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Can an improvement to an existing implementation be publishable?
My master thesis is an improvement of a code. I gave this code about one year and half ago from the author of the one paper.
After working on his code, I improve the result. but my implementation is not a lot. My added part to his code is less than 300 lines.
The base paper was published on 2013 in the journal with impact factor 2 .
My question is "improvements works" have the ability to send to a journal? Or when you can send your work to journal which you should develop the whole things.
By the way the issue which I am working on is one of the new standard.

What did your advisor say when you asked him this question?

@ff524 he wants to send our work to journal.

Any reason you don't trust his judgment, and felt the need to ask us?

@ff524 but one of our phd student told me it is hard to send "improvements" to a jouranl

update after the first answer: because the topic is new our idea is really help the field.

For purposes of publishability, it doesn't really matter whether your implementation was built from scratch or from an existing codebase, or how many new lines of code it required.
What matters is whether your results contribute some new knowledge to the field....
... which we can't evaluate for you here. You need to read the literature and the previous work, and identify what you're contributing that's new. (It's not measured in lines of code.)

I am really sure about our idea. But am I should bold our idea on the paper and describe that more. is this criteria OK? based your answer. because I want to start writing the paper.

@alex I don't know anything about the merits of your idea; you need to talk to your advisor about that. Your question was about whether basing an implementation on an existing codebase makes it unpublishable, and my answer is that it doesn't.

@alex You may as well start writing it anyway. Whatever work you do on it will be useful for your thesis.

Publishable? Yes. Everything is publishable, as long as it's original work and you can find a journal that thinks it's interesting enough. Publishable in a good journal? We've no idea: ask your peers in your field.  Ask your advisor: it's what s/he is there for!


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European Ph.D. student salary range web site
Is there any web site that shows average Ph.D. student salaries in European countries, and also information about living cost and so on?
update: what about France and Germany?

Do you mean the salary someone who has a PhD gets? Do you mean the salary in industry? What field are you referring to? Why would living cost be any different for someone with a PhD than for someone without? As it stands, your question could benefit from some clarification.

I mean PhD student. On computer engineering(computer networks)

For comparing living costs (per city), I recommend a lot: http://www.numbeo.com/common/. For expected salaries - it may vary a lot, even within an institute. (But it would be nice to have data somewhere.)

@PiotrMigdal I agree that it would be nice to have the data somewhere, but letting random people post dozens of answers to an AC.SE question is not the way to collect the data.

@yo' Perhaps this can be converted to a community wiki?

@jakebeal I'm personally against this -- providing biased data without any standard for obtaining them,

Living costs are off-topic; the salary info is on-topic.

See meta http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1694/possible-cw-question/1695#1695 about if this should be CE

Partial answer;
In the Netherlands you have a couple of different possibilities when it comes to PhDs. You can be a student (and thus have to pay), a payed phd (who also has teaching obligations), and an external PhD (who, depending on the professor, might have to pay).
The paid PhDs salary per month vary from 2,125 euro in the first year to 2,717 euro (in the fourth year, which should be the last year) according to the VSNU (look at the P column). There is also a 13th month and vacation money. Of course tax and social premiums still has to be deducted to get to the salary you get on your account.

The amounts posted by Maarten are correct, but if you are a foreigner doing a PhD in the Netherlands you can get some substantial tax deductions (for all the details see http://www.expatax.nl/30ruling.php). Just to give you an idea, the 2015 net salary starts near 1600 the 1st year and reaches 1950 the 4th year. With the 30% rule, you start at 1850 the 1st year and get 2280 during the 4th year.

Do you pay the student fees from it? If yes, how much?

@alezok would you give a clearer idea about the 30%rule. a foreign student would not have to give the 30%tax or what is it exactly. it's still not clear.

@MycrofD It means that you pay taxes only on 70% of your salary, the 30% you get is tax-free. Details are explained in the link in my previous comment!

In Germany, PhD work contracts are typically under the TVL group "E 13" union contracts. Fresh PhD students start in stage 1, but if you have relevant work experience, starting in stage 2 or 3 is possible as well.
Usually, PhD contracts are part time, either 50 % or 65 %. In some occasions the PhD students are not paid for the PhD work, but explicitly for the teaching they do ("PhD is your private fun"), occasionally also only by HiWi contracts (much less hourly wage).
A 50 % contract in E13 stage 1 yields approximately  1175 €/month net after taxes and social insurance (health insurances, unemployment insurance, pension fund contribution) have been paid. For more details, the linked page has a calculator that takes into acount further details.
If you are not paid by a work contract but by a scholarship, things are very different: firstly, scholarships can vary widely by the amount they pay and the additional conditions. Secondy, scholarships are not work contracts. Which means that you have to pay e.g. full health insurance yourself, and no pension payments are done. On the other hand, there is no income tax on scholarships, nor do they count for the tax progression (=> if you earn additional money e.g. for teaching, that will practically have no/very low income tax as well because of the income tax free limit).
As for how far that money gets you, this varies hugely between regions. E.g. Munich or Frankfurt are very expensive as housing costs are very expensive (shared flat > 25 €/m²), wheras other cities such as Leipzig are much cheaper to live in (maybe 10 €/m² for shared flat), have a look e.g. at WG-gesucht to get an idea of housing costs. Basic food stuff (= buying ingredients and cooking yourself) is cheap in Germany.
It is typically up to you whether you want to sign up as a university student when doing a PhD. People often decide this by comparing the semester fees with the advantages that come with the student ID such as public transport ticket or the lower mensa prices.

The "percentage" of a TV-L that is awarded varies strongly by discipline. In CS and engineering, for instance, it is almost unheard of to offer less than 100% of a TV-L position.

It's not just "unheard of", there are official (though not binding) guidelines from DFG (in German only, sorry): http://www.dfg.de/formulare/55_02/55_02_de.pdf. Salary budgets in DFG grant applications should take that into account.
http://www.dfg.de/foerderung/grundlagen_rahmenbedingungen/rechtliche_aspekte/verguetung/leitlinien_bezahlung_promovierenden/index.html

New partial answer : in Sweden it is pretty much like for the Nederland. The rules are the same but you're paid around 24 000 krona (around 2400€) a month. You then have to deduct the tax which depend on where you live. No extra taxes but I'm from the EU and it might be different if you're from outside the eu. The salary is based on the cost of living.
You have teaching obligation and are supposed to spend 20% of your time on work for the university (as in not on research).
You sign a contact with the university. So you're employed and you have all the advantages of a normal employee: health insurance and 25 days of holidays, for example. Security insurance might be only on campus.
For the savings, it depend on where you live and the way you live but you definitely can save some ;).

Please let us know the source URL. In other words, where did you get the info "you're paid around 24 000 krona" ?

I know it from my own PhD in Sweden and my friend's one. ;)

Is it before taxing or after taxing? Does it include social security/health insurance? Do you have to pay some extra taxes? Do you pay the student fees from it?

is that enough or you can save some money? (In case of student life and single )

KTH is (as far as I know) one of the more generous Swedish universities when it comes to PhD student salaries, and you can find the current salaries here: http://www.csc.kth.se/student/doktorandrad/doktorandstegen/ . Entry level is around 26K SEK/month, and then it increases each year so that you are paid around 31K SEK/Month the last year. That is before taxes. We have universal healthcare, so you don't need health insurance. After taxes you get around 20K-23K SEK/month, which is enough to live comfortably. We do not have fees, other than a small sum paid to the student union (150 SEK/year).

Another partial answer. In Italy there are two categories of PhD students: those who get a scholarship from the university or a government institution, and those who are funded by an industry or a firm (not many, actually).
For the first category, the scholarships are of about €1000-1200 per month, free of tax, and the students do not have to pay any yearly fee for the enrollment. For the second category, the salary depends on the funder, but it is probably of the same order of magnitude. In this latter case, however, students have to pay a yearly fee (around €1000-2000) to the school.
PhD students can have extra income from teaching assistantship or external contracts. The law does not limit the amount of extra income, but schools can set local limits. In any case, extra activity which involves a student for a significant amount of hours should be approved by the PhD program board and by the student's advisor(s).

Does it include social security/health insurance? Do you have to pay some extra taxes?

@yo': if you are an Italian citizen, you don't have to pay for social security, it's granted by the State. Foreigner students have to pay a small yearly tax, about €400, I've been told.

This is what I found with a simple Google search: The average PhD Student salary is US$28,928. This comes to about €26,322. The estimates are based on 1,086 salaries submitted anonymously to the Glassdoor website by PhD Student employees. Needless to say it will vary based on the area of research, location and University/Institution. It closely matches to my PhD salary though. I looked up the list and it featured entries from US, UK and Nordic countries.

Was there any data on Europe, which is what the OP asked for?

Could you please add a somewhat more specific source than "according to Google"? Maybe also a link?

@StephanKolassa Glassdoor is the specific source I mentioned in my answer.

Thanks. So "according to Google" does not seem to be helpful. Could you please edit your answer to point to a specific Glassdoor query? (If you want to emphasize that this can be found through a simple Google search, you can always add that.)

@StephanKolassa Thanks, I made an edit to my answer.

@jakebeal the Glassdoor link I looked up had a list of salaries from UK, Nordic countries and US.

@Ketan Can you please add that information to the answer?  Your original answer claimed it was just from the US

I made 1500 a month in Ireland (tax exempted). In Finland PhD students get 2400 a month but they pay tax (I'm guessing between 15 and 20%). All in Euro. As a side note, you can afford more with the Irish salary.

@Miguel true. PhD student salaries, like salaries in any other fields will vary greatly based on factors such as region, university, area of research, and more.

In the UK PhD salaries vary a bit by location but they are around 1000£ per month. It counts as a bursary and is thus tax exempt. The living costs vary drastically depending on where you live but generally it is enough to get by and maybe even safe some money. The rule of thumb is the further south you live the more expensive. Keep in mind that as taxes are quite high in the UK there are plenty of people working full time jobs that in the end will have less than that to live up on.
Switzerland, has a slightly wired system. The PhD salaries vary by field, fields in which it is hard to find anyone interested in pursuing an academic career will be paid much better then others. Most of my friends are paid around 3600Fr per month. Which would be seen as a low income in Switzerland but it is perfectly fine to live up on. One of my fiends has 2400Fr, you can just about live on that if you must but it will be tough. All incomes are taxed in Switzerland, no matter how low but taxes on low incomes are not high.

Does it include social security/health insurance? Do you have to pay some extra taxes? Do you pay the student fees from it?

@yo' In the UK, funding will provide both for the university fees and your stipend. PhD stipends are also exempt from taxes and social security. The UK has a national health system which is taxpayer funded, but if you are coming from outside the EU you will need to pay a newly instituted £150 per year surcharge to access the NHS.

I don't know about PhD students but I've seen postdoc jobs advertised with a "London allowance", some sort of compensation on top of official salaries to make up for extra living costs in London compared to the rest of the country. I wonder if this is commonplace.

@MJeffryes The NHS pretty clearly says students are exempt from charge. Do you have a link about this new surcharge. In another comment you said it was £200. I am a US expat living and working in the UK and have neither heard about this surcharge (although in general I ignore most of the news) nor been charged.

@StrongBad That guidance is sort of correct. The charge is flat, not matter how much treatment you require. The surcharge has only very recently been introduced (beginning of the month). It is £200 unless you are a student in which case it is £150. This is the government guidance on it. Since you already have a visa this doesn't affect you, but when you renew you will likely have to pay.

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Why does research cost so much money?
I have been dragged into an argument with someone who can't understand why millions are being raised to fund ALS research (that's the "ice bucket challenge", love it or hate it). He doesn't get why research costs so much money because - and I genuinely quote - "it only takes time and effort".
My first instinct was to say "Are you being serious or just trying to wind me up?". But then I realized that maybe from an outsider's perspective, this might actually be difficult to understand.
So I am asking for points to make when explaining the cost of research to lay people, and how to articulate these points in a way they can identify with them.

My first instinct was to say "Are you being serious or just trying to wind me up?". But then I realized that maybe from an outsider's perspective, this might actually be difficult to understand. - You are a better person than me.

Maybe it's just my small econ background, but the cited statement sounds to me like "It only costs a lot of money, why does it cost a lot of money?". I would not be able to carry on the conversation after that.

@xLeitix: actually I'd see that more like, "it only costs money, why does it cost so much money". If a math researcher spent millions on pencils you'd want to know how they managed it. So quantify the time and effort and the number of people (including suppliers) who slice those millions of research dollars up amongst themselves. When I worked for a company of 100 people it made perfect sense that it was spending over $1m a month on that time and effort. I suspect some people just mistakenly feel that "a million" is a huge number not easily reached by multiplication of regular numbers ;-)

Ask him how much does a doctor of his favorite specialty makes, in his opinion. Then ask him how much would it cost to fund a dozen such doctors for a couple years - that's a simple multiplication that results in multiple millions easily.

@Peteris It is actually even worse than that, only about 50% of the cost of employment is salary, the rest is insurance, offices, support staff, equipment, etc...

I would say - "you're nearly right - the time and effort it takes is quantified by the 'so much money' it costs, less the amount that the necessary equipment costs"

It's rather amusing to see academics trying to explain to people that nice things cost money. Here's a hint, us guys in the private sector have figured that one out (We thought you guys hadn't). He must have an "outsider's perspective" of reality.

There is nothing stopping your friend from doing research. It's just his time and effort, after all. However he will have a hard time doing much research without proper education, a salary, helpers and equipment; and generally those cost money. But he could, right now, start working for free. He could even find some pencils and paper for free, and can start doing every calculation by hand.

I believe that the only thing keeping me from NBA level play is time and effort.  NBA players have coaches and trainers, but that is just more time and effort.  Basketballs don't cost that much.  Why is basketball so expensive?

Money = (Time X Effort) -- Of course, since the solution to ALS is unknown and the precise method of arriving at the solution is unknown, both "Time" and "Effort" are indeterminate. But in short, that's what "Money" really is.

I have a feeling that that wasn't the intended question. I think maybe the person meant to ask if there are research costs besides paying the researchers for their time and effort e.g. laboratories, equipment, etc...?

"So I am asking for points to make [...] in a way that they can identify with them." Try answering this question: why does research obtain so few results with so much money? (Just playing Devil advocate here)

Actually he might be right. Scientists "extort" money from the general public. For research. Something they would be doing anyway. And they want to be paid top salaries without any guarantee of success.

@Robert Many (most?) lawyers expect to be paid even if they lose the case, and doctors expect to be paid even if their patient dies. One would presumably hire an academic who seems capable of doing good research based on previous work the same way he or she would hire a doctor or lawyer based on their track record. (Come to think of it, I can't think of any "top salary" earners who guarantee success...)

Well, it WOULD only take time and effort, if humanity would forgo the notions of material wealth, ego, being better than the next guy..and do things for the simple reason that they need to or should be done....greed/envy constantly muck everything up.  That's about as simple a way to put it as I think I can get it

The person asking the question reminds me quite strongly of someone I know.  In fact, she would phrase it exactly like that, so...  Are you someone I know?  :P

it only takes time and effort

I think the answer to the question is already there. It takes time and effort. So it means it takes at least the money to pay the people for a long time. And effort means you need a lot of people.
More precisely, for medical research, reagents, animal model, clinical test are really expensive. Many different drugs need to be developed to have only one working in the end. Finally when a drug seems promising, you have to do year-long clinical tests, just to ensure patients safety.
So time and effort == lot of money

And add to that that a lot of research turns out to be unusable in the medical field: Too extreme side effects, works in pigs, not in humans, chemically unstable, whatever. All those failed projects have to be funded as well by the successful projects.

Time and effort of top people with top education (professors, phds, etc). It is not like everybody can do a research and development.

And those people and that equipment has to be housed somewhere, so you need a building, probably a big one, with electricity, heating, air conditioning, office equipment, a parking lot (and/or bus stop or train station), etc. etc.

This is why companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on semi-custom-made software.  All those hundreds of thousands of dollars are still a lot cheaper than the mammoth cost of consistent human labor.

This isn't correct. If you don't have crucial (and expensive) equipment or materials, some research may be virtually impossible regardless of time or effort. You can't walk to the moon.

I like this answer. Time being the thing that has money attached to it and effort being the multiplier. So, 1k people in a small research lab for 1 year at an average of 100k each ends up being 100million. But don't forget about the equipment, from computers and chairs to buildings and custom tools.

@Superbest With unlimited time and effort you could acquire rocket fuel for free.  It is underground.  You just got to dig deep enough, you will find it.  Apply some more time and effort to refine it.  I am sure that everything else needed for a trip to the moon can be provisioned for free in a similar manner.

@emory Mortal humans do not have unlimited time.

@Superbest That's exactly his point. We don't have the time to do everything ourselves, so we use money instead.

People's salaries cost money. Given the overheads of running a business or university, plus the cost of fringe benefits like retirement and health insurance, you can basically double someone's salary to get the full cost of employing them (whether the number is directly charged or comes in through a national healthcare/retirement scheme). If their talent's are in demand, then companies may bid up salaries in order to attract them away from universities in order to try to make a profit on their labors.
STEM talents are in demand.
Therfore, each PhDed person who works on a project costs somewhere between $150,000 and $400,000 (salary is half that, recall) in a broad range of fields relevant to solving problems like ALS or cancer or other diseases.
Research is hard. Most drugs don't pan out, so you need lots of people trying lots of different ones in order to develop some that do work.
Mathematics is cheaper to pursue. That can literally be one person reading and scribbling and talking to colleagues until she has a breakthrough. These folks often get paid primarily to teach, but if they're willing to work on algorithms for companies or the government, then they are worth a lot, so salaries also get bid up.

As a mathematician, I must say that your last sentence is a little misleading.  It's not really the case that a mathematician is "paid primarily to teach" any more than her colleagues in other fields; at R1 universities, a tenure-track mathematician who only teaches and does not publish papers will not keep her salary for long.  Also, mathematicians do have research expenses, though typically much smaller than experimental sciences: usually hiring grad students and postdocs, and travel to conferences (falls under "talking to colleagues").  But +1 anyway.

There is an old joke. Mathematicians are cheap: they only need paper, a pencil and an eraser. Philosophers are even cheaper: they don't need the eraser... runs away before the philosophers come...

@StephanKolassa: they get through a lot more pencils though.

@NateEldredge, yeah, that was a bit tongue-in-cheek. Unless you're building a large instrument (supercomputer, particle collider, fMRI magnet, etc), though, the costs are primarily human, and the height of human costs in academia is primarily driven by the market for the skills.

@Bill: I must say that I find myself unamused by the "mathematicians are primarily paid to teach" comment.  Some issues here: (i) This is manifestly false much of the time.  For instance, as a mathematician at a state university, I have officially mandated percentages of teaching and research; research is more than half.  If you wanted to pay someone primarily to teach, you probably wouldn't hire me.  (ii) A lot of people believe this, including students and government officials.  (iii) These people's false beliefs have negative consequences.

"STEM talents are in demand" - they are, but in medical research, the job market structure doesn't really tempt the talents to go and do drug discovery. See for example http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/08/11/medchem_and_trucking_together_at_last.php and http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/07/15/the_prospects_of_an_academic_job.php.

Each PI might make that 75k+ number.  Lots of postdocs work for $40k or thereabouts for 3-5 years in addition to those :)

@Joe, agreed, though it depends on the field and the country. At my institution, PIs in STEM are near $100k and postdocs between $60k and $70k.

Given the question was about ALS research, I thought medical/immunological numbers might be most relevant.  NIH has a schedule for postdocs here, which tends to guide the funding levels of all but the very top postdoctoral fellows in the NIH-related fields; that starts at 40k for a first year postdoc and maxes out at 55k.  This is not necessarily applicable for MD/PhDs, who likely will receive a higher salary from the medical side (but have some other non-research duties).

The comment on maths is unbelievably misleading! (1) We need to meet. We do need to meet. We do need to meet a lot. France is becoming a leading country in maths, mostly because they make a lot of meetings. Yes, it's cheaper to pay 200 plane tickets and 1000 nights in a hotel, but it means a lot of expenses. And the truth is, people who don't travel (and neither their colleagues do) are rarely successful.

@tohecz this could be a chicken-and-egg problem: people who are not successful often lack the funding for frequent travels. There is correlation, but the causation could be the other way round.

@FedericoPoloni Still, it shows that research takes money. And yes, you have this unstability: Good money => good results => higher ranking => bigger chance of funding => more money. Versus: Losing money for 2 years => worse results => lower ranking => lower chance of funding => even less money. (The part "money => results" has to be taken with a big caution. Well, all of it has to be taken not too literally.) And with that you have: High ranking and high money => better choice of new members.

But my focus for on the fact that in France, it is standard to give mathematicians lots of money to travel and meet. This is not the case in some other countries (I better don't name here, I hope nobody minds).

@tohecz, define "a lot". The vast majority of the costs we're talking about here are salaries for summer time for professors, full-time researchers, and graduate students. Typical grants have hundreds of thousands in them for salary and tuition support, and maybe $5000 maximum for travel. Unless the French are giving hundreds of thousands of Euros for travel costs, this is not the majority of research cost in any discipline.

I'm an experimenter, so in addition to the cost of some highly trained people's salaries and benefits and the cost of keeping the lights on and the white boards cleaned there is equipment and consumables.
Some of the equipment is precision kit. Lots of it are produced in small runs because only a few hundred sites in the whole world need that kind of stuff, so there is no economies of scale. Some of the consumables are pretty exotic and cost a whole heck of a lot.
All of this applies perfectly well to the kind of research mentioned in the question, plus they have to deal with human subjects concerns and that doesn't come cheap either.

And just because I like to talk about my work...
Because I'm in big science, when it come time to stop tinkering around with prototypes and testbeds and get really serious we usually build a one-of-a-kind multi-ton detector with thousands or tens of thousands of instrumented channels. Giga-bytes per day data streams, massive computing infrastructure, hundreds of salaries and travel money.
The question isn't "Why does it cost so much?" but "How do you expect us to get it done with so little?". Then we go ahead and try because we're happy to have the chance to do it, even on a "shoestring".

My research was in robotics and related fields. When one humanoid robot your are working on costs between 100k - 300k(and that's actually pretty cheap) and you're trying to get it to do cutting edge things like, I dunno, open doors. Of course it's expensive. Cutting edge means things break sometimes, we had issues with the wrist motors burning up before engineers at the company discovered that the allowed limit and the actual limits were off by a tiny amount. That was 10k a repair!

I think it depends totally on the area of study.
Like everybody mentioned already, only the human costs are already relatively high, and equipment for bio sciences is crazy expensive as well.
Let's just make some estimates.
An average neuroscience lab has at least one EEG machine, which for those levels cost between 30 and 70 thousand bucks. You need good computers, which usually range from 1500 to 2500 USD, at least one for each member, in a 5 person group. That is already ~100,000 USD only in basic equipment.
You sometimes need to pay for your space in some universities, like a rent, having access to live animals to do experiments also costs about 2000 bucks per experiment for small animals, larger animals have all sorts of extra costs, I do not know, but having a chimpanzee should be costing a lab well over half a million bucks/ year to maintain and do experiments.
Want an MRA to do functional scanning of the brain, first get a University that has one, also crazy expensive, then pay the rent.
Conferences plus travel expenses is another sizeable chunk.
Thanks to the ripoff that Academic publishing is, Universities pay hefty sums of money to get access to research journals.
All of these costs are not even taking into account salaries for Professors, PostDocs, Grad Students, etc

'Universities pay hefty sums of money to get access to research journals'. Plus now, the money is spent twice because authors pay to get their stuff published. Naturally, they tend to publish more papers that way, so the number of papers, and thus the cost is skyrocketing.

This is a good answer, but you should add the caveat that universities are generally less expensive than private companies for the same research output.  This is because of the labor arbitrage between the two (graduate students in STEM are often 3-5 times less expensive than the equivalent private sector employee).

Yeah. E. G. No academic software discounts for things like matlab and comsol. Annual floating license subscriptions... The shock when I realized the costs at an r&d company... They wanted everyone to jump ship to python for significant savings.

@daaxix Yes, you are entirely right, but I've always have been in Academia, so I'm not really aware of much of the extra fees. I can guess a big R&D pays a sizable chunk in access to Journal Papers,  Salaries, Equipment and license that many times academia do not mind with. I'm just guessing here, but I would think and IEEE license for all the University is cheaper than a license for a 50 person company, just because of the academic discounts.

The fees are negligible compared with the labor.  For instance, right now, for work similar to what I'm doing for a grant agency, a company would pay me a salary of $115-125,000 annually, with greater benefits than I receive as a graduate student.  I currently make ~$26,000/year as a graduate student, with far fewer benefits...when people complain that university research in the US is "too expensive," it makes me cringe inside...especially when private companies can often license or use for free the results of the research, for much, much less than if they had done it themselves!

Beyond the cost of lab spaces, researchers, guinea pigs, machinery, and raw materials, I would like to add a few costs caused or worsened by the lack of open science (a great TED video about open science if you aren't familiar with it):

Paid access to research articles. In addition to preventing the general public from having easy access to and contributing, it has two main consequences:

Universities must pay some insane amount of money to access publications, typically a few millions USD yearly.
Even the most highly-ranked universities don't have access to all articles (far from it), which mean researchers sometimes waste time to try to get access to some papers.

Data sets unavailability or price:

Unavailability: researchers sometime have to create their own data sets or abandon project ideas due to the unwillingness of others to share their data sets, because sharing data set might mean wasting some publication opportunities.
Price: some researchers do share their data set, but but not free. For example, in the natural language processing community some of the key data sets are only available on the Linguistic Data Consortium website, which charges download.

Unreleased source code. Many publications don't share their source code that was used for the article. A couple of reasons might explain the behavior: just like for data set, access to source code gives an edge over other researchers, who will have a harder time improving, amending, etc, the article. Also, the source code might be badly written and researchers can be embarrassed about it. It might be a way to avoid other people finding bugs in your code that invalidates some of your results. I asked Are there any journals or conferences that take into account the availability and the quality of the source code when selecting the papers to publish? one day, even in 2014 it is hard to find... Also, see reference on availability of source code used in computer science research articles: "in computer science systems, out of 410 papers that were analyzed, only 85 has a link to source in the paper".
Too many articles due to overreliance on bibliometrics to assess researchers (grants, promotions, etc.), which push researchers to over-publish. I sometimes feel that I am a documentalist, trying to navigate my way through myriads of papers that are written in some unnecessarily complicated way with barely any contribution.
Lack of good, widely-used platforms to publicly comments on existing articles. E.g. if something is unclear in an article and a researcher spent his morning to understand, there is no good platform for him to leave a comment to help other future readers who will have the same understanding issue.
Publication bias, which results from the fact that positive results have a much higher chance to be published than negative findings. This slows down research too: see the article Why Most Published Research Findings Are False or the TED video: Ben Goldacre: What doctors don't know about the drugs they prescribe (really worth watching if you don't know the extent of the problem).
Page limit of the articles inherited from the Middle age where articles were printed and distributed through paper form (and charged $30 per article, without any dime going to the authors' pockets). This forces authors to chop off some of the information they would have liked to convey. How many times did you wonder how the authors performed some mathematical derivation? How many times did you wonder which parameters did the experimentalists used?

All these inefficiencies cost money too. E.g. How to Make More Published Research True:

Currently, many published research findings are false or exaggerated,
  and an estimated 85% of research resources are wasted. (in biomedical research)

Some key points from the TED video Ben Goldacre: What doctors don't know about the drugs they prescribe:

Former drug company researcher Glenn Begley looked at 53 papers in the
  world's top journals, and found that he and a team of scientists could
  NOT replicate 47 of the 53 published studies — all of which were
  considered important and valuable for the future of cancer treatments.
Half of all clinical trials ever completed on the medical treatments
  currently in use have never been published in the medical literature.
  Trials with positive results for the test treatment are about twice as
  likely to be published, and this applies to both academic research and
  industry studies.>
In 2010, three researchers from Harvard and Toronto identified all the
  published trials for five major classes of drugs, and then measured
  two key features: Were they positive, and were they funded by
  industry? Out of a total of 500 trials, 85 percent of the
  industry-funded studies were positive, compared to 50 percent of the
  government-funded trials.
According to a 2011 study in the Journal of Medical Ethics,4 nearly 32
  percent of retracted papers were not noted as having been retracted by
  the journal in question, leaving the readers completely in the dark
  about the inaccuracies in those studies.

For point 1, open-access article processing charges end up costing more than subscriptions. Especially since as no quality control is present in most OA journals, everything gets published and thus the number of articles explodes, as you point out in your point 4.

I agree with some of your points, but I don't think they play a dramatic role in the overall cost of research.  Even if we lived in a perfect world of open access, good publication practices, and convenient access to data sets, ALS research would still cost many millions of dollars and the person who was arguing with the OP would still wonder why.

@Jigg, this is incorrect generally, although it may be true in some fields.  In optics, the highest impact factor journal (and one of the most respected) is Optics Express, an open access journal.  It has, however, good reviewers and good editors.  This is more important than the open vs. closed model for quality.

@daaxix that's why I said 'most'.

@Jigg in Machine Learning you can make a career without paying for a single article (you or the university) since you either get everything from arxiv or from open access conferences and journals. Hell, even very good books are freely available from the authors.

@AnonymousMathematician I've added a reference indicating the cost in a specific field. It's obviously tough to assess accurately, and most likely experimental fields from theoretical ones (e.g. no reproducibility issue when proving a theorem).

Even in purely theoretical fields or fields without expensive lab costs, research is expensive.
I think the root of the problem is that your friend seems to be measuring 'cost per result (e.g. cost to cure ALS)'. Most lay people probably don't understand what it means to learn something truly new about the world. Discovering something new is really, really, really hard—even for very intelligent people (remember Einstein's 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration). Thus, whilst it may be true that "it only takes time and effort", the amount of those things needed to achieve even minor progress is huge. To achieve a major breakthrough, like curing a disease or proving a major theorem, might take thousands of scholars working for years or even a century (see, e.g., the Poincaré conjecture).
The cost to achieve one of these major 'results' is indeed large, but that is because they stand among the crowning achievements of mankind.

To deal with this answer more generally, I would insist on using their own argument: nearly everything on earth is just a matter of time and effort.
This includes everything from The Great Pyramids to battleships to cars, books to research, farming to mining. They are all products of the application of effort and time.
The reason things cost money is not mostly because of the raw materials. With most things in life, the raw material is the easy part!
I like farming/gardening as an example. Much of a garden or even a farm can be done with little to no raw materials. You need dirt, sure, but that stuff is everywhere! It isn't always good for growing, but you can fix that with time and effort to till, cultivate, amend with more cheap stuff (waste products and so on). Bugs? Squish them - time and effort. Seed? Harvest it wild, make your own selective cultivation to raise yield - time and effort.
Unlike gardening, though, research isn't growing the same crops over and over again every season. With growing food, it often gets easier each year if you do it right - you learn what works and what doesn't, the soil can be made more fertile. But with research, once you have your product you don't get to just repeat the same process again and call it good. That wouldn't bring about a publishable result - no one cares if you "discover electricity for the 40th time."
When research is easy and quick, it gets done easily and quickly, and then there is no reason to do it again. The low hanging fruit gets picked, and it doesn't grow back!
Therefore, we can expect research to get harder as we as a society learn more - more time, more effort per discovery is required. This means research should only get more and more expensive, while making and growing stuff should get cheaper and cheaper. Economics (research!) is more complicated than this of course.
So let's talk about what else costs money. 'Stuff', raw materials, do cost money. Research needs labs and offices, electricity/fuel, and most need all sorts of special equipment and apparatus. Medical labs need stupid amounts of these, and everything costs so much money because research is picky - poisoning someone with an injection because you didn't spring for that stupidly expensive "approved" beaker instead of using a $1 drinking glass from the second-hand store that wasn't resistant to the chemical regents you used is generally frowned upon.
And if a person thinks human time and effort should be free and people should not ask anything in exchange for their life dedication and work - why in blue blazes are you still talking with this person? Suddenly, a relevant XKCD:

And if the Senator seriously thinks medical research - or any research - should be cheap or free...well, good luck to you in your noble fight, friend.

The other answers address the cost of actual research extensively enough, but there are, sadly, other aspects to consider.
Academic research is, for the majority, funded by the government. That means that, although I have a high opinion of some government funding agencies, the decisions on how to spend the money is often political. As any other government organization, members of academia work in a loop to protect their interests and privileges.
As a result, in addition to the natural amount of effort and money spent on endeavors and projects that turn out to be dead ends (these are actually useful to research as they rule out possibilities), there is a tremendous amount of money lost in generating heat.
It's frequent to see faculty being hired because they are the spouse of another faculty, or because they have social traits that contribute to the 'diversity', grants being attributed hoping that the awardee will return the favor, funding being attributed to people on the basis of the number of publications instead of the quality of them (even more so now with the open-access movement and the subsequent logarithmic raise in paper count), etc. Not to mention cases (e.g. in medicine, socio-economics, history) where funding goes to promote the political agenda of the governing majority.
At the end I think at least a good third of academic research is either marginally incremental, frankly redundant or even completely bogus.
It should be noted that while these sums ('millions!') seem huge to us, the amount of money spent in academic research is typically a fraction of the government's budget.

You could put in perspective by comparing it to other ventures.
For instance, running Walmart "cost" around $450bn last year. Running IBM cost $115bn last year. Running Pfizer cost around $20bn last year.
Now, compare this to the cost of finding the Higgs boson: around ~$13.25bn over the total time taken. Hubble: around $10bn up to 2010.
Scientific research is not cheap, but it's way cheaper than running a business and has much wider reaching impacts. What sticks in people's minds is that the money comes from "funding" and "charity" and that strikes them as "waste".

Done. The Wikipedia links show Revenue and Net Profit for the 3 companies. I figured "cost" to be Revenue - Net Profit.

I'll play devil's advocate: You pay in $450 bn to run Walmart, but then you get $475 bn back and keep $15 bn profit. None of the money spent on research is expected to come back.

Perhaps, but I'd argue that's a simplistic view of economic value. The value of research may be hard to quantify in monetary terms but the positive impact of the results of medical research (for instance) far outstrips $15bn.

Research will find the cure to cancer, which will be priceless to humanity. No money spent on research, no cure found.

It is indeed simplistic, and I had to force myself to overlook this very obvious fact when stating my argument. However, that battle is already lost: The original question itself is very simplistic.

Research does not necessarily cost a lot of money. Even today, some areas such as literature, philosophy and theoretical mathematics (non-computational) literally cost only as much as a desk, pen and paper. In theory. In practice, as many have already pointed out, even in these fields it can make sense to do a little cost-time trade-off.
But what about the other fields? Since the question is about ALS, I will focus on more technology-heavy fields. I will also try to explain more the barriers to making the same research cost less, rather than try to guess what that particular researcher's budget was.

You need to be associated with a university or institute, and they take a big cut out of your funding. A vast bulk of research is done by university professors. While on the face, you might think that such institute-affiliated researchers take a monthly salary, and then get money from the government on top to spend on their research, that isn't quite true. When you receive a grant, the university or institute takes a large amount of this, eg. 50% or even 80%. Part of this is probably just taken because the president wants a nice house. But it also pays for the electricity in your office, the electron microscope everyone gets to use, the salary of the janitor, the salary of the health and safety people whose approval is required by law for you to obtain restricted research chemicals, etc. You could save a lot of money by not being a university affiliated researcher, but you can't just up and go and do research from your garage - you must deal with a lot of bureaucracy unless you want to get fined or jailed, and you lose the very important benefit of easily being able to eat lunch with leading scientists and talk to them about science.
Materials are expensive. Others have explained in detail why consumables (chemicals, enzymes, single use sterile tools such as petri dishes) are expensive. A lot of these you could in theory make yourself. I know many biology labs who eschew modern kits and still use DIY methods from decades ago to save money - but it's a lot of work and introduces a lot of risk for error. Even then, some crucial reagents are simply impossible to manufacture if you don't have a large chemical plant. Think by analogy to computers: You can do a lot with DIY electronics, but nobody is going to be building an i7 out of scrap metal in their garage.
Equipment is very expensive. Even the simplest biological research equipment tends to run from thousands of dollars to hundred of thousands or even millions. Even something as basic as a centrifuge can run you two grand, and you cannot do any molecular biology without one. If you want to do sequence based research (absolutely necessary for ALS), either you must buy a very expensive sequencer or you must pay someone to run samples on theirs.
Scientists need to eat. Research isn't a hobby, it's a full-time job. Perhaps the professor's salary gets paid by the university - but often grad students and postdocs are paid from the grant money. All these people must be paid a salary, otherwise their landlord will kick them out and they will starve. It would be ridiculous to expect someone with a 40-hour job to do a few hours of research every weekend and get somewhere.

With ALS and biology in particular, there are also some "soft" factors contributing to research costs: Firstly "big data" and high-throughput studies are currently in vogue, and both require expensive, specialized systems. Second, it is getting harder and harder to find problems that aren't expensive to solve.
There are many studies which can be done for a $10.000 in reagents (which isn't a lot, other costs notwithstanding) over 1-3 years. Many labs already do this. But not every lab is this lucky.
What happens if your disease has hundreds of variants which must be characterized by spending thousands on genotyping (it costs a few hundred per person, to cover things like cost of manufacturing the genotyping chip, cost of chemically preparing the sample, salary of people who do the specialized genotyping, and the profit margin of the genotyping company)? What happens if the protein that causes the disease must be purified using an extremely expensive chemical? What happens if the aberration that causes the disease is so microscopic, that you need a million dollar microscope to see it? What happens when the thing you study turns out to be so complex, that only a supercomputer (which are very expensive to have or use) can hope to make sense of the data? What happens when you are studying a very dangerous pathogen that will kill you unless you have a $100 million BSL-4 lab that takes $2 million every year to maintain?
What's worse is that biology has been around for quite some time, and a lot of the questions that are "cheap" to answer have already been answered by someone else. Problems like ALS, which have stayed unsolved for decades, are unsolved for a reason: Sometimes it's just because nobody happened to be clever enough to come up with the right idea, but a lot of the time it's because the scale of research needed to attack them was prohibitively expensive. Now technology has advanced, and it is no longer prohibitive, but still expensive (meanwhile the technology affording that discount is itself not cheap).

it only takes time and effort

Certainly not. There is some research to which this applies in a trivial way, but a lot of important research is practically impossible without using the technological infrastructure built over the centuries of human history, and using that infrastructure is rarely free.

Why does research cost so much money?

How much does he think it should cost? Based on the quote, I suspect it is $0. That's not gonna happen.
It costs what it costs because that's what it costs. If you can come up with your own budget for a given study that is much smaller, yet still makes it feasible, go ahead. But just writing numbers on paper and asking why it doesn't cost this much is wishful thinking. You don't go to the car store and tell the guy you think his Ferrari "ought" to cost $32.27 because that's how much cash you happen to have in your pocket.

points to make when explaining the cost of research to lay people

The condensed version of the above is: Even smart people sometimes cannot solve a problem without buying expensive things. You cannot study moon rocks without buying an expensive rocket to go to the moon. You cannot study what's inside the atom without buying an expensive atom smasher. You cannot test a cancer drug if you don't have expensive cancer cell cultures to test it on.
Science is not just sitting around in a room and philosophizing. You must also do experiments. The experiment's set up can sometimes get involved and complicated. Observing the outcome of the experiment can require specialized sensors or measurement tools. Processing the data gathered can require state of the art supercomputers.

how to articulate these points in a way that they can identify with them.

"You get what you pay for."

One part of the answer that was not mentioned so far is that highly skilled people want to get paid good. Or to phrase it differently: You will not find people with the skills you need to do research without paying them accordingly. Especially for pharmacy / medical studies you need a lot of man-hours of people who probably made a PhD at university. They spend a lot of their money to get to this point and they want to get paid accordingly.
As those studies require - as already mentioned - a lot of time, you need to pay a lot of expensive man-hours.
Some numbers

The median education debt for indebted medical school graduates in 2012 was $170,000, and 86 percent of graduates report having education debt. Specifically the 2012 the median debt at graduation was $160,000 at public institutions and $190,000 at private institutions. (Source: How Much Does Medical School Cost?)

'highly skilled people want to get paid good' but yet, most people working in academic research in the STEM fields are paid less than what they'd get in the private sector.

@Jigg: True, but they are still not cheap.

Highly skilled people want to be paid well, unless they're willing to work for virtues.  :)

This is simply irrelevant.  Everyone wants to be paid well.  Are we funding research for the purpose of debt relief?

@emory: No, it is not irrelevant. You need smart people who do the research. They need to have a certain skill set / reputation. They get this for lots of money at universities. As they are smart people, they think about the costs / benefits of studying. If research agencies don't pay them good enough, they will search another job.

The research group that I've been fortunate enough to work with as part of my Masters dissertation (Microelectronics) have recently received funding of £400,000.  To me that sounded like an immense amount of money; but then I saw some invoices for how much it costs to repair and maintain the antiquated machinery they're forced to use.
Plus, does your friend really not understand that "time and effort" cost money in and of themselves before you even start thinking about equipment and whatnot?  Does he think that researchers don't need a salary because they are immune to starvation and the elements?  US$1million would pay the salaries of 5 research assistants for 4 years; and those salaries are not exactly generous.

Welcome to Academia Stack Exchange. I recommend you to provide resources, examples and references to your answer and in my opinion, it is not a good idea to answer questions by other questions. For writing good answers, take a look at help center.

It seems odd to me that you would write this comment on my answer when literally no one else has provided references in their answers - especially as I did give an example.
Also, I didn't ask a question; I posited a rhetorical which in effect was making a statement.

One point to make is to realize that what is "so much" is a very relative term. If you see value in what is being produced then the cost may seem small and definitely "worth it". If you do not see the value, then of course the result is the opposite. It would be possible to go through, for example, public expenditures in government budgets and argue for military costs, for social benefit schemes, public health, public schools etc. and find similar disagreements.
It is becoming popular in certain political circles to want research to be directly translated into profits within a short time span. Although there of course is nothing wrong with gaining profitable results many discoveries have only yielded such results long after the timing of the discovery. The spin-offs from discoveries are also often realized once the basic research has been done, for example  as a result from unexpected discoveries. As the saying goes, "If I knew what I was doing, it wouldn't be science".
Hence, I think the view of "cost so much" is either a lack of perspective, or insight, or simply not finding the progress of any value. Having this view point is certainly valid but as many responses have already discussed, one must then argue what costs should or could be reduced.
To call research inefficient is not sufficient. We can see that certain problems can be solved if sufficient finances are supplied over a sufficient period, take the US space program to put a person on the moon as an example. But, was that a cheap project? Obviously for some but not to others.
If no time or effort was spent on anything, life would remain simple but hardly bearable, provided our intellectual development would occur spontaneously.

I would emphasize who's time and effort is involved, and how much of it is involved.  It isn't like we have a couple of undergrad research assistants working on the problem so we can pay them next to nothing.  ALS research occupies the time of teams of doctors.
Second they seem to be underestimating the type and length of the work involved.  It isn't like they can go over to CVS and say I have this prescription for this never before seen drug whip some up for me while I browse the magazine rack, or go to some medical supply store and order a never seen before medical device.
Third, safety protocols, it isn't like they fabricate some new concoction in the lab then go jab it in some guy's arm like they do on TV.  It takes a long time because they are actively trying to not kill people, and exercise an abundance of caution.

This is well explained by an American expression: "Time is money."
You have to pay "people" for their time. And these are not random people, but highly trained and paid researchers making salaries, typically in the top 20-30 per cent of the population.
Also, such researchers normally have to be supported on most projects by "advanced" scientific equipment, which also costs a lot of money.

First think about all of the other challenging and expensive endeavors we do. Running a business, building a bridge (or writing a computer program)... these were all done before by someone else. And if you are looking to build a bridge you are probably reading a book titled something like "how to build a bridge" and written by the last person to attempt what you are wanting to do.
Research involves solving problems that are open, there is no book to read because it has not been done before. Now, you can gather a lot of materials from this person over here that had one idea that helps you, and that person over there. But these scattered resources are harder to find (I.E. in academia) and at the end of the day you are the one who needs to put it all together and build the very first bridge in existence.
Now do us all a favor and put a whole bunch more money into safety testing.

I would suggest that if one starts with two observations: (1) A person or group who spends a lot of resources trying to discover new things is apt to find at least some new things which would not have been discovered if they spent less; (2) many of the things which could be discovered with only a small expenditure of resources already have been.  Because advancements in one field can often reduce the resource expenditures necessary to make discoveries in another, it's possible to make trade-offs between the cost per "discovery" and the rate of "discoveries".  The cost of research is thus...

...driven in large measure by the amount one is willing to spend to expedite discoveries, which is in turn driven by the reward for finding things sooner rather than later.  If a discovery would save a company $1,000,000/week, it may be worthwhile to spend $1,000,000 to simultaneously pursue thousands of possibilities for a month, even if an initial investment of $100 and a month's worth of research would allow one to eliminate half of the possibilities and shave the cost of the research by half.

Apparently your friend who says "it only takes time and effort" has never seen the proof that time=money. Since effort=time, it's clear that time=effort=money.
In my field (computer science), grant support for a middling-size research project might last five years and provide support for two PI's, a postdoc, and two to four graduate students. Let's look at an example personnel budget. Note- you can find lots of NSF or NIH sample budgets online that illuminate this further.
Assume both PI's ask for two months of summer support per year. If their base salary is $90,000 for a nine-month contract, then their base monthly salary is $10,000. Thus, if they both ask for two months, then that's $40,000 per year in base salary for the PI's.
Then you add on PI fringe benefits costs. This money provides benefits like health care. Different universities have different fringe rates. But, let's say that our rate is 15%. Then we have an additional $40,000*.15 = $6,000 per year.
Postdocs are similar, but they're paid full time to do research. They might have a base salary of $55,000 per year. Then their fringe benefits are $8250
Now let's talk grad students. Let's say we have three graduate students. Each graduate student has a monthly stipend of $2,500- or $30,000 each / $90,000 combined per year. Then you charge fringe on those students, which is going to be slightly less, say 10%. Thus, the fringe for all three per year is $9,000.
These are all the "direct salary costs". To recap, we have:
         Salary  + Fringe:
PI 1:    $20,000 + $3,000
PI 2:    $20,000 + $3,000
Postdoc: $55,000 + $8,250
Grad 1:  $30,000 + $3,000
Grad 2:  $30,000 + $3,000
Grad 3:  $30,000 + $3,000
--------------------------
Total:   $185,000 + $23,250 = $208,250 per year

But, these are only the direct costs. All grants also include what are called "indirect costs", which are paid to the university and go towards things like building maintenance, utilities, and non-research-staff salaries. A pretty normal indirect cost rate is 50%. So then we also have:
Indirect Costs = 0.5 * Direct Costs
$104,125       = 0.5 * $208,250

Finally, our total yearly cost:
Total Cost = Direct Costs + Indirect Costs
$312,375   = $208,250     + $104,125

Just like when you go to the grocery and just throw stuff in the basket, it adds up a lot quicker than you think. Notice that all of this is just to support six people per year (two PhD PI's, one PhD postdoc, and three grad students). And this is just counting salaries, it doesn't include other costs like equipment, publication fees, or travel.
The salary-only cost for a three year project under the above would be $937,125. The salary-only cost for a five year project would be $1,561,875. Note that the actual costs would be slightly higher in real life because of things like pay raises and cost of living adjustments.
If you consider published papers to be the basic unit of academic research, then suppose that this project turns out 8 papers per year (which is reasonable but optimistic). The cost per published paper is then a little over $39,000 per paper.

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text:
Incentives to read for seminar/discussion course
I'm preparing to teach an introductory course and to teach the content through assigned reading and viewing of A/V materials plus seminar-style discussion. This approach won't work if students don't do the homework. How can I design the course so that they're motivated to do the reading/watching/listening in preparation for discussion?
This is an undergraduate-level course in a continuing/adult education program at a large private university.

Is this a graduate course or undergraduate?

If they aren't motivated, they shouldn't register ... I know, idealistic. But seriously, the incentive is supposed to be a passing grade.

@MrMeritology good question. I clarified in my answer: undergraduate-level with (mostly) adult learners.

If it possible, duplicate materials in different formats such as book/audiobook/ebook so that the students can choose the media that easiest for them to access.

Any student that takes a course should be prepared to do all the course work in the way that the instructor lays out the course.
I had a science course in which I was told "In order to pass this course you will need to study 12 hours between each class" this was a twice a week class.
The entire course was pretty much homework based and do-it-at-home. The professor didn't need to motivate us to do that work because we knew that we could not easily pass without doing it and we paid a lot of money to take the course in the first place.
As a student and someone who is finishing up their first course that they are teaching: You can't force someone to do something to help pass the course. You can stress how important it is to do the homework and that it would be a waste of their money if they think they can do well without doing the homework. Remind them of the best practices to use when working on the homework and how long it should take. If you notice a student not being able to keep up talk to them about their homework habits.
In the course I mentioned above most students who did poorly had a lot of personal responsibilities such as a job or children. The amount of work required outside of class shouldn't be so heavy that people with other responsibilities than school just can't complete it all.

One approach you might try is to do a short in-class demonstration of the process.  Have them read a one-page summary of some paper, or a one-page section of a full paper.  Then have them write notes and questions about that one-pager.  Then have a class discussion, where they utilize their notes and questions.  This whole process might take 45 minutes, but it should be worthwhile for anyone who has never attended a seminar-type class before and should demonstrate the importance and value of the reading plus preparation prior to class.


text:
GPA calculation in German Grading system
I am studying in a German University where the GPA grades are :
1.0 , 1.3, 1.7, 2.0, 2.3, 2.7, 3.0, 3.3, 3.7, 4.0 with 1.0 being the best score a student can get in exam and below 4.0 it is fail.
However, My score card looks like this:

Clearly, graded average = 204.6/108 = 1.89 and my actual result in the scorecard is 2.2. (I also have seen the related questions for this in forum and they don't answe my question.)
Could anyone please explain the calculation behind this ?

Check what the actual computation method is. From my German Bauchgefühl I'd say that you should average grades, but there are definitely special rules. For example, the thesis is often factored-in twice, thus it has a larger weight.

It is very likely that not all your classes contribute to your GPA. The only studies I know use either 90, 120 or 180 credits as the final score. You have to fulfill certain conditions and the best combination of grades that fulfills all conditions gives your GPA. What theses conditions are you need to check with your university (for example in this case I would assume you cannot have "project II" twice).

Is this a typo that Project II occurs twice? If not, this might explain it. Normally you can pass each module only once, so the system might not take a second try into account. Ignoring the 1.0 in Project II and only taking the 2.7 into account, you end up with 174.6/78=2.2 (rounded).

Yes. That would be project I and project II

I'd guess your subjects are part of modules?
Then you need to calculate and round every module on itself and afterwards you can calculate your GPA based on the modules.
Have you checked your Prüfungsordnung (examination regulations)?
In it the calculation method of your GPA is stated.
If the GPA is still unclear after checking the document, you should contact your Examination Office.
Maybe they have a system/display bug and/or some "buffer marks" (have you something like 18 credits open, i.e. registered, but not taken yet, then grading it with 4.0 in the system would yield a grade of 2.2) or something that cannot be checked or verified from outside.

Thanks for the answer :) . I have attache the image a little wrong. I am going to correct them. The grades I mentioned there are Module (One module has 2 subjects).

I couldn't find a Prüfungsordnung.

You have a Prüfungsordnung. For sure.

@SrijaniGhosh Oleg is correct. If you are at a German university, then you will have a Prüfungsordnung.

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When is the right time to quit, if at all (2-year Master's)?
I am five weeks into a two-year MS program in statistics at a public university in the US. To be honest, I do not think my graduate program was the right choice for me. I am struggling a lot with the work. I do not find my instructors helpful in class or in office hours; what is taught in class is difficult to relate to the homework and is often a different focus than what's in our textbook.
Although I want to do more data science/research analysis work as a career, I picked a program that included both applied and theoretical courses because I thought the theory was good to know. But now the theoretical side feels like a burden. I still like stats, and I'm not sure if my unhappiness is my particular graduate program or being in grad school at all.
The question is, how soon is "too soon" to know to quit, and is there any way to tell if I would be happy or not in another, more applied program? I have spoken with my parents (who are funding my graduate education) and we are all agreed that I should at least finish out this semester. Do I quit then and look for jobs? Do I wait until the end of next semester and see if different professors make a difference, and if not, go to a different program or get a job? Or is it silly to do half of it and not finish the MS?

I think that it really depends on how much you're struggling. Are you failing your problem sets? Are you merely unhappy with the courses?
I expect that there will be huge variations with the answers, but personally I would advise you to finish out your MS. The reason being that there actually is a huge difference in terms of your career (salary, promotions etc) when you have an advanced degree, so usually an MS is a worthy investment (as an aside, there are studies that suggest that having a PhD does not offer a lot of extra advantages compared to an MS, so if you are already unsure of your MS, I could advise against a PhD).
Another reason is that it would not look too good to your employers to show that you dropped out after just a semester in your program. Perseverance is a very strong quality that is appreciated by many people.
Furthermore, your experience depends largely on your professors. I would talk to other students to see if there are particularly popular professors who teach courses that you are interested in, and try to take those classes next semester (and while you are talking to your fellow grad students, you might as well ask them about your current feelings and ask if this is common).
That being said, I suggest that you talk to your program director, because maybe your program is notoriously hard, and there are many students feeling this way. You may walk out of that meeting feeling reassured, or maybe that meeting will give you a very strong and concrete reason to drop out of your MS. Or maybe the program director could suggest an alternative MS program that can still credit this semester towards the degree (for example, it sounds like an MS in computer science might have been a better fit than an MS in statistics, but I can easily imagine an MS in computer science requiring some statistics courses).

Sadly, the program director in statistics is also one of my instructors this semester, so obviously it would be uncomfortable to bring concerns like "finding my instructors unhelpful" to him. I may consider my university's Data Science program, which I just found out about recently. It wouldn't be weird to contact that program director to ask about fit, right?

It doesn't have to be as uncomfortable as you are imagining. You can bring out specific concerns, such as "material X is not in my background, but your class seems to assume this, and I am having trouble catching up or getting help" is a perfectly valid thing to discuss with your professor. In general, generic complaints are not constructive.

"how soon is "too soon" to know to quit"
It really depends on your personal convictions-what did you major in for your undergrad? You have to be sure you've given it your best shot-it seems like you still enjoy the stats but lack the support you need with your coursework, etc. Graduate studies can be very difficult initially especially if you're not used to that style of learning. Stats can be difficult if you haven't majored in a quantitative field. Why not get extra help from your tutors? Perhaps watch online lectures from other "better" lecturers about the topics you're struggling with (MIT, harvard, etc all have free youtube videos). You may also wish to get a private tutor who may be of some assistance.
Back to your question of "when to quit"
All in all, I think you have to be careful not to allow too much unexplained gaps in your resume. If having put in 100% effort, you still don't think this is the right course for you, leave early and find something else to do. Besides, a masters degree is not a strict requirement for a data science career and there are many paths into this field.
You may wish to read more about the various paths to data science (Do I need a Masters/Phd to become a data scientist)
Best wishes.

I majored in mathematics in undergrad, but I went to a small LAC that didn't have a huge range of stats offerings (and the CS department was truly abysmal). I know that there are many resources available out there, it is just frustrating to me that the skills needed for the problems are not covered, or sometimes even mentioned, by our professors. I agree with your link–I don't know if I need the MS for skill reasons, but perhaps for job search reasons.

Imagine yourself 20 years from now, a dean in a department.  One of the students in your department feels a mismatch with the program of studies, but doesn't tell you or anyone else in the department.  The student drops out after one semester.  You feel frustrated because you think that some of the problems could have been solved, if only the student had let you know what was going on, before getting past the point of no return.
What I'm getting at here is that you and your parents are putting in huge amounts of time and money.  You must inform someone at your university of exactly what you wrote here.  If you are not comfortable talking to the person who is normally the point of contact for a problem such as yours, then pick someone else in your department.  Or go to someone higher up, who is not in your department.  Sometimes it is helpful to ask a nice secretary, or an empathetic fellow student, for a recommendation of whom to talk to.
If it is easier for you to have this needed conversation with an administrator by having a friend or relative participate, then do.  You can arrange, for example, for your parents to be part of the meeting, via Skype, for example, if that would be helpful for you.
You have taken the first step -- self awareness.  Now, share your self awareness with your university.  Give them the opportunity to try to help you figure this out with you.

There is no right answer. In my university, most drop-outs simply have a job and no time or energy to finish their studies. Though their workplaces sometimes make effort to speed up their employees graduation, with less work, but some just encourage the students to become full time workers.
In my university one can change their subject. Many of the completed classes are valid for other programs. It could be that if there is CS-department, you could become machine learning expert, which is basically the same, but not as rigor as pure stat-math.

Yes, that is why I might look into Data Science.

That is definitely a tough question. Do you think that grad school itself is not for you right now, or do you just want a different program?
First of all, whichever you do, it has to be seated deep within you. If you quit, for instance, and it ends up coming up at a job interview, you're going to have to answer that question with confidence. There are good answers for every choice you can make here--you just have to believe in them enough to defend them without shame.
If it's mainly the program, talk to your advisor and talk to the department chair. That's what they're there for. They had to choose their own fields and they know you do, too. They can explain your options, of which you may have more than you realize. Also, if they're not supportive, that's a great reason to pick a different program. You can also talk to the graduate advisor of record and/or the department chair for a department you are more interested in.
I went to grad school about four years after graduating undergrad, and I quit a few weeks in because I hated it so much. All my anxieties came back, I felt like I was failing miserably, and I was already struggling to make myself do any homework or go to school. It was hard, but I actually had to redefine my self-image in a way that didn't rely on my education level. That sounds obvious, but it turned out I was really wrapped up in that. I had to be okay with hearing myself say, "Maybe I don't actually want a Ph.D." (or Master's, in your case). Until then, I hadn't realized that graduate degrees were something you could want. To me, they were just something you did if you were worth anything.
10 years later, I'm getting my Master's in May and I'm waiting to hear back on a Ph.D. program I'm excited about. A lot of things have changed in the meantime, but mostly, they're very particular to my situation. The important thing that changed is that I realized what I'd always thought I wanted to study wasn't as interesting as I thought. It was close, so it wasn't obvious that it wasn't the right field for me. But I came to peace with that, and I did end up finding something that really was of great interest, and here I am. I was excited when I submitted my application and I was excited when I sat down for my first class, even though I hadn't been in school for 15 years by then and I struggled very much in undergrad. I'm just as excited now--I'm actually having fun. I encourage you to hold your experience to a high standard for what you want in your life.
One last point--if you're really miserable, taking care of yourself is important, and the right decision may be not to wait out the semester. If your parents are worried about the money, consider offering to pay them back over a period of a few months or years depending on how much it is. Consider also that if you wait out the semester, you won't get any credit for those classes in the job market. You may be able to apply them to another program later but it's iffy. The money is already sunk, so it shouldn't weigh too heavily. However, if you're doing okay and just not satisfied, I'd say, finish the semester. Maybe you'll have some insight and change your mind. If the semester ends and you're still not sure if you want to switch or quit, you can apply for a break for one or two semesters, usually.


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How can a commentary be published before the commentary it’s commenting on?
I submitted a commentary on a paper authored by the chief editor of a publication¹. After over six months, my commentary was finally placed in the peer-review queue. Before the review of our commentaries were even completed, two commentaries discussing our commentary were published. It should be noted that we still haven’t seem a response/reply to our original commentaries from the original author.
I am questioning the ethics of allowing commentaries of commentaries being published before the original commentary has been put "In Press" and would like to get other peoples perspective on the situation. Bottom line I am asking: Is there any explanation how this could have happened with an ethically operating journal or an ethically acting editor, respectively?

¹ I am being vague on specific details for a reason

Welcome to Academic stack exchange. I flagged this for closure because it's impossible for anyone who is not on the editorial board of the journal to know what is going on here. There isn't a generalizable question that can be answered.

The apparent system of "commentaries" and "commentaries-on-commentaries", and "commentary on paper", is not universal in the peer-reviewed publication game, either, which makes it harder for me, for one, to gauge whether the reported phenomenon is within normal variation of innocent (if geeky) behavior.

What do you mean by "there has been"? Have these two commentaries been published on the journal?

While I understand that you do not want to share too many details, the following information would help to better understand your problem and answer your question: 1) How extreme are six months for editorial handling? 2) Did you publish preprints of your commentaries or were they only accessible to editors and reviewers of the journal? 3) Did all publications in question happen on the same journal? 4) How long after submitting your paper were the commentaries published? 5) The commentaries discussing your commentaries are referring to it by name/citation?

What you describe certainly sounds weird, but it's not clear what you are looking for from us.  You haven't even really explained how other people could have seen your commentary if it was not published: or had you circulated it earlier in preprint form?  Anyway, with the level of detail provided, we know less than you do so I don't think we can help you tell whether the mistake was ethical, procedural or not a mistake at all.  Certainly this is worth contacting the editors about.  What do they say?

@Wrzlprmft -- Thank you for your suggested edits. Below are te answers to your questions 1) Based on what I got back from the initial review it wasn't a very intense peer review. I should note that I only got something back after emailing the chief editor and CCing the entire editorial board. 2) From what I can tell there are no pre-prints (i.e. typeset and formatted) just what I submitted to the journal. 3) Yes, All publications are within the same journal. 4) Approximately 5-7 months I started to see the commentaries on our commentary start coming. 5) Yes.

@PeteL.Clark --Exactly!!! That's the point the commentary hasn't officially been published yet, no pre-prints or early releases. Hell I haven't even received type-set proofs yet.

@Paul: In that case, if your question is "Sounds weird, right?!?" then I am happy to answer: "Right."

@PaulJulian, your comment "From what I can tell there are no preprints" seems very strange to me. In my world, I would be the one who created preprints, and no one else would, ... and (these days) there are no documents that are not typeset and formatted more-or-less. But/and if you send a PDF or .doc document to a journal, they can easily forward electronic copies... And, different question: how many different people seem to have acquired a copy of your submission prior to its appearance? Not just one? This seems very strange.

Assuming your "commentary" was not publicly available (e.g., as preprint on your homepage or some server), and assuming that you submitted it to the journal under an assumption of confidentiality (in the first place), a reasonable editor and/or referee would certainly not publish commentary on a thing they had under confidential review... IF "commentary" means something at all conforming to the usual rules-of-the-game with "papers", which I can't quite tell from the sketchy details you've given.
That is, in the world (academic mathematics) in which I operate, if in the course of refereeing papers submitted to traditional journals I learn something interesting/useful, or disagree with various aspects, my main channel of response is (anonymously) back to the authors through the editor, requesting or recommending a revision. It would be highly inappropriate for me to write and make-public, whether on a web site or any other venue, a paper either extending or contradicting or critiquing that paper prior to its official public appearance.
If anything like that has happened, then it does seem well outside the bounds of propriety, yes.


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Contacting via email or Linkedin (or similar sites) to help land a faculty appointment
I've applied for faculty jobs (in physics) in a number of places, and am just waiting for someone somewhere to contact me.
In the meantime is there any way to raise my level of visibility? For instance by trying to contact professors in the department by cold emailing them or trying to connect on LinkedIn?
I fear this might come off as desperate or look unprofessional in some way. Am I right to feel this way, or am I missing out by not utilizing such tools?

As a general point, email and linked in are very different tools. Personally, I find linkedin doesn't have much weight in academia. I realise people use it, particularly in business areas, but I don't think many academics use it much for social networking with other researchers. Social networking tools for academics is an emerging area. Researchgate has improved a lot in recent years and is starting to get more popular as a place to share research and connect with other researchers. So in general, being on sites like this may help a little with connecting with other scholars.
That said, publishing good work in good journals, going to conferences, forming meaningful collaborations and so on are going to do more to improve your social networks.
If you are going to contact someone by email, you don't want to waste their time.
So, if you are legitimately wanting to connect and form a collaboration with an academic and you think that they might be legitimately interested, then by all means send them an email. This site has various tips for writing such emails.
More generally, there is the question of when you should contact people who work in a department when you are applying for a job in that department. I think this can be a good strategy but it depends a lot on how it is done. And it's definitely easier if you know someone in the department or you know someone who knows someone. If you can have an informal chat with a contact in the department, you might learn something more about the school to help you decide whether you want to apply, determine how competitive you are, or help you to frame your application. They may also be able to assist you in meeting others.
That said, you don't want to waste people's time, and you don't want to come across as someone who wastes people's time. I'm also mindful that for some positions there are hundreds of applicants for one position, and if every one of them contacted people in a department, it could be a huge issue.
Also, remember that some employers (universities included) wont let you know that you did not get the job. Or if they do, they may take a long time to let you know.


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What does the term POI mean in the context of graduate admissions?
I hear the term POI used in graduate admissions. What does it mean?

POI stands for Professor of Interest -- i.e., the faculty member that is most likely to take the most interest in your application portfolio and is likely to be your advisor if you were to gain admission.


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Using social media brands (logos) in academic publications
I'm working on an illustration related to citizen science and would like to include the concept of social media in that graphic.
The most well known social media brands (as of now) are arguably Facebook and Twitter. According to their guidelines (Facebook, Twitter) it is perfectly fine to use their brand identity in form of a non-altered logo. I do not want to refer to anything specific on these platforms, merely use their logo to symbolize "social media".
However I'm not really sure if this is appropriate for an academic publication for a number of reasons: a) it may be considered a promotion or endowment of mentioned brands. b) it may be considered unprofessional. c) it may loose relevance with time.

Are these doubts justified? Any suggestions or (better) experience with a similar case?
What are solutions to this dilemma? I suppose replacing brand logos with generic ones that symbolize "social media" as well would be one thing to consider ...

Not really sure about the tags. If anyone has a better idea, please correct!

I guess the answer subjective but as far as I'm concerned it's totally fine to use logos.  I've done it myself*. In the caption you can make it clear they are just examples. Of course there are some exceptions.

Regarding your concerns:

it may be considered a promotion or endowment of mentioned brands.

It's fine you take well-known brands.

it may be considered unprofessional.

No (at least not in my research community)

it may loose relevance with time

That's life. The entire paper is likely to lose relevance as well.

*Example:

I agree with Frank. I think most of my publications and slides have at least one, if not more, logos in them.