishonestly claiming credit for someone else's work.  An acknowledgement gives the person being thanked no more responsibility or credit for the work than a citation to one of their papers.  A citation to "personal communication" is even more clearly equivalent to a paper citation.
Clearly attitudes toward citation and acknowledgement are different in medicine, and possibly in other fields; I'd like to understand why.  Does being acknowledged by a medical paper imply some responsibility toward or endorsement of the content of the paper?  Does acknowledging someone famous increase a medical paper's chances of being accepted or cited?  Why don't the same issues attach to paper citations?

It not usual in mathematics either.  But I remember one of my colleagues published a mathematics paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and for that she had to get such permissions.

I recall once having read that if there is someone that you don't want to review your paper (e.g., because the person is known to dislike the field of research), finding a reason for putting this person into the acknowledgements and doing so is a way to drastically reduce the risk of getting this person as a reviewer. Perhaps part of the reason for the rule in the question is to avoid this style of cheating.

@GEdgar  Interesting.  The PNAS submission guidelines don't mention this requirement.

@JeffE Might have been spawned by the editor based on the wording of the acknowledgement?

@DCTLib In my experience, both as an editor and as a referee, people who are acknowledged in a paper are more likely to be chosen as referees, especially if the acknowlegement  indicates that the person has already read the paper.

From the Lancet:

Acknowledgments — written consent of cited individual

From CMJA:

Authors should specify, in the acknowledgements section, contributions to the paper that should be recognized but do not justify authorship, for example critical review of the study proposal or assistance with statistical analysis. The Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) requires that these people give their written permission for their names to appear in print.

From Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology:

Thank you notes. Persons should not be thanked in the Acknowledgments
  section without their knowledge and consent. Authors will be asked
  during the submission process to confirm they obtained permission from
  all persons thanked by name in the Acknowledgments section.

I suspect some of this is from the very defined notion of what constitutes authorship in medical journals, and the likelihood that someone who had some impact on the reported study would not make the authorship list. For example, the same ICJME that has developed the most widely used authorship standards also has this to say about non-author contributors:

Because acknowledgment may imply endorsement by acknowledged
  individuals of a study’s data and conclusions, editors are advised to
  require that the corresponding author obtain written permission to be
  acknowledged from all acknowledged individuals.

Basically, the assumption is that, by being acknowledged, there is the possibility that you could be seen as endorsing the findings of the study, and that erring on the side of caution, you should have to obtain permission before acknowledging someone.
This is even true for not medically-specific journals. Consider, for example, this entry from PLoS One:

Authors are responsible for ensuring that anyone named in the Acknowledgments agrees to be named.

So if someone dies before giving consent, they'll never be acknowledged...

@MassimoOrtolano In such an edge case, there's no reason not to contact the editor and talk to them about it.


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Can I be admitted to a master's in the USA after a 3-year European bachelor's program?
I am an Indian citizen and I'm planning to go for my bachelors to Germany. Since schooling in Germany is 13 years in length, I'll study 1 year in India before going there. I wanted to ask that after completing my Bachelor's in Germany, will I be eligible to apply for Masters in USA straightaway right after my BS (I plan to pursue a BS in Computer Science). I had this doubt in my mind as BS in Germany would be 3 years compared to that in USA which is 4 years.

Please note that school nowadays takes 12 years in Germany (although I don't see how that's important), and that most Master programs are two-year programs.

related: PhD in the US compared to Europe and to some extent: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/34457/10643

@Niko - It depends on the state. Some states have 12 years of school, others have 13. Whether it is 13 or 12 is in constant flux, and sometimes a student can even choose.

My friend started PhD in Caltech after 3-year Bachelor's in Poland - so it's certainly possible. But as there is no 1-1 mapping between Continental European and US degrees, it may depend on a university, field, some exceptions being made (or not) etc.

The answer to your question is yes, no, and maybe. It all depends on where in the US you want to go.
As Brian indicated in his answer, these are some universities that don't accept a three-year bachelor:

San Jose State University
University of Idaho

However, there are certainly universities that do accept a three-year bachelor:

Stanford University
University of Minnesota
Columbia University
New York University (Wagner)
Almost all business schools accept a 3-year degree (including Harvard, MIT), source

And then there are who evaluate the three-year bachelor on a case-by-case basis:

University of Michigan (Rackham Graduate School)
UNC Charlotte

Certainly, this list is incomplete. So, do your own search if you like to apply in the US, and if a university does not state anything about the three-year bachelor, ask their Graduate Admissions office.

Some may "accept" the degree, however, you then might need to take additional Bachelors level courses before being admitted to the Master's.  This is also common in the US where one changes fields.

Many universities in the US will not admit foreign students as graduate students after a 3 year bachelor's degree.  Students in this situation typically complete a master's degree, some kind of post graduate certificate or an "honors degree" in the English system.
You're right to be concerned about this, but there aren't any easy solutions.
Some examples (from a quick google search): San Jose State University, UNCC, and University of Idaho.

So If I pursue MS also from Germany which is of 1 year again , will I then be eligible for admission into the Masters programme in USA because then, wouldn't i have 2 masters degree?

Yes, you could then apply to MS and PhD programs in the US.  Some programs might make you start by earning a second MS degree, depending on how strong your application looks.  It's not uncommon for students to earn 2 masters degrees on the way to a PhD.

Can you clarify your answer a bit more, what is the reason they won't admit foreign students into Masters after Bachelor? I myself applied for a US Masters after my Dutch 3-year Bachelor. Although I did not get accepted in the US, I went to another country. When I did join a summer project in the US, I met plenty of Masters students from Europe - and at least in the Netherlands all Bachelor degrees are 3 year. So I must admit, I very much doubt the correctness of your answer.

@DoubleYou: note he said "many universities". In the end, it will depend on the university you're applying from, and to. Also note that, despite the same terminology, a bachelor or master in the US simply isn't equivalent to the same degree in Europe, not just in terms of time-investment. In the US, you're expected to enter the industry after a bachelor, whereas in Europe, it is expected that you also do a masters.

@DoubleYou the idea behind such policies is simply that 3 year bachelor's degrees aren't equivalent to four year US bachelor's degrees.  That's a debatable point, and I don't want to personally defend such policies- I'm simply stating the fact that such policies exist in many universities.

Of course, I understand that. However, I felt your answer was quite negative and did not provided a complete answer to the OP. Therefore, I posted my own answer. I did link your examples in it too.

There are some schools that try to make up for their lack of goodness by making it harder for prospective students to get in.
But the best schools only care about enrolling people who will succeed.
A friend of mine is a case in point:  she got into a prestigious MBA program even though she'd never attended university at all, never mind having a degree.  She'd gone into the world of work straight out of secondary school, married, had 2 kids, and only thought about going back to school when her kids were teenagers, she was divorced, and she wanted to go into management rather than remain a Principal Software Engineer at a major company in the computer industry.
The school took one look at her record of accomplishment, brushed aside her lack of tertiary education, and 2 years later awarded her an MBA with honors.


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Are there good ways to approach a professor for a postdoc?
How do I approach an unknown professor before a PhD interview? My defense (viva) will be held next March and I will be seeking a postdoctoral fellowship after that.
I want to contact a Professor relevant to my research interests to discuss potential future research topics and get short-listed for an interview.
My field is Mathematics (pure maths).
What are the best ways to approach a professor in this field?

Say a bit more. Why do you want to contact the professor. What do you need?

okkss @Buffy  wait im editing

If you are nearby, just make an appointment and go for a visit. If you are farther away you can send an email. Talk about your math interests and ask what you can do to prepare for an interview. It isn't hard. Most professors are used to this sort of thing. However, some professors require that you make formal application to the program first. (Of course, if you are Lionel Messi, you can talk about futbol).

Where is the professor located (your institute, city or further away)? Will you be able to visit them or would this be done online? Does this professor engage in collaborations or attend the same conferences as your supervisor(s)? Note, you must be careful to contact anyone who might be examining your thesis as your institution may have rules about knowing who they are or influencing the result.

Most academics are open to meeting prospective postdoctoral candidates or future collaborators (even if they don’t currently have funds to recruit you). Many plan for the long term. The best thing to do is contact them ahead of time by email to schedule a meeting. It’s best to meet in person  if you can  but videoconferencing is also okay. They’ll be interested in whether you can communicate well and work with their research group in addition to potential research projects. If you are visiting their institution while travelling for a conference in the future or planning to apply for fellowship funding that you are eligible for.
You can also offer to give a seminar when visiting their department. They can offer support to host you be do not expect this. If you plan to visit, contact them long in advance in case they need time to organise your visit.
Please be patient and respectful, they are very busy and may not get back to you straight away. It’s helpful to mention any common connections you have including working on related projects. If you can, you should mention that you know their collaborators or have met them before at a conference. If their collaborator has recommended to contact them, you should include that when you introduce yourself but you can still contact them directly rather than getting someone to do it on your behalf.

The best way to do so is simply to email them. If your research interests align with theirs and your publication record is sufficiently impressive it'll start a conversation at the very least. Don't forget to attach an updated CV. If you're uncomfortable with this (or your publication record is not sufficiently impressive), some avenues to get their attention could be

Have a mutual professional acquaintance facilitate an introduction.
Look through their publications, find one that you're interested in and begin a discussion through it: how would you improve it? If you have amazing ideas that'll get their attention.

Be advised that funding is a major issue when taking on a postdoc. Some pure math fields do not attract research funding, so make sure that the professor has funding to take you (e.g. their website says they're looking, or they are advertising in mathematics mailing lists).
Good luck!

Alternatively, if the professor does not have funding when you write to them, make it clear that what you are looking for is their mentorship on an application for a personal fellowship.


text:
Mathematics Stack Exchange as an indicator for academic career
I'm due to start my PhD in Pure Mathematics next month, fully funded by a scholarship, at an average university, I'll be specialising in combinatorial group theory, and I have a strong First in Mathematics from a Russell group university. My goal is to become an academic.
This is my Mathematics Stack Exchange (MSE) profile. I've been an active user since 2013, visiting pretty much daily, but my reputation is currently just 5,760 and I haven't used MathOverflow at all (as the questions there every time I visit, which isn't that often, are beyond me). This seems quite low. Should this worry me?
To what extent is MSE reputation an indication of potential in academia?

The 3 best programmers whom I personally known and worked with in my country, at least in my opinion, don't have a stackoverflow account.

In every case that I tried to impress someone with my SE points I failed badly. Because most people have no idea what the heck SE is, and the few who do, surely won't find it that impressive.

As polfsol says, SE points are not impressive. However, the quality of your answers might impress somebody. I use muy Statistics SE contributions to showcase that I can write about statistics in English, just as I could use a blog for the same purpose. I don't make an answer out of this comment because I can't say for sure if it has impacted my career (but I keep the link at the end of my CV).

Points on the SX measure contributions, not quality. Some people answer 20+ questions daily, but with low quality answers. Nevertheless over the years they can collect a lot of reputation. Furthermore the number of votes a Q/A gets scales more with popularity than with quality IMO. On SO I've written - in my opinion - HQ posts with 1-3 votes, and straightforward answers with 10+ votes.

"To what extent is MSE reputation an indication of potential in academia?" It is an interesting question, but without data it is somewhat pointless to speculate. Also note that "potential" is somewhat nebulous. I take it as being essentially obvious that an undergraduate who can competently answer questions on something like MSE has potential in graduate school.

On another note: I've seen instances of people with technical blogs which interact with their SE accounts (e.g. has blog posts which expand on the answers to interesting questions). If you have a high-quality blog that complements the SE account that could be relevant when and if you get to the stage of applying for positions.

At one point a few of us compared our academic h index with our stack exchange h index. It was probably in chat or meta.

I currently have more Math.SE AND more MathOverflow points than you do and I wasn't smart enough to get into a Math PhD program. I would wager a large quantity of money that you are better at math than I am. I also have several friends from college who are in math PhD programs (and who are definitely smarter/more talented than me) who also have no account or far fewer points. Therefore neither Math.SE nor MathOverflow points are a reliable indicator of "math prowess". (You get more points for answers, but you can also get a large number of points for stupid questions.)

@Lynob vacuous truth?

To what extent is MSE reputation an indication of potential in education?

@Lynob I think OP meant to ask about how MSE activity/reputation is an indicator given that OP had visited daily for around 4 years.

The only thing that a high MSE or MO reputation indicates is that a person spends too much time on the internet (and I say that as someone with a reasonably high reputation on MO).  I don't think you should take it seriously as a data point on how successful you are likely to be.
On a related note, it also doesn't play any role in things like hiring decisions.  At all the places I've worked, someone would be ridiculed if they brought up MO or MSE reputation at a hiring meeting.
It's just recreation.

The main way that MO affects my opinions of people isn't through their reputation, but through particular questions or answers that got my attention.  For example, I once invited someone to a conference because they kept answering my MO questions.

I disagree with your assessment that MSE/MO contributions can play no role in the way people are perceived when they are evaluated for jobs. See here for a related discussion. I do agree with @NoahSnyder, what matters is actual reputation (in the normal English-language sense of the word) rather than reputation points. In any case, all of that is entirely tangential to OP's question, which you addressed well in the first paragraph.

I agree. On a related note, I have seen job advertising which asks applicants to provide their Stack Overflow ID if they have one, but I think it's a poor metric of ability - there are plenty of highly skilled developers/programmers who have low rep (or even no SO account). And then who wants to employ someone who appears to spend a lot of time working on other people's projects?

Stack Overflow rep is a hiring factor for quite some It companies. but I'd say universities don't really pay attention to MO/MSE.

@DanRomik I agree with both Andy and Noah.  I read Andy's answer with reputation meaning SE rep in the numerical sense.

Related: https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3938/the-importance-for-getting-an-account/3947#3947

@DanRomik: Notice that I said that MSE/MO reputation does not play any role in hiring.  I stand by that and cannot imagine any serious person regarding the numerical reputation score as anything other than a game.  That doesn't mean that one's contributions are irrelevant, though they are very much lower order terms (in particular, I don't know anyone whose contributions are interesting enough that I would want to hire them but whose research record is not already impressive enough to turn my head).

@GiorgiMoniava: The hiring practices in the computer programming world and in university mathematics departments are completely different.  In particular, we have far more useful sources of information concerning job candidates, namely their published research record and their letters of recommendation.  As I said in my answer, anyone who brought up things like a candidate's reputation score on some website in a hiring meeting would be belittled mercilessly.

@GiorgiMoniava "I wonder why it would be different on MO site." MO is and always has been rather different, in its content and attitude, from StackOverflow. Several people here, as long-time MO users and professional mathematicians, might be better placed to comment on how hiring committees in academic mathematics view MO reputation, than people who don't have MO accounts and aren't professional mathematicians.

@GiorgiMoniava: Among the high rep MO users (say, the first 3-4 pages of people ranked by rep), there are some some extraordinary people (including a couple of Fields medalists), but also plenty of people whose research records are pretty mediocre (there are even people in the latter category on the first page).    There is no way to say this without coming off like a total snob, but the kinds of people on the hiring committees at the universities I've worked at (good, but not super-elite) are far more distinguished than many high-rep users of MO.

To what extent is MSE reputation an indication of potential in academia?

Very little. You get a lot of reputation for simple answers to simple questions that make it onto the HNQ list, because those are the ones that people can quickly understand and say, "Yeah, that's right." Conversely, you get little reputation for deep, detailed answers to difficult questions, because people (probably rightly) think that reading and digesting them won't be a productive use of their time.
High reputation on a technical Stack Exchange site might indicate that you're a good teacher of that subject, since well-explained, easy-to-understand answers tend to get higher reputation. But, the teaching experience you get as a student and early-career researcher will be a much better indication of that.

+1 Oh, yes. For (a non-technical) instance, my top-voted answers here are the shortest ones (2-3 lines). I'll try to see what happens with a one-liner :-)

To what extent is MSE reputation an indication of potential in education?

Perhaps this is a philosophical nuance, but I think a case could be made that high MSE reputation would correlate strongly with success in academia. This correlation is likely not directly related to MSE reputation itself, but to something that a high MSE reputation may indicate: love of mathematics.
As an applied mathematics PhD holder myself, I've witnessed first-hand that success in both PhD programs and academic careers in general depends largely on having sufficient motivation and perseverance to put in the time necessary to develop new insights. I would argue that a high MSE reputation indicates a willingness and motivation to seek out challenging problems in a wide variety of mathematical subject matter.
Moreover, the fact that MSE reputation is not directly related to someone's job or academic position suggests that person is interacting with MSE in their personal time, which indicates that their motivation to participate in the mathematical community goes deeper than just looking for a way to pay the bills.
Thus, if mathematical academic success is correlated with having proper motivation to learn mathematics, and high MSE reputation is an indicator of sound motivation to learn mathematics, then, by the transitive property, high MSE reputation should be correlated with academic success.
Some of the above is tongue-in-cheek, but while the relationship between MSE reputation and academic success is not causal, I think there is likely a positive correlation resulting from a natural selection bias for significant contributors to this site.

I'll acknowledge the likely correlation, but note there is no likelihood of a reverse correlation: most highly successful math academicians are not on MSE.  The population sizes are different.

The other thing is that SE sites provides instant gratification for routine achievements being doable in a few minutes, in a way exactly the opposite of what is usually needed for mathematical research. So I would not give all that much predictive value to it re research. I may give it more regrading being a dedicated  teacher.

@Wildcard I wouldn't get lost in correlations, it's simply that "interacting with MSE in their personal time, ... indicates ... their motivation to participate in the mathematical community". Answering and asking questions depicts the involvement and interest in the subject. Reputation points is just a feature of the website and can be seen as a simple measure of the popularity of those interactions... People with successful careers prove their success with interactions with other communities, through papers or books... Comparing those communities with SE sites may be fruitless.

@Armfoot gets at the gist of my point. The question of level of success in academics and how that correlates to level of MSE reputation is a bit different (and likely more complex). However, I think someone who posts here and enjoys answering mathematical questions/contributing to the community has a leg up against those who might go into an advanced degree thinking of academia as more of a 9-5 job that'll pay the bills. I've seen such people fail to succeed, both at the graduate student level and at the professor level, due in large part to improper or insufficient motivation.

Doesn't it actually indicate the opposite? That instead of working on your research ideas, you're passing time on MSE or MO?

The OP states he is starting his PhD program next month. While it's not unheard of for undergraduates to begin research in mathematics, I would venture the majority of math PhD students don't engage in research until after a year or two in a graduate program. It seems a bit pedantic to me to assume the OP is participating in MSE at the expense of doing research at this stage in his career.

Lots of the duties which decide success in academia are not directly related to knowledge in or passion for the field of study but hard work, perseverance, acquiring grants, doing teaching, administration, live presentations, seminars, conferences, becoming a popular teacher, co-worker and contributor.
Math.SE strips those duties down and we only get to see the knowledge and passion side of the subject of study. There is much more to creating a career in academia than knowledge and passion in the subject of study -- for good, or for bad.

You shouldn't worry about MSE "reputation"; one can find MSE members with low reputation but high academic potential and vice versa. Think about it: there are members who reached 100k just by answering elementary calculus and combinatorics questions. "Reputation" is more about effort rather than potential.
However, there is definitively a tendency that those with high academic potential get into top-notch (as opposed to average) PhD programs.

I don't think SE participation is likely to matter one way or the other in your graduate studies, as long as it doesn't eat up a lot of time you ought to be spending elsewhere. Come to ask for help or offer it when appropriate.
Later on in your career that may change. My son Ben Bolker has a substantial presence on stackoverflow, helping people with R and statistics. (He's a tenured full professor so can apportion his time as he pleases.)
I posted this on tex se meta:

I quietly argue in my department and regularly tell colleagues that
  significant participation in stackexchange sites should count in
  faculty reviews as service to the scholarly community. I'm sure
  @egreg's answers here advance science more than does his mathematics,
  however deep and interesting that may be.

https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3938/the-importance-for-getting-an-account/3947#3947

Social media is definitely becoming a new component to academia outside of publications, and I suspect it can be influential to your career as a form of networking that may, for instance, get your work cited more often simply by bringing it more to others' attention. Possibly a good MSE could be helpful to that, but I suspect it's a stretch - Twitter, LinkedIn and other proper social media tools are better suited to that purpose. Beyond that I echo the other answers by saying you shouldn't expect it to be taken as a serious CV point for recruitment or hiring in academia.

Being associated with SE is not necessarily a good thing.  Not that you are like this, but many of the responders on SE simply do not present a pleasant demeanor and are off-putting in their arrogance.
Search for, "Stack Exchange Hate," and see what you get, then ask yourself, "If this is how people perceive SE, do I want really anyone knowing I'm associated with it?"
If you want to establish a reputation (which is not a function of SE to begin with), establish a real one, in the real world.

Don't you think that Googling for "Stack Exchange Hate" would result in a rather biased sample of opinions?

I find this response to present a less than pleasant demeanor and to be off-putting in its arrogance.


text:
Acknowledging a reviewer from a journal from which the paper was rejected
My paper was rejected from a journal. However, remarks of one of the reviewers were useful, and I incorporated them into the next version of the paper.
Is there a general pattern of acknowledging such contribution (in the Acknowledgement section)?
Or should I leave it, not to advertise information that the paper was rejected from a particular journal?
(As a side note, this paper was rejected two times, each time with one positive review, and one of type "OK, but I think it is not of general interest".)
EDIT:
In my case (as in general in my field) reviewers were anonymous. (Otherwise I would just use their names.)
And in my case the helpful comments were in positive reviews (but I doubt whether it changes anything).

Is it the case that you are wanting to mention the specific part of your paper that arose from the earlier reviewer's remarks (rather than a more general acknowledgement as suggested in Peter Jansson's answer)?

@TaraB Mostly small fixes (grammar, typos, small changes), distributed among whole paper.

Ah.  I don't think it is really necessary to mention that.  It's helpful, but not something that made a major improvement to the paper.  Have you considered simply asking the journal editor to pass your thanks on directly to the reviewer?

@TaraB I always try to thank reviewers (and especially when they understood it... or didn't but it is visible that they were trying), so most likely I sent a message to editor.

Right, then I really think that should be sufficient in this case, especially given the difficulty of making it clear you are thanking a reviewer from a different journal while not mentioning any names or the fact the paper was rejected!

@TaraB Thx! So, please write it as an answer. :)

let us continue this discussion in chat

Piotr has asked that I add one of my comments as an answer.  Please note that I am a fairly inexperienced academic, so don't take anything I say too seriously!
Firstly, I'll reiterate one of my comments on Peter Jansson's answer:
You really really should not mention journal names or the fact that the paper was previously rejected. The journal you are publishing in would not appreciate it! (It makes it clear they were only your second, or in this case third, choice.)
Since you say that the helpful remarks of the earlier reviewer were about grammar, typos and a few small changes throughout the document rather than something that substantially changed the exposition of your paper, I think that conveying your thanks directly to the reviewer via the journal's editor (which you say you have already done) is probably a more appropriate acknowledgment, especially given the difficulty of making it clear you are thanking a reviewer from a different journal while not mentioning any names or the fact that the paper was rejected.

Conveying thanks through the editor is a fantastic idea, but not as a substitute for acknowledging the reviewer in the paper.  It never hurts to say thank you in public, even if you're doing so anonymously.

@JeffE I know that it never hurts (it is why I asked this question!), but I don't know how to attribute the right person - even if anonymous, then not from another journal (misattribution is, IMHO, worse than lack of it).

I think what makes the difference is that the reviewer is anonymous. If you had a name to acknowledge, that is great. But it becomes difficult and there is dubious benefits to acknowledging an anonymous person anyways.

First, I think it is good to acknowledge reviewers as you consider doing. It is the editor who rejects any papers based on the results of reviews so the reviews may still be very constructive and indeed helpful in improving a paper. So I would suggest something like the following

We/I (gratefully) acknowledge the (critical) review by X on an earlier
  version of the manuscript.

There are many ways to express it and what words you wish to use is up to you and the way you wish to express your gratitude. I would not add the name of the journal(s) where the reviews were conducted (other than in the letter to the journal editor accompanying your MS submission).
I also would like to take the opportunity to add that the following issue, not that it applies to your case but more to point out some bad practices for the community. The poor behavior concerns when someone acknowledges a famous persons review just to gain leverage in resubmitting it to another journal. I have seen how persons have used reviews stating that the paper should be rejected because it is "crap" as a "most valuable input to help improve the manuscript". Since no-one typically knows what this review did, the gut reaction is to think it must have been valuable since the reviewer is well known. For this reason it is good to provide the review/revisions from the old MS when re-submitting it so that the review-revision work becomes obvious to the editor.
As a final point, I would not add the acknowledgement of any reviewers new or old until the time when your MS has been (hopefully) accepted in the new journal.
EDIT: Based on the good comments by Tara B on anonymous reviewers and how to distinguish reviews from old and new MS I would write something as the following

We/I (gratefully) acknowledge the (critical) review by two anonymous reviewers as well as the (critical) review by another anonymous reviewer on an earlier
  version of the manuscript.

Words in parenthesis are optional and can be exchanged for others that better suit your needs.

At least in my subject (maths), the reviews are supposed to be anonymous, so one would not be able to acknowledge the reviewer by name.

Good point, this varies slightly but in teh case of an anonymous reviewer, I would simply say "an anonymous reviewer" instead of the name.

I suppose the difficulty is that unless mentioned otherwise, it will be assumed that the anonymous reviewer was one of the reviewers for the paper the journal eventually appeared in.  I don't see a good way to mention otherwise, however.

@PeterJansson In my case there were anonymous. Additionally, how to make it obvious that it is not from reviewers in the current journal?

Additionally, I'm considering leaving it on arXiv, as it is accessible anyway (i.e. it is on arXiv anyway, just I consider submitting it for the 3rd time). The main question is whether to use journal names, or info about rejection, or not.

@PiotrMigdal I think some form of the second example I have given will do. Unless you need to explain your paper has been rejected in the past calling it an "earlier manuscript" should do. You are acknowledgiing the reviewer not the journal that rejected it. The exception would be if the editor of a journal that rejected your paper also provided something you wish to acknowledge. But as a whole I do not see the point of providing details such as earlier journals in the acknowledgement.

You really really should not mention journal names or the fact that the paper was previously rejected.  The journal you are publishing in would not appreciate it!  (It makes it clear they were only your second, or in this case third, choice.)

While I agree with Peter Jansson, I might use "earlier draft" instead of "earlier version".

+1 the "helpful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript" is a recipe I have used myself in this sort of situation.  I'm sure the reviewer if they read the published paper would recognise and appreciate your thanks, even in this slightly obscure manner!

I have been waiting for a chance to pull a prank like

I would like to thank 15 anonymous referees from 5 journals to which this paper was submitted for their helpful comments.

but, as many people said, few journals will appreciate this sort of remark. It is true that this is what happens with most papers, so if we are to be honest and transparent, we should just state this sort of history. And it happens to the top researchers, too, although some people, judging by their productivity of 10+ papers a year, never get even requests for revisions.
May be a weaker form would be

I would like to thank the three anonymous referees and the associate editor of [THIS JOURNAL], as well as several other anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments.

Sometimes, it happens that the most important revision was actually a couple of journals ago which really improved the paper, but that journal still did not accept the paper, so it cruised through another editorial board or two with just minor language remarks.

Hah! I've thought about Thanks to the anonymous referees for appearing to not read my paper and generically taking my word for it. Or, even better, Thanks for taking the time to point out those 2 spelling errors, and suggesting I cite one of your papers.. Perhaps we should just be thinking the other way, if I provide a helpful review (anonymous or not) I'm not going to hold it against the person if they don't give an explicit mention of thanks. If you actually listened to what I had to say I'm happy.

@Andy, apparently, you have not seen this: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/misc/review-process.html (not the original author from either side, I believe; this has been circulating with different journal titles and different university letterheads in it).

I use the phrase "I thank an anonymous colleague for [providing an important idea]."
This implies that the idea came from someone else, but it doesn't explicitly mention that the paper was previously rejected or reviewed.

To me 'colleague' makes it sound like it might be someone you know who prefers to remain anonymous.  But I still think this is quite a good idea.

Why are you using "I" within a paper?

I understand and even use the author's "we" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosism) in the main body of a paper, but I tend to be more informal in the acknowledgments.  Of course, "I" applies only if I am the sole author, but you can also use "The author" if you desire.


text:
Flying with a poster tube as a hand luggage
I am flying to a conference, in which I am presenting a poster.
In principle there might be a problem, as the poster tube:

is a second piece of hand luggage,
it is longer than the limit allows.

However, it seems that it works (once I tried with no problem, my colleagues usually have no problem).
Does it happen that one is not allowed to take a poster tube in the hand luggage?
If so, how to avoid this problem? (Advice, tips and tricks are welcome.)
If the question is place-specific, I'm interested mostly in EU.

Within Europe it usually works to take the train, I've done that several times from northern Sweden to Austria or southern France. Takes a little while (not necessarily more expensive if planned appropriately) but it's quite fun and there won't be any luggage problems :)

Neither me nor my students had any problems carrying a poster tube as second hand luggage (>50 flights, mostly EU, US, baut Asia as well). It usually even fits in the overhead compartment.

There are a couple solutions to the "transporting a poster tube on a plane" problem:

Most flights allow a second piece of hand-luggage, so that bit is fine. And while it is larger in the length dimension than is usually allowed, I've never had this be a problem. In not-very-full flights, it can be stored on top or behind other bags. On fuller flights, I usually just ask a flight attendant for help. So far the tubes have ended up behind the seats in the last row against the bulk head, and in the coat closet usually reserved for first class. Generally, I find they give you "credit" for trying not to be a problem.
As has been mentioned, you can get your poster printed or shipped to the conference location.
Cloth posters. These are becoming more easily accessible. While more expensive than paper posters, if carrying a poster on forces you to check a bag, and your airline charges fees for those, the cost difference vanishes swiftly. These can be folded and stored flat in a shipping envelop or bag. Just make sure to take them out and iron them on a very low setting to get the creases out before you hang them.

Creative rolling of your cloth poster can prevent creases and wrinkles.

From my current observations: even if the allow "one piece of hand luggage only", poster tubes for some reason does not count to the limit (however, I've never asked, just in case not to ask for troubles). There were no problems neither for me nor my colleagues; besides sometimes from RyanAir (once a friend needed to fold his poster); other cheap airlines where perfectly fine.

+1 for cloth posters, a friend used it once and definitely worth that extra little money.

+1 for cloth posters. I didn't even know they existed but they sound like a nice (and a little more expensive) alternative.

+1 for cloth posters. I have used them on a regular basis and they are fantastic. Just fold them, put them in my suitcase or even backpack. Sometimes just have them ship directly to the conference hotel so that it is waiting for me when I arrive. Most of the time you don't even need to iron them but an iron has always been available if needed. Then there is the novelty value. Lots of people stopped by my posters because they notice the fabric. I gave them some time to be fascinated and awed, and then delivered my pitch. My research got a lot more exposure this way too.

Sometimes flight attendant staff will be willing to hold a poster for you, since generally they can't safely go as checked luggage, and may not fit in the overhead compartment. You should inquire as to what will be allowed.
One useful alternative I've taken advantage of is to use a printing service in the city where you will be presenting your poster, and picking up the poster there. Nowadays, many will accept things sent by email, file transfer service, or web site. This makes the transfer process easier than before, and avoids the problem of last-minute delays (provided you send it ahead of time!).

Actually, the last time I printed my poster at the conference venue (on a cheep paper, so it wasn't that wasteful). However, usually I would like to re-use the poster.

Your alternative is only a half solution if you still need to somehow bring the poster back to your work location after the conference.

I only encountered problems once (with Ryanair - I think they wanted to make me pay for late checked luggage). Fortunately it was going back home. I had to make the poster roll small (it then fit into their hand luggage frame) and I loosely folded the poster. As soon as I was in the cabin I unfolded it again and put it into the roll. Someone frome the cabin staff even asked why the poster was folded and said that this was crazy. Fortunately the creases were not that bad.
I'd always take the poster with the hand luggage: I once attended a conference where at the first 2 days about 1/3 of the posters had an A4 sheet saying: The poster can currently be found at Alitalia's lost luggage department...
You could print the poster at the place of the conference. I once presented a poster that was printed by the poster printing service of the conference hosting university (who actually allowed orders from the outside).

Printing the poster at the place of the conference just solves the issue of bringing the poster to the conference, not that of bringing the poster back.

@O.R.Mapper: true, but then in my field we tend to have one-time-only posters so their main purpose is the conference.  The walls are already rather crowded, so if every once in a while one poster doesn't make it home it is not that bad.

I'm returning to this old question because I now know the best solution! It's actually Fomite's third solution: fabric posters.
How to do it:
AstroBetter has an excellent blog post on this (http://www.astrobetter.com/blog/2015/03/25/fabric-conference-posters-ftw/) which in turn takes you to the how-to from the company Spoonflower (https://support.spoonflower.com/hc/en-us/articles/204266984-How-to-Create-a-Fabric-Poster-from-a-PowerPoint-or-PDF).
This is an even better option than it was a few years ago when Fomite mentioned it, because I've found the fabric printing to be slightly cheaper than traditional poster printing (this may depend on your campus printer) and on the fabric recommended by Emily Rice on AstroBetter, no ironing is needed. It is incredibly fun to be able to stow the poster in the corner of a suitcase and bring it out to show to friends or relatives I'm staying with on the way home from the conference.

Historical note: I came across this post several years ago and followed the advice, when creating my first printed conference poster! It ended up being awkward: I asked the flight attendant politely about putting it in a closet or overhead, and she said to put the tube on the floor at my feet (and the feet of the two passengers next to me). As it turned out, I was sitting next to (and inconveniencing) a professor headed to my conference (though he was nice about it). For the return trip, I decided to fold it up and mail it home and avoid having to deal with a poster tube ever again.

I favour fabric posters, but they do not look as good as well-printed posters on good stock.

It depends on the airline's policies, but I have never had any problems on any of AA/AF/AZ/BA/DL/JL/KL/EK/QR/US, and I travelled extensively on all of them as a student, often with posters. The hand luggage restrictions are principally about overhead bin space: but a rolled up poster is small and can probably be squeezed in somewhere on the plane or in the coat cupboard if needs be. Therefore the fact that the tube exceeds one of the dimensions is not really of great interest to most airlines.
If you are travelling on a low cost carrier like RyanAir or EasyJet, that may be a different matter. I know that EasyJet is trying to be "business friendly" now so they probably will not be so interested in a small item like a poster tube. The one time I travelled on Ryanair with a poster I voluntarily checked it in at a very large fee rather than have an argument about it.
Now the warning I do have is: if you do check your poster tube, expect it to go missing. I lost three poster tubes (one permanently) by checking them. Somehow the baggage systems in many airports are not designed to transport tubes (especially if they have straps on them) and so they tend to get jammed somewhere and torn to pieces.

I recently flew with a poster to a conference. The dimensions for hand-luggage usually are Height+width+length <= 42" (inches) (maybe 45", don't quite remember accurately). If the 'tube' sums up to less than this you should be good.
As is mentioned in another answer, most airlines allow two pieces of hand-luggage e.g. A laptop bag and maybe your tube, if you don't have anything else.
You are free to carry it with you in the hand unless the tube is arbitrarily long i.e. it exceeds 42 inches in length. If you are below that by length, I doubt the other 2 dimensions would be all that big.
At times they may take it from you right at the boarding gate and ask you to check it in there and then. That's fine. It'll be safe and given to you the instant you exit the aircraft rather than at the carousel.
Some aircrafts are small and may have a separate luggage are for hand bags towards the tail. You can put it there.
If it's a small flight and the tube is not too big (diameter and length wise) just prop it by your leg if you are in a window seat or put it below your seat.
As long as you are within the dimensions and allowable limits of hand luggage (count = 2 weight <= 7kgs) you should be fine

Almost every airline allows "a personal item" in addition to your carry-on luggage; otherwise people with purses wouldn't get any carry-on.  Your poster tube is probably not "a personal item", but your carry-on could be if it's small enough to fit under your seat.  (That's the real reason: there's not enough overhead bin space, but there's plenty of under-seat space.  Many people hate having stuff at their feet, though, so the airline can't count on that space being used; saying that you can take a personal item that fits under the seat works for you.)  In any case, the way this all works out in practice is that if you're lugging a huge amount of stuff that doesn't look like it'll fit, you'll be asked to check some at the door.  Otherwise, it's all okay as long as it will either fit overhead or fit under your seat without sticking out inordinately.  I've never seen problems even with backpack (personal item) + carry-on (overhead, fitting strictly within size limits and without requiring lots of shoving to get it to pretend to fit) + poster tube, except on really small regional airplanes with desperately tiny overhead bin space.
Also, if the poster tube doesn't fit in the overhead luggage--it nearly always does--they'll be able to check it at the door to the airplane, just like they do with other overly large and slightly fragile items like strollers.
And, finally, almost everywhere you will present has its own poster printing facilities within a few miles.  Any institution of respectable size will have their own, and any city of respectable size--and you're rarely far from one in the EU--will have a copy store of some sort at which you can print at poster size.
So just take the item with you as carry on, and in the extraordinarily unlikely event that something goes wrong and the poster is destroyed, get it printed at your destination.  (If you are extra-paranoid, you can get a somewhat tougher plastic poster tube instead of the cardboard ones--bearing in mind that I have yet to see a cardboard one get so crushed that the poster was significantly damaged.)

If the flight attendants are nice, sometimes they will put the poster roll in the jacket closet that the first class fliers use, and then the flight attendant will give it back to you at the end of the flight.

Format your poster so it can be printed as three strips, either vertical or horizontal. Roll them up in a small poster tube that is short enought to fit in your luggage.

I have thought about this a couple of times, but have never tried it. I have never seen a poster at a conference that is made up of multiple strips.

+1, I have done this successfully. The cuts were scarcely noticeable once the poster was re-assembled. It does help that my posters tend to follow rather an unimaginative, column-based layout :).


text:
Is downloading articles from SciHub legal in some jurisdictions?
I read this comment:

The statement at the very beginning ("Downloading articles from SciHub is illegal.") seems problematic. This likely depends on where you are. Nick 2 days ago

This makes me wonder: is downloading articles from SciHub legal in some jurisdictions?
Assume that we are referring to paywalled articles that are not in the public domain or under some permissive license.

This might make more sense at Law.SE, together with some information for non-academics about what SciHub is. Then again, I don't know whether "is X legal in some jusrisdictions" is well received there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention lists the countries that are not signatories.

"Sin is geographical." (Bertrand Russel)

@Michael_1812 I disagree, putting scientific research behind paywalled is a sin any location.

@FranckDernoncourt  Touché :)

I can't read the original language to confirm, but it's possible that the bill discussed here also legalizes downloading scientific articles in Belarus.
The bill, passed in January 2023, is named "On the limitation of exclusive rights to objects of intellectual property"; allegedly it makes it legal to commit piracy against IP held by actors in foreign "unfriendly nations".

It seems to be legal in Switzerland, for instance. I asked the same question in the past, after a similar thread.


text:
Has any researcher been sued for using Sci-Hub data in their research?
I read on Consequences of publishing work using text from millions of Sci-Hub articles:

make no mistake: if you plan on doing something this blatantly illegal, and publishing a paper about it, then litigation is coming your way. There have been high profile cases about people breaking copyright in similar ways, and publishers have enough legal experts to drag you through courts for years. Stephan Kolassa

Has any researcher been sued for using Sci-Hub data in their research? Assume we are talking about paywalled articles that the Sci-Hub dataset makes available for free.
By using Sci-Hub data in their research I mean using a significant  numbers (let's say millions) of articles for research purpose such as  text mining or training word embeddings, not just downloading a few articles (the latter is addressed in this question).

Is it even possible to download millions of articles from Sci-Hub? I assume the website will be rate-limited. They pay for bandwidth, too.

@FedericoPoloni The OP of the linked question mentions having found a torrent option to download the articles, which wouldn't be subject to (traditional) rate limiting, only the availability of peers seeding the data. Related OpenData thread.

Perhaps related ... I see that a group of authors is suing some AI companies for using the authors' copyrighted texts to train an AI.

The sci-hub project has long used multiple mirror website as had the sci-hub affiliate project, LibraryGenesis. Both projects also make their database indexes and database contents available for torrent access. When I last looked at the Library Genesis metadata, it seemed that the entire library (including multiple duplicates) exceeded 100 terabytes. The list of unique Sci-Hub DOIs exceeds 2 gigabytes.

Your question is surprisingly difficult to answer. Why? Because of what it means, in different jurisdictions, to "sue" someone. If, for example, a researcher were to download articles from Sci Hub and were later to receive a threat of legal action from a publisher, it is likely that the matter would be settled, not only "out-of-court", but without a writ ever being issued  (or, in the United States, a complaint being filed and a summons issued) . Even were a writ to be issued, there are many jurisdictions in which such writs are difficult to find or search.  Taken together, these possibilities probably put a lot of potentially relevant information beyond reach.
Despite those limitations, I took the step of looking at the website of the World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII) and searched for both scihub and sci-hub (hyphenated) and found no instances of any case in which a researcher was being sued. Likewise I searched each of the affiliated websites listed at the end of the WorldLII website (including AustLII, CanLII, etc) and found no relevant case. I did not search for cases in the world's most litigious country because I could find no free-access database. On the other hand, I was amused to find a New Zealand tribunal case involving a chiropractor in which a a direct link is given to an article on Sci Hub.

There don't appear to be any instances in which researchers have been sued for using Sci-Hub data in such a manner. I suspect this is not because publishers are uninterested in suing researchers who do this, but because most researchers are going to avoid admitting to using Sci-Hub data in that manner, especially when they can pre-train on one of the general text corpora and then fine-tune on all articles from PubMed for domain specificity - legally.

I believe it is very difficult (or perhaps impossible?) to track individuals and determine whether they are using Sci-Hub. I think even your institution may not interfere with your data traffic unless public authorities request it. I am unsure if, for a researcher outside the U.S., any court could make such a decision.
Sometimes, when you download an article, it provides some data about the server that Sci-Hub uses for the download. If a researcher publicly uses a downloaded article, and if it's possible to prove that this article was obtained through Sci-Hub using the provided information, that person might face consequences. In the end, I think collecting evidence on this would be quite challenging, and it could turn out to be costly for those looking to take legal action against researchers using Sci-Hub.


text:
When organizing a conference on Underline.io, what determines if the videos will be later accessible for free to anyone?
https://underline.io/ is a video platform giving access to lectures from conferences. This is not a spam, I have no affiliations with them.
Some academic conferences such as AAAI 2023 and ACL 2023 use Underline.io to host their videos. I see that some videos are accessible for free to anyone, and some videos are not accessible for free to anyone (one needs to pay to access them).
When organizing a conference on Underline.io, what determines if the videos will be later accessible for free to anyone?

Example of a video  accessible for free to anyone: https://underline.io/lecture/77209-crosssum-beyond-english-centric-cross-lingual-summarization-for-1-500-language-pairs
Examples of a video that is not accessible for free to anyone (one needs to pay to access it): https://underline.io/lecture/69312-robustloc-robust-camera-pose-regression-in-challenging-driving-environments

https://underline.io/lecture/41697-demystifying-open-access:

I am still interested in this question.

Any idea is welcome.


text:
How to indicate shifting research interests on a CV or a website?
My research interests are shifting, due to papers I read and talks or conferences I attend (and also due to change of tastes).
However, I don't know how to communicate it on my CV or my website.
One the one hand, I am eager to move into new fields, and I am eager to learn more (and they are my first preference, when it comes to the further research).
On the other, neither I offer "expertise" in them nor I have a collection of relevant publications (at best 1-2 somehow related papers).
So, should the new interests be listed in "Research interests" as:

the first ones,
the last ones,
other (don't list them, or do sth else)?

Of course in longer research statements it is easier to explicitly state what one is doing and where the interest are going.
If it is relevant, I am a PhD student.

Why the need to advertise the new interests to the world? You can always be interested in new fields without listing them.

@DaveClarke First, when applying for schools or workshop. Second, to say "hey, you can talk to me about X".

You can/should tailor your CV for each specific application. If you are applying for something in, say, quantum optics, it might give the impression that you are not focussed if you are equally interested in, say, mathematical modelling in psychology. That said, I used to put loads of diverse things on my CV when I was a boy.

@DaveClarke When sending, I do tailor them. And dropping the new/extra interest is simple. However, applying to a new field is the difficult part. If I drop interests to which 80% of my previous work (and, say 60% of my current work) is related, it may both sound strange and do not show my skills and knowledge.

Certainly don't drop things that you have a strong track record in. I guess you need to explain when you get to the interview stage or in a cover letter that you were working in one area, but have switched to another.

As suggested in the comments above, the answer will depend on whom you are targeting.

If you are a professor targeting graduate students in a new field, I would just list the new field as an interest on your webpage, with links to your few papers. It should be enough to indicate to potential graduate students that if they have an interest in this field you would be more than happy to work with them.
If you are a professor targeting grant agencies, then just write grants targeted at whatever field you're interested in. Note that, if you have a poor publication record in the field of interest, it may be a good idea to find a strong collaborator or co-PI (if applicable in your field) to boost the likelihood of acceptance.
If you are a post-doc looking for new positions, I think it's pretty widely accepted that your interests will and should be changing. I would indicate it explicitly on your CV in your objective statement (assuming you have one) that you're interested in branching out, and again in the cover letter. Regarding your previous research, just list it under "experience"; the reader will understand based on your resume, cover letter, and the fact you're applying to jobs in different fields that this was intentional. As you stated, there is a not-insignificant chance that your lack of publications in the new field will negatively impact your application.
If you're a student, then you barely have research interests; you just have the research you've worked on for 2+ years, which you did so you could earn a PhD. Your colleagues will recognize that you're still familiarizing yourself with the field. Unless the shift is so substantial that none of your previous expertise would be useful, I wouldn't even bother to mention shifting interests; it's healthy and expected.

CVs usually have a line for research interests, and you can put whatever you want there. Similarly for a website. But if you're in a position to be evaluated based on your CV, be careful - you could be asked about these interests and you should have something to say.
Ultimately, if you're really interested in an area you'll start publishing in it and that will then be reflected in your publication list.

Surely, I can say a lot of stuff when it comes to each interests. When it comes to the actual publishing (or even before - the actual research), for me it's the egg and the chicken problem (little stuff done -> few opportunities / contacts -> ...).

I guess my point is that we eventually realize that a person is much more than their CV (in terms of what they know). So there's no harm placing a few signifiers. But more than that seems difficult to justify without evidence.

I find that few of my research opportunities come from what I put on my CV or website.  I think much more they come through my personal network.  If I'm invited to speak in a conference session, it's usually because the organizers know me, know my work, or (occasionally) know my PhD adviser (even though I finished more than 5 years ago).  When I'm asked to referee a paper, it's often because my work is cited in the paper.  One time I decided to go to a workshop in an area where I had not worked much.  Not long after I committed to the workshop, one of the organizers asked me to referee a paper on that topic.
All of that is to say, that I don't think what I list on my CV among my "research interests" contributes much to my research opportunities.  So, if you want to generate more opportunities, what should you do?  Go to conferences.  If you have work to talk about, great.  If not, go to sessions on the areas you want to move into.  Ask good questions.  Talk with the people you meet there about possible research and workshops, or what's the next big thing in the area.

I think most people just use my website to get copies of my papers (or possibly my slides).  Some of my students also use it to find links to the course webpage.


text:
How do I request that previously taken classes be counted toward my current program?
I'm in need of some advice. I am a nontraditional student coming back to school for a degree in nursing. Before I initially left school I only had 2 prerequisites that I still needed to fill. Now I'm being told that I have 4 because I have to retake A&P 1 and 2 with cadavers.
I previously obtained B's in both sections. Is there a proper way to approach the chair or coordinator to a program and respectfully ask for the two classes I've already taken to be reconsidered as fulfillment for the A&P they want me to take now? The material is basically the same and quite frankly I would like to avoid repeating something I've already done well in so that I can move on faster and spend my money taking classes I have not had yet. This feels like a step back.

Were you given a reason why these are not counted now?

You've answered your own question with the [tag:advisor] tag - talk to your academic advisor.  They can tell you how the department typically handles such cases, explain the reasoning, look at the rest of your record, and will typically be the one to approve an exception if they believe it is warranted.  They can also tell you how to petition for an exception if you disagree.

Thank you. I did sit down with an academic advisor before registering for my classes. She wouldn't elaborate on the reasoning accept to say that the material was different. Looking through the material they are using to teach now it all looks the same as what I previously took.

Sounds like the "advisor" you spoke to just has a standard list of excuses to read from : "the material is different"... It may be worthwhile speaking to one of the lecturers who teaches the subject for their input - I had to do this as the "advisor" I spoke to said I had to do a 4-week course at the end of my first semester (welding etc) and I said I knew how to weld... Spoke to the lecturer and within 5 minutes I was exempt... And., yes, I was a "non-traditional" . ie mature student...

No reason was given beyond time limit. The material hasn't changed.

Now I'm being told that I have 4 because I have to retake A&P 1 and 2 with cadavers.

While I find blanket condemnations of the passive voice to be misguided, this is a case where such an objection is well-founded. Who told you you have to retake them?
There are two main options. One is to go the professor in charge of the course. Go to office hours, and tell them about the courses you previously took. If you took the courses. Ask them what sort of discretion they have as far as granting course credit. For instance, Sometimes a professor can grant credit based on a course challenge exam. If they don't have discretion, ask them who does.
The other option is to talk with the chair of the department. Seeing them in person would probably be be best, but if they don't have office hours or other opportunities to see them, you can email them. As far as how to "respectfully" ask: really, the main thing is just to present it as inquiry rather than a request, and definitely try to avoid giving the impression that you feel entitled to an affirmative response. Showing a willingness for a compromise, such as taking the final exam for the course in lieu of taking the whole course, rather than expecting to have the requirement completely waived, also helps.

Okay so I did go and speak to the head of the nursing program. She told me that I could drop the A&P I'm currently in and take the exam that would allow me to bypass retaking A&P parts 1 and 2. Hopefully I do well enough. I appreciate the advice I was given here.


text:
Books/resources for new faculty
I recently accepted a TT asst prof position in computer science at an elite SLAC in the US.
During my job search I perused Karen Kelsky's book "The Professor is In", and I found it very valuable, especially to reflect about different aspects of the job search process that I hadn't considered.
I'm now looking for a similar resource for new faculty members.
Here's what I found (but haven't bought yet):

Robert Boice, Advice for New Faculty Members, 2000
Russell James, Tenure hacks: The 12 secrets of making tenure, 2014

Does anyone have any comment/review about these books, or advice about any other written resource?
Thank you.

Have you looked at https://github.com/jeanqasaur/against-junior-faculty-stress -- **Against Junior Faculty Stress Culture
A reading list.**? (Oh, and congrats!)

I got curious and looked up James's book on Amazon. The front cover describes the book as "A brutally Machiavellian guidebook", and one of the chapters is titled "Suck at teaching". Especially at a SLAC, let me recommend that you not follow his advice.

@Anonymous: The book is also written from a humanities viewpoint. It really doesn't apply well to academics in STEM fields.

@Clément: make it an answer and I'll accept it. Thanks.

This useful guide, called Against Junior Faculty Stress Culture recommends the following resources:

The Art of Saying "No", Kerry Ann Rocquemore, National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity, date unknown.
The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life, Radhika Nagpal (Harvard Computer Science), Scientific American, July 2013.
On Avoiding Stress Culture, Jean Yang (Carnegie Mellon Computer Science), personal blog, September 2016.
Shriram Krishnamurthi's Personal Manifesto, Shriram Krishnamurthi (Brown Computer Science), Google+, September 2016.
The Best Way to Not Get Tenure, Geoffrey Challen (University at Buffalo), personal blog, October 2016
Why I Don’t Tell Trainees How Many Hours I Work as a Tenure-Track Faculty Member and Advice on How to Be an Effective PhD Researcher, Sherri Rose, personal blog, June 2016 and August 2015
You Do Not Need to Work 80 Hours a Week to Succeed in Academia, Megan Duffy, personal blog, February 2014
How to Live in Paradise: A Guide for New and Disgruntled Professors, David Evans (University of Virginia Computer Science), personal blog, 2015.
How I (sometimes) achieve academic work life balance, Andy J. Ko (University of Washington iSchool), Medium, 2017.

It is on github, so don't hesitate to expand it by making pull requests!

On the teaching side, I wish that I'd read at the start of my career:

Ambrose, et. al., How Learning Works
Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

And specifically for math instructors:

Krantz, How to Teach Mathematics

Thanks, I'll definitively look at these as well.