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How to tell advisor I'm declining a scholarship?
I recently won a scholarship that could (in theory) pay for the remainder of my time in graduate school. However, it comes attached with strings that I'm not comfortable with, and so I've decided to decline the offer.
I was aware of the strings when I applied for it (basically, the public institution funding the scholarship pays x years and you work for them for x years). I thought I had done my research at the time and knew all that I needed to know about that -- it didn't seem like an issue then. Since then, however, I've learned more about the program that has me on edge (some very negative experiences that past winners have had, and a relatively-low salary compared to industry on graduation). Furthermore, the placement is not what I had in mind -- I was hoping for a position on the east coast of the U.S., and they placed me on the west coast.
I have one more year of funding available, so I can continue applying for more fellowships/scholarships; and my advisor had indicated to me in the past that he had other funding available for when my current fellowship ran out. However, I'm worried he'll get angry if I tell him I'm turning down free (for him, at least) funding.
So my question is: how should I inform him of my decision such that (hopefully) he's least likely to get infuriated? Or, put another way, how would faculty members on Academia S.E. want to be informed of such a decision?
(I have already planned to do this in-person; I'm looking for suggestions for what to actually say.)

The biggest decision is whether to tell him before or after formally declining the scholarship. Suppose his reaction, whenever you tell him, is to say you are on your own for funding for the rest of the program. Would you still decline the scholarship?

"I have decided to decline the scholarship."

I still have to meet a single advisor who cares more about funds for a single person than about the growth (personal and professional) of the ones he is advising. Thus I would talk to him openly, present the bad reputation this scholarship has, tell him you will keep looking for a better one, etc. I don't think he made it to his current position without ever declining a bad offer, so he should understand. Furthermore, as Patricia already pointed out, the one with a problem if there is no funding is you, not the professor...


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How to choose the appropriate graphic representation (plot) method for the results?
Do you use a rule of thumb when deciding the type of the chart/plot (box plot vs. scatter plot) you use when you want to represent the results of your research/simulations?
I would say the answer is "choose the one that represents the data best" but still there must be some type of rule where you surely don't use a given plotting method but use another one.
Or is my understanding of the purpose of plots completely wrong. Hope the more experienced scientists here provide some guidelines

What do you mean by "type of chart"? Do you mean like box plot vs. scatter plot? Or do you mean like log scale vs. linear scale?

What kind of results? This question is very broad.

@Penguin_Knight "results of your research/simulations"

Data visualization is an entire scientific field of its own. A good introduction to the basic principles can be found in the works of Edward Tufte, whose book on the visual display of quantitative information is a classic in the area.
The basic principle, however, is that you want the important information of the chart to leap out to the eye, and as such the dimensionality of your presentation and the dimensionality of the presentation method should be matched as closely as possible.  Likewise, the features of different elements of a graph should be adjusted to put the emphasis on the most important ones, while not concealing the others.
For a simple example, consider a simple one-dimensional data set, where there are a set of conditions, each of which produced some distribution of values.

If the conditions are qualitatively different or vary along many dimensions, the data should probably be presented as a bar graph
If they are quantitatively arranged along one dimension they should be presented as a line graph.
If they are arranged along two dimensions, the should be presented as multiple lines on a single graph.

The type of error bars also depends on the nature of the distributions:

If the distributions are small compared to the effect size, such that they do not significantly affects interpretation of the data, then error bars should be made small and subtle, so that the information is present but the eye is drawn to the means.
If the distributions are large but regular, they can be presented via visually prominent error bars.
If the distributions are large and highly irregular, then a more complex representation like a box-and-whisker graph is better.

This is just scratching the surface, of course, but hopefully gives an illustration of the principles of how to think about data visualization...

could you please provide simple examples for the first three bullet points?

@KristofTak Some examples from my recent work: bar graph: comparison of a single error statistic from several different methods.  Measurement of a single value over time: line graph.  Comparison of distribution over time: multiple lines on graph (one distribution per time point,  colored in a rainbow to indicate time).

source: Stack Exchange

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

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Is there a rule of thumb for defining the scope and depth of the Related Work section in a thesis?
This might be a generic question but I ask it for a case of a Master Thesis.
DO you have a rule of thumb for inferring the right amount and type of citations that go to your Related Work section.
Let's say in field A there is this problem X. And in literature there are two types of approaches to solve problem X: type1, and type2. My approach belongs to type1. Should I include works about type2 in the Related Work section too?
I found this post helpful.
However, I still find myself in doubt when writing the related work. Sometimes I feel I go a bit too far including stuff seemingly unrelated...
Often, I loose the focus of the related work.

What is its purpose in a thesis? To show what others have done, and how my work relates to that. Or give a general overview of the works that have been done in the field?
Do I have to discuss and speculate in the Related Work? Or do I have to only list the other
works?
Do I need to include results of the other works in my related
work?

I would say that it is difficult to give a generic answer. It is best to discuss the concrete instances with your supervisor.

The rule is to provide more details on those works that are most relevant to yours.  This is especially critical for those that seem to overlap with your work, or conceptually share similarities.  The most relevant ones are those whereby the problem is exactly the same, but your approach and others are different.  That means you need to cover these other approaches in detail.
For other not so relevant, you need to show you are aware of them.  Basically, you state, 'there are also works on blah, blah2, blah3.  However, this work is different because of x, y and z'.   Note that you go as far as providing the reference, and differences.  You might briefly state their aim(s).
Remember, one key reason for a  literature review is to provide evidence that your work fills gaps in the literature.  So present whatever is needed to proof this point.

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Where to include acknowledgements for used graphics
In the current technical report that I write, I have used graphic from an online-source where their policy requires that the author of the drawing has to be acknowledged in case that the drawing is to be used.
This policy applies to electronic and printed formats of the given work.
Where do I place the acknowledgement for this drawings? Probably the proper way would be to use footnote in the page where the drawing is shown but, the policy requires that the name of the author is written. I would like to avoid such content in the footnotes where I discuss important information.
Is it OK if I do the acknowledgement in an appendix in the end of the report?

You should include the authorship as part of a citation in the graphic (figure) label. There are some examples from Pierce College Library here. You are labeling your figures, right?

if by label you mean adding a caption to them, then yes. if I misunderstood, can you please clarify?

What I did on my papers is under the image (often needed to use an image editor) is put in a caption such as "Title of image (if applicable), author of image, year created" Similar to @mkennedy's comment but I prefer adding the citation into the image. I DO NOT alter the original I add extra pixels to the bottom of the image size.
Then in my works cited I would say "Title of image, author name, year, Retrieved from..."

You want the reference close to the actual picture. You could go with @Memj's suggestion in the other comment. Or simply put it in the caption:
Fig. 19: Measured relationship between galaxy distance and
red shift. (Figure reproduced with permission from http://abc.org,
copyright Adam Smith, 2015.)

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


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Do evaluation / recruiting committees respect "co first authors"?
Inspired by this question and this question, I continue my ongoing quest of understanding the concept of co first-authorship.
My question are:

In which fields does this notion even exist?
If the notion exists in your field, do recruiting committees (e.g., faculty search committees) actually care about this?

The background of the second part of this question is that it seems to me that a little footnote in a paper should be easy to miss for a committee, and even if a committee becomes aware of the claimed dual first-authorship, I find it hard to believe that the paper will actually be counted as another "first-authored" paper.

The notion exists at least in my wife's group (psychology), but I can't answer your second bullet point...

This exists in my field (chemistry) and I've seen it also for medical papers. I cannot speak about recruiting committees, but my impression is that the driving force are cumulative PhD theses where both co-authors can count the paper fully for their publication equivalent scores (see http://www.chemgeo.uni-jena.de/chegemedia/Forschung/Promotionsstelle/kumulatdiss2014.pdf for an example how detailed counting rules for co first-authorships are now getting established).

@cbeleites That link is very interesting. Thanks!

I have seen co-first authors in the social sciences, but it is not very common.  It is usually indicated in a very small footnote that the "authors contributed equally" or something to that extent.  Given that this practice is the exception than the rule, it is hard to imagine that committees (in the social sciences) will give much attention to this in whatever decision that is being made.  Thus, I am in complete agreement with you that a 'co first-author' paper will actually be counted as a 'first author' paper.
For me, co-first authorship doesn't really mean much to me (in the social sciences).  It is hard for me to believe that the contributions of the co-first authors were equal.  Did they really quantify the actual intellectual contribution? Did they really work equally as hard?  Did they really write equally as much?  It would be impossible to balance every aspect of the work, so every co-first authorship paper in the social sciences is based on different divisions of labor, so the title co-first authorship really doesn't mean much.
(BTW, I would be very interested in seeing a 'highly cited' paper in the social sciences that is co first-authored.)

I come from mathematics, whose practices are described in JeffE's answer: we are not in the business of quantifying author contribution at all.  I have heard remarks like those in your second paragraph made be authors on this site.  I don't understand them.  Let me explain: in order to make these remarks, it seems that you (and many others) must have some way of assigning a percentage measure to each author's contribution.  How the heck are you doing that?...

...In most academic fields, contributions to papers live in some high-dimensional space: there are initial ideas, experiments, analysis, computations, writing, literature review, editing, and so forth.  It is most common in a collaboration for one of the authors to do the majority of the work on some of these axes and another author to do the majority of the work on some other axes.  So in order to numerically rank coauthors you must have some fairly precise function in mind which projects a multidimensional vector down to a single numerical measure.  That's amazing: what is it??

Just to illustrate with an example: suppose the initial idea for the paper was mine, my coauthor did most of the implementation (and found, as usual, that some new ideas were necessary) and wrote a first draft of the paper, which I then edited and significantly rewrote, including improving some of the results.  If we take (idea,implementation,writing) as axes, then maybe I have a vector like (1,.2,.4) and my coauthor has a vector like (0,.8,.6).  Who deserves to be first author??

In theoretical computer science and mathematics, authors are (almost) always listed alphabetically. There is simply no such thing as a "first author", except lexicographically.  Equivalently, all authors are co-first authors.
In my experience, recruiting committees generally understand and respect this practice, but (at least in computer science, where order by contribution is more common) they do occasionally have to be reminded, especially for candidates whose last names start late in the alphabet.  One sentence in the CV and/or in a recommendation letter usually suffices.
For non-theoretical CS, I have seen CVs that indicated equal contribution of co-authors. Again, one sentence in the CV ("Stars indicate co-authors who contributed equally") made the notation clear, and the recruiting committee understood and respected it.
As Ari and gefei say, having a local advocate is much more important that having another (co-)first-author paper.  If nobody on the faculty is willing to pound on the table and demand that you get an interview, you won't.

I have not seen co first-authorship in engineering or computer science papers.  That said:

Any committee can find reasons to accept or reject a candidate.  Ultimately, if you have an advocate, it will be his/her job to find out and explain your contribution to the work.  It is much more important to develop a local advocate than it is to have high numbers.
Authorship deals only with what happens before the paper is published.  However, what you do after publication (e.g. give talks, produce extensions) is no less important in cementing your ultimate contribution to the field.

I just want to repeat this: It is much more important to develop a local advocate than it is to have high numbers. +1

I work in a Psychology and order of authorship matters and co-first author papers are not unheard of. As for how search committee treat them, I think you might be missing how search committee work. There is no formula in terms of how papers are weighted in terms of authorship. We want to make sure a candidate has a strong publication record. Order of authorship doesn't really matter for this as much as being associated with strong papers. In some ways we don't care how hard you worked for the publication. The second thing we look for is wether you could continue to carry out the type of research in the papers. Co-first author papers raise more questions about this then single first author papers. Generally the rest of the publication history, CV, and research statement can clarify this. I would suggest making sure your research statement makes it clear what type of research you can do on your own.

As already said, the notion of fist author barely makes sense in mathematics. It is a common and important notion in (at least some part) of biology, with the additional and complicated provisio that I have heard of second-named-co-first-authors which where really not-as-first-author-than-the-first-author-but-more-than-the-third, even when the names are marked as a balanced co-first-authorship.
With respect to the second question, you should keep in mind that it is one's job to write one's CV in a way that stresses the important points. So, in addition to underlining one's name in the list of authors for each publication in one's CV (which seems common in the fields where author order matters), I would advise to make it very clear, at one glance, which papers in your publication record are first-authored or co-first-authored (so that they are shown on the same level).
Below are two easy ways to do that (to be adapted if you need to also highlight last-authored papers).
First, you can split your publication list in two, with in the top part all first-author and co-first-author papers, and in the bottom part all other papers. If you number publications, you can use a common numbering, e.g. first-authored papers are numbered 1, 2, 3 and the other papers are numbered 4, 5, 6, etc.
This makes it easy for a committee to count the number of first-authored papers and the total number of papers you have.
A second solution is to mark all first-authored and co-first-authored papers by a clear sign (e.g. bold star), with an explicit footnote explaining the meaning of the sign.
But you certainly should not expect committees to actually open your published papers to see if by any chance a little star somewhere credits you for co-first-authorship. They can do it if they want to check your claims, but you have to claim it clearly.


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Mapping connections between topics covered in academic papers - does such a tool exist?
I'm interested in learning about how to go about writing a paper, and obviously, an integral part of this process will be to read papers written by others, and study those. I'm curious about the idea of using software mapping tools as a means of logging connections between certain papers of interest.
The following questions: Is there a network map of subjects and how they connect with each other? and Map (tree) of citations/references are related to my question, but I'm not sure the suggested software, Auto Desk
or Cytoscape, would be entirely appropriate for what I'm interested in doing.
Does anyone have any other suggestions?

ScienceWISE is one of the attempts:

The ScienceWISE project aims to develop a scientist-generated on-line knowledge base fully integrated into the physics ArXiv.org
The ScienceWISE system allows scientists, in the course of their daily work to

dynamically generate professional-field-specific ontologies: add concepts and logical relations between them; provide expertly-written, community-ranked definition articles and links to other existing resources;
to create an interactive semantic environment, annotating scientific research papers, uploaded to ArXiv.org, and linking them to the ScienceWISE ontology, thus expanding content of their papers with supporting material in the form of encyclopedia-like articles.

(See also info on the arXiv: http://arxiv.org/help/sciencewise)

This question is a bit older, but I thought I would add a new suggestion to hopefully help anyone looking for something more current.
If you're looking for a tool to help you discover new papers based on related topics or papers you've already read to assist with scientific writing, I highly recommend using an online application/website called Research Rabbit.
They describe themselves as being like Spotify in that they learn from the papers you upload and collections (think playlists) of papers that you create and will modify their recommendations of new papers for you to look at that might be related. It also provides interactive visualizations showing how different publications connect based on their algorithm of relevance. All the papers can be connected to the reference library, Zotero, so you can save anything you find and use the Zotero tools for reference library organization and citation formatting.
I really enjoy using it to find papers and look through the literature, particularly on topics that I might be less familiar with.

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Attendance recording software

Possible Duplicate:
What systems are most effective for monitoring student attendance?

I'm looking for a simple software package, or online service, whereby teachers can record any students that are late/absent for any of their classes throughout the day. I'm not after a daily attendance system, I need a system that can be easy and quick for teachers to log attendance of students to their classes. Is there any such thing? If not, what do you recommend? a wiki? or something else?


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A text which is not a draft, but expected to be updated - upload to arXiv?
I've been working on a text which you could call a short monograph. Without going into details (which might lead to another question) - I'm considering posting/uploading/"publishing" it on arXiv.
It's not a draft - I've gone over it several times and it seems in pretty good share; but, at the same time, it is not finally done: I expect that, with feedback from others, I will need to make several additions, rephrasings, and possibly even slight correction of certain details regarding existing work.
Now, I would have liked to have received this feedback before ever publishing, but this is unlikely to happen; and I've been "sitting" on this for quite a long time already.
Is it legitimate, and is it reasonable, to upload an initial version on arXiv, expecting that an update will be necessary?

@DaveLRenfro: Changed the text. I guess that also has bearing on the answer.

I personally think this is legitimate, and this was originally the spirit in which I started using the arXiv (hence "comments welcome") - but this seems to be less common nowadays, probably due to the growth of arXiv usage and its "semi-official status" these days for e.g. establishing priority.

I suggest that you go ahead and do it, but use the "comments" field in the metadata to explain briefly that this is a preliminary version rather than an "about to be submitted" version

Not a draft, but you expect to make more changes? That still sounds like a draft to me, but maybe we're just using different terminology.

My normal workflow is to:

Post the first version after all coauthors are happy
Collect any feedback, and if there are needed edits incorporate them into a second ArXiv post which is exactly the version submitted to a journal (otherwise you run the risk that the referee looks at the wrong version).
After any referee reports and responses make a third ArXiv version which is the author-final version.
No more than once-a-year update with any post-publication typo fixes.

For any given paper steps 2, 3, or 4 might not be needed, so this is more of a maximum than a required.  But I think if you’re not doing more posts than what I’ve outlined you’re certainly ok.

But... 1. I don't have co-authors, so I don't have the inter-coauthor feedback loop stage 2. It's not a draft journal submission, but rather an 80-page-long affair, so the space of potential changes (and potential deficiencies) is different.

If it’s just you then “all coauthors” means just you.  If you’re happy with it and don’t have further changes you want to make before getting outside feedback the post.  Anyway I have an 80-page paper and yes there were more changes from feedback for that paper than for other papers I’ve written, but the above workflow still worked great.

Yes, it’s legitimate. The fact that arXiv has a versioning system tells you everything you need to know: the ability to post updated and improved versions of your manuscript is an intentional feature of arXiv. So your question really amounts to “is it reasonable to use this feature?” - to which the answer is, yes, of course.
Now, keep in mind that the versioning feature can be, and at times has been, abused by people who post way too many versions of their paper with many confusing, incremental updates, usually in an attempt to bring an originally very low quality paper up to an acceptable level. This type of behavior is certainly looked down upon as a form of “noise pollution” and may be seen as a signal of low quality content, so if you think you’ll be posting more than, say, three versions (including the original submission), I’d suggest rethinking your approach. Also remember that the older versions of the paper remain accessible indefinitely. If you care about your reputation, you’d want to make sure that even the original version of the paper is of a high enough quality that you can accept being associated with it far into the future. With that said, your desire to share the work even in non-final form, whether because you think it may be useful to others and/or because you need some feedback to put the finishing touches on it, are quite understandable and acceptable, and shared by many; that is why the versioning system exists. So as I said, it’s totally legitimate.

Legitimate but not recommended.

My experience is that feedbacks from persons unknown are very rare.  Think of the reverse: do you yourself send feedbacks to random authors in your field who submit on arXiv?
There is a reputational cost to submitting work obviously not ready for publication.  Do you yourself read a lot of submissions of this type or do you stop once you realized this is not finished work?
Constantly updating an arXiv submission tends to bad at the time of journal submission.

If you are a few days away from journal submission then nothing is lost by privately circulating advanced copies of your work or posting on arXiv: you might get the occasional feedback especially if there is a glaring omission in the text or in the bibliography, but arXiv is not a peer-reviewing service, and thinking of this as such may lead to acute disappointments.

There won't be any journal submission. 2. I'm interested in feedback not from persons unknown, but essentially from persons known-poorly. It's just that instead of sending them some dropbox/box.com link "here's something I want you to look at" I want to have some that is sort-of-published (and thus supposedly more worth than time).


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Have there been attempts to get around "DeWitt clause"-like license restrictions?
(This is a complementary question to: Has the DeWitt Clause, which prevents publication of named DBMS benchmarks, ever been successfully defended in court?)
Several commercial database vendors include an end-user license agreement provision, known as the DeWitt Clause, that prohibits researchers and scientists from explicitly using the names of their systems in academic papers.
There are several concievable approaches to circumvent this prohibition, including:

In the US: Ignoring the prohibition and claiming "fair use" which supersedes the Copyright, or general un-enforcability like Spitzer did (see the related question) - risking legal action.
Outside the US: Some states in the world allow download and certain kinds of non-commercial use of copyrighted works without permission from the author / rights holder, in which case the researcher never accepts the restriction in the first place.
Outside the US: Some states have laws regarding "standard contracts", as opposed to contracts specifically worded by two parties negotiating - e.g. the conditions for opening a bank account, your Internet Access Provider's terms of service etc. Such laws declare certain kinds of terms and conditions in such contracts as null and void if they are injurious to the weaker party - the many individuals who must accept the contract. One could publish a benchmark result, claiming s/he wasn't bound by the DeWitt clause.
Loopholes in the condition itself. For example, Microsoft's SQL server license says:

BENCHMARK TESTING. You must obtain Microsoft’s prior written approval to disclose to a third party the results of any benchmark test of the software.

Well, you must obtain Microsoft's prior written approval to disclose to a third party the results of any benchmark. But you're not required to go any significant effort to prevent third parties from learning about these results. So, for example, Joe Smith (not you) runs some benchmark and writes down the results in a file. It's not in a public folder, but - you or a friend of yours have access to that folder. You're not bound by the conditions of the license, and can supposedly publish the benchmark result. Joe Smith should also not be liable, since he did not actually disclose the results to anybody, nor did he solicit others to check out his results.

I'm not saying I know for a fact these avenues of circumvention are bullet-proof. And I'm not asking whether they are. I just want to know whether there are known cases of people using one of them, or any other course of action, to openly and notoriously circumvent DeWitt clauses (in Software or w.r.t. access to materials of academic interest).

I find this very interesting and think it’s mostly on-topic here, but you may get some interesting takes on this subject by asking the same question (or a related question, like what are some hypothetical arguments that may be used to invalidate the Dewitt clause) on law.se.

A third workaround is to avoid describing the experiments as benchmarks. For instance, "On this website we run horse races, and we found that Maria terminated the race in 17.2 seconds, while Progresso took 23.1 seconds". People have done this to work around restrictions on publishing electoral polls, in my country.

@DanRomik: I might, but note I'm not asking about whether the legal argument is sound, but whether anyone has tried something like that.

@FedericoPoloni: Could be a bit difficult when you want to compare the benchmark results of existing systems and alternative ones...

The legal argument may be sound or not. You can try, of course, to break "contracts". But, I would guess that if you go up against Microsoft or Oracle or similar in court that you'd better have very deep pockets. Very. Deep. Pockets. And I suspect that they utilized their own Very Deep Pockets in the phrasing of such clauses.


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What is the promotion rate of professors in United States?
I'm writing an essay, and want to know the promotion rate and average duration from assistant professor to associate professor and associate professor to professor in recent years. Sadly I don't know the data for the US. Could anyone tell me?

Would you explain what do you mean by I haven't known the date in the US ? And you want to know the average duration from assistant professor to associate professor in the whole world or a particular location?

@scaaahu: the OP means "data" not "date".

I really like the OP to answer that question.

@Danfox: I fixed it.

@scaaahu Sorry for my careless misspelling......I want to know the date in US

@DanFox thanks so much for help me to correctify it!

The US National Science Foundation collects a lot of data from surveys of recent doctoral recipients that it publishes on this web page. The precise thing you are looking for (tenure success rate) does not seem to appear, but there is a lot of relevant information. Specific professional societies collect similar information. For instance, the American Mathematical Society publishes an annual survey of information on recent doctoral recipients; it includes data about the salaries and employment situation of recent doctoral recipients in the mathematical sciences.

Hello Dan! I know the rate for assistant to associate is 48% in 2010, but it seems no precise data for associate to full, and the average duration neither. Anyway, your answer is really helpful for my eaasy. Thanks for your nice answer!

Well, I'm sure this is too late for the essay, but I happened to come across some (old) data for US medical school faculty from the AAMC.  They look at average number of years to promotion and percentage of faculty promoted within a ten-year period, both from assistant to associate, and associate to full, broken down into various categories (gender, degree earned, whiteness, clinical vs theory, etc).
The 10-year promotion rates, both to associate and full, are generally in the 30-50% range, and for those specifically in tenure-track positions, around 50%.
I suspect the numbers would be higher for Arts & Sciences or Engineering faculty.

genuine curiosity: why do you suspect this with regards to faculty in different fields?

@kbh Personal observation in my field (math) makes me think that most tenure-track people who apply for tenure get it, except at top schools where it's more competitive.  Among people I know, many more have gotten tenure than been denied.   However, one thing I'm not sure of is how these studies count faculty who leave before getting or being denied tenure.  If they count them as not getting tenure, then that skews the numbers downward.

@kbh BTW, see this related question: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/568/19607


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Should someone giving a second opinion on an article be a co-author or just acknowledged?
I decided to write an article extracted from part of my master’s thesis. This will be my first time trying to get published, so obviously I’ll never think it is good enough therefore I’ll need a second opinion. I’m thinking of contacting my previous supervisor and ask him if he can read it before I try to submit it to a journal. And if things goes well, I’ll ask one of my colleagues (an assistant professor) to read it as well.
My question is, if they are willing to read it, should I include their names as co-authors or just in the acknowledgment?

To just evaluate a manuscript should not result in co-authorship. Authorship implies a certain contribution to the article. There are many interpretations of what is sufficient and some are really bad. Criteria for co-authorship that has gained support has been given by the Vancouver Protocol (see e.g. the BMJ description of their use of the terms in practise)

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work;

AND

Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;

AND

Final approval of the version to be published;

AND

Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

An advisor for a master's project sounds as a reasonable candidate for co-authorship since that person likely has provided much input on original ideas through to the final written product. How that applies in your case is for you to decide.
It is, however, never wrong to add a new person as co-author, if that person provides contributions that qualify them according to the list above. So consider who may be considered co-author and do not promise co-authorship without explaining the terms.
For additional input, please search on the authorship here on Academia.sx and look into the concept of contributorship, a concept more clearly related to contributions than what the term authorship implies, by also searching the internet.


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MathSciNet reviews license
I have been asked to become a MathSciNet reviewer. I personally find the database very useful, but I am a bit held back by the fact the database is kept behind a paywall.
What is actually the licensing/copyright status of reviews submitted to MathSciNet? Do authors keep the copyright and are allowed to post copies on their websites (like the AMS license for its journals)? If so, does anyone actually do the latter?
The information is nowhere to be found on MathSciNet, and actually I have never seen anyone releasing their reviews somewhere else.

It's a good question.  I am a reviewer and I found my original invitation letter.  It says "We must ask each reviewer to grant all rights, including copyright, to the
American Mathematical Society for each review written for us. A paper copy of
form will be sent to you within in a few days; we ask that you sign it,
thereby granting such rights to the AMS, and return it to us."  I can't find my copy of this form, but I'm sure you could ask them to send you the form before you decide.

In view of the journal policy, I would guess that AMS would probably not object to someone posting their own reviews, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone do this.

Back in 2016, when I was invited to review, mathscinet did not grant me the right to post my reviews under an OA license on my site. Not sure if they still are following this policy (I declined to review for this very reason, so I don't get updates from them).

This question on MathOverflow is very relevant, and puts the moral dilemma about writing for a paid subscription service in (what I think is) an interesting perspective.

I see no dilemmas here, moral or otherwise. They want unpaid work from me, they don't get to pose constraints on what else I do with it. This is standard across most of the online content-generating community.

@darijgrinberg a Creative Commons license is not a constraint? Anyway, even if there’s no dilemma for you, this question’s OP describes having a dilemma, and it sounds like his conflict is of a moral or ethical nature.

@DanRomik No, a Creative Commons license is not a constraint for the content creator. They are still free to do what they want with the content, including selling and re-licensing it.

Here are some answers to your questions:  Yes, MathSciNet is behind a paywall.  Yes, we ask reviewers to give us copyright to their reviews.  Yes, you can post your reviews elsewhere.
 In return, for each review, we put US$12 on account at the AMS (up from the US$8 it was a few years ago) for the reviewer to use to buy AMS books, to pay (part of) your AMS membership, or to pay for other things (such as t-shirts).  The credit is in the form of "AMS Points".
Why the copyright?  This helps us to copyright the whole database.  Copyrighting a database is rather different from copyrighting a journal or a conference proceedings volume.
Can you post the reviews?  The reviewer letter says, "You may post your reviews on your website, circulate them to colleagues, distribute copies to your students, and make other customary scholarly uses. You may even include your reviews in journals, books, and databases in the particular field(s) of mathematics to which they relate, provided that first publication credit is given to the AMS."
Why the paywall?  Creating and maintaining MathSciNet is expensive.  It costs millions of dollars per year to run it.  The subscription model allows us to cover the costs.  It would take a lot of donations or ads to make up for that.
Why so expensive? We work hard to make sure that we get things right. In order to do this, Mathematical Reviews has a staff of 80 people.  That includes 18 PhD mathematicians who serve as editors.  We also have people with advanced library degrees and experience that ensure that our bibliographic data is complete and correct.  We have cataloguers who ensure that we correctly identify authors.  We have copy editors who help out with the reviews and check references.  We have a whole department who work with the reviewers (and their reviews).  We have an IT department.
I hope this is helpful.  If not, post a comment!
--
Edward Dunne
Executive Editor
Mathematical Reviews

Use the 'Standard Trick'.
Let's assume you're willing to contribute, but don't want at least your review to be hidden off from the world. So, as @NateEldredge suggests in a comment - AMS says they "must ask each reviewer to grant all rights etc. etc."
Well this is where the standard trick comes in - which is also useful for journals and conferences which try to one-up you legally by requiring you sign over your rights:

At the beginning, you hold some relevant legal rights on the intended item for publication (in your case, a MathSciNet review), and the publisher has none; you haven't yet submitted your item.
Before submitting the item and signing anything, you post a copy of the work somewhere, e.g. on your personal web-page/blog. You do so while specifying an appropriate license, such as Creative Commons (e.g. Attribution-Sharealike or another variant), GNU Free Documentation License or others.
To be extra safe, you make sure at least one person you can count on downloads a copy from that on-line posting. That person now holds rights you've granted him under the license.
You now submit to the publisher - possibly signing away most of the rights you hold. You now have almost no rights in your own work...
This is the fun part: You download a copy from your posting of the item. Magically - you've regained at least the rights specified in the license! To be mor air-tight-safe - have that trusted person send you a copy, and they are the ones who have now granted you the rights (so it can't be argued this was all an exercise in your head, with yourself).

Et voila! :-)
Caveats:

I have not had any interaction with MathSciNet, this is general advice.
IANAL; and while I have some legal experience, that is always country-specific.
If you want to take a more principled stance, consider my other answer.

If the journal license agreement grants an exclusive license, your "standard trick" could be fraud, which is a crime.

@AnonymousPhysicist: No, it would not be fraud. Now, it's true that MathSciNet could change the text so to make using the standard trick more problematic, but they haven't to my knowledge.

Do you have a reason for claiming that granting a license you can't legally grant is not fraud?

@AnonymousPhysicist: It doesn't work that way. If you claim something is fraudulent, the onus of establishing that claim is on you.

I think I already did that, but I'll go again.  Fraud is intentional deception.  Intentionally granting a an exclusive license after already intentionally granting another license is intentional deception.  Therefore it is fraud.

I do not give legal advice.

@AnonymousPhysicist: Ok, let's discuss the (brief) case you've made. There are several issues with it, but two main ones: 1. Is deception occurring? 2. Intention to deceive. I'd argue none of them is happening . 1. MathSciNet are asking OP for a review of something, and he provides them the review. They don't have a basis to expect the review to be something that has never been communicated to anyone else; and they haven't asked OP to declare anything to that effect. So, no deception. 2. Scientists, or perhaps even all people, have a good-faith basis of assuming that ...

... all scientific information is inherently something of public interest which is to be shared by all humanity. They are never to be expected to hide research findings, data, comments, reviews and such. So, catering to a theoretical hope of some publisher to manipulate people into paying the publisher by preventing access to scientific material - that is a strange, counter-intuitive, and socially disadvantageous behavior which people cannot be expected to engage in.

If the license agreement grants an exclusive license, the intent to deceive is unambiguous.   You are right about public interest, but I doubt you are correct about the law.

Let's assume you are right about the law; then surely the for profit publishers will immediately change their license agreements to forbid this trick.

@AnonymousPhysicist: No, not surely. There are multiple reasons why that would not happen. Perhaps the most significant is the fact that most MathSciNet reviews don't seem to be available elsewhere (as OP suggests).

If you don't want to use the standard trick, you can
Refuse on principle.
Do seriously consider telling MathSciNet you'll gladly accept, if they were to drop their paywall and make their content publicly accessible; which they will likely refuse.
But if you do this, don't just leave it at that, but rather engage with AMS policy-makers to at least make the case for opening up MathSciNet; and also make this known to your colleagues and encourage them to do the same. I'm not saying you must do so.

Do you have any suggestions for how MathSciNet could solve the cost issues raised by @Edward Dunne in the last two paragraphs of his answer here?

@DaveLRenfro: Note that this answer is not actually new, I just separated it from my "standard trick" answer of 6 years ago. But so as to answer your question: 1. Instead of asking people to sign over their rights, consider asking (some of) them to do some volunteer editing. 2. Solicit donations. 3. Lobby for funding and try to motivate MathSciNet users to participate in lobbying universities and governments for funding.

Incidentally, as far as "signing over their rights", I don't understand why MathSciNet would need or even want to do this. The value MathSciNet adds is MUCH MUCH more than just the review itself, and includes cross-referencing with other reviews, a centralized location, etc. -- things that are still just as valuable if many of the reviews were scattered throughout on several hundred mathematicians' web pages (these being the reviews those mathematicians wrote).


text:
Etiquette of wearing the wrong academic robes at graduation as a lecturer in the UK
I have graduated three times from UK universities. First was a bachelors' degree, then a Masters' degree, then a PhD. The graduation robes associated with my PhD graduation are absolutely horrible. I am now a lecturer in a UK university and if I attend graduation ceremonies at this University (or others, I suppose), I am supposed to wear the academic robes from my highest degree, i.e. the horrible PhD ones.
So my question is this, is it considered acceptable to wear the robes from my 'lower' degrees at such occasions, or even the equivalent PhD robes from the university I now work at (much nicer!)?
Basically, can I get away with wearing the wrong robes to graduation ceremonies?

I am struggling to imagine what negative consequences you could really face for wearing the "wrong" robes.

a kilt is probably not acceptable.

Wouldn't that question be more suitable for a site on medieval role-playing?

It probably depends on the university. I would expect Oxbridge to care more. But it is also the case at Oxford and Cambridge that you shouldn't wear academic dress from another institution. So it may be acceptable for you to wear the equivalent robes of your current university.

I'm curious, what university? I personally love the "horrible" robes I see at graduations.

There are usually regulations on what you should wear which will be online. You can make your own decision about whether you want to break them of course.

A kilt is totally acceptable!

And my PhD (in engineering) comes from Heriot-Watt University. The robes in question are plain cerise-pink, with a cerise-pink hood!  http://oic.eps.hw.ac.uk/fun/photos/Graduation2002/Grad2002_3.jpg

@DrC those robes are are awesome. wear them with pride.

Suck it up, it's not a fashion parade.

I vote for wearing the cerise-pink robes.

"Cerise-pink" looks remarkably similar to Harvard's "crimson" robes, which I've worn without embarrassment.

In the United States, there are typically two acceptable pieces of regalia to wear: either your university-specific regalia or a "generic Ph.D." regalia that is just simple black robes plus your doctoral hood.  It would seem rather gauche to me to wear non-Ph.D. regalia or to wear the regalia of a school that is not your alma mater, even if that is where your post is.  I don't know if "generic Ph.D." regalia is also accepted in the UK, where many universities have a much longer and more formal set of traditions than in the US, but I would recommend that you look into that as a possibility.

"Generic PhD regalia" should do also in the UK. I wonder what else a PhD should wear who comes from a non-anglophone country, where regalia are not customary.

@henning: I guess that boils down to the question whether "a robe, but the 'wrong' one" is still better than "no robe at all" (just formal attire, such as a suit and a tie).

@O.R.Mapper - I can't read your comment without thinking The Emperor's New Robes. :^)

@J.R., did you hear about the emperor's new paint? It's a pigment of your imagination.

My dad got his PhD at a university that wore bright blue robes, and lectured at a university that had red robes for a PhD. Every graduation you could pick him out of a crowd with no trouble.

@Najib Idrissi I totally agree with you, but it's just as bad on other Stackexchange sites. Here is another amusing example: http://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/14524/should-i-leave-tips-in-latvian-hotels

This is a matter for whichever official at your university is in charge of ceremonies; in a British university there is almost certainly someone who knows the official rules, even if the university as a whole is very relaxed about academic dress. At some universities (Oxford and Cambridge are the main examples) the rules about wearing 'local' versus 'foreign' academic dress are very strict, and still taken fairly seriously (there are only specific occasions when academic dress from other universities may be worn, and for other purposes fellows are 'incorporated' into the university so they are entitled to wear MA robes).

If your question is 'can I get away with it', the answer is almost certainly 'yes', assuming your institution is one of the majority that are quite relaxed about academic dress.
If your question is 'should I wear the less gaudy robes', I would suggest the answer is 'no'; part of your role at a graduation is to make the event as meaningful as possible for your students graduating, and wearing more impressive robes supports that.

I recommend the 'Academical Dress' Facebook group as a source of academic dress advice and knowledge, often from the people (at the Burgon Society) who wrote the book on the topic.

Yes, you can totally get away with it. The situation in the UK is much more formal than in the US, where I have seen a graduation ceremony that looked exactly like the Comanche attack scene from Blood Meridian, but I have never seen anybody called out for wearing the wrong robes, except for once in Cambridge where I was gently chided for letting some ribbons hang out which were supposed to be tucked under the armpits.
Wear whatever you feel comfortable with. As long as it's academic dress, nobody will know and it doesn't really matter. (But if you did happen to get a PhD from Leeds, you are wrong about those robes! They are awesome!)

I can't comment on whether you'd get away with it, as that depends on your institution and colleagues, but wearing the wrong robes is certainly both bad form and rude.
It's bad form to disrespect the rules of the ceremony, and it's rude to everyone who is graduating to do so. Moreover, it's rude to everyone who has ever got a PhD from Heriot-Watt to treat a Masters from another university as more valuable to display than your doctorate from Heriot-Watt.
You may not like it, but you neither get to choose the design of your institutes's robes not what the robes you wear mean and wearing the wrong gown communicates to anyone who understands that you place your masters in higher esteem to your PhD.

Who will ever know? No one really knows what degrees you have, save the panel that hired you and the people at HR who maintain the staff records!
Spotting a degree and university by eye from a robe is a real skill that I suspect few possess. Its even rarer than bird spotting. (Never heard of robe twitchers)....
Wear what looks the best in the photos or the official video, because you will appear in many hundreds of parent photographs.
Myself, I put on the most colourful ties and waistcoats under my robe. Colour, pomp and show is what the entire ceremony is about.

Who will ever know? I guess most people in your department and a few people out of it, some of whom may know what your robes look like.  (Though I doubt many would would report you to the Ministry of Robes.)

Faculty know each other's colors. We comment on them regularly at graduation, how we feel sorry for those stuck with pink for the rest of their academic lives, how much we like the deep blues, etc.

Another thing that happens is that people also borrow regalia for one reason or another.  My wife waited until she was the Dept. Chair and the school would let her charge the $800  expense before she got her own "correct" set.

I'm very confused by the suggestion that the OP's colleges wouldn't know what university the OP attended.


text:
What to do if the data in a paper you are reviewing is copied from another paper of the same authors which is supposed to be a different device?
I got a paper to review and the authors of this paper already published a conference proceedings on the same topic but supposedly a different device. When comparing the figures of the conference proceedings and the submitted paper it becomes apparent that the data is exactly the same. This should not be possible as even the noise patterns are agreeing and the device structure is different enough to show different results.
What are my options?

What field are you in? I'm in the life sciences and conference proceedings/abstracts usually do not carry much weight. However, I've heard that other fields such as computer science and mathematics gives much more weight to conference proceedings.

I think a word or two might be missing from the title: "...supposed to be obtained from a different device", perhaps?  As it is now, the title seems to refer to the paper itself as a "device", which is confusing.

@RichardErickson: The field is irrelevant here. One or the other paper commit academic fraud by presenting data that does not match the description. Whether the paper is worth a lot of not does not matter. It's the same as stealing a silver ring from a store -- not worth as much as a gold ring, but still theft.

@WolfgangBangerth, You're correct. I misread the original post and didn't notice the research-misconduct tag. I was placing more emphasis the plagiarism. The question title places the emphasis on coping data rather than fraud, which is the bigger issue regardless of field. (PS thanks for you calling me out on that).

I didn't quite understand the nuances involving "different device", but if I have the rest right: you've observed that the data of the present submission is identical to that of a past submission.  The present submission involves something different enough so that identical data is not plausible, and therefore you strongly suspect that the data included in the present submission is not legitimate.  Is that it?
If so, I see just one reasonable option: bring this information to the attention of the editors.  It is serious enough that you need not (and perhaps should not) make a recommendation of acceptance or rejection: this needs to be resolved first.

Having been in this position as both a reviewer and an editor, I concur: There is no need for your to write a complete review. Just send an email to the editor (and maybe the managing editor at the publisher) with a note that you have found an instance of academic fraud. They will (hopefully) handle the rest.

I believe the poster means "a different experimental device."  (If true, this would allow the author to publish a second paper.)

@WolfgangBangerth, apparent academic fraud.  I wouldn't be comfortable saying it is academic fraud (as opposed to, say, accidentally pasting the wrong graph into the paper) without better evidence.

It'd be tactful to avoid using the words "academic fraud" - just say that you've noticed a figure was copied from another source. The editor certainly knows that this constitutes fraud unless there is a legitimate reason for the copying.

All fair points. That said, I don't believe that there are cases of "accidentally pasting the wrong graph into a paper". I believe that there are only cases where people do it knowing full well what they are doing and later claiming that it was accidental.

If someone did manage to write a whole paper in which they accidentally analyzed the wrong data in a way that looks like fraud, then that is staggering negligence even if it's not fraudulent (and I wouldn't be unhappy to see it treated similarly to fraud).

@AnonymousMathematician Is it possible that they analyzed the right data, but then put the wrong data in the figure?

Yeah, it's certainly important to check whether the discussion in the body of the paper matches the figure.  If it doesn't, then substituting the wrong figure is much less consequential.


text:
Where can I apply for a third party Travel Grant?
I am a fresh graduate (LLB) and I was selected as an volunteer for a conference in UK (held in June 1st & 2nd). They don't provide travel or accomodation expenses.
I'm a Sri Lankan citizen who resides in Sri Lanka and this volunteering opportunity will definitely be a great experience in my life. I really can't miss this opportunity.
But as a citizen from a developing country, its really hard for me to spend on huge airfare. Is there any place/organization that I can apply for a travel grant for my volunteering? (It will be a great help if I can gain even only the airfare, then I can spend my own for accommodation)

I fail to see the reason for downvote. However, I see this question may be too broad as there may be many organizations that could help the OP's situation.

Does LLB mean "Bachelor of Laws (Latin: Legum Baccalaureus)"?

Are you presenting at the conference (paper, talk, poster, etc)?

Yes, LLB means Bachelor of Law.
I'm not presenting nor an author in the conference. I was selected as an volunteer.
I couldn't find any organisations that accept my plea yet. Please recommend me if there is any. Thanks for your responses so far.

For many travel grants, you need to present your work at a conference to be eligible. The short time line is also an issue as applications often have to be submitted months in advance (and there was only about 2 weeks between you asking this question and the start of the conference).

Speak to the conference organizers, although you claim that they don't offer travel, you don't say how you know this. Have you asked them? If you approach them with a polite email expressing your intense interest and disappointment that you cannot attend, maybe some money can be found.
Can the conference sponsor help? Often these conferences are sponsored by a large company looking to hire fresh talent. This is a good way to get noticed, so maybe they can throw a few £100 in your direction. Make sure you talk to the right person in the company.
Can your (past) institution in Sri Lanka help? Don't just look at what your department offers, scour the websites for any kind of money that is available for student travel. Speak to your former advisor. Speak to the head of the department. Speak to the careers advice team.
Are you a member of any learned society or institute? They will often have discounted rates for students and unemployed, but offer bursaries for (recent) students attending conferences.
Does your government fund any programmes that might be of use?
Are you in a minority or in some other group that gets targeted for extra money? Don't be shy, go looking for it.

Finally, what kind of price quotes are you getting for your airfare?

+1 for "learned society" -- they're probably the best place to go for a grant that covers your specific area of interest.


text:
What's the bargaining space in a post-doc employment contract - in the Netherlands?
Motivation
I'm soon going to start a Post-Doc in the Netherlands. The labor laws are different from where I did my Ph.D. work; the academic culture is somewhat different; the unionization situation is different; etc.
So, I've gotten the informal offer over email, and I'm now expecting the formal contract offer. I already have a copy of the collective employment agreement which covers post-doctoral researchers where I'll be working.
When I did my PhD, like I said, the situation was quite different - plus, I didn't actually get to sign any contract and no bargaining was involved. But now there might be some bargaining (although I'm not sure to what extent as employment conditions are mostly standardized).
The actual question
My question is: What are, in your experience or opinion are points that are possible/useful to bargain about in the individualized contract? If you can, please give an example of better vs worse options for the same point. Long lists with less details are also quite ok by me :-)
Examples
(some more academia-specific and some more generic)

The extent to which the academic institute controls copyrights to your discoveries: Partial copyright in your works / Institute controls everything / Automatic publication under free license.
The extent to which you can be required to perform duties other than your chosen specific personal research: Not at all / At their discretion / Upto x% of the work week
Funding for attending conferences abroad

Notes

Somewhat-related question: What questions should I ask when I visit labs for potential post-doc employment?
Please answer even if your experience does not regard the Netherlands. I'm particularly interested in inter-national differences, because the prevalence of alternatives elsewhere is a point I can use in bargaining.

In hindsight, I can say the following:
The research institute did not take kindly to attempts at negotiation, and would basically not negotiate on nearly anything. (That is, it's not that it stuck to its position - there was no negotiations dialog).
Exceptions or near-exceptions to this rule were (or could have been):

Mode of calculation of your effective experience (e.g. how does industry experience count)
Guarantees regarding funding for experimental equipment
Opportunities for "access" to potential grad students
Some kind of help with temporary accommodation while you search for a place to live in Amsterdam, which is an incredibly long and arduous process.
(Informal?) agreement re how FOSS code you write is to be licensed upon release

Perhaps there are a few other negotiable points, but the negative attitude to negotiations makes it difficult to cover that many.

Legally, as far as I understand, it is not possible to negotiate new terms that contradict the terms of the applicable collective labour agreements in the Netherlands. Many labour agreements however leave some room for negotiation, see e.g. Appendix 3 in the file you linked. In practice however there I would not expect there to be much room.
As for your example questions:

As Bill Barth pointed out, Section 1.9 arranges IP ownership, and indeed the employer owns everything. See also point 4 of Article 1.9.3. I don't see much room here for negotiation.
This is not part of the collective agreement. Your contract may have certain provisions, for example the amount of teaching (if applicable). You should discuss this with your supervisor/boss on what is expected and how much freedom you will have. Here there may be some room for negotiation.
Again, this is something the supervisor can answer. It depends on how much budget the group has available, or if your work is part of a grant funded project, how much there is available there.

If the employer owns everything, the employer can transfer some/all of the rights to me, or decide to publish things under a non-restrictive license, if it so chooses. So no problem there. Also, of course I'm not talking about contradicting the terms of the collective agreement - just adding conditions to my contract which are in my benefit. And reading the agreement there does seem to be a lot of room for that.

About the budget - there seems to be enough of it. But I have absolutely no idea how it's divvied up or what part of it can be used for what. Plus, some of the conditions don't have a direct cost, or no cost at all.

I would just ask the PI how much roughly would be available for travel each year. For most of the people I know in the Netherlands, travel funding usually isn't a problem. I wouldn't count on being able to add much if anything to your contract. Probably the only point where there might be some room is the step in the salary scale where you will start. This depends on your experience, but as Bill pointed out, as a postdoc you don't have much leverage.

Looking at the collective employment agreement briefly, I'd say that pretty much everything is prescribed, and that only the things in Appendix 3 are negotiable. That is to say, you can negotiate about some things in the amount of gross salary and the amount of vacation. These are options for, it appears, trading salary/vacation for help with commuting costs, costs of school, union dues, additional retirement savings, and the purchase of a reasonable bicycle (it is the Netherlands after all!). This is referred to in Section 1.8 of the General Provisions.
Section 1.9 of the General Provisions covers Intellectual Property. I don't see anything that makes these provisions negotiable, and the employer appears to own everything. 1.9.2 covers Copyright and 1.9.2.1 covers requests for the transfer of copyright to the employee. If you are concerned about who owns your scientific articles or software products, I would ask how frequently these transfers are approved.
I haven't looked through all the chapters for provisions specific to researchers and postdocs, so if you are concerned that you might be assigned duties outside of your own, self-directed research, I would carefully ask your interviewer/potential supervisor about that. Post-doctoral positions are usually about extended training in the US, and so they tend to be a blend of producing works that came out of the dissertation (or extending it) and producing new works that are a collaboration between the postdoc and the advisor. I.e., postdocs are expected to continue working on their old ideas but also work on new ideas that come from the collaboration of the postdoc and the advisor.
That's the theory at least. They are often expected to do the former and also lead ongoing lab efforts at the advisor's sole direction. If you are concerned about this, ask. Just be careful that you don't turn your potential employer off to hiring you due to an apparent unwillingness to be a team-player.

First of all - +1 and thanks. However... the IP and copyright clauses are probably rather negotiable, since the employer can always cede copyrights and IP rights. Also, there are points not covered by the agreement at all, or covered vaguely, and those are the ones I'm most interested for people to bring up here.

@einpoklum What evidence do you have for the negotiability other than hope? I don't see anything in the collective agreement that says that any of its terms are negotiable, beyond those that are explicitly negotiable like I mentioned already? Where is your "probably" coming from? The IP portion even lays out the process for transfer to the employee, so I find it to be quite specific and not vague at all. I doubt you would get a blanket transfer written into your contract, for example, and I think that asking for such might be detrimental to your application.

I'm not applying for anything. I think you're considering the situation based on your experience in the US, which is one of the more employer-slanted places to work in... I've been given a job offer, and now we're negotiating terms. My evidence is experience in other workplaces, with and without collective agreement defaults.

@einpoklum, maybe you can come back and answer this question yourself with your experiences if you don't find a Dutch reader to provide one. I've never worked in a place with a pre-negotiated collective employment agreement like this, so I can only speculate. Everything is technically negotiable in non-union employment in the US, but in most of my experience, working without written contracts, employers don't deviate from their written policies. They'd rather forgo the hire than make an exception, though this is conventional not enforced by any law.


text:
Why only medicine lectures are closed to the public?
In a coment, David Richerby pointed out that in his university in the UK everybody was entitled to attend to any lectures, except for Medicine. I have also found that Dusseldorf has the same policy, but no reasons are quoted.
I can think of two possibilities:

Potential missuse of the information in the class "oh, I saw a rash like that the other day, it is nothing". (But no one has died because "the condition number of that matrix is not SO bad...").
Sensitive information, like some details about patients, necessary for the education.

But they don't seem too strong. They would both apply to med students, or just people that signed up for a few courses, but are not going to be doctors (think some biologist that may be interested in taking Pathology).
Does anyone know of an official reason for this policy?

This certainly does not hold for all German universities. I once went to a medicine lecture, which was held in our physics lecture hall before my lectures.

In my experience in Switzerland, you can attend all ex cathedra medicine courses as a guest. But laboratories, anatomy classes and anything that requires an ethical/safety protocol is restricted to registered students, mostly for practical reasons. Some are held in hospitals, which have their own rules about who can be present.

The University of Düsseldorf's policy specifically applies to high school students on a visit program, who will be underage in general. So I would assume that this is purely a parental guidance issue due to the possibly (very) graphic nature of the content of these lectures.

In the United States, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) greatly restricts who can see or discuss medical records. While most grand rounds tend to be obscure the patient's identity, there could be an abundance of caution. Note that there is an exemption from HIPAA for grand round presentations -- if the audience are only medical personnel (including students):

The HIPAA Privacy Rule allows physicians and staff to use and disclose PHI [private health information] without a patient's written authorization for purposes related to treatment, payment, and health care operations.  It further defines "heath care operations" to include "to conduct training programs in which students, trainees, or practitioners in areas of health care learn under supervision to practice or improve their skills as health care providers. [Cite]"

The other reason in the United States that grand rounds are often closed is the prevalence of various types of protesters -- e.g. from PETA or from the anti-psychiatry movement.

[That all being said, at my university most of the grand rounds are open unless closed at the request of the speaker or for other reasons. However, they aren't advertised so you would have to be a department member or on the mailing list to know when and where to go. They are also behind the security umbrella of the university, so you would need an ID card to get past the guard at the front door of the building. So whether you call that 'open' is up to you.]

Are specific patients' medical records often discussed in med school lectures?  (This is an entirely naive question.  It happened once on an episode of House, which is where the majority of my experience with the medical field comes from.)

Specific cases are discussed. Most of the speakers will redact as much as possible, however it's not always possible to totally obscure the identity of the patient and deductive disclosure is always a risk. If a speaker from Atlanta came to talk about the experimental treatment of a patient with hemorrhagic fever, it wouldn't take Dr. House to figure out who the patient was.


text:
How much can/should quotes from student evaluations be edited when preparing a teaching statement?
I'm writing a teaching statement and want to include quotes from student evaluations. How much can/should I edit these (for grammar)?

In general, quotes should always be edited as little as possible.
The only changes you should make are:

Truncations to remove sections of quotes that aren't relevant for your purposes.
Edits to fit the grammatical structure of the existing sentence.
Correcting small errors in the original text.

However, any changes to the quotation must be clearly indicated. Truncations should be marked with an ellipsis (" . . . "), while all other changes should be indicated using square brackets.

Got it. So, I should act like a reporter.

what if a word is misspelled?

@DavidHill it depends what is the intended purpose. If it is just an internal document, I would say no one will mind that you silently fix typos.

@Davidmh: Especially if you're transcribing from handwritten comments!

@David You can always use (sic) if you don't want people to think that you can't spell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic

@JeromyAnglim: (sic) can come across as snarky, unfortunately, so you might want to avoid it for that reason.

A quotation is, by definition, explicitly what someone else said or wrote. If you modify a quotation so that it's no longer what someone else said or wrote then you are deceiving your audience. On this basis you should edit as little as possible and if you do need to edit you should make it clear to your audience.
It is reasonable to truncate if it does not change the sense of the quote. If you omit parts in the middle of a quote you should indicate this with ellipses '...'.
It's okay to correct minor spelling errors if they're not relevant to the quote.
You can add in a missing word, but it's usually best to indicate where you've done so, if the student said "the lecturer overpaid fool" you could quote as "the lecturer is an overpaid fool" but it would be preferable to quote as "the lecturer [is an] overpaid fool" so it is clear you have edited the quote.
You can add context but should indicate where you've done so, for example if asked the question "Did you like the lecturer?" the answer you're quoting is "He is an overpaid fool" you could quote it as "He [the lecturer] is an overpaid fool" or "[The lecturer] is an overpaid fool".
You can also add emphasis but you should indicate where you've done so. For example: "I'm writing a teaching statement and want to include quotes from student evaluations. How much can/should I edit these (for grammar)?" (emphasis mine).


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How to express dissension as a grad TA while maintaining professionalism
I have a problem with the courses I'm TAing.  I am a math PhD student at a large (supposedly good) state university where the lower-division math classes are taught in the "discussion section" format (i.e. students go to a big lecture with clickers three days a week, and attend 30ish person sized recitation with a TA once a week).  I teach three of these recitations.
When I first came here several years ago, I was shocked by the low quality of the courses I was assigned to. This was supposed to be a good school, yet the students are treated without respect, held to no standards, and come out knowing virtually nothing.  Furthermore, there are strict limitations imposed on TAs, to the point where I feel that I am being actively prevented from teaching anything to my students.  A breaking point came for me recently when my course coordinator made it mandatory for us to assign online quizzes through a third party "online instructional application," instead of administering handwritten quizzes in class.  I have very strong objections to this, for multiple reasons that I could elaborate on, but they are not the point of this post.
The point is, I feel gross. I'm being forced to teach in a way that I find unethical and unreasonable, and every attempt that I have made to bring up an issue in the past has been met with complete inflexibility. It seems to be the culture of the department to dismiss the opinions of its graduate students.
I don't know how else to state my objections. I know I'm not in charge, and I don't want to be unprofessional, but I want to be heard.  I have given serious thought to resigning with a public letter.  However, even with that sacrifice, I'm not sure anyone would listen.
Is there anything I can do?  How should I handle this situation?

Could you elaborate on the fact that teachers have no respect for students and have low expectations on them? Also, what is the audience of this course? Maths major or not?

I would not recommend resigning with a public letter. It gives an impression that "There's a problem here, and I'm leaving rather than helping with it."

The prof leading the course is the person who decides the best way to teach it.  You are not the one responsible for the quality of the course - the prof is.  Your responsibility is to help the students understand the material with the guidelines and tools given.

@Taladris I think I need to leave out some details for answers to be useful in the general case. (and, also, to preserve my anonymity.)  I will say that the audience is first year students of uniformly distributed majors, and that the school has discontinued honors / for majors calculus.

Regarding the online quizzes: politicians like "innovative education" and "new technologies" everywhere. This sometimes means doing the same things using electricity instead of paper, so they can tick an extra box in the form.

@Davidmh These new technologies can be detrimental. I wouldn't be upset if it really were the same thing. The medium matters.

@APOdTA I know they are different, but what I want to say is that there may be external pressures to do suboptimal things just to look good.

@Davidmh Yeah, that is possible.  Is there some way that I can I help the administrators to look good by doing optimal things, instead?

@APOdTA Is it a way to reduce the amount of grading?

@APOdTA sadly, if they are just interested in looking good with the minimal amount of work, not. There is no way for me to tell if that is true, though.

@Alex I don't know. The TAs are the ones who do all the grading, so it wouldn't make sense to mandate it, instead of just providing the option. I don't mind grading and love to write quizzes and give feedback. I suspect the motivation is more along the lines of preserving section equality, since the online quiz questions must all be selected from a problem bank, and then graded automatically by a computer.

I would strongly recommend against doing anything dramatic, such as resigning or publicly denouncing the course.  I feel bad about discouraging acting on your beliefs, but I think it could actually hurt your career.  There are two reasons for this:
First, the topic of how to teach low-level mathematics courses has become contentious and politicized in recent decades.  Unless this is actually your scholarly specialty, it's safest not to get too dramatically involved, particularly as a grad student.  The problem is that you can easily find people who will embrace you as a champion or martyr, whichever side you are on.  Even if you are sober and self-restrained (which would probably rule out a public letter), other people on your side will say provocative things and attract negative attention while supporting you.  Controversy is dangerous for academic careers, since it's generally easier to veto hiring someone than to generate an offer.  So if you acquire equal numbers of friends and enemies, your enemies can hurt you more than your friends can help you.  Plus, if you want a research career, being known for inflexible opinions about low-level teaching will distract attention away from your research accomplishments.  That distraction can be a problem even for people who agree with you.
Second, you risk coming across like a worrisomely disruptive colleague.  Most math departments contain at least one faculty member who regularly takes fervent stands on seemingly minor issues.  They feel they have logically analyzed these issues, and they can't in good conscience cooperate with anything other than what they see as the logical option, since that would be a betrayal of the basic principles underlying mathematics.  Coordinating with others or compromising play no role in the analysis, and it doesn't really matter how important the issue itself is (what matters is standing up for what's right).  These people drive everyone else nuts, since they make it impossible to get anything done without either giving in to them about their pet issues or spending hours debating.
I'm not saying you are necessarily disruptive in this way.  You have chosen an important topic to get upset over, and you might be completely right about it.  However, if a hiring committee hears that you resigned in disgust upon being asked to administer online quizzes, they will wonder what else you might make a fuss over.  This could put them off even if they agree with your concerns about teaching, and there's no way to reassure them that it's really just this one issue.
So what can you do while avoiding these dangers?  One approach is to let the faculty handle this fight.  If every faculty member disagrees with you, then your cause is hopeless in the short term and it's best just to calm down and finish your Ph.D. program without too much controversy.  If some of them do agree with you, then it's not likely that publicly joining them as a grad student will shift the balance of power in the department.  Instead, you can try to get your future TA assignments in courses they teach, while encouraging them behind the scenes in their attempts to change the department's approach.
To the extent you take direct action, I'd look for approaches that don't cause extra work for anyone else.  For example, if you resign, then someone will have to find a replacement for you (so they'll automatically be upset about it).  But you might be able to improve the course by strategic volunteering.  Could you prepare optional handouts meant to deepen the students' knowledge?  Could you offer a few additional review sessions before exams?  These sorts of things aren't going to effect the fundamental changes you seek, but they could at least make you feel better about having done something rather than nothing, and they may build some goodwill with the lecturer by showing that you really want to help the students.

I should also say that the disruptive faculty that takes a stand on everything is not specific to maths - every engineering department seems to have one of those as well, and they are also almost universally disliked.

This is closely related to the ideal teaching recommendation for faculty applying to large public universities. At these institutions, one thing the hiring committee and chair want to hear is that the faculty member "won't cause trouble": there won't be a long line of students at the chair's office because of the course. Yes, the departments would love to have only "excellent" instructors, but most academics are only average instructors, so that's not realistic. What the departments don't want are average instructors who cause the administratiors many hours of extra work each semester.

Thank you for the advice. I do frequently prepare handouts, answer keys, and hold reviews, extra office hours, etc. The problem is this behavior is often discouraged by administration, under grounds that it is uneven with the other sections. (The fact that this eclipses any quality concerns is one of the main thing that disgusts me.) Despite my semester evaluations being very good- often full of unsolicited, touching comments- I have never heard anything but negative feedback from the administration about my teaching. I admit this has built resentment, and makes volunteering hard to maintain.

Many new graduate students have idealized ideas about teaching. You should ask yourself whether your opinions are based on a long experience of teaching at similar schools, or only based on your impressions as a new TA of "how things should be".
In my experience in the math departments at two 40,000+ student state universities, many new GAs have an idealized viewpoint that doesn't match reality. Here are a few important aspects of these schools that I didn't recognize when I first arrived at one:

The typical student at a large state university is not as strong as many incoming GAs imagine. This is true even at highly-rated institutions. Yes, the students can do something - they are decent students. But the university has no way to find 10,000 "graduate-quality" high school seniors each year to admit as freshmen. Many of the students they do admit will still struggle with calculus, organic chemistry, and other traditionally "hard" courses.
At a large institution, many of the students who don't struggle with calculus already took it and can place out of it, or will sign up for an honors calculus course if there is one to take.  So the calculus classes aren't a representative sample of the student body, which increases the effect from the previous paragraph.
Especially at large schools, students complain about unequal treatment. If every section of the calculus course ran differently - especially if some TAs decided to impose stricter standards than others - the likely result would be formal complaints by the students, which the departmental administration would have to resolve.  So it is often a goal of the course coordinator to prevent each TA from making their section much different than other sections.

A new GA only enters the program once, but faculty see a new crop of GAs every year.  These new GAs are unfamiliar with the history of the department, and they do not attend the administrative meetings where the relevant faculty talk about how they want the courses to run. But the GAs often have opinions about how the courses should be run which the faculty know would be disastrous if implemented. The general tone of the question above sounds to my ear like the type of complaint permanent faculty have probably heard from many previous graduate students, so I'm not surprised if they quickly dismiss it.
From the outside, it sounds as if the coordinator of your class is doing things to try to maintain quality. Using clickers in lecture, and using an online quiz system, are ways to increase student participation.
With that said, let me answer:

Is there anything I can do? How should I handle this situation?

As a TA, do your best in the situation you are in, and learn from your experience. Once you graduate, the format of the calculus course you once taught will be a very minor afterthought. If you end up in a position to decide on how calculus is taught at another school, you can use your experience then.
If you take up a career in academia, there will be many irritating things that you have to do, with little flexibility. You can't win every battle, even if you think the other side is completely wrong. So you have to have a thick skin, and keep a focus on what is really important.

I appreciate the advice, but I really don't think I'm just being unreasonably idealist. It seems like the policies have crossed the line from practical decisions to lazy ones that come at the expense of the students. (One example is, there are no excused absences. No sick notes, no deaths. You just fail.) I TAd for five semesters during my undergrad (which was smaller, but still big) and I thought everything was fine. I recognize the challenges of organizing courses at a large university, but that means optimizing for shortcuts, efficiency, not that it's ok to just teach like crap.

(Seriously, though, thank you.  I think this is how they probably view me, and it is sincerely helpful to hear it reasonably depicted.)

A first important note before I answer the actual question:

I don't know how else to state my objections. I know I'm not in charge, and I don't want to be unprofessional, but I want to be heard.

From what it sounds like, you were heard (you have been given the chance to voice your objections on multiple occasions). The persons in charge just decided to not follow through with your suggestions, which is, in the abstract, completely ok for them to do (they are in charge, and you are not).
I feel this is an important distinction to make - from what you have written in the post, there is nothing that rings a big alarm bell of grossly unethical behaviour to me. Yes, the thing with the commercial provider could be due to somebody personally profiting from the contract, but it could just as well be that the persons in charge honestly think that handling quizzes electronically will improve class. There are strict limitations on what TAs can do and teach in many big courses in many universities, this is often simply required for coordination between different recitation groups. That you feel the students are treated without respect and "come out knowing virtually nothing" sounds dramatic, but I am not entirely sure whether this is a fact or just your personal impression.
One interesting question would be how other TAs and the undergrads see the situation. Are other TAs also of the impression that the quality in the courses is much lower than it could be? Do the students also feel treated without respect? If you have not done so yet, I would suggest you to verify that your opinion is indeed shared by a majority of the other involved stakeholders - and, if this is not the case, reflect critically whether you are just overreacting.

Is there anything I can do? How should I handle this situation?

It sounds like you did what you could do (bring up your concerns with the responsible persons), and they decided to dismiss your concerns. At this point, you have basically two options:

Quit TAing - some statements in your (well-written) question sound like you have reached a level where you cannot justify working on the course anymore. In this case, the best thing to do is to leave. However, don't make a big fuss with a public letter etc. - I have seen similar things happen on multiple different occasions, and they never led to any substantial change and they always led to a plethora of public shaming and scapegoating of the letter writer. Don't put yourself into that position.
Go on - you have done what can reasonably expected from you in this position (notified the higher-ups, argued your objections), and they have decided to not change. You do not need to have any ethical concerns about leaving things be for now, and just move on teaching the course even though you personally would do things entirely differently. You are, as you say yourself, not in charge, so you don't need to beat yourself up over decisions which are not yours to make.

If you select the "go on" option, you can either resign from your cause entirely (and give up all hopes of change), or play the political game. As you are probably well aware, politicians everywhere (not only in congress, but also in companies, faculties, and any other collection of humans) are able to influence decisions that are not actually theirs to make by slowly swaying over the formal decision makers to their cause. This will only work "from the inside", so if you quit, this door is pretty much closed to you.

+1 This. You either quit or go with the flow (since you did everything humanly possible to change things). Public letters of resignation will sound like a rant and will be treated as such

While I don't think it's necessary to say that the OP sound dramatic (some people feel strongly about good teaching), I concur that OP should talk to the other TA  to verify his feeling.

@Heisenberg I said "dramatic", not "overdramatic". Maybe just an unfortunate choice of words on my side.

Thank you for the advice. If I quit I will not leave a public letter. I guess that was partly a frustrated fantasy.

I would recommend two things:

Don't take responsibility for what you don't have authority over. For example, if the students ask why they have to take their quizzes online, the answer is "Because Prof. X said so." If they complain, don't try to justify Prof. X's decision. Just say "I have been explicitly told that I don't have any authority over this matter. You should go talk to Prof. X."
Indeed, you have an opportunity to play good cop - bad cop. The powers that be have set up a system and a series of hoops to jump through. Become an expert on how the game is played. If old exams are publicly available, study them carefully and explain to your students what sorts of questions are likely to appear. If you present yourself as the students' ally against "the system", they will believe you when you give them advice and tell them that they really, really need to do their homework.

Keep this in mind in your job search. A lot of small liberal arts colleges pride themselves on offering an experience opposite to what you describe. Do a good job even in an environment you hate, and when twenty employers ask you "Why do you want to work at a liberal arts college?" in ten-minute interviews at the Joint Math Meetings, you will have a very convincing answer.

Point 1 is worth a downvote for me. Whatever you do, don't undermine your own course by passive-agressive statements in the sense of "well, I know this is terrible, go to Prof. X to complain". If you feel like doing that, then, by all means, quit. And, never, never, never play Good Cop / Bad Cop by making the other involved persons look bad.

I never once advocated complaining to the students about "the system", Prof. X, or anything else. I am saying that TAs should not defend superiors' decisions if they disagree with them. (And, I was once specifically encouraged by a professor for whom I was TAing to play good cop to his bad.)


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Which authority regulates the conferring of degrees in South Africa?
In South Africa, is there a body that regulates the institutions that are permitted to confer degrees? If so, what is this entity?
Does it regulate:

The ability to confer academic degrees?
Which degrees may be conferred?
Which subjects may form part of that degree?
The content of the subjects?

There is a university in my country that confers a Bachelor of Science in Complementary Medicine, this degree includes subjects whose premises have little to no evidence for them.

The laws you want are the Higher Education Act 101 of 1997 and its amendments, and the NQF Act 67 of 2008 (NQF being the National Qualifications Framework).
They establish the Council on Higher Education and the South African Qualifications Authority, respectively, who between them bear responsibility for assessing, registering and accrediting institutions and qualifications in South Africa, and recognising foreign equivalent qualifications as appropriate.
I have not examined specific availability of courses, programmes, specialties or qualifications in the records maintained by either group.
However, Chapter 7 of the HEA, Act 101/1997 as amended forbids practise as a provider of higher education by anybody except "public higher education institution[s] and ... organ[s] of state" without being registered or conditionally registered, under that Act.
Section 66 of the same Act is of particular note. In full,

66.    Offences
Any person other than a higher education institution, who, without the authority of a
  higher education institution -
(a) offers or pretends to offer any higher education programme or part thereof;
(b) purports to confer a qualification granted by a higher education institution, or in
  collaboration with a higher education institution; or
(c) purports to perform an act on behalf of a higher education institution,
is guilty of an offence and is liable on conviction to a sentence which may be imposed for fraud.
(2) Any person who pretends that a qualification has been awarded to him or her by a higher education institution, whereas in fact no such qualification has been so awarded, is guilty of an offence and is liable on conviction to a sentence which may be imposed for fraud.
(3) Any person who contravenes section 51 (1) (a), 54 (7) or 55 (2) is guilty of an offence and is liable on conviction to a fine or to imprisonment not exceeding five years or to both such fine and imprisonment.
  [Sub-s. (3) substituted by s. 10 of Act 54/2000]
(4) Any private higher education institution which does not comply with section 55 (1) is guilty of an offence and is liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding R20 000.

Note that 51(1)(a) is the aforementioned ban on unregistered practise, 54(7) forbids the use of names like "university" or "professor" unless entitled to use them by correct registration, 55(2) concerns deregistered institutions returning registration certificates, and 55(1) requires the public display of (a certified copy of) such a certificate.
Penalties are either specified in the section or are set equivalent to those for fraud. Needless to say, if you believe any such laws and regulations are breached, you should contact either the CHE or the SAQA directly with your information, because these are offences held equivalent to fraud.