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Does doing a PhD in a small/simple university make sense after getting a Master's from a very prestigious school?
I got a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from a school which is among the top ranked of Europe. Nevertheless, this is a pure coincidence, I did it here because it was the closest to my home.
For purely personal reasons I am tired of living in a place where there is such high population density, and having to suffer city life, crowded trains, traffic (even though I do not drive, I suffer the noise and pollution a lot), and spending so much time every day in queues is very annoying. My dream would be to return living in the countryside in a small village where people know each other, like when I was a kid (the village where I grew up is now today part of a suburb and mostly lost its soul).
I'm considering applying for a PhD position in a very small university in a medium sized town, in order to relocate and live in a rural village near the town. That university would be quite small and barely large enough to offer PhD programs, and definitely does not have much international reputation or anything. The exact opposite to the university where I got a Master's, which is high ranked and has amazing international reputation.
What I'd be doing would be the exact opposite of the mainstream, where people are always more willing to live in cities despite the disadvantages, and also are wanting to have their PhD from a school that is prestigious. I am afraid to kill my academic career because of a caprice of mine ("live in the countryside") would have taken up all the other advantages over staying here in the same School for a PhD.

Does it have to be that particular university?  There are lots of prestigious universities in the world which are located in small towns, so if you are willing to relocate further, you may be able to get the best of both worlds.

i think the important question here is "what do you value most?"  there is no universal answer to your question.  the answer depends on what kind of life you want to lead.

I can imagine a job interview .. Such a decision really makes you sound like a lazy guy, who only care about having a soft, cushy work with not much challenges and comfortable, slow life and the most important thing is his life that he can go fishing early afternoon. This is a huge red flag for most industrial jobs, and for many academic. As @NateEldredge pointed out many (if not most) prestigious universities are in rural places. Many people actually have the opposite problem: going to an institute that is good, but not in a terribly rural area.

No.
I did it.  From King's College world rank 15 to Queen Mary world rank 150. Your PhD wipes out everything. All my friends who continued their studies at King's had a better chance in finding jobs at good companies while I had to convince people over interviews why I made such a decision.

I guess the first question is What do you want to do with your PhD?
If you want to stay in academia, you will have the same problem after graduating all over again (and, speaking from personal experience, as a young postdoc/faculty, one does not generally have the luxury of choosing where one goes next). Further, going to a (presumably) under-funded local university with weak research programme is going to severely reduce the probability of you doing world-class research. While Moriaty is correct in saying that "It's the quality of your individual work that counts.", said quality is definitely strongly correlated to the excellence of your advisors and fellow students and collaborators. Another problem may be funding (e.g., for going to conferences), which may not be plentiful in a small university.
What I am also wondering is whether you actually need to switch university, or should just live off-campus? I work in Zurich, and I have one student who used to live between Zurich and Bern (about a one-hour car drive away), in an area that was pretty much as rural as it gets. He just did a lot of home office, and took the train approximately 3 times a week. Maybe an arrangement like that helps you more than throwing out the baby with the bath water?

Re Switzerland, EPFL is pretty well regarded, and Lausanne is not what I would call a major city.  When I worked there, I could bike to countryside in half an hour or so, or maybe 10 minutes to parks on the lake shore.  But I thoroughly agree with the OP's choice for living in smaller towns or country.  I got my degrees from a smaller, mid-rank state university that happens to be where I wanted to live.  I've done fairly well professionally, and enjoy the rest of my life, too.

I was in EPFL, Lausanne, and for my standards it is a major city (at least when it comes to nuisances) (see my original post). They built a new metroline and the day it was opened it was already too small to transport the waves of people that wanted to use it. There is constant traffic jam from 6 AM to to 7 PM everywhere everyday, even using bycicle or foot it makes it very unpleasant. This is this kind of stuff of "big city nuisance" I'm talking about, not the # of inhabitants.

@Bregalad If Lausanne is too metropolitan, your options may indeed be limited.

@Bregalad: I think that rather depends.  You could find big-city annoyances in Lausanne, if you looked for them, but I lived in Ecublens, just a 5 minute walk from the lab.  Could bike (following national bike routes du Rhône & du Jura) to country in short order.  Same is true of where I live now: I can find all big-city stuff if I want to travel 20 minutes in one direction, but still am in country and can be in wilderness 20 minutes in other directions.

@Bregalad: honestly, in that case just pick any of the dozens of villages in Vaud which are like 30' car/bus/train commute away from Lausanne. I have several friends who live in rural towns along Lac Léman and study/work at EPFL.

I totally get your dilemma, as I'm going through a similar thing (I'm not sure what I want to do after my PhD, in a university in a city of ~200,000 people).
Remember that a lack of overall reputation shouldn't greatly harm your chances of having further success in academia. It's the quality of your individual work that counts. Having a PhD is rarely necessary outside of academia, so your Master's degree from a great university should be adequately impressive.
Don't forget that there are many great universities in smaller towns, and some cities have small "satellite villages" where you can live outside of the city but still easily commute to work. I think that you're restricting yourself too much. In saying that, if you're motivated and convinced that you can do a great PhD at this particular university, you should still give a paid PhD offer some serious consideration.
Don't unnecessarily restrict yourself to Europe, either. Most towns and cities in the USA, Australia, and New Zealand are generally much more spread out and feel far less claustrophobic.
My advice would be to try to get the best PhD you can, as long as you're willing to put up with the lifestyle compromises. Or else, why bother getting a PhD? I can understand Paris, London, or New York being right out. But any campus that's an acceptably short cycle, bus, or train ride (commuting at off-peak times helps, if you can get away with it) from a smaller village shouldn't be ruled out automatically.

I don't really get your dilemma unless there are further geographical constraints you haven't mentioned.  In the US at least, the quality of the university is not much correlated with the population size or density. The American university currently rated #1 (according to a famous ranking that should not be taken too seriously; but certainly it is and has been a very top university) is Princeton.  Princeton is located in such a small town that I did not want to go there for graduate school.  On the same list we find places like Dartmouth, Cornell...
I am not nearly as familiar with universities outside of the US, but for instance I was a visitor at Universite de Bordeaux I.  It turns out that there is some mildly false advertising here: UNBI is not actually in Bordeaux (which I thought was a charming, beautiful small city, by the way), just very close to it in a tiny town called Talence.
Also many people -- probably most -- who like to live outside of cities nevertheless commute into them for their work.  One hour's drive from a prestigious university puts you in almost any kind of living situation I can think of.
Are you really asking whether moving from one of the top ranked European universities to "a Phd position in a very small University in a medium sized Town, in order to relocate and live in a rural village near the town. That university would be quite small and barely large enough to offer Phd programs, and definitely do not have much international reputation or anything. The exact opposite to the university where I got a Master's, which is high ranked and has amazing international reputation" will cause your academic career to suffer?  Okay, fair question but an easy one: yes.

What I'd be doing would be the exact opposite of the mainstream, where people are always more willing to live in cities despite the disadvantages,

That is obviously false.  Lots of people do not live in cities.  In fact, lots of people who would prefer to live in large cities instead take jobs in small cities / college towns in order to keep their academic career alive.  (I am one of them.  I grew up in a city of two million people.  I now live in a city of one hundred thousand people and have a really good academic job there.)
I suggest that you think more carefully about your long term goals. It seems to be implicit that you want to stay in a very small geographic space.  That kind of priority is anathema to an academic career, and that's true in Europe as much as or more than in the United States.  I know that because I know many excellent European mathematicians who have tried for years to find a job in their home country, to no avail.  In many cases they need to leave Europe entirely in order to find a suitable academic job.  Or maybe you don't really want an intense academic career following your PhD but would be content to have a mostly teaching position in a desirable geographic location (maybe even at a good high school?).  In that case, simply getting your PhD anywhere might be enough.  You should look into it.  But considering a much worse PhD program wondering how much you're sacrificing by doing so is a very poor investment in your own future.

I think in Europe there is indeed a trend that most well-respected universities are in capitals / big cities, and often directly in the city (e.g., ETH, TU Munich, UCL, KTH - even though KTH is actually in Kista, which is arguably worse then Stockholm if you can't stand pollution).

@xLeitix: There are fewer universities per capita in Europe, so that must be true overall.  Still, I know of several quite reputable universities in France (which is the European country I know the best) which are far away from Paris.  So the OP could: (i) go to one of the smaller number of good universities which are not in a big city.  (ii) Commute into the city (as both you and I have mentioned).  (iii) Go outside of Europe if it is really highly important that he match top-ranking world university with small town.  There are plenty of European students at Princeton, Stanford....

Wait: Oxford? Cambridge?!?  Or does that not really count as Europe?

Listing Stanford with small-town universities is not really accurate.  Yes, the census-designated place "Stanford, California" does have a population of only 13,809, but this is really just a quirk of city limits: it's in the middle of a dense metropolitan area of population almost 9 million.  Though I do suppose you could commute from Half Moon Bay or something.

(Data point: I was in the vicinity of Stanford a couple of weeks ago.  Traffic was so bad that it took over an hour just to get onto Highway 101.)

One should note that the ranking doesn't really claim that Princeton is the "top university" so much as "top undergraduate program."

@PeteL.Clark, Cambridge is no longer a nice small town, you can't even cycle in the city center without lots of people getting in the way.   Assuming you could aford to live in Cambridge anyway.

@Ian Cambridge is now a medium-size town, but you can easily commute from a small village in the countryside, or a smaller town like Ely or Huntingdon. If you can afford to live there -- I agree that it's very expensive.

Your concern about sabotaging your career is real.  Academic hiring for full professorships in even second or third tier universities is overwhelmingly from higher prestige institutions in many countries/programs.  (Not terribly surprisingly - people usually fall back to prestige when asked to make high-stakes decisions among things that aren't really easily ranked.)
Now this may vary by country and/or program, so I would look at places that you would consider and take a close look at where the candidates got their PhD.  That's the level of institution that you'll probably need to attend if you are serious about that sort of job.
(This doesn't mean don't choose a smaller institution - but it does mean being aware of how that reduces your chances of success in certain areas.  Everything's a trade-off.)


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How to prepare effectively for teaching a graduate course?
Next year, I will be teaching a graduate-level course about an advanced topic for the first time (in a West European university, in science). I'm a lecturer and this is the first time I will teach such an advanced topic. This will also be the first time that I will teach something completely alone (usually there are teaching assistants, or colleagues who teach the same course at the same time, etc).
How do I prepare effectively for such a thing? The level of the students is usually excellent and I don't want to disappoint. The course is rather intensive, over a few weeks, so there is not much room for error.

I assume that you have something like a syllabus for the course, listing the topics that the students are expected to master. If you don't have even that then you need to obtain one, either from some prof who taught the course in the past, or by developing one yourself, perhaps by using a similar course syllabus as a guide. It needn't be terribly detailed at this stage, but needs a list of topics to be mastered. Secondary topics can be omitted, but noted.
The next thing to focus on in the development of any course is what will be the student learning activities throughout the course. This is actually the most important thing. Choose projects, exercises, exams, or whatever, that will guarantee mastery of the key topics if done well. Lay the timeline of the course by laying out the sequence and duration of each of these activities. Make these things activities not just readings.
With that done you can start to think about what you need to do to make it possible for the students to succeed in their activities. This might be lecture or it might be classroom activities (labs), etc. As you do this you can fill in secondary topics, realizing that you may have to forgo some of them if the students need more on the main ideas, but you will at least have some extra material to insert as needed, depending on how the course progresses.
Find a way to get some anonymous feedback from your students along the way. One easy way is to invite students to submit (anonymous) questions and comments to you on index cards at the beginning or end of each face to face session. These questions should help you determine if the pace you have set for the course is right or not. Be prepared to make adjustments based on what they write. Find a way for the questions to get answered, perhaps in class, and perhaps in some electronic medium, even a mailing list.
Note that the teaching philosophy behind this answer is that it is much more important what the student does in a course than what the professor does. Likewise, the feedback from students is very useful to a new teacher.

Note that if the course is being taught for the first time, as happens in some fields, then some parts of this are more work than otherwise. Syllabus preparation will likely take longer. But in such situations, it is especially important to keep quite a lot of flexibility in the schedule and in the grading/marking scheme so that students wind up with a good experience: hard but not impossible.

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How not to commit to a post-doc offer while waiting for another?
I have received acceptance at University A and I have been told that the contract is being prepared (which takes some weeks e.g. 3 or 4), in the mean while I received an offer from university B stating that I need to reply them within one week. I want to keep all chances by my side, and want to know if I reply to university B by email saying that I am interested in the offer (while waiting to sign contract with University A) will that commit me to signing the contract with them afterwards?

Lots of questions here about handling offers or multiple offers: https://academia.stackexchange.com/search?q=other+offer (can add more terms to focus it a bit)

Some basic advice:

Let university A know about the competing offer from B and the deadline it comes with. Ask them if they can expedite sending you the contract (strongly hinting that they are your preferred choice, but without saying anything certain), or failing that, at least provide sufficient assurances that you will be receiving a contract that would enable you to take a leap of faith and reject the offer from university B.

Ask for more time to reach a decision from university B, citing a pending offer you expect to be receiving soon from another university, and your desire to make an informed decision that takes into account all relevant information.

Writing these sorts of emails is a bit of an art. The precise tone of voice and details you share need to be carefully controlled. You don't want to make the people at University B feel like they are your backup option and that if you accept their offer it's only out of fear that you will not have better options. (If they get that feeling they may well decide not to extend your deadline so they can cut their losses early and go make an offer to someone else who likes them better.) Similarly, when communicating with A, you want them to feel a healthy level of pressure to motivate them to get you your offer, or assurances of an offer, as fast as possible so that you are not forced to accept an offer from another place because of a deadline. But you don't want them thinking that you will definitely accept their offer, since then they won't be motivated to make their offer as attractive as possible in terms of salary and other details. Plus there's always a chance that you may in fact decide to accept the offer from B, and you don't want the people at A to feel like you've misled them if that happens.
Good luck, this is a tricky situation and needs to be handled with tact and diplomacy. Oh, and it's not a great idea to post things on a public website using your real name, since people from universities A and B may stumble upon this discussion.

legally speaking, will replying yes to B commit me to pursue the position at B as well?

@MartinMoore https://law.stackexchange.com for legal question (which you will also need to add details such as location and other, as law are different in every country). I would add that on an ethical point of view, you shouldn't say "yes" if you don't mean yes. The answer advice you on how to not say "yes" and keep both options open, follow this advice

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Is there a standard approach for grading sequence-based questions?
An assessment I'm looking at contains a few questions along the lines of:

Arrange the following in the correct sequence:

__: The third in sequence
__: The second in sequence
__: The fourth in sequence
__: The first in sequence
__: The fifth in sequence

What is the standard method for grading such a question?
The correct sequence of numbers to be written into the __ spaces would be 3, 2, 4, 1, 5. However, if a student misses, say, the correct starting point, but has the remainder of the sequence correct relative to each other (eg: 2, 1, 3, 5, 4), does one generally consider the entire sequence incorrect, or is partial credit of some sort more appropriate? If the latter, are there any ways to easily automate the evaluation process?
One option that comes to mind is to create a list of possible options and convert the question itself to a multiple-choice question.
Eg:

A. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
B. 5, 1, 3, 4, 2
C. 3, 2, 4, 1, 5
D. 2, 1, 3, 5, 4

However, (a) I feel that it then becomes a bit more confusing to answer, and (b) I'm not sure if it is really assessing the same skill at that point.

I saw exams where you had to put four things in a specific order. Each correct thing gave you half a point. This should be reasonable. You can't prevent people from guessing, though.

@ian_itor, thanks for the comment. For clarification, if I followed your suggestion, how would you suggest that I mark the student who answers 2, 1, 3, 5, 4? None of those orders are "correct", but at least the second through fifth options are in the correct sequence relative to each other. Having multiple questions with a lower number of choices might be an option worth considering (and then just treating the entire sequence as correct or incorrect).

You can use whatever grading standard you want—different rubrics are appropriate for different types of question or different levels of difficulty—but you should choose your rubric and reveal it to your students before they have to answer the question.

@AHandcartAndMohair A half point would be awarded for the correct absolute position, not for relative positions. It is kind of arbitrary when you think of the case that a student makes one mistake and puts the first item last and gets no points, but you have to decide on something.

@JeffE, I agree that we can set our own standards, and that it's fine as long as we reveal it to students. At a theoretical level, I think it's good to be able to justify why a certain approach for scoring has been adopted, which is why I was curious whether there are any existing standards (or whether I should explore a probabilistic approach for justifying one scoring approach over another).

In some cases you might want an ad-hoc method.  If the correct answer is 21354, then maybe 12354 and 23154 would be considered equally wrong by some standardized evaluation process, but maybe in terms of the actual content, one is closer than the other.  Maybe the fact that 2 comes before 1 is a really basic fundamental fact that students must know, but the fact that 3 comes after 1 is a minor technical detail that isn't really so important.  You might then want to give more partial credit for 23154 than 12354.

And of course, if the standard is designed specifically for the question, you wouldn't want to reveal it to the students, other than something like "you can score between 0 and 5 points, based on my judgment as to how much correct understanding is indicated by your answer."

Ick, what a yucky question. Consideration: How much time will it take the grader to handle all the multifarious permutations for partial credit? That seems nightmarish.

I always winced when I came across these kinds of questions on tests, precisely because if you get one thing out of order you'll tend to just get everything wrong. Yet at the same time, a similar kind of mistake (such as swapping item 1 and 2, but the rest are in order) isn't so bad, yet often the difference in score seemed to be a poor indicator of actual knowledge. I would be careful to look and see just exactly what you want to examine and if that is worthy of grading at all - remembering the exact order of a sequence is mostly a trick of memory and may not indicate any useful learning.

You could give points for the longest subsequence in the correct order.
Alternatively, you could make it an open question: "Describe the process step by step, make sure to include in your answer 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5." Then grade by a few essential insights that need to be in the answer. This eliminates any easy guessing and shows you why the student misorders the process.
Also a possibility is to only let the students place 1 element of the process in the correct spot. For example:
Where in the process does 1 happen?
A. before 2
B. after 2, but before 3
C. after 3, but before 4
D. after 4, but before 5
E. after 5

Another possibility is to focus on the parts of the process that directly follow each other. Suppose the student answered "1,2,3,4,5", you could look at the pairs (1,2), (2,3), (3,4) and (4,5). Then give a point for (1,2) if 1 directly precedes 2 in the correct sequence, give a point for (2,3) if 2 directly precedes 3 in the correct sequence etc.

Both nice choices for me to look into further. Thanks! The open question is ideal from the demonstration of learning perspective, but I think the test itself needs to be something that can be administered without too much intervention or manual correction.

Marking this as accepted. Will still probably explore more options in terms of revisiting the question structure itself.

I don't know any standard method for grading such questions, but I have the impression that we get the best correlation between student knowledge and grades if we base the grading on the number of wrongly ordered pairs (or in other words, the Kendall tau ranking distance between the given answer and the correct one). A wrongly ordered pair is a pair of items (x,y), where x occurs before y in the answer, but should occur after y. So, for example,

(1, 2, 3, 4, 5) has 0 wrongly ordered pairs,
(1, 3, 2, 4, 5) has 1 wrongly ordered pair, since 3 should occur after 2,
(3, 1, 2, 4, 5) has 2 wrongly ordered pairs, since 3 should occur after 1 and after 2,
(2, 1, 5, 4, 3) has 4 wrongly ordered pairs, since 2 should occur after 1, 5 should occur after 4 and after 3, and 4 should occur after 3,
(5, 4, 3, 2, 1) has 10 wrongly ordered pairs.

The minimal number is 0, the maximal number is n(n–1)/2. For grading, define some function that maps the interval [0,n(n–1)/2] to points, not necessarily in a linear way.

This seems like an interesting and potentially workable approach. I think I might have to make up a couple of dummy responses and see what it might be like to implement it. Thanks for the suggestion!

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When journals falsely assume I already have my PhD, do I need to correct them?
I have published several papers and have done a number of peer-reviews (on request by the journals) as well. In the communication with these journals, I frequently get addressed as "Dr. Lastname", although I have not finished my PhD yet.
I don't mind when this happens in predatory requests from shady journals and conferences (science spam), because I don't expect them to do their due diligence in finding out correct personal info on all the people they send these requests to.
But coming from more serious sources it feels weird.
In the beginning, I made the effort to correct them, but as it started to happen more and more, I stopped, but always wonder if this is not misrepresenting myself. Maybe the requests for e.g. peer-review would not have been sent to me if they knew that I didn't have my doctorate yet, as several journals I know only invite PhD-holders to review.
So should I always clarify my status, or is this a pretty common thing happening to many researchers, and no one really cares?

This also happens to me a lot. I am also very confused about it but , until now, I did not make the effort to correct them, as I feared I bothering the persons I communicated with. I am intrigued what others have to say on this topic!

Some academics do not have a photo of them on their websites, and you can spend many minutes trying to see if there is yet another website with a photo (departmental websites, Linkedin, ...). So sometimes it can be tricky to find out whether to address somebody as "Mr" or "Ms", not even mentioning that the impression of gender that the photo gives may be incorrect. So just defaulting to "Dr." regardless of whether the recipient actually has a PhD saves the editor a lot of time and a lot of worries.

@DCTLib, I have never thought about this gender aspect, but it is very true.

The letter sent to reviewers is probably a form letter.  "Dear Dr ______ ..." and the computer automatically inserts your name.

I don't think you mean "falsely," rather "incorrectly."

No one cares about titles, with the exception of this guy.

I used to work for a guy who had a string of published papers in top-tier journals (and had a well known concept used in his field named after him!) but who had actually ended his formal education at age 16 and had never attended university at all. He found it highly amusing when researchers wrote to "Dr. XYZ" requesting a preprint of one of his papers, etc. He never bothered to correct them. The published papers themselves appeared using his name with no title.

Overthinking. At least in my opinion they do not care at all of your title especially now that you are a prolific author already in their referees lists. Answer by nick012000 is anyway good.

Include your proper title and position in your email signature.
I'd say not to explicitly correct them in the email, but to include a signature to the email that says something like "Mr/Ms Sursula, PhD Candidate at Faculty of ABC, XYZ University". Ideally  you'd want to use your university's official email footer format to do so.
That way, you can inform them of how you're properly meant to be addressed, without openly chastising them for getting it wrong.

Universities have official email footers?

Many organizations (education, government, corporate, non-profit) have standardized email footer formats. Many do not. The equivalent (and doesn't cost them anything) of organizations that used to (some still do) provide business cards in a standard format for each new employee.

Even if there is no official footer from the university or institution, there is always the possiblity to make your own custom footer saying what @nick012000 proposed.

Your university's marketing department (the business function of marketing, not the academic department of marketing) may have some footer guidelines also.

Note that some e-mail systems (major example: Gmail) hide the signature and anything after it by default, so it’s possible that this footer won’t be seen. This still seems like the best answer, though.

@KRyan, As far as I'm aware, Gmail shows the first instance of the full signature once. It doesn't hide it all the time. It only hides it the additional times it appears within the same thread I believe.

The journals are not contacting you because of your title, but because you have published research that they think makes you a good candidate to review the given paper.
There is no need to correct them, the quality of your review does not depend on your title.

This typically happens because for editors who do not know you personally, keeping track of whether you have graduated yet takes more time than just finding your name from one of your publications. It is better to err on the side of overstating your title than understating it: if they refer to a PhD-holder as "Ms." or "Mr.", the PhD-holder might be offended, but if they refer to a graduate student as "Dr.", the grad student is less likely to be offended. Combined with the fact that most reviewers have a PhD, it's easier for editors to default to the "Dr." title when inviting new reviewers.
There's no obligation for you to correct them in the submission website. As a reviewer, correction is unlikely to be an issue as reviewers' names and titles should not appear in the publication. As an author, you may want to correct your title and affiliation on your publications.

…and, as @DCTLib remarks in the comments, it's gender-neutral. The PhD-holder might be even more offended if addressed as "Mr." where "Mrs." would have been correct.

@Bergi, or "Ms." :)

@Bergi  Or "Miss."  I called all my female undergraduate students "Miss Lastname."  Not one complaint in over 20 years of teaching.

@BobBrown: we need to be cognizant that people over whom we have power are unlikely to complain to us even if our practices can be improved.

I know many journals/editors that send emails starting with "Dear Prof. XXX," as default. It doesn't matter, you can ignore the title they use, correcting them is not worth the effort.

@GregMartin : we need to be cognizant that many samples each year multiplied by 20 years of individual unlikely events lead to an event of "it happened at least once" with a much higher probability than the individual event.

@GregMartin  You are, of course, correct.  However, I promise you my students were not shy.  In the cases when we talked about titles, and we did, mostly they seemed happy to be treated as adults.  If they had to call me "Dr." and the culture of the institution was that was expected, then it seemed fair that I reciprocate with a courtesy title when addressing them.  Male students were "Mr. Lastname."

It may be worth mentioning, that at least in Germany you are indeed (theoretically) legally obligated to correct them. Not doing so has been ruled unauthorized use of an academic title in the past, which is illegal according to §132a StGB (translation here) and carries a penalty of imprisonment for a term not exceeding one year or a fine.
In practice nobody will care about your private emails.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm quite sure that just because a journal has a standard template where they refer to everyone as "Dr./Prof.", it does not obligate the recipient to correct it. It's just commonsense. However, if the recipient replies back with "Dr.PersonsName" in their email signature or deliberately writes anything pretending that they have an academic title that they don't, in that case it could be a legal offence.

There have definitely been convictions for not stopping others from referring to someone using a title that person did not earn. Since Germany is a civil law system that doesn't set any precedent, but still. Your best protection is not that it's definitely not illegal, but that a) nobody will ever know and b) it's just not worth the effort prosecuting someone for it in this case.

The text of the law doesn't suggest to me that there's a duty in private emails to correct other people. If your university or a paper you coauthored errorously lists you with a title that you don't have, then you likely do have an obligation to correct that given that third parties would get a wrong impression of what title you have. In 1-on-1 emails I don't see how such a case could be made.

The law does not define "use" or more precisely it doesn't define what "einen Titel führen" means. But knowingly accepting that other people consistently use it to address you can be included. Usually this is only prosecuted if it is connected to some other crime,  like fraud or  unfair businesse practices.


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Automatic failure for not completing all assignments - proper?
Related: How to motivate students to complete low-point homework?
One of my undergraduate professors had a similar problem to the OP's in the above question, that is, that students would skip many minor low-point assignments in favor of studying for big exams, and the professor felt that not completing every single assignment resulted in a lower-quality learning experience even though a student's average still might be passing or even excellent.
The professor's solution was a policy that any student who failed to complete  all assignments would be automatically assigned a zero for the course. That is, the student did not have an opportunity to accept a zero for the assignment that was not done - they would instead get an automatic F for the course. There was no requirement that each assignment be perfect, or even good - the requirement was that you had to at least attempt and turn something in for each assignment.
Are there any problems with this strategy from a pedagogical or ethics perspective? Obviously, some universities permit this and some do not, and the instructor in question did announce this policy in the syllabus at the beginning of the course, but I'm asking from a more general or best practices perspective. It seems to me that this is a non-optimal solution, more specifically one that is using an academic assessment system (grades/GPA) improperly as a behavioral management technique. That is, this strategy is similar/analogous to dropping a student's grade from a B to a C because they brought a weapon to class, or (in reverse) restricting a student from attending a campus dance because they did not demonstrate sufficient mastery of Boyle's Law (implementing a behavioral intervention when an academic one such as a lowered grade would have been more appropriate).
Is this a fair assessment of the situation, or is such a strategy a legitimate tool?
Obviously, the minimum level of effort required to constitute "completing" an assignment was vague and something I did not actually inquire into - one might wonder whether or not turning in a piece of paper with "I like pie, here is Boyle's Law, Boyle's Law is great, the answer to all of the questions on this assignment is THREE." would have sufficed (well, it would have been more than a blank page!). That also concerns me - whether or not being able to identify a boundary between making random guesses that effectively constitute not trying at all and an entirely incompetent, but sincere, attempt to complete the assignment (e.g. answers are all wrong, student failed to apply recent best practices covered in lecture, student confused Ohm's Law with Boyle's Law, student did not express all results to two significant figures as insisted upon in the instructions, answer was in French when English was required, student claimed that Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy was invented by Freud in 1543 and is generally considered effective in treating acute alcohol intoxication, student claimed that Orange is the New Black is a prime example of early twelfth-century Anglo-Saxon epic poetry, etc.), matters in determining whether or not such a penalty should be allowed.
This question has nothing to do with cheating or plagiarism.
Note: This was NOT Competency-Based Education (CBE). This was a regular engineering class that just happened to have this odd policy tacked on because the instructor was sick to death of students skipping his little 2 point assignments that he thought were critical. The course was otherwise entirely normal.
In response to @aeismail, yes, assignments could be turned in up until the date of the final exam, at least for purposes of not automatically failing the course for failing to turn something in.

Was there any allowance for late assignments or excused absences?

@aeismail yes, assignments could be turned in up until the date of the final exam.

This was 15 years ago and I did, in fact, complete all assignments and pass the class, so my own situation is not relevant.

Such a grading system is ridiculous.

This might not be common but not uncommon neither, especially when the course is graded pass/fail (in which case students might just skip the work!). The point is to set a fair standard for "completion" (good-faith attempt?) and give students enough time to make up missed work (because they could be overwhelmed and/or sick).

"students skipping his little 2 point assignments that he thought were critical." - If they were critical, they should've been worth much more than 2 points.

your question needs a step back: is university the place to force students' personal behavior and personal decisions?  if yes, then what is the difference between university and school?
My view is simple: University is the transitional place where students learn to make their own decisions and be responsible in preparation for real-life. This means that there is no one anymore chasing you to "please study". At university you are responsible for your own learning and students quickly start learning responsibility after a little while.
If we are going to keep holding the metaphorical stick and say "you HAVE to do everything as i told you to or else" then when will these students learn to make decisions or realize the  consequences of bad decisions in a relatively safe Environment?
Then comes the 2nd question: Is it for you as a university educator to actually force students to do assignments? why?
If they want to have better learning experience from your class they will choose to do more work. If not then not. It is really not your business, their grades cover their learning. whether or not they choose if your class is worth remembering after the  semester end is their own choice.
Finally, some university professors make me feel they just want to control students. I had various discussions before about why for example you'd be offended of having your student use a laptop in lecture or look at his/her phone (this seems to be more common in the USA instructors than in other countries I dealt with for some reason).
Of course I expect like a million comment now about how you are supposed to "do what is best for them". Except that that they are no longer children, what is good for them is to teach them to be adults. This means: guide them not force them

I agree with Elkady that university should be a place where students are treated as adults, and expected to drive their own learning, without anyone chasing them and forcing them to study.  In view of this, I have always been averse to assessment structures that penalise students for failing to engage with the material in the way preferred by the professor.  If a student is able to acquire sufficient knowledge to demonstrate competence on their exams, it shouldn't matter how that competence was attained (whether through doing all the assigned work, or some other means).  If a student fails to submit an assessment task, and therefore gets zero on that assessment, that will require them to do even better on other tasks.  For this reason, I have always hated compulsory attendance rules, compulsory submission rules, etc.
The strategic problem with this kind of assessment structure is that it mimics school-work, where there is an authority figure micro-managing the learning process.  The student is expected to obey and learn according to the instructions of the authority figure, instead of being given resources and expected to use them proactively in their own way.  The student is not allowed to make trade-offs in their learning process.  This means that although the specific course material gets taught, the more general adult skill of proactive learning is not.
While there is a strategic drawback to this approach, there is no ethical problem with a professor structuring assessment in this way.  Academics are rightly given wide discretion to choose the mode of assessment for their courses, and to determine what is optimal for their own teaching.  So long as there is disclosure of the assessment rules at the outset of the course, I see no ethical problem with imposing a requirement of this kind on students.

Academics are rightly given wide discretion — Yes, but wide discretion is not a blank check.  It would be grossly unethical of me to pass only to students who give me $1000, or who come to class naked, or who were born in Tennessee, or who sit in the first three rows of seats, or who call me "Princess Sparkles", or who write their 7s with a horizontal bar, or who only use red pencils. I think "turn in every assignment" is just as ridiculous as any of these.


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Does discovering a physical thing or artifact merit authorship?
Hypothetical (somewhat farfetched, but still in the realm of possibility):
A ten year old child is sliding down a slide at the local school playground when she sees something sticking out from the ground. Curious, she digs it up and admires it for a while. Thinking that she found something that might be scientifically interesting, she ditches school and spends her lunch money on bus fare to the local university, where she shows what she found to professors. One of the professors identifies the object as a "missing link" fossil and begins the process of writing up a paper for submission to a journal.
Does the child deserve authorship?
More generally, does discovering a "thing" merit authorship? Clearly, if I am on a grant-funded dig to find transitional fossils, rare crystals, paleolithic weapons, or mutant hermaphrodite hybrid lizard-bird droppings and I actually find one that turns out to be critical to the paper, I deserve authorship. Does stumbling onto a scientifically novel object by accident rather than design also merit authorship?
Similarly, if an uneducated, illiterate farmhand finds an axe in a field and it turns out the axe is a critical piece of archaeological evidence that pushes back a milestone in human civilization by a thousand years, does the farmhand deserve authorship or does authorship only fall to the one who recognizes the scientific merit of the find?
If scientific understanding of the find is required to merit authorship, what is the threshold? For example, perhaps our hypothetical child discoverer merits authorship only if she recognized that the item was a fossil. If she thought the item was a meteorite and took it to an astronomy professor, she wouldn't get authorship but would probably merit an acknowledgment ("Thanks to little Suzie Smith, age 10, who found this fossil for me on the grounds of North Town Elementary School."). If Suzie knew the item was a fossil but had no idea that it was interesting enough for a paper, would she still get authorship? What if she knew the item was scientifically interesting enough to merit a paper but did not know enough of the science to actually write the paper without help from someone actually working in academia?
Thoughts:
If the answer or convention varies by field, an answer that covers the field(s) with which you are familiar with authorship conventions would count as a good answer. For example, "In archaeology we have a strict requirement that nobody without at least a bachelor's degree can receive authorship, but in evolutionary biology it's based on a holistic analysis of your contributions, see e.g. Smith (2002) for a summary of recent authorship disputes as it pertains to fossil discovery." could qualify.
If something like this has actually happened, explaining the scenario and what decision was made would count as an answer. For example, "Last fall, this car salesman named Donald J Robin found a 17th century manuscript in his grandmother's jewelry box that he thought was an unknown early textual variant of Hamlet. Working closely with professors at his local university, he discovered that he was correct and published a paper together with them. The professors recommended him for an accelerated double master's degree in literature and archaeology and he is scheduled to graduate this spring."
Yes, I know that this is somewhat of a far-fetched idea and acknowledge that the vast majority of people will never chance upon a major discovery like this. I do note that this is a somewhat common trope in science fiction (e.g. some ordinary "Joe" falls into a bog and comes up choking on the Missing Link and tangled up in a map to Atlantis or something), so it seems likely that such a scenario has been considered or may have even happened.

Do students working on archaeology digs normally get authorship?

Actually, I was hoping for an answer from an archaeologist. If you are not such a person then you are just speculating. You need to know the actual practice in this branch of science. In high energy physics, such as practiced at CERN, a lot more people than you might expect get authorship. I don't know the actual practice in this field and your question is quite specific.

You’re overthinking this. The child discovered the thing, and that discovery was instrumental to a major scientific result. She obviously gets to be a coauthor. There is no reason to deny her coauthorship based on her age, lack of scientific understanding, or anything else.
The point is, coauthorship is not a reward for being smart or scientifically sophisticated, and those qualities are not a prerequisite for becoming a coauthor. The list of authors on a paper is simply a list of the people whose contributions were material in leading to the paper being conceived and written. In this case, you can say that getting coauthorship was simply a matter of luck. Well, the same goes for many famous discoveries that do not involve children or physical artifacts, so conceptually there is nothing new about this situation.

I would vote twice for this if I could.

In contrast to the answers at this moment, let me suggest that ethically full co-authorship is deserved. This is based on ethical principles only as I'm neither an archaeologist nor a paleontologist, so don't know the actual practice in those fields.
But, the student brought more to the game than just "stumbling across" an important artifact.
Put yourself in the shoes of the academic who meets with this child. Could you have written the paper without them? Could you have formed a hypothesis about its importance. The kid brought you not only the artifact, but also the research question. They "sparked" an insight in you, since you had past experience, that you would not have had otherwise.
And it is even quite different than finding an artifact in an old museum collection, since the child took an active part in bringing it to your notice, after which, but only after which, a paper becomes possible. They had an "idea", no matter how ill formed, that the thing might be important.
Yes, they are an author. Ethically speaking, anyway.
The academic would also be wise to see if they could "adopt" the child as a protege and teach them a bit about their field. Perhaps they will become an important scientist with a bit of early guidance.

Note that I've answered the question as stated in the body, not just the top-line question, for which the answer might be no in a different context.

This should probably start by working out what the objectives of authorship are. Interestingly, a number of guidelines on authorship are silent on that. They mostly defer to the conventions of the field. Perhaps we might suppose that the objectives of authorship are these;

Identify those who may answer questions or respond to criticism of the work. The child and the farmhand might answer questions, or field criticism but it's likely they are not best placed to do so.
Establish the reputation of the authors, as people who are capable of making contributions of academic value. Authorship is pretty strongly tied to employability for many fields. This is what conditions like "significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study" are basically intended to cover. Both the child and the farmhand made a chance discovery, but they did recognise it as interesting. Lots of discoveries depend on some element of chance, so the random nature ought not to disqualify them. Anyway, a single publication will not normally generate much reputation, so perhaps the effects of giving authorship are not out of proportion. I'd argue that anyone who takes a muddy object in a field to an academic must have had some inkling that it was significant, and should gain reputation for understanding that.
The inverse of point 2; give significance to the paper, by merit of the author's reputation. This one is contentious, but the blunt truth is that there is more work coming out of most fields than most academics have time to read. In each subfield there are people whose work it's generally worth following. Lots of people probably have an alert set to tell them if Jesse Thaler publishes something, for instance. From this point of view, the child and the farmhand are neither here nor there, it won't matter if they are on the author list or not.

So I'd probably conclude that overall giving authorship is not the best option, unless the would-be-author could reasonably answer common questions about the work. On the other hand, if the academic involved is listed as the corresponding author, it likely won't do any real harm. After all, this situation is sufficiently unusual that it won't occur often. J.H. Hetherington gave his cat co-authorship, and that has not caused any real issues.

What do people think about the objectives for authorship? Are these close?

Also, I advocate for cat-co-authorship.

I think you are making the (common) mistake of thinking of co-authorship as some sort of brownie point that should be awarded according to some criteria. Reality is much simpler - the authors of a scientific paper are the people who wrote the scientific paper. These are normally also the same people who planned the research, applied for funding for the research, executed the research, and analysed / interpreted its results.
If you think about authorship along these lines, it becomes fairly obvious that simply stumbling over an important artifact does not make you an author of any publications that would later on be written about this artifact. Clearly the 10-year old (or the "illiterate farmhand") was important to the research, and later write-ups would and should talk about their role when discussing the story of these results, but it would be silly to pretend that their chance discovery suddenly made them an expert in archeology or evolution theory.

As a sidenote, this question illustrates the main limitation of our current way of acknowledging scientific contributions over authorship of papers - there are simply many "other" ways of contributing to science besides writing up results, and our current model conflates them all. Ultimately, I believe that (especially in the more experimental sciences) we will need to move to a more fine-grained accounting, where we can distinguish between those planning and executing experiments, those acquiring funding, and those doing more menial support work. All of those should be acknowledged, but fairly for the things that they actually did. The CRediT author statement model is a good step into that direction, but ultimately we probably want to move towards a world where the authors of a paper are exclusively the people who actually wrote the paper, while still fairly acknowledging everybody else who had significant contributions.

This doesn't match the reality of how academia works. Authorship is NOT just about who wrote the paper, as shown in the many "criteria for authorship" guidelines/documents out there.

@user2390246 I see what you mean. This is mostly what I tried to address in the second half of the question. The way I see it it's still about "authoring" a paper, but we have certainly become very liberal in defining what exactly authoring a paper entails. But simply stumbling over an artefact would still not be part of that definition.

You say we should "move towards a world where the authors of a paper are exclusively the people who actually wrote the paper" and your answer is based on that world, but (without commenting on the merits of that world) it is not the one we are in.

I agree with your conclusion, but not the reasoning given in the first half of the answer

“the authors of a scientific paper are the people who wrote the scientific paper”: in several experimental fields this is not the reality. The authors of a scientific papers are those who contributed in the large to an experiment, and might have not written a single word. That is, what you propose in the second part is frequently already done, albeit not formally coded.

Academia and research publication are two different concepts, two different things that overlap.

it would be silly to pretend that their chance discovery suddenly made them an expert: you are making the exact same mistake that you accuse OP of making, namely assuming that coauthorship on a paper is a reward for being an expert on something. It’s not. It’s an acknowledgment that you contributed something that was material to the research being created, which clearly is the case here. Of course, people would know the coauthor is a child who made a chance discovery (that would be explained in the paper) and no one would be confused about what the coauthorship means.


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Does accessing a paper through an alternative format require citation or acknowledgment?
Many universities have service bureaus where one can obtain media in alternative formats (e.g. see the University of Colorado). These offices can transform books and articles into different formats such as large print, audiobook, or Braille editions. Generally speaking, if one of these services has been used to access sources in preparation for an academic paper, is it necessary to cite or acknowledge this?
Way back when I was young, I was taught to always disclose the media format that I was actually using to write the paper. For example, if I was writing a Freshman paper on Hamlet and used the audio CD edition from College Shortcuts Audiobooks, Inc., I was expected to explicitly cite the CD version in my bibliography. Two reasons were given: first, that this was an exercise in honesty when so many students wanted to use shortcuts like Cliff's Notes and audiobooks (in other words, citing your actual source was an "admission" that you hadn't actually read the book), and second, that different editions of the same work sometimes included textual differences, errors, or even censorship (e.g. if the instructor knew that you were using the "for kids" edition of a literary work that omitted all of the sex jokes, they would understand why you never referenced any of them in your paper). These rationales may not be relevant when dealing with university-level alternative format media that are intended for persons with disabilities and presumably adhere to academic-grade high standards in accuracy.
So, if I use my institution's disability services office to obtain an audiobook, large-print, Braille, or otherwise alternative edition of some article, am I expected to:

Explicitly cite the alternative format (e.g. "Smith, R. (2021) "An Analysis of Free Radicals Under Macroscopic Hypercube Regression Special Large Print Anti-Dyslexia Font Ed.. Podunk U Disabilities Office (2021), orig. printed in Advanced J. of Advancements in Advancing Science Stuff (2019, pp. 433-464)")?

Cite the "original" source material that the disabilities office used to produce my alternative format medium, but add an acknowledgment to my paper (e.g. "Thanks to the Podunk U Disabilities Office for making Smith R.'s (2019) paper available to me in a large print, dyslexia-friendly edition.")?

Just cite the original paper, omitting any mention of disability accommodations?

Yes, I'm aware that there may be institution or journal-specific policies. I'm asking about general practices. Is this kind of citation or acknowledgment even a thing?
If this differs between fields, that can be an answer. For example, "Yeah, nobody cares about how you accessed a mathematics, physics, or sociology paper, but Film Studies experts frequently hold that watching a movie with closed captions on is a different experience and needs to be disclosed, though of course you don't have to disclose whether you had them on because you have a disability or whether it was for some other reason.".

Related: if you've only read the work you're citing in translation, it's almost certainly a good idea to say so.

Citing the alternative format is going to be a disservice to both your readers and to the authors of the original paper. For the readers you are adding an extra complication in figuring out the original source (even if it is just disregarding half of the information in the reference). For the authors the problem is that citation data bases probably won't be able to identified that their paper was indeed cited, and will thus not count it. Maybe citing counts shouldn't matter, but in practise they do.
You should be mindful of potential discrepancies though. A common issue would be page numbers. Don't give wrong paper numbers. Either omit them altogether, or better, get someone to figure out the page numbers in the original of whatever specific points you are making.
When to comes to acknowledgements: If you want to highlight the importance of accessibility, you should feel free to include this. If you don't want to draw attention to a disability, you should feel equally free to not mention this.
(This is from a math/CS perspective.)

Instead of saying "Citing the alternative format is going to be a disservice", I think you mean to write "Not citing the original format is going to be a disservice"?

Cite section numbers (or any other sort of internal structure that is likely to remain unchanged under format changes; e.g., theorem numbers in math papers) instead of page numbers! Don't just omit them.

I am torn on this. On one hand, the citation count may be messed up, but the special format citation may have modifications/updates and therefore readers may not be able to match the relevant content in the new format, e.g. because it was re-edited. I personally think the source used should be mentioned to permit reconstruction if relevant.

@CaptainEmacs If I'm told that something is on Page 7 of the Braille version of a paper created by the disability department of the University of Hintertupfing, that information doesn't help me at all in finding this. I'll either have to search in the paper for a relevant keyword or skim it to find the correct place in the primary version.

@Arno I wasn't clear. I believe that the version used should be cited. (possibly one could also mention the original to track it back).

As you alluded to in your question, following particular journal or institutional practices is a good first step.
As for a more general answer, you should cite the media to be as 1) accurate as possible and as 2) helpful to other scholars as possible.
A few examples:

If you were using a different edition of a text (perhaps a 3rd edition with a new introduction by X scholar), you should indicate this in your citation to be as accurate as possible.

If a special print version (with larger text, for example) was used, the page numbers might be different. To be as helpful to other researchers, you should indicate this alternate version.

If all text is the same and all page numbers line up in a special printing of a book, say a Braille edition, then the normal citation is probably accurate and helpful to scholars. However, it could be nice to indicate an acknowledgement of the accessibility service’s effort in obtaining a special volume for your work.


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Does use of computer translation as an aide when writing a paper require a citation or disclosure?
Related (not duplicates):

Is it appropriate to cite a paper in a language I don't understand?
Would it be ethical to hire a proofreader for theses and academic articles?

One of the things that I have found extremely helpful when writing in a non-native language is to use tools such as Google Translate, where I will first write what I want to say in my native language, put it into the translator, and then revise the translated output based on my actual knowledge of the language. Specifically, I am often able to recognize the correctness of a passage in that language (e.g. word usage, false friends, correct verb tenses, spelling errors, appropriate levels of politeness, etc.) better than I can write fluently from scratch.
When doing such a thing in an academic paper, is it generally necessary to either:

Disclose that an automated translation tool was used to assist in the composition of the paper?
Formally cite the translation tool (e.g. Google Translate)?

I'm not asking about any specific situation (contact your instructor or editor), but about best practices and general understandings.
I'm not asking whether it's acceptable to copypaste directly from the output of an online translator straight into a manuscript, thesis, or course essay (that would be crazy), but whether the fact that one has used a translator in a non-trivial way can be considered unethical. Would the answer differ based on context? For example, my instinct tells me that this would probably not be ok for coursework in which mastery of the target language is a main focus (e.g. you are taking Advanced English as a Second Language and are assigned to write a short story), but would be more acceptable in a context (coursework or journal submission) in which mastery of the target language is not the focus (but rather the medium of demonstrating mastery over or research findings regarding some other thing), such as writing a paper on astrophysics for a journal that requires that all papers be in English (the journal is really focused on your astrophysics findings, and the language is just a standardized medium of information exchange, i.e. a tool to do so).
It's already well-accepted that using general language reference tools such as dictionaries, thesauri, grammars, and style guides are not unethical, but it's not clear if automated translation tools are truly analogous to them.
In a nutshell, the process I'm speaking of is as follows:

Write my original composition, findings, thoughts, analyses, etc. in my native language, without doing anything remotely resembling plagiarism.
Send what I wrote through a translator.
Use the output of the translator as a framework or draft, going through it and making appropriate corrections (conjugations, false friends, incorrect synonym chosen (e.g. translating "hot" as in temperature as "spicy" or "sexy"), awkward phraseology, archaic language, inappropriate diction, blatant translation errors, etc.), but without recomposing the entire paper from scratch in the target language.

I would say if you speak the target language you don’t have to cite it. If you do not speak the target language don’t rely on translation software (and therefore don’t cite it)

My opinion (note: opinion) is that you don't need to do a citation here as the words are yours originally and the meaning/essence isn't intended to be modified in any way.
However, my opinion, also, is that it might be useful to note that auto translation was done. This is just so that a reader fluent in the translated language might be forewarned that any anomalies of language might be explained by the use of the translator.
I think that the workflow in such a case is to tweak the translation in any case as such things are still far from perfect. In this case, especially, it is clear that the translator is just a tool. You state, in fact, that this is your workflow, of course.

It's also worth noting that Google Translate doesn't give a hoot about whether you cite it.

In my opinion there are two situations that need to be addressed:

Writing an academic paper to be published in a journal. I personally would not cite a translation service that I used to guide my writing. This is similar to how I would not provide a citation for standard uses of C++ or Python in a journal article. It would sound silly to say "I am indebted to Google Chrome and Google Scholar for their assistance in searching the Internet for resources for this paper." The focus of a journal article is not on the writing of the paper as much as it is on what is being presented on the topic.
Writing a dissertation/thesis. In my thesis and dissertation I cited every resource that I used. This includes citations for several programming languages and LaTeX.

This thesis was typeset using LaTeX [citation]. All models in Chapter 4 were fit using Python 3.6 [citation]. All models in Chapter 5 were fit using R [citation].

I feel that the writing of a thesis or dissertation is of larger emphasis than that of a journal article. The purpose of a dissertation is to, quite literally, dissert. Obviously the content needs to be strong and purposeful. But you are allowed much more space for providing every detail from the research process.

To me it sounds like what your describing is the verification [or re-verification] of what your already know. Obviously, you are not actually relying on google translate in a significant respect, for if you were you would probably paste your whole English text and spit out your answer.
This is similar to what I do all the time while chatting in foreign languages (spoken or written). I have a grasp of the language to a good enough degree, but I can not afford to look up each question which may arise. However, most of the time I would be able to recognize right from wrong. An easy example would be forgetting an irregular verb conjugation: I don’t remember, Google does. But more than that, I can easily forget many idioms which I can verify my recollection through Google, which has access to the internet as a whole. Also other services such as Reverso which specializes in this.
In summary, the machine is not doing anything you wouldn’t do if you had more time or energy.


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Is it worth getting a masters in a secondary field as part of an interdisciplinary PhD?
I'm in the process of making a decision with regards to graduate school and my number one choice is an interdisciplinary PhD program in Computational Science and Engineering. On the computational side of things I'll be focusing largely on data science, but I'll be looking to apply those skills to land use modeling. So effectively I'll be doing a lot of work in environmental policy.
My goal is to go into academia after my degree and as such I'm wondering if it would make sense to pick up a second masters in Environmental Policy as part of my coursework? Doing so would likely add a bit more time to the PhD, but would this make me more attractive as a candidate for a tenure track job afterwards given I already hold a Masters in Software Engineering?

From your question, It is not clear to me 1) whether the "interdisciplinary program in Computational Science and Engineering" is a Ph.D. program and 2) whether you are thinking about studying for the M.S. in Environmental Policy in parallel with something else OR sequentially, that is, prior to the CSE degree you have mentioned.

@AleksandrBlekh I edited the question a bit so it should be more clear now.

When you are evaluated as a job candidate in academia, the first thing people will see is your PhD.  That will tell them that you know how to dig into a topic, get the background knowledge that you need in order to conduct the research you are interested in.
The next thing they will look at is your publication record.  Because of the peer review process, they will feel confident that if you publish in reputable journals on a particular topic, you know what you're talking about.
So if you're sure you're headed for academia, I think you will be fine just cherry-picking the particular courses you think will be most helpful for you in Environmental Policy.  (Although if you find that you're, say, only one or two courses away from satisfying the requirements for the masters, then I suppose you might as well finish it off.)
Think of how many PhDs veer off in a different direction during the course of their career!  They don't bother getting a new PhD in the process, because they already have one.  You can think of the PhD studies as the apprenticeship to do research, and the PhD as a driver's license which was issued in one state, but which you can use in other states.

Yes, the big reason I asked was I heard somewhere that for teaching purposes most universities have a policy that you need n graduate courses in the subject. Thus the masters in Environmental Policy might enable me to teach those classes as well as Computer Science courses?

@rob - Not sure about that, but I still think you should keep your focus  and take courses to prepare for your thesis research.  Getting a PhD is hard and you need to stay focused to get through.  ----  However, if you want to do something to prepare for being a good teacher, you could take a couple of carefully chosen pedagogy (Education) classes.

I don't know where I got "rob" from!  I should have said @rjzii.

Thank you for the clarification. My opinion on your situation (which you should take with a grain of salt, of course) is that it would be an overkill (time-wise, finance-wise and otherwise) to go through another M.S. program with assumption that it would make you "more attractive as a candidate" for the CSE program. Even if it would, the "price" that you would pay for that might just be too high.
On the other hand, if you have plenty of time, financial resources and the lack of family or other obligations, I find nothing wrong in your approach - I am just not sure, whether it is the optimal one.

Sorry, it looks like the question might still be a bit unclear. The PhD would be the program I'd be enrolling in, but as part of I'm wondering if I should get the MS as part of the PhD coursework. So the MS would effectively be acquired in passing.

@rob: Yes, the question was still unclear to me, as only now I understand that you are talking about studying in both M.S. and Ph.D. programs simultaneously. Anyway, in that case, the overall "price" that you'd pay would be less than in the sequential case. However, since you want to be more attractive "as a candidate", this still doesn't make much sense IMHO. I think that it is better to focus on one degree and, if you want to acquire some specialized knowledge, not offered as a part of the Ph.D. program, enroll in those specific courses additionally (such option is typically available).

authors: Преводи и Легализация Варна СА

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text:
How should I structure my CV since my degree doesn't reflect my primary studies?
As per the title, how should I structure my CV since when I'm done with my course of study my formal degree (PhD, Computational Science and Engineering) will not reflect my course of study and research (environmental modeling and sustainability). Based upon my projected coursework I will get a graduate certificate in sustainability along the way. Furthermore, most of my publications will be related as well.
Currently my goal is to secure role in academia, ideally a professorship, but my background is industry so I'm used to automated application filtering, it is a concern of mine. As such, how should I structure my CV to reflect my actual research interests, or is this effectively a non-issue in the long run?

I have a PhD in Computer Science and work in social sciences so have a similar situation as you. I get away with it as a 'methods' person rather than a 'subject matter' person. In the long run, it will be a non-issue because your research interests and jobs that interest you should overlap. But for the first post-doc position, you may need to be careful in your presentation.
First, an academic CV looks nothing like an industry CV. Get hold of some CVs from more senior academics and peers and attend any training offered by your institution. There is usually considerably more detail in an academic CV (sometimes excessive, which gives the impression of insufficient analytical skills to assess relevance).
While I am not specifically familiar with the US context, based on UK and Australia it would be unusual to use any sort of application filtering past the basic level of 'do you have a PhD'. It is important though to include your thesis title, which hopefully reflects your interests.
Any application process will include your publications. Almost all will have some sort of 'research statement' or cover letter etc. Take advantage of these to emphasise the relevance of your research and experience to the particular job. While it is fine to have a standard CV, you need to actively think about why you would be good for the particular job, not rely on fairly empty stock phrases. It is very important to write this statement or letter from a blank page for each job.
Interdisciplinarity is also attractive, but only if it's relevant - being able to use different methods is a plus in a larger research group because there's not much point in having multiple researchers with the identical skills and knowledge.


text:
How to tell my supervisor that I have severe phobia of flying?
The phobia of flying is discouraging me to travel for conferences, although quite a number of them are very good opportunities for me to "market" the researches of our lab and of mine. Apparently, I can't overcome this phobia even with the help of therapists. I almost passed out due to panic attacks on the airplanes, and after the flights, I always felt too exhausted to do anything for an entire week.
I think it's time to let my supervisor know that I can't to go to any conferences that I have to fly there. How can I do it in the most professional way?
Thanks

seriously, will you do that?

That's really tough. Well done for doing your best to get help. It seems to me that you are not alone. I know a couple of academics who don't fly at all (I suspect for the same reason, although they haven't told me why) and they seem perfectly happy with their careers. I hope you manage to find some work-arounds and that your supervisor is understanding.

Hey Josh, joined here to write this. To answer your question, I agree with @CharlesMorisset. However, keep doing your best and beat it. Yes it can get scary, which is 100% reasonable. However, travelling is a beautiful thing. I cannot imagine not being able to see new places and meet new people. Your career will be fine, your life may not be as exciting as you like. I helped my ex-girlfriend beat it and now she is ok. You will be too. Take someone that can keep you calm on short plane rides and relax. Enjoy seeing new places. Good luck!

Directly, as if your supervisor were human.

@JoshVo: Is it a phobia of airplanes or of heights? (For example, is it a fear of terrorists bombing the plane or a fear of falling due to equipment malfunction?)

@Arin. Thanks. How did you help your gf to beat it? Can you give me some tips? Thanks.

@Mehrdad. For me, it is the phobia of crashing. I suddenly developed it after a traumatic flight :(

I really don't think this comment thread is the place to probe the details of the OP's condition or offer  diagnosis and/or treatment.  To stay on topic, let's limit ourselves to how to mitigate the effects on his academic career.

It takes longer, but if a conference is on the same continent, it's perfectly possible to take the train, cerrtainly if you can work.  I've attended a summer school in Rome while living in northern Sweden — 48 hours by train each way.  Not because I can't fly, but because I prefer not to.  Europe still has a great intercity train network, and crossing the continental US by train/bus takes 3 days and many buses have wifi and outlets.  I just hope you're not in Oceania or another remote corner of the world.

Thanks gerrit. I am in the midwest of the US.I just missed one big conference on the west coast...

@JoshVo Did you develop the phobia prior to starting your PhD, or during? It might be more difficult to explain to your supervisor if it was a prior condition, because your supervisor could justifiably question why he or she wasn't told much earlier.

"I'm like John Madden; I don't fly. But I suppose I can leave a couple days early and take a train."

I think you have your answer from everyone else. Remember, you're not alone, Dennis Bergkamp (a footballing legend) also had a severe fear of flying. He worked around it sometimes.

Get drunk during the flight. Helps a lot

Since it doesn't sound like it's likely that you will be able able to work around it in the immediate future, I think you should schedule a meeting and just have the conversation. Explain your phobia, explain the effects, and explain that you have worked with therapists and that the problem is unresolved.
Treat it like any other health or mental health disability that will affect your ability to carry out the tasks graduate students normally do and make it clear that you will attend conferences by train or bus where possible. There are many questions about health and disability on this site and the consensus generally is that if it will impact your performance, you should bring it up with your supervisor and colleagues as soon as possible.  Since this has already become an issue, you should do that now.

+1 Treat it like any other health or mental health disability... One wouldn't fly to a conference with a broken femur, would one?

@PavelPetrman depends on the conference.

@LegoStormtroopr true. What I meant was that the fobia of flying can be compared to other health issues that prevent you from attending a conference more obviously. Next time I'll get my simile right, hopefully.

If you live in Europe or the United States, a severe phobia of flying should not invalidate an academic career.  Some conferences will be excluded.  You won't attend that conference in Hawaii, do field work in the (Ant)arctic, or visit the institute on the other continent (although moving there for a longer time is still possible — search Travel Stack Exchange for "freighter travel").  When you talk to your supervisor, I would bring up the alternative.
It is possible to travel overland to conferences on the same continent.  That has two issues:

It might take 48 hours or longer to get there.  You might have to leave Friday night for a conference that starts on Monday.  Europe (still) has excellent intercity trains and one can get from northern Sweden to southern Italy in 48 hours.  American trains are much less developed, but even if you are one one coast and need to get to the other, you can get there.  Maybe 3 days on trains and buses.  Are you willing to spend that time?  Is your supervisor willing to let you spend that time?
The cost.  Even if the time is fine, it might cost significantly more to take train and bus, in particular if you request a bed on the train, so you can sleep.  It doesn't have to cost more, but sometimes it does.

During my PhD and postdoc, I've attended conferences regularly, but I've only flown twice — once for a California conference when I was based in Sweden, and once for a Korea conference when I was based in Canada.  All other times, I've taken the train.  Longest was 48 hours each way, for a 2-week conference.  For me, it was not the fear of flying.  I prefer the train, want to limit my impact on the environment, and found a line in my university's travel policy that sustainable transportation solutions should be preferred.  My supervisor bought that and let me take the train.
I don't know where you are.  If you're in Australia, New Zealand, or another relatively remote corner, it's going to be a lot more difficult.  If you're in Europe and in the future want to go to North America for a post-doc, or vice versa, you can still get there through freighter travel — although you probably don't want to do that for any visit shorter than six months.  Even east Asia might work.  Be creative — a life without flying is possible, and in fact, some people choose such a life for a variety of reasons.  And yes, some are in academia too.

P.S. If your circumstances allows it, you might want to try to be at a relatively central university.  For example, Germany or France if you're in Europe, Chicago area if you're in the USA.

Thanks gerrit. I am in the midwest of the US.I just missed one big conference on the west coast..

@JoshVo I see.  I'm going to get on the Amtrak from Iowa to San Francisco, departing this Friday evening, arriving Sunday afternoon, just in time for a big conference there...

It should never invalidate any career. Flying is unnatural to Humans. We should not be expected to do so. I love flying, btw.

@jay_t55 Well, a phobia of flying would certainly prevent a career as an airline pilot! And, actually, I don't buy your claim that an inability to do certain things should never prevent one from doing a particular career. Accommodations should be made wherever possible so that, for example, being in a wheelchair shouldn't prevent you from having an academic career -- but it probably is going to make you physically unable to be a window-cleaner, for example.

You misunderstood.

No.. he didn't.

I know some very productive senior scientists who never physically attend any conferences or meetings.

@gerrit: it's much more important for junior scientists to attend than for senior, more established names.

Do you need to be the one to present papers at conferences, or could it be done by those co-authors who actually enjoy airline travel?
I'm in a somewhat similar circumstance: I don't fly commercial, not because of a phobia (I have my own light plane), but because I'm not willing to put up with TSA BS and the discomfort of economy class, and have other life circumstances that make travel difficult.  But there are other people in the lab who do like travelling, so they do the presenting of papers.  Though for some reason, the lab director always manages to do the ones in Hawaii :-)

Joined just to post this answer:
G.H. Hardy had a fear of travelling over sea; so he sent messages to his colleagues telling them that he had solved the Riemann Hypothesis.
Who was the mathematician who thought “god” was out to get him?
So maybe tell your supervisor that you have solved a big problem in your field and God won't let anything bad happen to you.

Just simply tell your supervisor that you are scared of flying and you don't fly for this reason. Most people are sympathetic and will understand.
On a different note, let me offer a helpful suggestion. Of all the types of psychological problems, phobias are actually the easiest to cure. The best treatment for phobia is "exposure therapy". If you haven't already, seek out a "cognitive behavior therapist" and they will know what to do to help you.
Additionally, things like Valium and Xanax are excellent ways to help you deal with panic situations. In fact, the exposure therapy combined with Xanax is a very good way to help you learn to deal with panic, so that eventually over time you are retrained not to panic in those situations and you no longer need any medicine to help you get through it. In addition to a small dose of Xanax  you can add a small dose of a beta-blocker. Beta-blockers prevent adrenaline. As the "adrenaline feedback loop" is one of the defining characteristics of a panic attack, the beta-blocker can help mitigate it as well.
If you end up using medication, you need to combine it with the cognitive behavior therapy because you don't want to get dependent on medication to deal with panic. Instead, your goal is to use the medication only as a temporary way of helping you analyze yourself and deal rationally with the panic situation, so that eventually you realize you don't actually need the medication.
If you want to talk more about this, message me privately, I'll be happy to discuss what I know.
Another thing to think about: a panic attack is a "fight or flight" response, which is your evolutionary response to protect yourself. Think about this. It's your body's own way of helping itself. Although, it happens to be misdirected at an inappropriate target (a plane, or whatever situation causes you to panic.) Everybody who has a panic attack thinks they're going to go crazy, pass out, die, etc., but it never happens. Nobody has died from a panic attack. How are you going to die from something that is actually your body's attempt to protect itself? You don't. What happens is you get into an adrenaline cycle: the adrenaline peaks, it tapers off, it peaks again 10-15 minutes later, tapers off again.... These are natural things designed to get you out of danger.

I'm a little worried about the lay medical advice here. It sounds the OP has already contacted professionals. He should trust their opinion, not ours.

Don't just tell your supervisor that you're scared of flying. Tell them all the things you've said in the question (that you've sought professional help, that it didn't work, that you get panic attacks rather than just feeling uneasy) and try to offer a solution as well as just the problem.


text:
Will one 'C' grade due to health issues ruin my chances of admission into a top grad school?
I am in the third year of my undergraduate degree now, and in the process of applying for Graduate schools and Med schools. I have a burning questions about a creepy "C" in my transcript.
To summarize my story: I was recovering from a biopsy operation back then. Though I was advised to take one semester off to rest physically and mentally (I was extremely paranoid waiting for the pathology report, and luckily it came back benign), I still decided to take all the courses and the heavy research that I had started before. I performed so badly that semester that I received a C. That is like the most embarrassing element in my transcript.
Some told me that such a bad grade is a disadvantage for admissions. Do I still have a chance to make it to top grad and med schools?  With extra effort (I have managed to pull up my GPA to 3.8 now, I have been on the Dean's list for some semesters, have 3 publications, and 2 poster presentations at symposium, my GRE and MCAT are good too), can I cover that ugly spot?

It sounds like you have done everything you can to cover it, short of bribery.

They will probably recognize that you're human anyway.

I've taken a couple of liberties with the wording here. In particular, I don't know if the poster is in the third year of his undergrad degree or not, but it seems like a reasonable inference.

Haha... It was more than a year ago, when I was in my most desperate mood for grad schools. Now, getting into a top one, and having some opportunities to know what were done behind the scenes, I agree that I should not have lamented about the GPA, or the GRE :). It is because there are much more important factors the admission committee want to look at.

No. My grades were colorful and I'm at Berkeley for my PhD now. They're not nearly as important as your recommendations, publications, awards/fellowships (if any). Basically anything that demonstrates your research ability, which grades don't as well as those factors.

Your final GPA already shows that you have done well in your study and a bad grade in one of the semester or subject wouldn't matter much. Even if you are concerned about your grade affecting the admission chances, you can include in your Statement of Purpose why you performed badly, what did you learn from that and how did you managed to improvise upon it. Failure is also a learning experience, and if you are applying to a sane school, the admission committee are usually intelligent enough to understand it. Moreover, by describing how you improvised after a bad grade, would reflect your commitment and seriousness.

In your shoes, I would include a letter explaining the biopsy operation, the date of it, and its "correlation" with the "creepy C." This letter should probably come from a professor familiar with the situation, if possible, or maybe a doctor.
You've come a long way since then. You've got several publications/presentations, and a cumulative GPA of 3.8  that includes the C. Most schools would be happy let you in. They'd wonder about the C, but would also be looking for an "excuse" to overlook it.
This is something you don't want to let "pass" but you also don't want to make a "big deal" of it. A letter or two should be just about right


text:
Finding the total number of papers published in a given journal, for a given year
Is there any way that one can find the percentage of papers from a certain journal that meet a given keyword?
The numerator of that fraction (the number of papers that conform to the keyword who were published in a given journal) can be found easily enough with a simple search. But the hardest part really comes down to finding the denominator of the fraction, that is, the total number of papers that were published in a given year, across multiple journals (thus, using the same metrics for all to enable comparison).
Services from Web of Science/Knowledge (InCites JCR etc) don't seem to help here. The only resource I found that gives this total number is https://scirev.org/, but many important multidisciplinary journals or general-psychology journals are not listed there.

Have you tried asking them...

No, as that would probably constitute a pre-submission enquiry, which are not allowed in the journals I have in mind

Why would asking how many be a pre-submission? What are you hiding?

What makes you think I'm hiding something. Point is, the total number of articles published in any one year is available for some journals (on their website, or on SciRev), but not for others, making such comparisons difficult.

The way you answered my comment... still you could ask.

Can't you just search by publication name and publication year? Basically the same search, but without requiring the keyword?

You mean as a way to find the total number of papers published that year in that journal? I think the rounding error would be so great in a e.g. Google SCholar search, that that total number would be very unreliable. Cf also the controversy relating "total number of citable items" (denominator of the JIF fraction)

I suggest you edit the question to be "number of articles per year in given journal" or something, since that is what you're really looking for. Is it possible for you to tell us what journal this is? And my understanding is that a "pre-submission inquiry" is a question relating to your submission (such as, "would this topic be suitable for your journal?") The rule should not categorically forbid all contact with the editorial staff as long as you one day plan to submit a paper to the journal...

Good point, will edit as you suggest

OP, is the journal indexed in WoS?

I actually intend to compare across several journals, and haven't checked whether all are indexed in WoS - I'd guess most are.

If the journal is indexed in Web of Science, this can be easily searched for. You mention it doesn't seem to help, but I don't understand why. In the main search window, search for 1) publication name = [name of journal] and 2) published in whichever year you're interested in.

I just don't know if the total numbers you get from a search like this truly reflects the number of papers published. For instance, WoS returns 25,334 hits for a search with journal name=Scientific Reports, and year=2017. A more trustworthy/realistic number would be obtained from the journal itself, but then one runs into the problem that not all journals report this.

There's a way to do the search in WoS to get the journal with that exact title.