text:
My university requires unrestricted access to my personal laptop. What should I do?
I am not sure that Academia is the right place to post this, as it would probably be better suited for Law.se.
I am a student in Italy. My university requires unrestricted access to my personal computer for an afternoon to install a certain software. I obviously have security concerns, so I have contacted the responsible for my course to know if I could be given the key to install such software personally. He has explicitly stated that there are no alternatives to the standard process of giving in my computer to the tech department for one afternoon.
On one side am reluctant to give unrestricted access to my computer for security reasons, as I have personal files stored on my machine; on the other side I need to have access to such software because it is required for a course in the future.
Is such a request even legal or a common request in academia? How can I avoid giving unrestricted access to my personal machine while still obtaining this software?

You could buy the software on your own. If they are gifting you a license they can probably attach conditions to that, but I agree it's really icky. Especially if the software is needed for your classes. What are their options for students who do not have a personal computer? Is this software available in the computer pool? You could use that instead.

You could trick them into operating on a virtual machine that is not easily recognisable as such and encrypt everything else for good measure (keeping a backup).

Ask to be present when the tech support installs the software and stare them down sternly.

Is this a request, or a "request"? That is, what happens if you don't comply. Will it just be a minor inconvenience since you cannot use the software on your own computer, or will it have more severe consequences?

@PieterNaaijkens We have in-class assignments which require the use of such software on our personal machines; missing a certain percentage of these assignments is an automatic fail. I would call It a request.

@TheWanderer thank you for the suggestion. I have asked if this is possible.

I can't imagine an institution that is willing to use IT peoples' time to install a software on every single student's computer. That sounds absolutely crazy.

Is it possible to borrow a university owned laptop or use a computer at the university? As @nengel said, what about students who don't have a personal computer (or not the right operating system, if the software is OS specific)?

@Mark this situation is not contemplated. Every person in my class has a personal laptop. The software is not OS specific.

As a side note, it might be genuinely impossible for the school to give you a key. If they have some sort of campus-wide academic license for the software, installation may require the licence administrator to log in to their account from your computer. Matlab is an example of this. (Speaking from my own experience, needing a specific person to come to my office to set it up. )

@InquisitiveLurker It may be, but I had a Matlab licence with my past institution and they surely did not require unrestricted access to my machine.

Make a complete backup, then remove all the users and create a new user. Let then install with that new user . Once complete then add back your other users from the backup...

@Wrzlprmft: I agree with your suggestion, but I am not sure remarks like "trick them" or "not easily recognisable" are appropriate here. We do not actually know they use the software installation as a pretext to carry out any malicious plan with the OP's computer. Instead, I'd consider it a legitimate idea to openly offer giving the university access to a restricted user account with a VM within which the IT people have sufficient rights to install stuff.

“I have contacted the responsible for my course”: do you mean the professor teaching the course? If not, I suggest asking the professor and explaining your privacy concerns, they may be more sympathetic and may be able to instruct the IT staff and the “responsible for the course” (assuming that’s someone less powerful such as a teaching assistant or staff member) to acccommodate your request, or at least propose a mechanism that will allow the IT staff to install the software without raising concerns about violating your privacy.

If no root password is required, installing in a separate user account may be sufficient (assuming that the system is reasonably safe and the technicians are not adversarial).

Another solution: get a second hard disc, install a basic OS (for example from a linux live cd) and let them install their software there. When you have your computer back, add your original disc(s) and set up a multiboot option.

@InquisitiveLurker: Matlab's not a good example. My campus has a universal Matlab license that did not require administrator assistance.

Encryption is your friend.

@InquisitiveLurker Matlab doesn't need that. We have a campus licence for Matlab for 30k+ students, and each one can install their copy through the Mathworks site.

I'm curious to know how it ended up.

@MassimoOrtolano The uni said it's not possible for me to be present during the installation. The uni does not offer this software on its machines and requires some assignments to be done specifically with this software. Long story short, I decided to not have the software installed and everybody is treating me as the weirdo because I won't give my computer in.

My university requires unrestricted access to my personal computer for an afternoon to install a certain software.

Your university has messed up. Are you really sure that it's the university requiring this? Maybe it's the isolated action of your professor, in agreement with their department IT (not the university one).

He has explicitly stated that there are no alternatives to the standard process of giving in my computer to the tech department for one afternoon.

I've never, ever seen an academic software licence requiring such a procedure.

On one side am reluctant to give unrestricted access to my computer for security reasons

You're rightly reluctant.

How can I avoid giving unrestricted access to my personal machine while still obtaining this software?

First, contact your course mates to start a collective action. I suggest you to write an email, signed by all students, to the dean supervising the courses of your field, the head of the department to which your professor belongs to, and, if there is one, the head of the IT university service. Copy the email to the rector too. Express clearly your concerns and state that is totally unacceptable to require students to give access to their personal computers. If your university insists on this position, ask them a copy of the licence agreement.

You'll have to look elsewhere for legal advice, but from an academic point of view this is extremely unusual.
Most academic software licenses make a distinction between software that is allowed to be installed on student's personal machines and software that is only allowed to be installed on university-owned machines. For student software the software distributor always has some mechanism in place to allow students to achieve that installation on their own.
As to why your university has instituted this policy we cannot guess.
1) Politely inform your technology department that you are not comfortable handing over your personal property and ask that you be allowed to perform the installation yourself. This is a reasonable request that should be accommodated. If they refuse, ask them to be specific as to why.
2) If nothing else, politely insist that you schedule a time so they can conduct the installation with you present. Most software installations take just a few minutes but at worst take an hour or two. Again, this is a reasonable request. If they refuse, ask them to be specific as to why.

If your concern is personal files that are currently on your machine, then moving them onto an external hard drive and back should address that. If the concern is whether the software will have access to personal files in the future, an option would be buying a computer just for this software. And as Flyto says, a vitual machine is another option, but if you're really paranoid, that's not as secure, as they will still have physical access to the entire machine.

If you are worried about the university accessing other parts of the machine (outside the virtual machine), then what else should you be worried about? They might (perhaps not intentionally) install malware on the machine. In that case, moving the files off the computer and then back again is not secure either (unless you can be sure of removing any such malware first).

This is indeed very odd. If you are sufficiently tech-savvy to do this, one option may be to set up a virtual machine that they can install the software onto. They can have root access to that, without needing permissions to browse your computer.


text:
Why do some arXiv preprints have increased line spacing?
Some preprints on arXiv have 1.5- or double-spaced lines, making it less pleasant to read and more wasteful to print.
Is there a reason for it, except for the laziness/sloppiness?
(If drafts were >1-spaced, one need to change only one option.)

for most papers on arXiv, the latex source is accessible (via "other formats" button). You can recompile it as you wish..

I think the real underlying cause is just what Anonymous Mathematician said, that having a double-spaced version of a paper is more convenient for going through and making notes on a printed copy. But it's not just a phenomenon of the dark ages; many people still do this today during the revision process when a paper is being prepared for submission.
In fact, at least in physics (my field), the tradition of double-spacing is perpetuated by the fact that at least one of the major journal publishers' LaTeX class defaults to a preprint mode which sets the line spacing to double. It is possible to change this to single line spacing by passing a class option for the appropriate journal (pra, prb, prl, etc.), but many authors forget to do this - and somewhat understandably, I think, because their job is to do research, not to be proficient with LaTeX. I would imagine that a similar situation might arise with LaTeX classes used by other publishers and in other fields.
It's worth noting that arXiv recommends not submitting in double-spaced mode. But probably very few submitters have the patience to read through the instructions in their entirety.

I'd wondered why this seemed to be more common in physics, but I assumed it was just cultural, and I didn't know about the revtex preprint mode.

There's also the fact that normal revtex (say, PRA or PRL) prints in tiny script and packs a lot of information into the page, which is hard enough to read without having to make notes on a printed copy when refereeing.

I don't like it either.  My understanding is that it's for historical reasons: in the dark ages, publishers asked for double-spaced manuscripts (produced on typewriters) because it would leave space for the typesetters to mark up the manuscript.  Some authors got used to doing this and have continued the tradition to this day, despite the fact that publishers no longer care, and a few younger authors even imitate it.  I think a lot of people find it a little annoying, but they typically don't care enough to complain to the authors, so it will take a while for this practice to die out.
P.S.  It's not just the arXiv, but also journal submissions.

If the line spacing bothers you enough, you can often download the TeX source, modify the line spacing, then recompile.  To do this, when you're viewing the page for the article, on the top left click on "Download: Other formats"

Those are not even such dark ages: 20 years ago, Physical Review would still make the correction to manuscripts in a double-spaced version and send you a scan of those corrections together with the page proofs (today, they send difflatex output).

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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

sort: votes


text:
Are there any differences between Master's admissions and Ph.D admissions in the US?
I notice that the majority of admission questions on this site regarding admissions specifically refer to Ph.D admissions. That being the case, are Master's applicants evaluated any differently in regards to focus on research, grades, letters of recommendation, etc.?  For instance, research potential is a big determining factor for Ph.D admissions I know, but the Ph.D is a research oriented degree. Is there the same focus on research potential for Master's students?
This is specifically focused on STEM fields, particularly the "E."

Are you interested in Masters with a research and thesis component, or just coursework? The criteria will likely vary a lot between these options.

I'm assuming a thesis, but I'm curious as to how much different a non-thesis option applicant would be decided as well.

The difference is huge, at least in my field, computer science.  Master's programs are typically money-makers, with students paying full tuition.  Some programs are purely coursework; others require Master's theses or projects.
In contrast, PhD programs accept many fewer students, none of whom pay tuition, instead receiving stipends paid for by fellowships, teaching assistantships, and research assistantships.
Because of the difference in the size of these programs and who pays whom, PhD programs are far more selective.

A masters in research applicant is usually assessed for very similar things to the PhD, all the things that you mention but to a lower level, the amount of experience and strength of the candidate is not required to be as high, the masters is much less of a commitment than a 4 year PhD for example and so the entry requirements aren't as stringent.
It is for this reason that some bachelor students who cannot obtain a PhD offer may do a masters first or why a thesis not good enough to gain a PhD may be awarded a masters instead.
A purely taught masters candidate would not be necessarily assessed on research potential, mainly grades and motivation instead (which could include desire to do future research).

In universities I've been at (in Sweden & Belgium), students apply for a masters at the department level or higher and all candidates are assessed collectively.  PhD candidates are assessed by the individual professor who holds the grant that will pay the student.
A few important additional criteria used to assess PhD candidates include:

Is the candidate's background and interests suitable for this particular project?
Is the candidate likely to fit into the research group?
Is the candidate likely to last the distance?
Is the candidate likely to become independent?
How creative is the candidate?
How does the candidate approach problem solving?

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
Is it plagiarism if I use a text I wrote myself but put on the internet before?
I just rememebered a case when I was still in school: we had to write an essay about a specific topic and one guy put big parts of his essay on Wikipedia before handing it in. When the teacher checked for plagiarism she indeed found big parts of his text in the Wikipedia article and thus accused him of plagiarism.
How would that situation be with journal papers (or other "official" ways of publishing)?
Can I reuse part(s) of texts I wrote myself but that are available publicly/online like on Wikipedia, my Blog, university homepage, etc.?
(Maybe consider that pseudonyms are used on Wikipedia, Blogs, etc.)

I don't think this has a single answer. It will depend on specific journal policies.

I think this is an interesting question that depends on separating three concepts that sometimes get intertwined:

plagiarism
copyright
legality

Plagiarism refers to using something without properly indicating its source.
Copyright refers to having the right to use material elsewhere.
Legality refers to whether you're violating a law or committing a crime by doing something.
If you've posted something anywhere (and especially to an openly editable place like wikipedia or SE), then there's possible issues with reusing it on each of the fronts.
With respect to plagiarism, what matters is if the prior posting counts as "published" or "submitted" for the purposes of the item in question. (The former being the standard for journals and books; the latter being the standard for classes -- though I suspect most classes would care if you submitted something you already had published).
For copyright, you may not have the legal right to use something in its entirety even if you're the one who wrote it. This would depend on which copy rights your retained from your first publication. If it's SE, for instance, you're under Creative Commons. Wikipedia seems to have their own thing (I'm not a lawyer and can't entirely parse their policy).
Finally, none of this means that you're doing anything criminal, but if you were publishing for money, you could have liability if you violate the copyright.
Two confusing issues are that copyrights can speak as if they create citation obligations (they don't) and act as if their violation is a crime, but at least in the US its only a crime when done for profit.

Most Wikipedia text is licensed both under the GFDL and CC-BY-SA 3.0. There was a change in licence at one stage, hence the confusion.

Wikipedia's policy is that the user retains the copyright but agrees to licence their contributions under a non-exclusive CC-BY-SA licence. There should be no legal trouble there (but IAalsoNAL)

@dendodge This indeed, without explicitly handing over copyright (or implicitly under some jurisdictions as part of a paid contract) you can't lose copyright. Doesn't matter under what license you decide to publish your work, the copyright stays with you. I can license any text I write under a million different licenses and none of these licenses can limit me in what I can do. At least that's the case in my jurisdiction.

I think there is a fourth concept, "originality", and "plagiarism" is simply not a problem when you quote your own earlier work, because you are the author, exactly as claimed.  Reuse/republication generally should be accompanied by citation of the earlier work, but it is not plagiarism of any sort.  ("self-plagiarism" is not a type of plagiarism at all)

@BenVoigt while I'd tend to agree, self-plagiarism does appear to be an issue at least for undergraduates. Perhaps it's fair to say it's not an issue when we publish?

@DavidMulder, A license can be exclusive, and can limit you in any (legal) way. These are all legal agreements. What happens depends on the exact wording of the agreement and where it's being adjudicated. While it's certainly possible for you to license something under a million different licenses and most licenses which people commonly see are non-exclusive, you can definitely enter into an agreement which is an exclusive license, which prohibits you from any particular act normally associated with your "copy rights". Exclusivity is often a significant negotiating point for custom licenses.

@virmaior: It can be an issue, either in class or with publication, it's just not an issue of plagiarism.  Violating an originality requirement can certainly be a problem, even when none of the three items you mentioned are violated.

With Wikipedia, it's simple: you grant them a non-exclusive CC-BY-SA license to your work, but you retain copyright.  You're free to do whatever you want with the work elsewhere, so long as it doesn't involve granting exclusive rights.

@Makyen, are you a lawyer?  You didn't say.  IANAL, but what you're saying doesn't make sense if you didn't receive compensation for the exclusive license.  In other words, I don't think you can lose copyright on something simply by writing a particular something into the license when you publish it, if you didn't receive compensation (i.e. "consideration" as in contract law) for it in any way.

@Wildcard, I'd planned on putting IANAL in there, but it appears I forgot. However, you should always assume that anyone on the internet is NAL, even if they say they are. Unless you're paying them in person, then it all should be considered just opinion. We're rapidly getting into corner/specific-cases where it's going to depend on the exact circumstances (including jurisdiction, wording, who wrote it, where/how you're publishing it, what the contract/license is for, etc., etc.). It could easily be argued that just publication (depending on the circumstances) is the consideration.

@Wildcard Releasing something under a licence surely never directly entails any kind of compensation/consideration? That would be laid out in a contract (which may or may not specify a licence)—and in a contract, signing off your copyright does not necessarily entail compensation beyond the publication itself. But if I write something and release it with a licence stating that it is in the public domain and no copyright applies to it, then I (who am also NAL) would think compensation is irrelevant to whether or not I retain my copyright.

Whenever you write something, you always retain full copyright, and you can do whatever you would like with your own work. The only case in which this is different is when you assign the work to someone else by a written agreement. Even as I'm writing this comment (which is licensed to SE under the CC license, I still own and have full copyright over this comment).

@Makyen An exclusive license is in my country at least a description of a contract + license, the license itself doesn't limit you. And considering you can't enter such a contract by simply inputting something online (though I am less well acquainted with those laws) it has nothing to do with "putting it on the internet". The thing to realize is that a license is the 'permission to use something granted to another party'. A legal contract is necessary between to parties to limit the copyright holder in some way.

@DavidMulder, "Contract" is a superset of "license". All licenses are contracts (once accepted; prior to acceptance, it's an offer of a contract). While I can understand distinguishing between them, to do so exactly would require us to define the term "license", specifically as to how it relates to "contract" as a subset. From your usage, I'm happy to agree that I was using "license" to mean something more broad than you were. How each party to the license/contract is affected by it depends on the terms of the license/contract (and how good their lawyers are :-( ).

Whenever you write something, you always retain full copyright, and you can do whatever you would like with your own work. Can you provide a reference for this claim and the jurisdiction in which you think it applies? (I ask because it would be handy and because for several things I've written, I believe I would need to ask their permission to reproduce it elsewhere).

@Wildcard, "compensation" can be anything. It does not need to be money, that is why it is called compensation.

Plagiarism essentially covers illicit appropriation of credit and its benefits (and possibly depriving the author of them; this particularly includes omission of the original author's credits).
In your case, what is described in the brackets is not relevant, as whoever "lifted" the text from the internet is the author themselves. The only problem can arise when credit is claimed twice: e.g. the work has been separately prepared for one journal article/exam and later is re-used for another for double credit.
I think it is not ideal to publish a piece of coursework solution before submitting it (for precisely the reason OP lists), but it is not plagiarism provided it has not been used to gain credit for original work anywhere else. Some teachers permit resubmission of work executed for a prior opportunity by the same author in the sense that it is the authors' work itself; in which case, also, it is not plagiarism, because the re-use has been deemed by the teacher to be legitimate.
TL;DR: For the purposes of the present question, plagiarism is the attempt to gain illicit credit for a task requiring original work by copying an existing text (from others or oneself).

You've described the potential issue using the correct terminology, so why confuse it with representation of someone else's work as your own by (incorrectly) calling both "plagiarism"?

@BenVoigt How would you call representing other people's work as your own? Or do you mean reuse of your own work? This is often called "self"-plagiarism which many consider a wrong term, unless you view it in light of appropriation of illicit credit appropriation, when the "plagiarism" term makes sense again. So, since this is the topic of the question, I was under the belief that concentrating on the pure "plagiarism" component in that particular sense (of illicit appropriation of credit) would make the response clearer and less cluttered. Or did you have something else in mind?

So-called "self-plagiarism" doesn't make sense even then. The problem is the lack of originality. Let's consider the case where a student submits, whether for course credit or publication, an entire reprint, with full meta-data, of his sole-author journal article. I think we can agree that the recipient is completely within his rights to refuse to give duplicate credit... but an accusation of plagiarism would never hold up. In the uncited case, can punishment be greater for hiding the lack of originality? Sure, but that's simply originality-related fraud, still not plagiarism.

@BenVoigt I did not invent the term self-plagiarism, in the sense of hiding lack of originality rather than stealing credit. There are many discussions about whether this is the right term. Whether I like it or not, this is the word I see commonly used for that. I do not consider a fight about the use of words for which there is a more-or-less general consensus time well spent. I am here to help the OP and therefore tried to explain the term in a perspective I saw that would co-opt the consensus use of the term in a way to enable OP to interpret it and decide what to do.

Self-plagiarism is a thing. I was unaware of this until a few years ago when I decided to return to school and complete my bachelors. The plagiarism guidelines from my school specifically called out using previously published (or submitted in the case of a class) work, even if the work is yours, as plagiarism. However, this didn't mean that you couldn't use your previous work. The solution was to quote and properly site your previous work as a reference. I expect that this would be acceptable in your case as well.

This. +1 OP needs to be clear on the assessment regulations OP's institution. In mine, submitting any previously written work for course requirements would be a case of academic misconduct. The work submitted must be written for purpose. As you point out, any previously published work can be used in the same way as any other resource: clearly demarcated, cited, attributed, etc.

There are four views on plagiarism here.
The first is the broad view. Here, plagiarism simply means taking someone else's work and passing it off as your own. In that sense, this is not plagiarism.
In a formal academic context, there are three additional perspectives of which you should be aware.
The first is that plagiarism can further extend to failing to properly attribute a reference, even if you don't claim it as your own work. Using a statistic or a simple, "I read somewhere" without the corresponding citation can be seen as a form a plagiarism because, while you didn't try to pass the work off as your own, you still failed to cite the source and deprived them of due credit for their work. In this case, it does not matter that you are your own source, because without the citation the reader has no way to know this.
The second is that plagiarism can extend to re-using your own material on successive assignments. Personally, while I can understand this as a policy violation, especially for undergraduates, I don't feel this should be called plagiarism. Nevertheless, in academic context this is often called and treated as a plagiarism, because you failed in the practice of the objectives of the assignment. From the instructor's point of view, in failing to cite yourself, they feel like you tried to deceive them by hiding that you did not do original work for this assignment. And even if you do cite yourself, what kind of paper just has one citation to another paper which it copies word for word? It is seen as academically dishonest, even it's not quite "pure" plagiarism, and speaks to personal integrity.
The final perspective on plagiarism is to falsify a source or research. This is similar to your situation in that if it were okay to put information on wikipedia yourself and then immediately cite it in your own paper, you would be able to create a circular source of authority, with no real citation or reference behind it. You cite Wikipedia, but wikipedia is just your own words. This might be credible in the real sense, but it breaks the proper attribution chain, making research down the road impossible to verify. Moreover, it's seen as an attempt to artificially inflate an argument by adding a meaningless citation, which is again about misplacing credit for the work.

Your last paragraph is called Citogenesis.  https://xkcd.com/978/

I certainly hope "in academic context this is often called and treated as a plagiarism, because you failed in the practice of the objectives of the assignment" is not true.  I certainly marked many homework assignments with failing grades as a result of "failure in the practice of the objectives of the assignment", but I would never have thought to begin misconduct proceedings simply because a student turned in too many wrong answers. (I'm not disputing that some treat this as plagiarism, but the reasons appear to be e.g. those given by Captain Emacs in his answer)

I agree with Ben Voigt on point two.  I think you might have mis-phrased what you intended to say, because you're currently saying that it's plagiarism because you "failed in the practice of the objectives of the assignment".  But that would mean getting an F (which is failing in the objectives of the assignment) is plagiarism .

Many publications insist that they be the first place where your work is published. It may not actually matter if it is plagiarism if it violate's the journal's policies on that count.
And, yes, as others pointed out, there is such a thing as self-plagiarism.
When it comes to plagiarism, context matters a lot. For instance, it matters if the overlap between your publication and the Wikipedia page is only one paragraph in a 100-page book, vs. whether it's 90% overlap.

I believe all that is necessary in your first case is to reference the original source on the internet.  That should be enough for any publisher.

If you quote your source than it is not plagiarism, for example According to John Adam "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence".  You can also paraphrase and site your source, plagiarism is the practice of using someone else writings or work and trying to say it's yours without giving them credit according to Dictionary.com. Also I would avoid any and all wiki's when writing papers;however, most credible wiki pages site sources at the bottom of the page, you can often find the original article that the information came from,allowing you to go right to the source. Using paraphrasing will often get you past a plagiarism checker, although teachers read so many papers that they often know when they have heard something before and expect you to site where the information came from.


text:
Could sending sexual messages online affect my academic career?
So, suppose you're a grad student in some academic program in the US; suppose furthermore you're employed by the university (as a teaching/research assistant, say), and you message total strangers on the internet, looking for a sexual encounter. Some of the messages may be sexually explicit/implicit.
Is it possible that, if some stranger could be offended by this, the university could act against you in some form were the stranger to contact them about it? Would the relationship of the stranger to the university matter, even if one did not know beforehand such relationship? For instance, would the situation change if the stranger is a student of the university?
Of course there is nothing illegal in the US about these actions, but universities sometimes have much stricter codes. In answering this question, please keep "large public university" in mind, not some christian college.
Thanks!

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's not about Academia.

Sending an explicit message to a minor could be a felony in your jurisdiction. You could become a registered sex offender, making you essentially unemployable in any educational institution.

Shake Baby, how is it not about academia? It's potentially related to sexual misconduct and how universities treat their sexually liberal staff.
Jon Custer, of course, as it should be.

This is off-topic for academia, but may be you could reconsider whether such unprovoked explicit messages are actually wanted by your target audience, and whether that's a good strategy in any context.

I think this is on topic. Someone is wondering how their extracurricular behavior could affect their academic career.

I hope you're not sending sexual messages to people who are not on dating sites where such messages are on-topic. That would be creepy and could rightfully damage someone's careers.

@wrtsvkrfm : There might be legalities involved, but it's not a legal question.

There's a large chance that, especially if you're a new graduate student, you could potentially send a message to someone who may be in a class you're teaching (if you're a GTA).  That could definitely cause some potential problems (more so if you were to end up meeting up with them).  I'd say this question is mostly on topic, even if we make it "messages for dating which may or may not be sexually explicit", I think it's quite clear that faculty and GTAs have to be prudent in how the approach online dating or hook-up sites/apps in a way that is different than for, say, a banker.

As long as you send and receive these emails from home, on your privately purchased computer, using your personal email account, during non-work hours, and meet the people you contact off-campus, there is probably little the university can or would want to do -- this would seem to be your personal business. (Though it is not necessarily legal: sending complete strangers explicit messages could be considered harassment.)
But from the long list of "ifs" above, you probably already see where the rub is. Let's say, one of the people you contact doesn't appreciate the contact, finds out that you are a student at the university in department X under professor Y, and writes a blog post including all of this information. The local newspaper then picks it up after finding 3 other people who are also complaining. Suddenly, the university, department X, and professor Y are in the picture, and they're going to be interested in dissociating themselves from you. Now, if it turns out that you sent or read some of the emails from a work laptop at home, or from a work desktop during work hours, or on a work trip paid for by the university, or met some of your contacts in your office, or used your work email (a university-provided resource), then you're in trouble because all of these things suddenly expose you to university rules and regulations, as well as state law governing the conduct of employees.
The point is that if you're a regular grad student, your life is probably structured in a way that you can not consistently avoid all of the conflicts mentioned above, and that exposes you to being sanctioned by your university.

Thanks for your answer! It does seem that one needs to be extremely careful, or at least tone down the explicitness of the messages. Of course, doing such activities during work hours is wrong, if anything because it's not work.

And, if you hit on an undergraduate student for whom you are in any way responsible, such as being a TA, you will be gone so fast you won't even see the door go by.

Here's an excerpt from a randomly selected sexual misconduct policy (Indiana University):

Indiana University prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex or gender in its educational programs and activities. Discrimination on the basis of sex or gender is also prohibited by federal laws, including Title VII and Title IX. This policy governs the University’s response to discrimination based on sex or gender, and all forms of sexual misconduct (which includes sexual harassment, sexual assault, other forms of sexual violence, dating violence, domestic violence, sexual exploitation and stalking. [...]
The University will provide  a fair and impartial investigation and resolution for complaints and, where appropriate, issue sanctions and remedial measures. The severity of the corrective action, up to and including termination or expulsion of the offender, will depend on the circumstances of the particular case.

It seems to me that contacting a stranger with a possibly unwelcome explicit message would probably be viewed as sexual harassment.

I'd say it depends on the circumstances of the contact? Like, if it happened on a dating site, for instance, it would seem to me that one would have to see these things in a different light than if it were, say, through Facebook or an instant message platform?

Not to say that people on dating sites must necessarily welcome such explicit messages, but it does seem to me that to some extent, dating sites are places where such behavior, at least as an introduction, is generally tolerated and "normal".

@GradStudent - Is there some reason why you can't create an anonymous persona with no connection to your real name and your university email address, with no conceivable way to trace this type of internet activity back to your university life?

Well, I like having pictures of myself, so there's a lower bound on the amount of anonimity I'd have in such sites.

@GradStudent - Perhaps this will help motivate you to be less public about this: think of your future job hunting.


text:
What are the roles and responsibilities of an adjunct faculty?
Is adjunct faculty's duty limited to teaching? Do they have any role in course design, grading, etc.?
What are the other responsibilities, as an adjunct faculty?

There's a wide range of people called adjunct faculty.  For example, it may include working professionals in the field who serve as part-time faculty (this is common in law and architecture, and I've seen it with industrial researchers in computer science).  Depending on the circumstances, this sort of adjunct may be treated much like the other faculty in the department, except for being part time.  However, I assume you are talking about the most common use of the term "adjunct", at least in the US, namely low-paid, low-status faculty typically teaching part time on temporary contracts.  (They may be working full time overall, but only part time at any given institution, so the universities can avoid paying benefits.)
For this sort of adjunct, it really depends on the details of the contract, and it may vary between universities, as well as depending on issues such as whether any of the courses are online.  A typical arrangement will include some amount of course design (at least at the level of creating a syllabus), lecturing, grading, and office hours.  Typically there is no committee work or other service and no research duties.

Reference is to temporary teaching positions, who are otherwise employed in the same or some other institute.

Being an adjunct faculty may provide the following benefits (and responsibilities):

Be a PI grants that require faculty status
Advise / mentor students and postdocs
Vote in departmental meetings
Participate in committees


text:
How much public funding do private universities in the United States receive, directly or indirectly?
I am trying to assess how much public funding private universities in the United States receive.
I found a study that partially answers the question:
Taxpayer Subsidies for Most Colleges and Universities Average Between $8,000 to More than $100,000 for Each Bachelor’s Degree, New Study Finds
 (published in 2011):

Washington, D.C. – Taxpayer subsidies that cover the operating costs
  of most colleges and universities ranges from around $8,000 to more
  than $100,000 for each bachelor’s degree awarded, with most public
  institutions averaging more than $60,000 per degree, according to an
  analysis by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and Nexus
  Research and Policy Center (Nexus).
Among elite private universities, like Harvard and Yale, the average
  taxpayer subsidy is $13,000 per student per year, while the annual
  subsidy at the most selective public universities, like the University
  of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the University of California, Los
  Angeles is more than $23,000 per student annually.
The financial figures reflect the amount of money colleges and
  universities receive in direct government support and tax breaks. They
  do not include loans and grants provided by state and federal
  governments to help students meet tuition costs.

However, this leaves out how much public funding go into loans and grants provided by state and federal governments to help students meet tuition costs in the United States.
I got interested in that question reading U.S. to Forgive at Least $108 Billion in Student Debt in Coming Years (published on November 30, 2016).

It's not clear what programs are included in "direct government support and tax breaks" and what programs are included in "loans and grants provided by state and federal governments to help students meet tuition costs".

@ff524 Good point. I assume that  "direct government support and tax breaks" exclude all student loans and grants. But I have rephrased the question so that it focuses on the total public funding, so that we avoid this boundary issue.

One significant question would be whether research grants are included in "direct government support".  It would be misleading to divide that by number of bachelor's degrees, since such grants are not (primarily) intended to support undergraduate education.

It is worth noting that Nexus, a co-sponsor of that study, "...seeks to do research and promote policies that improve the proprietary education sector...", and that its current president was previously the president of the for-profit University of Phoenix.  So it seems they may have a particular viewpoint about public, private non-profit, and for-profit institutions.

I am voting to close this as unclear, since it seems that your question is already answered by base subsidy + average student loan information.

@jakebeal: I don't understand: do you mean the question is unclear or that the question contains its answer?

@FranckDernoncourt Obviously, you don't think the question contains its answer, or else you wouldn't have asked it. I can't figure out, however, what you're looking for beyond $13K + ~$7.5K (~$30K average debt at graduation / ~4 years).

@jakebeal: It is unclear whether the $13K is the entire public funding excluding student loan help.

@FranckDernoncourt: Do you agree? If so, please retract your close vote. If not, please comment what is still unclear. As a side note, that's why I'm often hesitant to show my research when I ask questions on this website, as comments and close votes sometimes focus on what I have found so far instead of focusing on the original question.

Estimating indirect subsidies is a much more subtle question than it sounds like.  There's no way to answer it without some economic modeling, and even if you do that, you'll get a debatable answer.
For example, consider tax deductions for charitable donations.  To what extent should they be counted as a subsidy?  (For scale, current-use giving and endowment distributions amounted to 40% of Harvard's budget last year, so how you account for this really matters.)
Imagine a well-off donor, with a marginal tax rate of 33%.  If they donate $1000 and deduct this money from their taxable income, then the government loses $330 in tax revenue.  Should we count the $330 as a government contribution?
One argument says yes.  Imagine that the donor has chosen $1000 because that's how much they feel they can spare.  If they had been charged the $330 tax, then they would have been able to spare only $670 if they wanted to end up keeping the same amount.  This means the tax-deductible donation is really equivalent to a $670 donation from the donor plus a $330 subsidy from the government.  Under this theory, a substantial fraction of charitable giving is really a government subsidy in disguise.
Another argument says no.  Many donors, especially small-to-medium donors, don't make carefully optimized financial decisions based on the tax consequences.  They probably chose $1000 because it sounded like a reasonable number, and would have made the same donation regardless of the tax situation.  In that case, the $330 in reduced taxes ends up as a reward to the donor for being charitable, and it has nothing to do with the university's finances.  To the extent a change in tax policy wouldn't change the donation rate, it's unfair to count the tax deduction as a subsidy.
Of course these aren't the only arguments one could make on this topic, but let's focus on these two.  Now the question is which argument better describes charitable giving practices.  The truth is undoubtedly somewhere in between: donors are in fact influenced by tax deductions, but don't make all their decisions on this basis.  To give a principled number for how great the effective subsidy is, you'll have to model this effect, and the answer may even vary between universities based on differences in their donor pools.
What makes this whole issue even more subject to debate is that politics comes into the picture.  If you view the $330 as tax money that by default belongs to the government, then the whole $330 should obviously be counted as a subsidy.  If you believe the government has no business taxing charities or donations to them, then none of it is a subsidy because the government never had any right to this money in the first place.  Many people lie somewhere between these views, but some pile up at the extremes.
The net effect is that if you really want to figure out how much of an indirect governmental subsidy private universities get in the U.S., you'll first have to articulate your political position, and then do some economic modeling if politics hasn't settled everything yet.  Whatever you decide, someone will tell you you're doing it all wrong.  There is no answer all reasonable people must agree with.

According to http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/16/health/trump-budget-medical-science-huge-cuts/  (mirror) federal support to academic institutions for basic research in the United States amount to $35 billion annually:

It's unclear what would happen to the National Science Foundation. That agency gives out more than $7 billion annually in research grants, accounting for about 20% of federal support to academic institutions for basic research, but didn't get a mention in the budget.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2017-03-27):

we rely on federal funding for 66% of our campus research support

http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/04/03/ivy-league-colleges-collecting-more-than-41-billion-in-taxpayer-money-report-says.html  (mirror):

According to a report compiled by the non-profit group Open the Books, America's Ivy League colleges’ payments and entitlements cost taxpayers more than $41 billion over a six-year period from fiscal year 2010 to fiscal year 2015. This is equivalent to $120,000 per student in government aid or $6.93 billion per year.

More details regarding the report  (mirror) they cite:

  KEY FINDINGS:

Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000
  in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per
  undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.
The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments during this period: contracts ($1.37 billion), grants ($23.9
  billion) and direct payments – student assistance ($460 million).
In monetary terms, the ‘government contracting’ business of the Ivy League ($25.27 billion – federal contracts and grants) exceeded their
  educational mission ($22 billion in student tuition) FY2010-FY2015.
The eight colleges of the Ivy League received more money ($4.31 billion) – on average - annually from the federal government than
  sixteen states: see report.
The Ivy League endowment funds (2015) exceeded $119 billion, which is equivalent to nearly $2 million per undergraduate student.
As a non-profit, educational institution, the Ivy League pays no tax on investment gains. Between FY2011-FY2015, the Ivy League schools
  received a $9.6 billion tax break on the $27.3 billion growth of their
  endowment funds. In FY2014, the tax-free subsidy on endowment gains
  amounted to $3.4 billion, or nearly $60,000 per student.
With continued gifts at present rates, the $119 billion endowment fund provides free tuition to the entire student body in perpetuity.
  Without new gifts, the endowment is equivalent to a full-ride
  scholarship for all Ivy League undergraduate students for 51-years, or
  until 2068.
In FY2014, the balance sheet for all Ivy League colleges showed $194,332,115,120 in accumulated gross assets. This is equivalent to
  $3.35 million per undergraduate student.
The Ivy League employs 47 administrators who each earn more than $1 million per year. Two executives each earned $20 million between
  2010-2014. Ivy League employees earned $62 billion in compensation.
In a five-year period (2010-2014) the Ivy League spent $17.8 million on lobbying, which included issues mostly related to their
  endowment, federal contracting, immigration and student aid.


text:
Percentage of total scholarly literature available in open access repositories by year of publication broken down by discipline
I am looking for the percentage of total scholarly literature available in open access repositories by year of publication broken down by discipline.
I am aware of the following figure, however it is old. Are there any more recent statistics?
Swan, Alma. Policy guidelines for the development and promotion of open access. UNESCO, 2012.

Presumably this is a [tag:reference-request]? Unless you are also interested in speculation.

@ff524 Good point, let's avoid that.

As far as I see, to answer this question based upon a more recent data set one has to create the needed data set in advance.
An overview article (open access version) published in 2013 is the most recent work I could find. Even an article from 2016 analyses only articles published between 2010 and 2012.
Unfortunately, neither the data set behind the shown picture nor the method used to create the data set is given in the report (see footnotes 63 and 64) but I found the corresponding pre-print.
The needed data set has to include all published articles, the publication year, the information of the access state on article level (gold/green) and a consistent classification.
One could start by using google scholar or the Thomson Reuters list to collect all published articles and repositories or a web trawler to find corresponding green open access versions. One could also use a data collector as BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine). BASE offers browsing using the DDC which should help to identify the publications of the different disciplines, if one has no access to the Thomson Reuters list. Additionally, each article has an access state. The access state of an article can also be collected from oaDOI.
There are definitely several ways to get the needed information. Unfortunately, it seems that no one has done this work recently.

Ask the research team at Open University.  Contact Petr Knoth.  This is what he and his team are working on.
'It is now the world¹s largest collection of Open
Access research papers and we are working to popularise it as a dataset
for text-mining.'


text:
What's the point in specifying the grant number in a paper's acknowledgments?
I understand why people mention the grant agency, but what's the point in specifying the grant number in a paper's acknowledgments?
Examples:

The authors acknowledge
  the support of the U.S. Army Research Office under
  grant number W911NF-10-1-0533
This work was supported
  by the National Key Basic Research Program of
  China via grant 2014CB340503

I am mostly interested in the field of computer science > machine learning, and English-speaking venues.

If you had 10+ grants, wouldn't it be relevant which one supported this paper?

Are you aware that many funders require it and you want to know why? If not the answer is the funder says so.

To make it easier to Google for research supported by a particular grant, of course.

Any answer or comment besides it is required by the funding agency is someone guessing or reputation fishing.

It makes it easier for pork-cutting Congressional staffers and others to identify what came out of what taxpayer-funded grant, and allows comparison between the grant application and its results.

The agencies that provide this funding often require such acknowledgement. NSF does. The format, more or less, is up to the agency. I don't know why they do it, but I believe they want readers to be able to find the programs that fund the work so that other potential applicant can find future versions of the program and possibly apply.
Edit: Look at Part J of NSF's grants guide for their format

Could it also be to aid internal lookup in case of correspondence/enquiries/FOI/subpoena/whatever? OK, they probably keep records of papers they've funded, so they could look it up that way if they're ever asked about the grant that funded a particular paper. But by the same argument nobody needs to quote "your ref" in correspondence, since the recipient can probably figure it out given enough time with their card-index ;-) Nevertheless, people can be quite keen for their own numbers and codes to be used where relevant!

@SteveJessop, definitely. It could also be required by the US Congress that the US agencies track the outputs of their funding.

@SteveJessop I think one issue is they don't know what papers they've funded, because the fund proposals rather than papers.  Yes, you're supposed to tell them in reports, but they may want to check this, or people external to the grant agency may want to know.

@Kimball: "Yes, you're supposed to tell them in reports, but they may want to check this" - indeed - actually, I presume some sort of a verification function; researchers list papers based on a given grant in their report, and to make sure such researchers do not list the same papers for many different grants, the papers themselves also have to uniquely "link back" to the grant.

@Kimball, I'm not convinced that Program Officers or their IT systems have the time or ability to do much checking or verification. Maybe on a case-by-case basis, or when the reports are deemed insufficient. Also, there might be an interest by some reviewers to take a look at prior awards and their results when reviewing new grant proposals.

In general, it should be easy for taxpayers to see what they are paying for.

The funding agency is responsible for making sure that grant money was used according to the respective Call for Proposals and its terms and conditions. In case of public funding (e.g. government-funded) research the funding body reports to a higher authority, e.g. the government or a governmental department.
Publications are a key outcome of research. Besides the obligation to clear a manuscript before publication and having funding agency and/or grant number acknowledged, handing in a copy of the publication for them to file offers such proof of the projects results. Having the grant number on it simplifies the bookkeeping for the higher-ups that might not be subject matter experts.
Not questioning the conduct and honesty of scientists... but having the grant number explicitely on the manuscript further aids the avoiding of double / multiple funding as it clearly states under which grant the presented research was conducted.

"avoiding of double funding" - or at least of multiple funding from ridiculously many grants at a time. Double funding, i.e. partial funding by as few as two grants at a time, is not at all unusual. I have published various papers whose acknowledgments contained a statement like "This research was funded in part from grant ... and in part from grant ... .", usually in cases where the two first authors (who were most closely involved in the research and paper creation) were paid from two different grants.

@O.R.Mapper, you're right.

I understand why people mention the grant agency, but what's the point in specifying the grant number in a paper's acknowledgments?

As @BillBarth states, some funding agencies require that you list the grant number in the acknowledgment (or first-page footnote, etc.).
For example, from past experience with the US Department of Defense (DoD), several of my papers had to go through a public clearance process with the DoD. On a few occasions, I had sent my manuscripts to the DoD to be cleared, and those times that I did not include the grant number in my paper, I received instructions from the DoD that I had to include the grant number in the acknowledgments first, before they would clear my manuscript for public release, preventing me from submitting my paper for peer review.

It's a "bibliographical" issue. Agencies want people to know which agencies and which grants supported which papers, for the benefit of people applying in the future for grants.


text:
Scientific hackathons or other intense voluntary bottom-up events
In programming there are many hackathons - intense voluntary one day-week events, where participants collaboratively attack problems. They may be proposed by a company, NGO, participants or a group; for qualification/profit, for fun or for a good cause (eg. http://www.rhok.org/).
The question is - are there any similar events in science?
If not, what can be done or why it cannot work?
(As a comment: as I observe, while scientist are open-minded for a discussion, they are conservative, when it comes to action; at least much more than some of the programmers.)
EDIT (much later):
There are such events, even if extremely rare, e.g.:

Ariel Waldman, Hacking science: the intersection of web geeks and science geeks, Scientific American (August 29, 2011)

So how can we continue to make science more disruptively accessible across all science disciplines, geographies, industries and skill-sets?
Enter Science Hack Day, a 48-hour-all-night event that brings together designers, developers, scientists and other enthusiastic geeks in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and building ‘cool stuff’. A hack is a unique modification, an interesting mashup or a quick solution to a problem – maybe not the most elegant solution, but often the cleverest. By having a fresh set of eyes from those who solve different types of problems across a variety of industries inside and outside of science, new concepts often emerge and can go on to influence science and adults’ relationship to science in unexpected ways.

I have found, having participated in a few fairly intensive workshops that were intended to produce a product after a short amount of time that this tends toward failure for a few reasons:

Most academics are interested in problems as well as the implementation of solutions. Hackatons are implementation factories, but its only a small subset of academics who will enjoy and/or be supported just to solve other people's problems.
Building on that, its hard to formulate a meaningful problem, do the background research, plan the research and perform it in a one or two week period. A hackathon benefits from having all but the last stage done before-hand. Generally I've found with those types of intensive workshops, you can get the concept and maybe the plan down, but there needs to be more work done when everyone goes home. A lot more work. Which leads to the final issue...
Long distance collaboration, especially with people with whom you have a fairly weak bond, and especially one without strong, lasting grant support, is really, really hard to do.

So they do happen, but the finished-product focused ones tend to have a longer timeframe, and the shorter ones tend to be trying to accomplish very specific things, like putting out a consensus statement or planning research to be done later.

+1 For problems vs implementation. However, my main emphasis is on bottom-up things, often not being a part of one's main projects.

In math we have various programs where a group of people get together to do focused work on a problem, usually at one of the mathematical institutes (I know of the SQuaREs program at AIM and the Research in Pairs program at Oberwolfach, and there are probably others).  These are usually for 2-6 people, and the time frame is longer.

In industrial math, Oxford has a long tradition of running study groups.  This vague-sounding name has a rather specific meaning.  From the page just linked:

What is a study group?
Study groups bring together mathematicians from across the globe to
  work on mathematical problems presented by industry in a week long
  workshop.
How does a study group work?
The academics work in problem solving teams with the presenters to
  tackle the problems raised, formulating their ideas using modelling,
  analysis and computation. At the end of the study group the academics
  present their findings and make suggestions of future work to be
  carried out. A final report is written after the study group.

I attended this one.  They are a lot of fun and have a track record of real impact.

I shall argue that iGEM falls under the category of a Hackathon. Having coached a team, I have grown the impression that the program essentially gathers a bunch of undergrads together, teaches them various problematic things about biology, and then for 10 weeks the students slash together a random assortment of solutions and call it a day.
Like EpiGrad, I have evolved to not favor this type of approach. Many times the students will take on a problem without recognizing that it is actually isn't a real problem. The result is a solution that tends to be very very narrowly constrained. Secondly, unlike a programming Hackathon, these sessions result in tons of hastily performed experiments with very few controls and lots of very difficult to reproduced data. Notably the Registry of Biological Parts is having a serious issue with the quality control of their "parts" since they all come from unsequenced plasmids that were shipped to the Registry to qualify for the deadline.
The positive is that it does get a lot of young students interested in science but it isn't a very productive way of doing science.

Thanks for bringing the example of iGEM (actually, some of my friends have taken part in it; while I had in mind sth 1-7days, it is relevant). I am not arguing that this should be the main way people do science. However, IMHO in I science there is way little bottom-up things (esp. for students, resulting in lost of motivation, burnout, dropping out and even depression). And then 10weeks with no "real results" (but learning techniques, teamwork, ...) may be effectively less time-consuming than months of work with lack of energy.


text:
Asking for a site visit as a master's applicant
I'm currently an undergraduate, and I will finish my bachelors this coming spring. I've been looking at graduate programs, including one physical chemistry masters program in the Amsterdam. I found out that I'm visiting Amsterdam in less than a week, and I am now wondering if it would be appropriate for me to ask the program contact person if I can visit the campus and maybe talk to a professor or two about their research and the program.
I'm concerned because it is short notice, and I haven't started any application with the school. But, I would like to know if the school is a good fit. I don't live in Europe so this is my only opportunity to visit the campus in the foreseeable future.
Would it be appropriate for me to ask if I could visit the college/institute? Also, should I mention a few projects that caught my eye and ask to meet the professors in charge? If so, how would be the best way for me to phrase it?
Thank you for the input.

Why not email the professor(s) directly? They won't bite!

Of course. Email profs or the departmental administrator. With the short notice, phoning the departmental main phone number may be better.

You (@RoboKaren & @Moriarty) bring up a valid point. With the way their website is setup, it's difficult to know which project belong to which prof, but working the specific research area coordinator may be more fruitful than some general contact person.

@Moriarty - Profs don't bite, but we can also be very bad about responding to non-critical emails at the beginning of the semester.  :)

This is totally appropriate and a great idea.
Simply send an email to the contact person (who may have a title like "graduate coordinator" or "graduate chair").

My name is Edna Farblefester and I'm a junior at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.  I am interested in applying to your program next year.  I will be in Amsterdam next week and was wondering if I might be able to meet with you or some of your colleagues to learn more about the program and some of the faculty's research.

They should certainly say yes unless there are some extenuating circumstances.  Graduate programs are always eager to recruit students, especially in a case like this where it costs them nothing.  They probably do these sort of meetings all the time, so it should not be much of an inconvenience for them, even on short notice.
They may also offer to set up a campus tour, arrange a meeting with one or more current grad students (very useful), and provide some information about living in Amsterdam.
If there are one or two professors whose research particularly interests you, you could send similar emails to them directly.  (Mention that you are already getting in touch with the contact person, otherwise they will probably suggest that you do so.)
One final note: your phrasing "asking for a site visit" suggested at first that you were going to ask them to pay for the costs of your trip, which would be sort of an unreasonable request (it would be for them to offer if they wanted).  Of course, that isn't what you meant, but you might just want to check your phrasing when you write your email.

If you are going to be visiting the city anyways, there's nothing wrong with asking if you can visit the department. The worst-case scenario is that they will simply tell you, "no, it's not possible."
However, visiting the department and talking with staff and students there is often a good way to show your enthusiasm for applying to a particular program, and can help to set you apart from other applicants. I know that a student I supervised in research did something similar and ended up being admitted to the program (one of the few he was accepted to, in fact).


text:
Mentioning placement offer in a curriculum vitae?
I have been offered an engineering position from a reputed multinational corporation working broadly in Communications and Microprocessors. Meanwhile I am applying for a MS/PhD position in a different specialization but can still be broadly classified as Electrical Engineering.
Is it advisable to mention a Placement Offer in a curriculum vitae? If so, will it be relevant in the above case?

If you are working at the company while you are applying to schools, then it should definitely be mentioned. However, if you are choosing between the placement offer and graduate school (in other words, accepting the offer instead of graduate school), then I would leave it out. This is because this may give the appearance that you're not really serious about applying to graduate schools, which may lessen your odds of getting an interview or an offer.
If you feel it's absolutely essential to mention it, you should do so in your cover letter; however, for the most part, I would do so only if it became important for you to do so (because there's a deadline for accepting the offer, for instance).


text:
Five-year cutoff for postdocs?
I am currently a postdoc in a genomics lab, doing computational work. I will be completing three years in the lab, this fall (this in the US). I graduated with a PhD in theoretical physics in 2012 (US university) and during a postdoc year at an obscure lab somewhere in Europe (this was the only offer I could land), I decided to switch fields and move into computational biology. It took me about a year to figure out the background for the field and land another postdoc (which is where I am now). I have managed to publish one paper in a high impact journal at this lab and also picked up lots of bioinformatics techniques.
However, the lab is not a good fit for me. It's not really multi-disciplinary and does not use any of my physics skills. But by going to conferences and talking to other people, I have managed to figure out what kind of work I'd like to do in the broad field of computational biology. I've also taught myself the necessary analysis methods that would be helpful.
So here's my question: I am going to apply this fall for another postdoc in labs that are much more aligned with my interests and where I can be a better fit. (a) But some universities specifically state that the PhD should be within five years. (b) Others state that the total postdoc time (including previous experiences) should be five years. (c) And there are yet others which state that the total postdoc time at that particular university should be five years.
Cases (a) and (b) could hurt me. Are there other researchers here who've been in similar (or remotely similar) situations? How strict are these five-year cut-offs? I have now acquired a lot of skills and have a much better vision of where I'd like to take my research in computational biology. I am worried though that this five-year cutoff rule could hurt my research plans and career.
In physics itself, I know many post-docs who did more than two post-doctoral stints with a total time exceeding five years. I wonder how they managed to deal with this rule?

At least in the US, postdocs are hired by individual faculty members without consultation from others, so the guidelines are somewhat fungible, particularly if there's a compelling reason to hire you.
The one exception is for external (and some internal) fellowships—in such cases, the recency rules are pretty much absolute.
In other countries, though, the rules for what is or is not allowed are stricter, and it may not be possible to circumvent them without significant amounts of work on the part of all involved.

I strongly agree that these time limits are a horrible idea, especially when applied indiscriminately and across fields.
For fellowships and "postdoc status", you're often stuck--the rules are whatever they are. Some places are willing to make exceptions for people who have changed fields or spent time away from the lab (e.g., to have a child or work in industry).  If either of these apply, that might be your best bet.
If not, you still might be able to take a postdoc-like job without the postdoc title. These positions are often labelled "Research Associate", "Associate Research Scientist", or "Staff Scientist." Informally, these often still get call postdocs.
My impression is that it's sometimes slightly harder to be hired into one of these jobs: the salary is often (slightly) higher and you won't be eligible for time-limited fellowships, but it's not impossible and I think it's fairly common for postdocs to be 'promoted' into this job when they age out.

"I strongly agree that these time limits are a horrible idea" - Note that part of the reason for these time limits is that post docs are still not 100% considered employees under certain legal situations as "employees-in-training"; their situation is a bit better than graduate students in research assistant positions. The other positions you mention that omit the "postdoc" designation force those people to be hired as true employees. Although this could disadvantage the employees if they are not hired as a result, the intent is the opposite, to protect employees from 'in training' labels.


text:
How do I handle a faculty colleague who reports what I said to the chair?
I am a new faculty and I have serious conflicts with my chair because she has taken two of my grant proposals (putting herself as the PI) and a conference research proposal and tools I developed for my study (she put a senior faculty and herself as the first and the second author before me).
There is another new assistant professor in my department: she is American, but originally from a country in the Middle East. She comes to my office for a closed-door conversation once a week before meeting with the chair. Then she asks a list of questions regarding my situation and about other colleagues. Also, she asks me when I am going to leave this position.
At the beginning, I thought that she was my friend, as she seemed she cared about me. However, I realized that she reported my words to the chair because, for example, the chair brought to me what I said only to her as an issue and I heard what she said to the chair—it was what she asked to me—when I walked near the chair's office.
So I began to ignore her and phone calls. Also I do not smile when she comes to my office anymore. Also I told her indirectly "stop". However, even still today she came to my office again and kept asking questions again.
How can I make her stop doing that, smoothly and without any conflicts?

Don't tell her anything you wouldn't want repeated to the chair?

My office is located next to the chair's office - so the chair knows she comes my office.  If she is a really bad person, I think that she can create whatever she wants to get her advantages.  What do you think?  I stopped telling her already for a long times ago - however, she is still coming to my office to do the same things.

Why does it matter where your colleague is from?

Your conflicts with your department chair sound like a much bigger concern than with your colleague. As an assistant professor, she probably has little influence over your career and work environment, and as @ff524 said all you basically need to do is to ignore her and not share any private thoughts with her. But your chair sounds extremely unethical and abusive, and her behavior has a lot more potential to cause you real harm. Can you clarify therefore why your concern (as manifested in your question) is more about the younger colleague than about the chair?

to me is really clear... there is a person that wants him kicked out of department, I dont understand why is difficult to understand

Dan Romik - eventauly I decided to leave this school because of my situation - so I stopped interacting with my chair.  I just feel annoyed too much by my colleague who does not stop.

I just needed to mention her background to understand her culture - from my culture, people usually feel guilty to deliver any words - because we teach and learn - only bad person does such a thing.

The background of the person is completely irrelevant, and the way you phrase it on your comment is far from appropriate (to say the least!) since you are (directly) hinting that the behavior is a byproduct of her background.

Also I told her indirectly "stop". -- Have you tried telling her directly to stop?

In general, I feel no confidentiality obligations to colleagues and I do not expect any from them.  The only reason I could think of to have a closed door conversation is if I was respecting the quiet work environment of others - not for privacy.

While I acknowledge that dealing with department chairs and other senior professors can occasionally be fraught because of the power differential, at the end of the day, you are all adults. Talk about things.
Behavior such as "not smile", "not want to talk", "I thought she was my friend", "ignore her and her phone calls" is not how adults behave. Adults sit down and tell each other things like this:

I'm happy to talk about these things, but I would really like it if that doesn't get to the chair.

or

I know you're my chair, but these are my research ideas and I think that I should publish them under my name so I can build up a portfolio that can get me through the tenure process.

The point being that you should communicate about issues as adults do. If you have an issue with someone, talk to them, explain them what you don't like, and propose solutions. "Not smiling" is not a solution -- it's a kindergarten approach.

You should consider posting this at the workplace, as your situation is not specific within the domain of academia.
With this said, having a colleague who isn't necessarily discreet isn't the end of the world. It is a formerly unknown variable whom has revealed their true colors. At the end of the day, you decide the direction of where your research will go. Remain professional and cordial in your dealings, there is no need to be impolite towards your colleagues, instead approach the conversation and steer it in such a way where if you are asked compromising question, laugh and say sorry but you don't feel comfortable answering that. In time, prepare to set sail for other harbors if you don't think your current institution isn't a good place for you.


text:
How to find ways to proofread English in papers
As a non-native speaker of English, it can often be hard to spot some of the errors that a native speaker would find. For a long time, I've been thinking about getting a native speaker to help me with proof-reading my texts (articles, theses, application, etc), but I don't quite know where to look. What are some good ways to get proofreading for your texts?
For example, are there any websites on the Internet where one can exchange proofreading services between different languages? (Say, if you help me proofread my text in language x, I'll help you with yours in language y.)

Collaborate with a colleague who is a native speaker?

Unfortunately, I have none.

Yes, Elsevier publishing group provides professional language services, like editing. You can find about it here
I also found this website which looks good, and it's cheaper and quicker, I think.

Wiley has also a language editing service. From my experience, they are a bit faster than Elsevier and automatically give you a certificate that the manuscript was edited. And you can by credits, so if your financing is getting to an end, you can pre-pay some service. Later, you can use your credits instead of direct payments.

Being a native speaker does not mean they are a good proof-reader. In fact, most are far from it.
Your spelling- and grammar-checkers should pick up most of the horrors, and the common 'tricks' of pushing the text to one side for a few days and reading from the end to the beginning will probably allow you to catch the rest yourself.
If your articles are for publication, the editor or sub-editors will tidy up the details if the text is basically sound. A thesis generally needs only to be clearly readable - nobody is going to pull you up for ending a sentence with a preposition or using 'that' instead of 'which'.
For your CV... try a professional CV writer, or one of the many CV templates available on-line. Go to the the university ones though, to avoid the scammers.

If your articles are for publication, the editor or sub-editors will tidy up the details if the text is basically sound  Actually, many editors (at least for math journals) do very little copy editing.

this bring up an important point.  Non native english speakers should not automatically assume english speakers know 'correct grammar'.  Instead they may give clues to what 'sounds' correct or natural.  As a native speaker, I admit to non native speakers teaching me alot about grammar that I took for granted in younger years.

Learning all the nuances of a second language can be overwhelming.  Fortunately, when writing in a technical field, often the vocabulary needed for your paper is a tiny subset of the whole language.  However, I recommend that when you get the chance you ask native speakers (or others who write clear, precise prose) to explain the motivation behind their decisions.  One good resource that does this is The Grammar According to West.

There are professional translators who offer editing and proofreading of scientific articles.
Just google it (the good thing that they don't need to be nearby).
Once I tried such service and I was happy (and the reviewers as well). And even a bit surprised, as I had some doubts if such service can work for scientific texts, full of jargon and complex ideas.
Of course, to start with, the article needs to be decent enough - readable (even if with some grammatical errors). Otherwise you need someone to write it with you, not only correct.

Any reference to that service?

if you mention the services, that would be great


text:
How to get the most out of an internship (in industry)?
As a PhD student pursuing an academic career (but optionally a career in industry), what should I do do to get the most of a 10-week internship at a research lab?
Things I've thought of: talking with people (networking); attending talk/seminar (new ideas); giving a talk (get people to know you).
What other things can/should be done?

Industry or Academic research lab?

industry (does it matter?)

The opportunities and career paths at each are significantly different, so the people you should talk to at each are different as well.

First of all, good for you in getting the internship. Now that you're there, some suggestions for what to do, broadly and specifically:

Meet people with similar backgrounds to yourself. Find out what they do, what skills they value, what skills they wish they had.
If you're in a large company, talk to people in other parts of the business, see what they do. You may find positions in other parts of the company that interest you that you weren't even aware of.
If you're in a large company, talk to managers, see what they desire in people like you. They'll already be slightly impressed that you thought to talk to them. Learn what they do, what skills they like. It can help you guide your career later on.
Learn new skills & hone old ones. This is a good time to see which of your skills are marketable and which aren't. Get really good at the marketable ones.
Use the opportunity to reach out to people in similar positions at different companies and see what they're doing. If you don't know people at other companies, ask around; your new coworkers should have friends they can put you in phone/email contact with, and you can take it from there.

Above all, try to do a really good job. Internships can often lead to full-time employment, so you want to impress.

Let me add two important items to eykanal's great answer:

Do awesome research.  If you want an academic career, you can't ever not do this.  A good internship is not a vacation from research; it's an opportunity to broaden your research portfolio.
Cultivate references for your future job search.  Find, work with, and impress people whose interests overlap yours and whose opinions are valued in the academic research community.  These people may work at the company, or they may be visitors.

When it comes time to look for an academic job, your application will be significantly stronger if you have recommendation letters from and publications with people who don't work at your home institution.  In fact, if your CV lists an internship, but you don't have a letter from or paper with someone at your hosting company, that gap will raise a (small) red flag with recruiting committees.


text:
Why do universities tolerate uploading papers on their websites?
Lots of professors provide their full papers published by scholarly journals on their personal website (in the university official domain). PDF files of their final papers published by different publishers are available online. However, this is against the copyright transfer agreement, and the authors have no right to distribute their papers publicly. In other words, the authors have the same right as well as others to distribute their own papers publicly, as this is the marketing right of the publisher.
This is clear violation of the US copyright law, like distributing cracked software programs or movies without copyright. Why the university officials do not take action over this copyright violation?
One may say that this is their personal website and they are legally responsible, but if someone distribute an illegal item on his/her personal website, the university will not allow this because it is part of the university domain.
I think universities ignore this because it seems to be less criminal, but why? as it is still illegal. So much the worse, it is even common in top universities where considering legal issues in different aspects is quite serious.

Even ignoring all the other arguments, why should the university take action proactively? It's the publisher's job to issue a DMCA takedown, under US law (where it applies).

As Yuichiro Fujiwara indicates below, it's not automatically copyright infringement. For some journals it is, for others, it isn't. Absolutes rarely hold up in academia!

Indeed, how do you know it's copyright infringement? There is such at hing as non-exclusive licensing: you can redistribute it, but so can I.

@Kaz when there are 200+ papers by different publishers, it is obvious that copyright issue has not been taken into account; otherwise, they should avoid at least a few papers in the list.

@All: it could also be a sign that e.g. the funding agencies and/or university require the researchers to make versions publicly available, and thus the journals were selected so that e.g. having at least preprint online (possibly x months after publication) is allowed.

@All: It isn't obvious at all.  For instance, in mathematics, every publisher I know allows authors to post papers on their own websites.

I find very little resemblance between software I cracked (or movies I illegally downloaded) and a published article that I spent days or months to write.

Many researchers and universities aren't biggest friends of publishers and therefore may not give a ... ... about some of the limitations publishers try to lay upon them.

Why the university officials do not take action over this copyright violation?

Because they can't.  There is no way to tell whether a given electronic preprint violates the publisher's copyright-transfer agreement or not.  Different publishers place different restrictions on authors' rights to redistribute their papers.  Some allow posting pre-edited versions; some allow posting the official camera-ready version; some allow neither; some only require an exclusive publication license and leave copyright in the author's hands.  These restrictions change over time, and may depend on whether the author paid an open access fee to the publisher.  The only way to determine whether an electronic (p)reprint is posted illegally is to read the actual copyright-transfer/publication contract.  But this contract is directly between the authors and the publishers; universities have no record of these agreements.
Because they don't have to.  At least within the US, university web sites generally fall under the "safe harbor" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires copyright holder to request removal of the specific items to which they claim copyright.
Because the publishers don't care.  Scary legal language notwithstanding, academic publishers in many fields have zero interest in pursuing legal action against individual researchers for posting copies of their own papers in violation of copyright transfer agreements.  (I have heard this said specifically about ACM, IEEE, SIAM, and Springer, by people with connections inside each of those organizations.)
Because it's not in their best interest.  Both universities and the public benefit materially from the public availability of research by their faculty, students, postdocs, and other researchers.  Universities have no incentive—aside from a potential legal threat that they know will never materialize—to proactively censor that research.  Many universities, and more recently many governments, have adopted open-access policies that either encourage or require their members to amend publication agreements and make their work publicly available.
Because researchers would revolt.  Even if academic publishers started sending DMCA notices to universities, and even if universities required their members to take down copies of their papers, in violation of research community expectations, the people whose research is being censored would simply take their business elsewhere.  Those publishers would receive fewer papers, and those universities would receive fewer graduate school and faculty applicants.

At least for SIAM, the copyright transfer agreement explicitly allows authors to post the final, camera-ready proof to the author's personal website (but not other public repositories).

Are you sure those "lots of professors" you're talking about are infringing copyright holder's right? Because of the way you put it, your "question" sounded to me as if you were claiming that posting your own paper on your personal website was always copyright infringement no matter what, which is not true.
For example, here's an excerpt from Terms and conditions associated with the American Physical Society Transfer of Copyright Agreement:

The author(s)... ...shall have the following rights (the “Author Rights”):
...
*3. The right to use all or part of the Article, including the APS-prepared version without revision or modification, on the author(s)’ web home page or employer’s website and to make copies of all or part of the Article, including the APS-prepared version without revision or modification, for the author(s)’ and/or the employer’s use for educational or research purposes.

So, you can upload the final, published version of your paper published in, say, Physical Review Letters on your personal website. It's perfectly legal from any perspective.
Of course, not all journals have the exact same policy, so what kind of right you have as the author can vary greatly from publisher to publisher and maybe from journal to journal as well. For instance, unlike APS, IEEE allows authors to upload the final, published versions only if they chose the open access option by paying a fee. (Note that this doesn't mean IEEE forbids any online distribution of your results on your own. For example, you can still post your final accepted manuscript on your personal website without paying the fee. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory even encourages authors to upload your manuscript to arXiv when submitting to the journal.)
I'm not familiar with other publishers' policies, but as far as I know, many mathematics journals allow authors to upload final accepted manuscripts on their personal websites.
Could you substantiate your claim by providing links to the many examples you're sure are the kind of copyright infringement you're talking about? Maybe this is peculiar to my field, but I don't remember many instances of such copyright infringement and am having very hard time believing this is prevalent.
Also, assuming there are actually many such ilegal cases, what makes you think that universities ignore this problem for the reason that it looks less criminal? I don't see why this explanation is the most plausible.

IEEE doesn't allow uploading the final, publisher-prepared version, but it does allow uploading a version prepared by the author. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/ieeecopyrightform.pdf (Paragraph 6 of the section about retained rights).

@silvado: Please read what I wrote. My sentence you seem to be referring to ends with "only if they chose the open access option by paying a fee" and the link to the publisher's website explaining this. Here's what they say: OA authors are assured that they are free to post the final, published version of their articles on their personal Web sites, their employers' sites, or their funding agency's sites. Here's an example of open access articles: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2013.2247461 I'm not sure if every IEEE journal has this option though.

Sorry for the misunderstanding, I meant to highlight that they allow uploading the author's version even without paying the OA fee.

Oh, I see. I edited my post to emphasize it.

It is legal for a copyright holder to do whatever the holder wants to do with the work. The issue at hand is just who owns the copyright. Copyright can be owned by multiple parties, and some of those parties can sign away all or part of their rights. Doing so does not limit the rights of the remaining parties. The authors of an article may sign away their rights, but they generally do not have the authority to sign away any copyright that belongs to their employer. In the US, and perhaps elsewhere, work you perform for your employer is also copyright to your employer. In fact, depending on the terms of your contract, you may have already completely transferred copyright of any work you perform as part of your employment (and academic research likely applies) to your employer. Thus, publishers may be asking you to sign away something that is not yours.
I am assuming that by top universities, you mean institutions like MIT. MIT encourages employees to fight total transfer of copyright by amending the copyright transfer agreement. The gist of the amendment is that MIT contends that the authors' copyright to the material is nonexclusive - it also belongs to MIT. Thus it cannot be completely signed away by the authors to publishing companies. MIT will extend its privileges back to the authors regardless of what the publisher intends. Thus:

The Author shall, without limitation, have the non-exclusive right to use, reproduce, distribute, create derivative works including update, perform, and display publicly, the Article in electronic, digital or print form in connection with the Author’s teaching, conference presentations, lectures, other scholarly works, and for all of Author’s
  academic and professional activities.

and

Once the Article has been published by Publisher, the Author shall also have all the non-
  exclusive rights necessary to make, or to authorize others to make, the final published version of the Article available in digital form over the Internet, including but not limited to a website under the control of the Author or the Author’s employer or through
  any digital repository, such as MIT’s DSpace.

and

The Author further retains all non-exclusive rights necessary to grant to the Author’s employing institution the non-exclusive right to use, reproduce, distribute, display, publicly perform, and make copies of the work in electronic, digital or in print form in connection with teaching, digital repositories, conference presentations, lectures, other
  scholarly works, and all academic and professional activities conducted at the Author’s employing institution.

Since these rights are non-exclusive, they don't prevent the publisher from providing high quality print and online versions of the article to their subscribers. They also do not prevent the authors and MIT from making the article publicly available in a noncommercial way.
While MIT has taken steps to explicitly assert its rights to do so, many institutions likely have such rights implicitly (for example, they may be stated in employee contracts) and see no need to limit or infringe upon their own rights.

Actually, one may hold the copyright, but also be bound by contractual agreements. E.g., I retain the copyright to not only my pre-publication [sic: it's on-line...] version of a monograph, but also the copyright to the eventual conventionally-published version (re-typeset, etc), by the non-profit Cambridge Univ Press. But/and part of the deal is that I give up royalties on e-books (!?) in order to have no delay in putting my on-line version on-line, etc. In particular, keeping the copyright does not prevent one from contractual obligations...

You are describing the US arrangment. In the UK though to be able to participate in the research excellence framework, thus in future funding for the university, all research must be made open access. Most if not all UK universities have their own open repositories where one will publish pre-prints if the journal or academic repository a piece of work was published in was not open access.