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Can I write a paper on a method that is novel but yields similar results compared to existing methods?
I have developed a method that gives similar results (in few cases: better) compared to existing methods and I want to publish it. Can I do this and if yes, how do I motivate it? More specifically:
I am a undergraduate researcher, investigating methods to detect X in images. We have a solution using two images and another method proposed in the literature before also used two images.
Recently we discovered that we can solve the same problem in a very different manner if we use three images (taken differently) and still get similar results. This technique will be based on a particular observation and it is not discussed in the literature. Does it make a good paper given that the problem can be solved using two images with similar results?
How should I write and explain it in my paper about why I am using three images instead of two, because the results obtained are similar? The way in which the three images are taken is different from taking two images and our observation in the three-image-case seems to be novel.
Edit (from comment): In some cases our previously proposed method which uses 2 images gives inaccurate results compared to 3 image solution.

It's hard to say anything without knowing more of the field. Are images easy to come by in this situation? Is capturing an image cheap (e.g. consumer products) or challenging (e.g. distant astronomy features). Is this a mostly theoretical paper where you're trying to just propose a novel idea or is it attempting to solve a more real-life issue? Regardless of the answers, this seems like a good question for your adviser or a more experienced researcher in your group.

1). Capturing images is cheap. 2). Paper is not theoritical, implementation is done and results will be shown. 3). It is a real life problem while taking images.

Is there any advantage (such as higher accuracy, more confidence of results, ...) in using 3 instead of 2 images?

Yes, but in some cases. In some cases our previously proposed method which uses 2 images gives inaccurate results compared to 3 image solution.

I believe this inaccuracy (even if it is only in some cases) is something that you could focus on in your new paper. In case your new method with 3 images can eliminate it in a substantial number of cases, I think you have a quite convincing paper.

Related: Is developing a cheaper method ever considered to be originality in academic research?

As your three-image method takes a new approach, it is novel in the academic sense: It adds to the existing knowledge. Thus you should be able to publish a paper on this, though probably not in a high-ranking journal (unless you blatantly underestimated the advantages of your method). The rationale for this is the following and you may use it to motivate your method in your paper: Your new approaches may inspire other methods which in turn may drastically outperform existing ones or yield entirely new information.
You could write the paper directly in this tone, not focussing on the method you are presenting but on the fact that you can extract the information your method (and the others) yield in a new way. In this context, you may consider not presenting your method primarily as a method, but as a way to verify your approach to extract the existing information.
You might get bonus points, if you actually have suggestions how to improve your method to outperform the existing ones.

Anything that is considered novel in literature can be published. This includes methods that doesn't exceed the performance of that of the state of the art. Eg. PLOS ONE Journal welcomes research including negative results.
Just make sure that the method yow are to propose isn't so obvious in application to your research problem. This should be done with appropriate literature survey. Also make sure you go through the Journal guidelines and consult with the publisher/editor prior to manuscript submission.


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Cheating during a test
I took a test today morning and I saw that the person sitting next to me used her phone repeatedly, I believe it was to check the power point slides for answers. The fact that this student also asked me for the answer to a question before I left also raises my suspicious slightly.
I don't know this person. I decided not to report it this morning because I don't feel quite alright accusing anyone, at least not in person. I am tempted to send an anonymous email and explain what happened, although I don't think it will make any difference. I'm not happy at all with the incident, because the test wasn't exactly trivial and some of us might fail, while other people could pass simply copying the answers from their phone.
What should I do?

If your school has an academic integrity clause, you should follow through with this.

You should have called an invigilator over - explained quietly what you saw and they could have then watched and dealt with it if she continued. Now it is much more difficult - posting on here won’t condone your inaction.

@SolarMike This woman was sitting next to me. She would have noticed, and also a lot other people. It would have been impossible to do it without causing a general disruption.

You could have handed the invigilator a note asking to go to the back to explain... but its over now.

A good question!
There is not much you can do now. You cannot prove anything and can not even name the cheating person. If you think that explaining the situation can help the invilgator to make cheating less likely the next time, you should write them an anonymous email.
I've heard that there are some universities with so-called "honor codes" that tell you to report this - if this is the case for you, do absolutely report it (anonymously).

and can not even name the cheating person.

Well, I could find out easily, but I won't bother to look into it. My problem is with the institution that allows this kind of situation.

What do you mean by that? What is the problem?

"What do you mean by that?" We students have access to a list with all the people taking the course, including our pictures. I believe it would be easy to find out who this person was.
"What is the problem?" Crowded classrooms with not enough assistants (just one in fact) to avoid having people cheating.

Okay, but what is your goal? Do you want to tell the department that they do not prevent cheating effectively? Then it might help to write them an email. And in this case, you do not have to find out who the cheating person was and do not have to name her (you should not name her anyway).

"Do you want to tell the department that they do not prevent cheating effectively?" I think that's the idea. But I'm worried about what kind of measures the department might take with us knowing someone in the class cheated.

If you report this anonymously, they can not do anything besides taking better care the next time. (It is also possible/likely that nothing changes.) I don't think you should be worried.

The fact that this student also asked me for the answer to a question before I left also raises my suspicious slightly.

Slightly?!

I decided not to report it this morning because I don't feel quite alright accusing anyone, at least not in person.

Why not?
You can also do this via email or phone call.
Imagine yourself in the position of the instructor, or the proctor, or the department administrator, ten years from now.  Wouldn't you want the student who saw irregularities to let you know?  You can't revamp your exam proctoring procedures unless you're aware that there are opportunities to cheat in the current set-up.

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Where should I host software for individual papers?
I'm a teen who's writing a paper on Poisson-Disc distribution over the summer for fun, and I wanted to distribute the software I used for the simulations to maintain scientific integrity. Obviously I don't have anything like a university server I can host it on, so my first instinct is to host it on my GitHub. I guess this would work, but there are several problems with it, such as its fallibility. Furthermore, I'm not really used to professionalism yet, and I'm not sure if it's appropriate to host professional, academia stuff on my personal GitHub. I do go to a more-or-less significant technological program at my school, and since school starts back up in a few weeks, I guess I could talk to my teachers about hosting it on the school servers, but there's only a 50-50 chance they'll let me do that. Do y'all have any better ideas?

Use GitHub (as mentioned in the comments), but with a twist.
You can archive GitHub repos to Zenodo (they have a machinery for that) or really any other scientific research storages (as a tarball, for example). In this manner you can ensure permanence. The visibility is easier on the GitHub, though.
And, as mentioned, a somewhat official-looking (like, with a real name) personal GitHub account is professional enough. It's basically the link from the paper to the GitHub that matters, not other way round.

Zenodo will also give you a DOI for the specific release of the code, which will be pretty easy to cite in your papers, and very easy to find in a few years, even if your Github repository goes missing.

+1.  You can also just upload a tarball to zenodo and bypass github entirely

Using Github for this is fine and is generally not seen as unprofessional. There is a little bit more to proper sharing of code than just sticking it into a git repo. Github has a "releases" function that will let you capture an image of your code base in time. You can say "I tested this code with release v1.2.3 from this github repository." In that way your code will always be retrievable in the state that worked despite any modifications, updates, re-releases etc you do on it.
The problem is capturing the metadata and environment data that you used to run the code. There are tools for this but one of the "easiest" ways to do this would be to write a docker file that has all the library/environment dependencies you need to make the code run, include your released code into that, build the image and host that on docker-hub. Gitlab also has a docker image repo that you can use for free. There are also all sorts of automated CI/CD pipelines built into gitlab/hub you can use to automate this but that might be going a little far.
Using a combination of releases/docker, in the future, a different user will be able to pull the exact same code you used, run it with the exact same versions of all the libraries, and hopefully get the exact same results. You should also address the provenance of the input data, preprocessing steps etc in case the code doesn't auto generate everything from scratch.

I am slightly confused. When you say "host", do you mean distribute the source code or the actual live application?
For the source code, I'm would go as far to say as GitHub (and BB, GitLab etc) is pretty much the only way you should be distributing source code. Not only does it allow you to distribute the code, but also allows for contributions to your code. It is pretty much just tailor made for sharing code. I'm also struggling to understand how you would share a source code over "University servers", are you planning to have an FTP server running and then a zip file containing the source code? Or possibly hosting your own git server? Seems like a lot of work for no apparent reasons.
If you are afraid of GitHub (or equiv) of going down (which is my interpretation of "fallibility"), then you can archive a zip file of your source code somewhere, say on a Google Drive. You can even do this automatically via GitHub's DevOps capabilities (Github Actions). However, this really is overkill as tens of thousands of companies depend on GitHub so any downtime definitely won't be significant enough to impact you.
For a live (presumably web) application, then it is much different but I have a feeling your use case is option 1 based on the existing answers and comments.

There are rules for cases like this.
They are covered, for instance, in ME599 course taught at Oregon state university by Dr. Niemeyer: https://softwaredevengresearch.github.io/syllabus-s2019/#lecture-10-open-science-software-citation-and-reproducibility-best-practices. See lecture 10 in particular.
A broader version of this course can be taken at URSSI (US research software sustainability institute), if you qualify of course (https://urssi.us/blog/).
You can look up the referenced resources for details. I am going to outline the framework for you briefly.
If you plan to publish your paper, it will receive a DOI. DOI - a digital object identifier - is a number, it "writes your paper in stone". In other words, if you don't have DOI and add changes to your paper, I will not know whether I am reading the original version or the changed one. You can fool me like this indefinitely. DOI prevents this kind of confusion.
The piece of software that you are using in your paper - if it doesn't have a DOI - can be changed and, therefore, confuse the people just like I described above. Therefore, hosting your software on GitHub, GitLab, Google Drive, your school server etc. is unacceptable. You must archive your software either on Zenodo or Figshare. Both of them assign DOIs to your pieces of work automatically and keep track of the changes. Zenodo is maintained by CERN and, therefore, is deemed the most reliable. Usually, Zenodo is used for software packages, Figshare is used to store plots and (scripts to get the plots) which are presented in the paper.
Once you have archived your software on Zenodo, you can submit your software to an appropriate journal (in a form of an article that describes the algorithm behind your software). For example JOSS (journal of open source software https://joss.theoj.org/). Only once JOSS has accepted and published your software, can you cite it in your paper. You cannot cite your software in your paper if it is not published. If it is not published, but has a DOI then you can provide the DOI link in the text of your paper, but you cannot put it into the list of used literature.
All the best practices of archiving your software and citing it are given in Dr. Niemeyer's course notes which I referenced above. Else, you can take the URSSI open source software course. Note that the applications are now open for URSSI summer school.

In terms of hosting the actual source code, the other answers have already mentioned that GitHub is a fine and professional place to do so.
But one aspect that has not been covered is how to actually distribute a piece of software, in order to make it as useful as possible to the academiv community.
Making the source code open source is a good place to start, since it allows everyone to verify that is works as intended, and possibly even to build on it.
But in order for the code to be truly useful for the community, it needs to be delivered in the same way other similar "products" are delivered, which is only rarely by cloning a git repo.
How precisely this should be done depends on the precise nature of the code, as well as the language used to write it, but for most academics, the most useful thing is as a package they can import into whatever other code they are already using. This could also be done from the source code, but in that case, handling versioning and updates tends to get cumbersome.
For example, for DotNet code, users will expect to be able to get is as a NuGet package (usually hosted on nuget.org), and for JavaScript code, people expect to be able to get it as a Node package using npm (I assume other languages/frameworks have similar delivery mechanisms, I am just mostly familiar with these).
If the software is not currently in a form where this would make sense, then consider making the necessary changes to at least extract something from it that can be delivered like this.
As an alternative, one can add a web API on top, and add the docker-files as described in another answer. This can allow people to use it regardless of programming language by running the web API themselves locally, but it is not quite as convenient.

I'm not sure what you mean by GitHub's "fallibility." Due to its size, reputation and the funding behind it (Microsoft, now) it's likely one of the most reliable places to host a Git repo.
But the key characteristic of Git repos is that they're essentially blockchain based, so the source of the repo (i.e., where it's hosted) is not really that important. Commit 0b9b56adcdf56ff013421c50d0721d29fa08f43a is that commit regardless of where you got it. So it's not such a big deal if a repo moves around, or came from a dodgy source; someone has a copy of a repo with that commit in it, it's almost certainly the code I'm talking about when I talk about that commit. (Note that all this is not the case for information outside of the repo, such as in GitHub wikis or issues.)
So put your code up on GitHub, or GitLab, or Bitbucket, or on any other site that looks as if it's not going to vanish too soon and when you reference it give not just the hosting location but the commit ID of the commit in the repo containing the code used in your paper. The commit ID ensures that regardless of the source your code is identified, and being on GitHub (or any other major provider) makes it likely that it will be easy to find and download the repo. But even if it vanishes off GitHub for some reason (which is unlikely unless you deliberately delete it), if there's enough identifying information in the repo and in your paper (e.g., if the paper's author and title are mentioned in the repo) a web search may find it, and the commit ID will provide verification that the correct repo has been found.

I removed a long discussion about blockchain, Merkle trees, and data structures, which eventually devolved into some rude/condescending comments. Let us remember our code of conduct.

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


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Should I take a "positive, but not enthusiastically strong" letter of recommendation?
I'm currently applying for a Masters degree in a competitive program, and most things on my application are going well.
The problem I'm having is with securing a letter of recommendation - I have already secured two strong letters, one from a workplace manager in the field that I am applying for and another from a professor in an unrelated field. Regarding the third letter, a professor that I spoke to said that he could write a "positive, but not enthusiastically strong" recommendation.
From reading up on answers here and on other sites, it seems that in most cases I should look elsewhere for a letter. However, in my case I do not yet have a letter from a professor in the field that I am applying for. There are a few other professors in the field that I will reach out to, but assuming that they reject my request, should I take this letter?
Another option that I have is to secure a strong third letter from another manager at my workplace. Would taking a third letter from a work manager be better? I am leaning towards this being the case, but I also do not want to jeopardize my application by not having a letter from a professor directly in the field I am applying to.

If you have to ask, the answer is no. (Less glibly: Recommendation letters that aren't effusive are toxic. Not only are such applications competitive, but mediocre recommendation letters are often used as polite anti-recommendations.)

Just because someone writes a letter, doesn't mean you have to include it in your application. Why not let him write the letter - then see what it says?

I've been told that there can be different approaches to letters of recommendation between European and American professors. American letters tend to be "effusive", while European letters tend to be more realistic.

@AlanCampbell : In most places the applicant never gets to see the letter, it is sent directly from the professor to the hiring committee.

a professor that I spoke to said that he could write a "positive, but not enthusiastically strong" recommendation

This sounds like a polite way to tell you to ask somebody else.

I don't agree completely. Sometimes (often?) they become meaningless rather than polarized. A while ago I was involved in some admissions committee, and most letters ranked students in the top 10%. Including several letters from the same person, who ranked three different students in the top 10% (in a program where there were less than 10 students).  My own take is that I tend to ignore (instead of take negatively) terse letters. In strong letters I look for facts as opposed to generalizations, so I often also ignore "strong" letters.

I also do not want to jeopardize my application by not having a letter
  from a professor directly in the field

Having a lacklustre letter from someone in the field you want to go in to is significantly worse than having an extremely positive letter from someone outside the field. A committee is likely to interpret the first letter as an expert saying that you really aren't very good. It would be smart to seek a very positive letter from elsewhere and ask your letter writer to focus on your potential to succeed etc.

I would say this highly depends on the type of letter (and the differences between the fields---a highly enthusiastic letter about art abilities means nothing for a math degree).  The letter might be not enthusiastic because the professor thinks not very highly of the student, or because the professor just doesn't know the student that well.

So basically your answer is to take the strong letter from a second industry person. I tend to agree. This is only a Masters program after all. Presumably the career plan is to return to industry.

You need to understand what “positive but not enthusiastically strong” means in the context of this specific referee.
I have seen too many reference letters that are positive and enthusiastically strong but totally meaningless because they do not reveal anything about the candidate or do not provide anything but narrow context for the letter: “This student is the best student of my class and should be awarded a full scholarship” is totally unhelpful.
Having a well-written, clearly balanced letter with lots of context can be very valuable, even if it comes with caveats and especially if it comes from a specialist in the field.
It seems that, given the reservations expressed by your third referee, you might want to arrange a 15-minute conversation to discuss the situation with this person and politely ask if your referee can clarify reservations.  It could be a difficult conversation, but just asking for an in-person meeting to clarify what is meant by “positive but not enthusiastically strong” letter will be immensely useful.  If the referee does not agree with having such a meeting then you should consider asking another person.

I strongly support this solution, especially the last paragraph. Even if the final letter doesn't come from this person, it would be useful to know what are their reservations. It might be something that you need to address generally. It might also turn out to be something trivial.

Since the professor hasn't outright declined your request (which he/she could have), you could still ask him/her to write the letter and see how positive and enthusiastic it is. If it is good and then you may still be able to use it for the application. Otherwise you can ask another person to write you a letter. In fact you could get many people to write you letters and then only pick the best ones for the application.

You are implying the candidate should have access to the reference letter, which in most cases does not (or should not) happen.


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How to minimize tension with an advisor with strong personality
He always thinks he is right, specially when we talk together, sometimes I ask a question and he just became super angry and made me feel dumb.
That's why I try to minimize my interactions and meetings with him, I usually polish his raw ideas and when we set a meeting he says all my polishings are completely wrong.
Like today, he blamed me an entire hour because I am a grad student yet I don't know the difference between PSD kernel and PSD matrix. Though I am sure that I was right, he insisted on his words and I just have to give up every time, and after sometime, usually another grad student or Postdoc mention exactly the same point and he admit that.
Sometimes I think maybe I approach him in a wrong way but I'm sure this is not the case, I never tell him "YOU ARE WRONG IN ..." (though he is actually wrong), I just say something like "I didn't understand, could you please explain ..." hoping that he recognize his mistake, however, he starts insisting on that.
Honestly how can I just be clear to him and finish my MSc? I don't want to have any tension with him.
Like look at this which happened today:
Prove matrix constructed based on gaussian RBF is PSD
I used to thought that maybe I am the problem not him, but I hear the same stories from the students of his courses, they always say he made them feel stupid when they ask questions.
One time he received a negative review from one of his class students, he just came to me and started justifying that the student wrote the negative review because she wanted to take a revenge of him and it was personal attack and prejudice.
I'm about to defend my Msc in next two semesters, I don't want to quit, but I also don't know how to manage tension with him.

Simply, that person sounds like a complete jerk... and, there's no real way to deal with such people...

You can't fix other people. You can't "not have tension" with someone who is this fragile and automatically creates tension with everyone they interact with.
If you're willing to put up with this, keep your head down and do the best you can to complete all your requirements.
If not, better to move on sooner rather than later.


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Cold emailing another grad student at your institution to ask a question
I’m stuck in my research (I'm a PhD student) with a task/question that neither I nor my advisor are knowledgeable about (we are looking for vendors of a niche item and have had very little success in that). I have found a group on campus that I think may use this tech (based on their published research) and I want to reach out to a grad student there that I think may know where they get this tech from or who makes it for them.
Would it be inappropriate to email them just to ask this question? It isn’t really a scientific question so I don’t want it to come across in a bad way.

Grad students are always looking for any reason to procrastinate. Always.

If anything, they'll be delighted. Those emails are my favourite emails.

How is that about Academia, or any other area of specific interest, as opposed to simple communication?
Who do you think will ever mind if you say something like "Sorry to contact you out of the blue and I hope you don't mind if I ask you (blah lah lah…) …?"

@RobbieGoodwin, if this scenario was taking place outside of Academia then it would not be a question. The question is about unique communication aspects of academia. Many questions are like this on Academia and other parts of stack exchange such as the workplace

@user74671 Thanks and I suggest there's nothing unique to Academia about that Question. You're welcome to Post some explanations in Chat and please consider what kind of problem the Answers or other Comments here see… or even ask your own colleagues?

Nope, this would be totally appropriate.
If they don't respond, your advisor could escalate to their advisor.

But possibly ignored as many cold emails get ignored. But, if your advisor asks them, or their advisor, it changes the game.

@Buffy The same goes for professors getting emails. All else being equal, I would estimate a larger chance of success emailing a grad student than a professor.

@AzorAhai-him- yes this is why I chose to email a grad student haha I know the professor would not respond. I think if I was the one getting the email I’d be happy to help if I could, but I wasn’t sure if it would come across as lazy

@user74671 Why would the professor not answer you? You are not a invisible lab rat or sone underspecies. You are looking for solution of your problem and they may have the answer.
Phrase it well, show the interest and you might be surprised.

In my past experience they are just very busy and sometimes don’t answer emails reliably. Especially if they are PI of a large group, and especially if they have never heard of you. I am at a very large university for context

@user74671 can you see the department staff structure. There should be some "technician" focused more on the equipment than publications and they can answer you as well. Besides, when asking about the article, they may be more open to discuss or forward the case.

@Crowley That sounds highly field-dependent. There's no such person like that in the places I've worked.

+1 I'll add: Go visit the group (covid restrictions permitting).

You may or may not get a response but it doesn't hurt you in any way. I've done this plenty of times during my PhD and while it usually didn't amount to much, I still got responses.

Under recent circumstances (Covid lockdown) the e-mail asking for either collaboration or details of their equipment is sufficient. Just phrase it well. You don't need to hesitate to ask the professor or department head and other officials.
Answering this question two years earlier (no plague) I would recommend you going to their department and asking face to face. Either the students or professor/officials.
Think of it like a conference - even there the students are talking to the professors, how else the research seniors can communicate their knowledge to the younger ones?

Answering this question two years earlier, I would still suggest sending an email first, asking if they used a certain type of equipment - followed by a face to face meeting if the answer was yes.

I also appreciate face to face contact but at a large university such as mine, finding the group's lab/office may even be challenging. Or lab may be in secured building that you maybe shouldn't be wandering around. Not to mention could be a mile away. I think an email at least asking to arrange to meet would be more appropriate

I agree with the other answers that this is entirely appropriate. If reaching out to this one group doesn't yield results, it may be useful to cast a wider net by using a departmental (or similar) mailing list.

This suggestion may be good in some cases but i think it would be inappropriate in the current case. I don’t want to give too many details but it would basically be a question like “does anyone know a good mechanic” except for a scientific service. Such an email would be very uncommon in my department at least

@user74671 Sure, it depends on departmental customs. In physics departments I've seen a fair number of "is anyone familiar with X", "does anyone know how to repair Y" and "does anyone have a spare Z they're willing to loan out" emails, but YMMV.


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Is it a good idea to unsubscribe from academic spam?
Like all of us (probably), I am pestered by loads of academic spam, inviting me to submit something to a junk conference or journal or participate in some irrelevant course. I delete this spam quickly, but sometimes I notice an option to unsubscribe from this mail.
I wonder, is it a good idea to use this function in general? Does someone have the experience of getting less mail after unsubscribing from a couple of spam e-mails? The reason I'm wary is that this interaction lets the senders know that my account is in fact active, which might trigger even more spam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Journal_of_Advanced_Computer_Technology

@AnonymousPhysicist that is hilarious!

I am eternally grateful that my lab has a fabulous spam ID system - I see almost none of this stuff. When I do I flag it as spam and never see anything else from there again.

@AnonymousPhysicist disappointing that the authors didn't think it was worth the $150 to publish

@Joe Well, paying that APC would mean directly funding the operation of a predatory journal, which some may view a bit too immoral to do just for fun.

@TooTea well maybe, $150 wouldn't be tonnes of money for them. It would be fun, but it would also make a more powerful message against the journal

@Joe But would such a message actually change anything? I suspect that those publishing in predatory journals don't care the slightest about the journal's reputation,so the journal really does not have anything to lose. There's probably very little if any competition between predatory and mainstream journals.

@TooTea yeah maybe you're right, I guess if I was a predatory journal and people were citing that article published in my journal and it was causing my reputation to be damaged in a way that reduced my income stream, I would just remove the publication from the journal. No reason to expect them to uphold the publication, they're not exactly acting ethically anyway

I used to believe what @Buffy said:  That spammers will not honor unsubscribe requests.  Eventually, I tried it and found that many of them do honor unsubscribe requests.  That surprised me.

This is interesting. People have been saying for many years that there is no point trying to unsubscribe from spam, or that it makes things worse. Are you talking about just academic spam, or spam in general? Among junk academic publishers, can you tell us any specific examples who honored your unsubscribe requests?

Not that you probably would have much success, but you could sue them if your request to be taken of their list istn't honored. At least according to the laws some countries (in the EU at least).

@gib This answer only relates to academic spam.

Is it possible for you to give examples of the academic spammers you successfully unsubscribe to? (and the unsuccessful ones too maybe)

@Sursula Many (all?) the EU countries with such laws should have an office where you can report offenses. It's unlikely anything actually gets done (although with enough reports it might), but it's a much lower bar than suing them yourself.

Google supports "automatic unsubscribe" where they generate an unsubscribe request.  Possibly emailers who continue to send after that get punished by google spam filters badly enough that people  obey unsubscribe requests?

Yes, "many" will do the right thing. But clicking on any link in something from an unknown sender, even if it seems to be academic, is dangerous. I almost got caught the other day with something that seemed real enough.

Corporate Spam (aka without active criminal intent) meant for European consumers is usually quite good because the EU started cracking down hard

@Hobbamok: Agreed — these days at least in my (European) experience there are two pretty clearly distinct tiers of spam: things with deceptive intent (seriously trying to evade the law) and indiscriminate mass-mailing staying just about within the law (including anything from an identifiable sender, individual or commercial).

My very clean inbox for a 20-year-old email account agrees with this answer. Religiously using "unsubscribe" buttons means that even my spam box has only a handful of items from the last several months.

I still hesitate because of worrying about phishing links disguised as 'unsubscribe'. Does anyone have any experience in this regard?

I don't have evidence for my method other than personal experience. However, I take a per-message approach to unsubscribing.
In the US, the spam I get usually comes from two sources.

Spam from "legitimate" commercial vendors who have scraped my email from the university's website or bought it from professional organizations. Many of these are managed by major spam email companies like Constant Contact or Mailchimp. You can identify these from their "privacy" notices in the footer.I unsubscribe from these. The reasoning is that these entities are "legitimate" and so to avoid raising the attention of government regulators, they will comply (after all the US Federal Trade Commission requires you to have an unsubscribe functionality). The spammers are too unsophisticated to add you back to the list systematically.

Spam from "journals" and "conferences" that are mostly scams. These are generally run by small operations like the ones you'll see spamming Stack Exchange. They are too small and in jurisdictions that make it too difficult for government enforcement actions. You should avoid interacting with these emails in any way. Block sender, mark as junk, move on.

In sum, unsubscribe from spam you receive from a major email marketing platforms but ignore scam spam from smaller operations.

I don't necessarily think it's a Domestic/International distinction, but there are certainly two different types of "spam": (1) "Unsolicited Commercial Email" sent by (mostly) legitimate companies attempting to wrangle your business and (2) scammers attempting a con job. Legitimate businesses (wherever they're located) will (mostly) honor an unsubscribe address, whereas scammers (wherever they're located) don't care.

I think there's a grey area between the two, for example companies selling quack medical remedies or fake news full of click-bait.

Yes
I can think of three reasons not to unsubscribe. The first is that it takes effort. If you believe that the effort it takes to unsubscribe is greater than the effort to delete all future academic spam, then sure, don't unsubscribe - it's your call.
The second reason is if the spammer actually is malicious and is attempting to phish for information. This is what things like Mimecast is for, which I'm not an expert on, but presumably your email service provider will already have some kind of defense in place. I would trust them to work. If the service provider flags the unsubscribe link as dangerous, then I would not unsubscribe.
The last reason is that you allegedly tell the spammers that your email is being monitored and read. But if you are an academic, then your email is already known to be monitored and read (a lot of your published papers will have it, it's available on your department's website, etc.). It's probable that the entity sending the emails got your email from such avenues in the first place. You can't both publicize your work and avoid revealing your email address without going to extreme lengths, so not unsubscribing doesn't actually do anything.
A final point is that if you don't tell the entity that is sending the emails that you don't want to receive them, you can't really fault them for continuing to send it. E.g. I've gotten emails ("spam") about open research/faculty positions that I am overwhelmingly unlikely to be interested in owing to personal circumstances, but I can hardly blame the sender for not knowing those personal circumstances. If I unsubscribe and they continue to send those emails, then they should know better, and it's a different matter.

Very skeptical about Mimecast. Would definitely not trust their system to protect me.

I generally don't unsubscribe since it only verifies that you look at their mail and they have a valid email address. Instead, if possible, have your email client send such things to junk when you see them. Some mailers "learn" from these actions and send future mailings from that source automatically to the junk folder. Some other systems let you specify sender addresses that should be shunted to junk.
I'm not convinced that spammers will even honor unsubscribe requests. They aren't noted for their ethical principles.

My thoughts is that even if the scammers aren’t noted for their ethical principles, it may well be that sending mail has a cost; if you unsubscribe, they might consider you as less likely to fall in their trap, hence they might stop mailing you in order to focus on other targets.

@Plop I did a quick search on commercial bulk mailers, and the price per email I get is about 0.05 cents / email. That is, a hundred emails will cost you 5 cents. There isn't a strong financial incentive to cull their database.

@Davidmh But how many people click on the link or reply, and how many of those end up buying the product? These need to be taken into account as well.

@gib it depends, can you remove an email for less than a cent? Even if there is a 0.1% chance that they will buy your "services", and in the absence of regulations and a reputation to keep, there is no incentive to remove it.

I agree with most answers here that there are arguments in favor of unsubscribing and against unsubscribing. Whatever you do, however, it's probably best to not click on any link inside the spam emails. Those links, including unsubscribe links, might redirect your browser to a malicious site. Such a site could be stealing information via phishing or distribute malware.


text:
How do I cite the authors of a web page that is maintained by Google and other contributors (APA style)?
I have to cite a web page in my thesis and I am unsure how to do it. Unfortunately, I could not find anything helpful for my specific problem.
The website is maintained by Google, but Google also allows others to contribute to the website. Those additional contributors are not specifically mentioned on the website. Do I need to cite these contributors and add them to the bibliography as authors? If yes, how should I name them?
I have thought about the following things:

Name the other contributors simply as 'other contributors'

Group Google and the other contributors together as 'WEBSITE_NAME website contributors'

Leave the other contributors out because they are not specifically mentioned in the website maintained by Google

What do you think? Any inputs?


text:
Large distributed research network
I remember having heard of a large distributed computer network being operated by several universities. As far as I remember, it would be possible to get several (hundreds) of virtual machines to perform computations, testing, evaluations, etc.
Unfortunately, I do not remember this network's name, but I have the feeling that it was similar to "ResearchLab" or "ScienceLab". However, I was not able to find a network with such a name...
Hope that anyone out there can help. Thanks a lot!

There are several. And they come and go. This is too broad, really - it's a big-list question.

You're probably thinking of PlanetLab.

PlanetLab is a global research network that supports the development of new network services. Since the beginning of 2003, more than 1,000 researchers at top academic institutions and industrial research labs have used PlanetLab to develop new technologies for distributed storage, network mapping, peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables, and query processing.
PlanetLab currently consists of 1335 nodes at 645 sites.

More generally, there are lots of "testbeds" (as these networks of distributed resources are called), including Emulab, PlanetLab, ORBIT, DETER, Seattle, and many others. Each has various advantages and disadvantages, depending on what you're trying to do. These are often federated so that users can access resources from multiple testbeds; projects like GENI and FIRE are federations of testbeds.

Right... I'd forgotten about PlanetLab... do you know what its relation to the two projects that I mentioned is?

@jakebeal See my updated answer.

I am currently aware of two large research networks of this type:

EmuLab allows experimentation with large numbers of virtual machines co-located within a facility at the University of Utah.
GENI is a large-scale distributed networking testbed that also allows reconfiguration of the network switching hardware.

Both are primarily sponsored by the US National Science Foundation as public testbeds.  I have previously used EmuLab myself and found it delightfully easy to use.  I have not personally had an occasion to use GENI; the company I work for runs the GENI project office, though, and I hear that the testbed has been working out well.

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


text:
What did Universities use in lectures before they starting using PowerPoint?
On my 'quest' to understand how universities have changed over the past decade(s), I'm curious as to how teaching in lectures was done before the days of PowerPoint (which as an undergraduate is seemingly the only thing I see all day, but I am sure it was not used anywhere near as extensively a decade or two ago).
Needless to say I've still seen plenty of chalk use when calculations need to be done, but there is still not a lecture without PowerPoint.
Thoughts:

Did they flip through the slides with a bit of narrative like they do today?
The 'you don't need to take notes, slides are on online' mentality of today must have been different.
I've gathered overhead projectors were the tool of the trade and handouts where more common.
Most old lectures on YouTube (being taught by well known professors) never seem to use any PowerPoint. However, they seem to in general cover topics that deal more with theory and calculation than real examples and practical uses.
Would the professor during a e.g. an engineering materials course (i.e. mostly content stuff) just go through slides on the overhead? The quality of what you can share seems pretty limited as opposed to full color images, or would they actually have more tools at their disposal?

What did Universities use in lectures before they starting using PowerPoint? — The chalk board, overhead, brain, etc.

@YviDe In 2013 I still had CS (i.e. math was involved...) lectures only using the blackboard and rightfully so. Projectors and PowerPoint are nice tools, but not for every task. A hammer is a nice tool as well, still I don't use it when I want to paint my walls.

How did people ever ask questions about academia without Academia.SE?

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

It's very sad that so many comments (and answers) here and in the chat are attacking the OP because all of their math/CS lectures were done with a blackboard. There are also other subjects! In philosophy/lingusitics (and in all high school subjects except maths) I did never see a lecture which made substantial use of a blackboard.

I can go back to 1989, when I enrolled at the university (engineering). The first two years were mostly devoted to mathematics, physics, chemistry and circuit theory. No overheads were employed in those courses, just plain old blackboard. There was just a course on Fortran and Pascal where the professor probably employed overheads, but I skipped all the lectures so, well, I'm not sure about that.
Overheads really started to appear from the third year on, mainly for engineering courses about algorithms, digital circuits or solid state physics (alas, these were abysmal). Lecturers would deposit a printed copy of the handouts at a local photocopy shop, so that everyone could buy a copy. Certain courses had packs of around 1000 handouts, and frequently the handouts were not available till the end of the course. Luckily, most of the courses about analogue circuits, advanced electromagnetics and quantum physics were still delivered through the blackboard.
It is worth recalling that at the time "overhead transitions" were implemented by means of patches and adhesive tapes. When printed, these "effects" would leave black marks of various shapes on the handouts.
Overheads were typically in full colours when handwritten, but the handouts were of course black and white, and writings in lighter colours were barely readable. Program listings were instead printed with black and white printers: no syntax colouring at the time.
Edit: I've just found under a pile of papers one of those packs of handouts. Here is how one of the pages looked like (two overheads per page; the pack is dated 1987):

The first overhead, on the left, is the text of an exercise ("Design a circuit with three inputs x,y,z [...]"), the overhead on the right is part of the solution. You might notice that on the upper right corner of the left overhead there are two page numbers: probably the overheads had been renumbered along the years.

This is so radically different compared to what I have experienced that I would have loved to experience a day back then and compare it to now (for better or worse). Seems like considerably more work/care needed to be taken since students just did not have the option to fall back easily to the internet for information like they do today most of the time when teaching material is insufficient. Thanks for sharing :)

@MikeFoxtrot  I got my BS from 99-03; the handful of classes I had that posted lecture notes online were (at least superficially) much easier to blow off attendance of.  Reading them on my own time never resulted in as complete of retention as going to class did.  Partly that was the lecture itself, and the annotations I'd make to the printouts.  However another major factor was generally a mismatch between the way the professor laid out the content and what was most natural for me, and would waste space on things I felt were obvious while giving short shrift to others I needed more detail.

These remind me of the overheads from a course where he stopped us on the first day and said "we have a lot of material to get through this year and there is no way we can cover it all if you people insist on taking notes." Really. This was perhaps 1979? 1980? Anyway we arranged to mimeo (the purple stuff) his notes at student expense and after that we were all happier. (And I still recall some of that material.)

@KateGregory: your comment taught me a new, old, word of which I didn't know the meaning, even in my language, and picked up another memory. The word is mimeo, corresponding to the Italian mimeografare, which I didn't know either, because we used the more common ciclostile, cyclostyle. The memory is that when I was young, many people printed notes or other stuff like dazebaos by means of cyclostyle, but to avoid paying a specific tax, every sheet had the following footnote: "cyclostyled by own means" (rough translation, i.e., printed without resorting to a typography).

@KateGregory I got the same thing from one of my CS professors (around 2007), but he added some extra explanation:  Some students kept wanting him to slow down because they were straight copying all the slides verbatim.  Especially with the way he taught, that's way too slow - they'd be writing so intently that they'd ignore what he said aloud, and ask questions that were already answered.  We were encouraged to pay attention instead, and only take notes on the important parts to act as reminders for our memory.

Why did you roll back my edit? It is now harder to read, which is why I edited in the first place. You may use the shorthand, but it took me a while to get it, and today's kids will think an overhead is a cost or expense.

@user2768 I rolled back your edit because it was, well, wrong in several places (e.g. "Overhead projectors really started to appear" has a different meaning with respect to "Overheads really started to appear" and  "overhead projector transitions" doesn't make sense at all). For the meaning of overhead, today's kids can have a look at a dictionary, e.g. here, noun meaning 2.

I think I misunderstood your intent a little, but overheads/transparencies were never the primary teaching tool, the [overhead] projector was. Without the projector, transparencies offer little value (paper can serve the same role).

@user2768 In 1989, when my examples start, overhead projectors were already there, they were probably there from the 1970s, but very few professors used them (see the first paragraph).

I don't see the connection with my comment... My point is: Overheads are only ever used with projectors (during lectures, disregarding handouts). So, it seemingly makes sense to discuss projectors, rather than overheads. Anyhow, it is your answer, so do as you please, but do be advised that some will struggle to understand.

I studied for my bachelor's degree in mathematics from 1967 to 1970. The main form of instruction was the lecturer writing on blackboards and the students desperately trying to take the proofs down in our notebooks.

Well, I studied mathematics from 2002 to 2007 (BS+MS), and it was basically the same. :)

I've had math professors tell me that they don't want to convert to slides simply because writing their lecture on the board presents the material at a pace where students can copy it into their notes. There's something to be said for giving the students the material at a more regurgitatable pace, and having them write it down instead of just passively staring at it.

I can't think at the same time as writing. If I am copying down material from the board, I have to wait until I read over my copy later for any thought or understanding. Fortunately, the digital camera was invented between 1970 and 2002, when I started on my PhD. Being able to think about the material while I could ask questions about it was wonderful.

@J.R. It's not just about the pace.  Writing it on the blackboard forces the lecturer to think through and fully understand the material again, and makes his exposition much clearer.  It's all too easy to accidentally gloss over a detail that you think you fully understand when in fact you'd need a few minutes to clear it up in your head again if asked a question about.

I've never seen Powerpoint used in any mathematical lecture.  Where in the world is this common?

@gerrit In statistics I had a teacher use his website instead of PowerPoint, with writing on boards only used to answer questions or give a special example. In discrete mathematics I had a teacher use 50% slides, 40% chalk, 10% document camera. In college algebra I had a teacher use a smart board 80%+ of the time, and in pre-calculus the teacher used the board maybe 20% of the time (less really, it was a hybrid online/in-person course). This is in Wisconsin, USA. But even in this one institution some math teachers only use chalk and talk, so it varies heavily by instructor.

@gerrit: who says that it is common in maths?

@guest3 I don't remember.  Someone must have said it at the time I posted my comment.

@gerrit: oh, okay. Sorry then. I thought you were referring to this answer/the question.

@gerrit I assume that, by "any mathematical lecture", you mean lectures to classes. In talks at conferences, I used to see PowerPoint fairly often; nowadays I see Beamer instead.  Personally, I've used Beamer in conferences recently, but I still teach my classes with chalk (except for one time when I was too sick to come to the university but taught my class via video).

The things I've seen in use:

Blackboard
Whiteboard
Overhead projector (writing in real time)
Overhead projector (prepared slides)
Slide projector
Paper board
Professor just talking
Talking and using objects (e.g. tennis balls) to demonstrate something

Course notes were sometimes available for purchase. Sometimes the course notes were similar to slides, sometimes they were like a book (except cheaper), sometimes like a book with exercises, sometimes the course used an actual book.
Blackboard was the most common in my personal experience. Quite a few professors never touched a projector even when it was available.

This is my experience as well (math, chemistry and cs 2006-2012 in Germany) and I prefer writing in real time on the overhead projector and then after the lecture scanning the overhead slides and making them available to the students online. This is a nice compromise between  pacing for students who learn better when they take notes and students who learn better when they don't have to concentrate on writing.

I remember some professors used transparency with an overhead projector. Sometimes the professor had enough transparencies photocopies for each student for free, sometimes we had to buy them.
An advice: you should always pay attention and take some notes, it's more important what have been discussed on class and not just what a ppt have

I had a professor not that long ago that was still using transparencies. He often pointed out that, while people have problems with their ppt file or the projector regularly, he had never had a problem getting his transparencies to work. (But I guess that's because he never had them out in the rain!)

We used the blackboard and paper hand-outs, as well as overhead slides and photo-type slides. I only started to use overhead slides around 1999 when there was a budget crunch and we had to reduce the number of handouts. But I don't need to point to color photos or things of that nature in my field, so the motivation for PPT is quite field-dependent.

Your field-dependent remark is spot on. I can remember humanities professors who never used a chalkboard, but simply talked for 50 minutes, math professors who used chalkboards relentlessly (to write definitions, solve problems, and write out proofs), electrical engineering professors who used the boards (mostly for circuit diagrams), physics professors who solved problems but also drew diagrams depicting angles and such. Whether the advent of .ppt files improved or degraded instruction, I think, often depends on one key question: does the professor use their slides as a tool, or as a crutch?

What did Universities use in lectures before they starting using PowerPoint?

human voices
real examples
chalkboards
dry erase boards
overhead projectors
paper/markers
handouts
etc.

Did they flip through the slides with a bit of narrative like they do today?

I'm sure some did but Powerpoint has obviously made that a habit.

The 'you don't need to take notes, slides are on online' mentality of today must have been different.

Yes, there was a time when we took notes. :)
Remember, PPT is more of a crutch than a useful way to make a presentation. People that use PPT to enhance their lecture can do good things. But most people just use PPT as a teleprompter. Which is just pointless. Just email it to everyone and save everyone the hassle of sitting through a boring hour of someone reading a PPT deck out loud.

The last is true even without powerpoint slides. E.g. profs reading books at verbatim. Still, there does seem a disappropriate number of ppt users which use the tools wrong.

Can you explain the term "real examples"?

In the university I attended in the early 80's (before PowerPoint), professors also used 3 things in lecture I haven't seen mentioned already:

There was a department that produced (beautiful, color) slides to be shown with overhead projectors.  Few professors used them, mostly for sciences, especially Biology.  I forget the name of this department.
There was another department (Engineering Shop?) that made, among other things, equipment used to demonstrate the principles being discussed.  Especially in Engineering and Physics, this was very helpful.
Larger auditoriums with high ceilings had a motorized system with 3 blackboards: when the professor filled one up, it was raised (out of reach) and a clean one brought in its place.  That way, he could fill 3 blackboards, and we could still see them all.

Even in the early 80's, many classrooms had whiteboards.

"Reprographics" was probably the name of the department. Mostly used for external talks given at major conferences. (3) was still in use in 2014.

One thing I believe the other answers are missing is that we relied a lot more on the book. I studied Chemical Engineering from 2000-2007 (B.S. and Ph.D.) and only had two courses that used powerpoint slides (a seminar course and a biochem course). The rest used the blackboard/whiteboard, lectures, or overhead projectors with the occasional slide, usually for diagrams or pictures, but every once in a while, for text.
We had to write notes down based on what we would guess were the most important things, and/or what we thought we would have trouble remembering. Usually though, the result was that everyone would just try to copy down everything that went on the board, whether it ended up being important or not, and not much else. As you can imagine, that method didn't work out very well for people who were not skilled note-takers in classes where the instructor was not a skilled note-giver. So, we relied on the book. The book contained all the information we needed, for the most part, and the lecturer's role became to explain the more difficult concepts, or elaborate where the book was lacking. This also left less time for working through example problems in class, which meant sample problems in the book were even more important.
After graduation, I taught for a couple of years. I used power point slides in my classes (Chemistry) for two reasons - it let me focus on explaining things and solving problems on the blackboard rather than trying to sketch all the pictures myself, and it gave me a way to summarize the important points in a reusable format that the students could just download, which usually meant they didn't have to try to copy everything down, and could instead listen to what I was saying. I think it was effective, and my students seemed to agree - but the key was to make the slides mostly pictures, with key points to move the "story" along. Otherwise, students would "zone out" and think they didn't have to pay attention in class.
Powerpoint (or really any type of slides) have made it possible to teach more effectively, if they are used appropriately. This is mainly because you can use more effective graphics, and it reduces the amount of time you need to spend writing notes, which gives more time for example problems and in-class exercises. On the other hand, a bad lecturer with slides is still going to be less effective than a good lecturer without them. For example, I had one course where the instructor literally hand-copied text from the book onto overhead projector slides, and would just read it. Lectures were an almost complete waste of time. Doing that with powerpoint instead would be just as ineffective.
A side effect of this is that students are seeing less and less of a need to use the books for courses. When they believe that all the necessary material is available in slides online, they naturally want to take the easier route and skip reading the book. I had to work pretty hard in the classes I taught to get my students to think of the book as a primary resource.

Studying Engineering in late 70s early 80s.
All material or information you needed to understand concepts or methods were presented at the lectures on a blackboard.  The Prof / lecturer would write it up on the board while explaining.
As students you were expected to take notes and decide for yourself what was important enough to record.  On the very odd occasion there would be printed handouts with information in support of the lecture.
There were also tutorial sessions where students were given a series of problems to solve and older students were present as tutors to assist.
Only ever saw or used an overhead during the presentation of my thesis in final year.

Árpád Kucsmann the professor of organic chemistry projected b/w slides in 1972-1973. I do not know how he made them but his slides were not crowded. The contained simple formulas of reagents, product and intermediate complexes.
He handed out the copies of hi slided after each lecture but I could buy a five volume book made of the only two weeks before the final exam on organic chemistry, in 1974.
Ferenc Nagy, former chemistry student of Eötvös University, Budapest, Hungary.

Starting uni in the late 90s I saw the first data projectors appear in the big lecture theatres and they were rubbish.  You couldn't have copied down an equation much more complex than E=mc² without sitting in the front row.
Almost all my lecturers used OHPs*.  The majority used pre-prepared handwritten slides and clearly reused them.  Some wroe on the fly (OHP film on a roll attached to the projector) which I saw quite a bit of in school as well. A few used inkjet-printed, laser-printed or photocopied OHPs.
With the handwritten ones it was possible to edit them and to use them in a fill-in-the-blanks style as pens are avilable in both water-soluble and "permanent" alcohol-soluble versions.  I took advantage of something similar by mirror-image printing my inkjet OHPs for presentations, then putting them on the OHP face down so I could mark up on the back and remove the markup -- something that's still hard to do with powerpoint unless you project onto a whiteboard.
Of course black/white boards were commonly used as well, but handwriting OHPs in the lecture can be clearer (it's easier to write nicely normal size).
Handouts were uncommon, and when they did appear, tended to appear after the material was shown -- sometimes photocopies of the slides on request, but you might need a reason.  I still actually prefer not to have the slides printed in front of me in a lecture if I want to understand the material, I'd rather take notes of the important stuff.
*Overhead projectors

When I was an undergraduate between 1982 and 1985, there were two principal ways to show stuff during a lecture - blackboard and chalk, or acetate and marker pens on an overhead projector.  The acetate could be individual sheets or on a roll.
Anything prepared in advance would be acetates, but the lecturer could doodle on them during the class.
Lecturers might hand out photocopied notes, but you were also expected to take notes yourself during the class.

My experience from mathematics and philosophy programs in the early 1990's:

Textbook
Chalkboard
Some paper handouts
Some bound copies of papers

One math professor had an overhead projector with transparent material on rollers. He would write with wet-erase markers and then scroll the material once he had filled up the visible area.
No one ever used film slides or the like.
(P.S.: I currently teach at a large urban community college where the math department has actually blocked installation of whiteboard/overhead projectors in the classrooms we control, still holding onto chalkboards in those rooms. Personally I'm unique in switching over to digital overhead usage, and have a standing request to put my classes in rooms outside the usual math wing.)

I studied Biology between 1979 and 1982. Therefore, by definition, no personal computers, no Microsoft Windows, no powerpoint,
The lecturers just wrote everything out longhand on blackboards or whiteboards depending on the size of group and would often back this up with slides on an overhead projector and sometimes with handouts.
We students then took notes, written longhand on paper because no personal computers, no Windows, no laptops....

I hadn't realized that Powerpoint was that prevalent, but I guess it might depend on where you are. Perhaps I am unusual, but as far as I can remember I have never used Powerpoint in a lecture. Sometimes it is useful to demo things on the computer, sometimes I use the old slide projector for pictures that would be difficult to draw, but usually I just write on the board.
So maybe I am a living fossil, useful for teaching today's kids how things were back then when we all lived in a shoebox on the motorway. Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtXVe0pDILM

And one from a bigger lecture hall, with multiple boards:
https://youtu.be/i7Q3QhBVEpo?t=24m21s

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


text:
How to narrow down a field of study when you enjoy and perform well in every subject?
Might it be odd for a student to love and have excellent academic performance in all subjects—I am that student. I am really confused what to study in the university. My grades are similar (high) in all subjects, and I prefer both scientific and non-scientific subjects. It's like I want to get a degree in all fields. How can I decide what I should choose? What can I study? I have tried a lot of tests, even paid ones, but I get similar percentages for all choices.

This could be considered an undergraduate question, which would make it outside the scope of this site per the [help/on-topic]. On the other hand, one could also argue that narrowing down a field of study at the undergraduate level directly relates to going on to graduate study. I guess we'll see which way the community votes on this one...

Do what you like most and don't worry too much about grades and tests: for what it's worth, I chose the field where I had the lowest grades, simply because I like it. And after almost 20 years, I can definitely say that I'm happy about that choice.

While narrowing down a field of study is something both those starting uni and those going on to postgrad study face, my answer in those two cases would be rather different. I'm voting to close for that reason. For example, I would suggest the OP find out if it is possible to have an undeclared major for a couple of years. (This is a more common option in the U.S than in Europe, I believe.) But others may be able to offer general advice that applies to both scenarios.

What you're good at in school does not generally equate to what you'll enjoy doing in the future. I'm really good at math, but if you made my teach math on the fact alone, I would start slamming my head into a wall one week in.

I would pick a major that maximizes your future options.  Not necessarily one that will get you a job, but one that gives you a strong foundation so it's easy to pick up knowledge of other subjects.
One good major for this is math.  Once you have mathematical sophistication it's a lot easier to learn other fields, like physics, engineering, computer science etc.  In general, I think it's a lot easier to switch from math to a more applied field than it would be to switch from an applied field to math.  (Personally I majored in math, and then switched to computer science, which is another major I highly endorse.)
Besides, it is a very fun major.  At any reputable university the homework assignments require original thought and no two problems are the same.
In terms of career options, most math majors I knew either (1) went for their PhDs (2) became traders/took other jobs in the financial sector (3) branched into software engineering or data science.

Performing well in every subject is simply impossible past the high school level.  Conversely, I would argue that a strong high school student in a US-style system should be able to perform acceptably in every subject (excepting effects of disabilities), since studies in high school are typically designed to give the sort of general grounding that will be required in most professional careers (critical thinking, analysis of written ideas, clear exposition of your own thoughts, creative expression, foundational mathematical and scientific knowledge).
Beyond high school, one might still have the potential to be good at any particular thing.  It is just that this is the time when one begins to study specialities more deeply, and there are simply too many of them to be an expert in all of them.  This happens in a fractal manner at each level: in undergraduate, you can be excellent at whole major, but cannot study all the majors; in graduate school, you can be excellent at a sub-discipline, but cannot study all sub-disciplines; as you establish a career as an academic, it is important to identify a small scope of contributions within the disciplines you work where you can contribute uniquely well.
These realities also imply an answer to your dilemma.  You don't have to pick the "right" academic focus, you just have to pick one that you will enjoy.  And you can even afford to be wrong a couple of times, as long as you figure it out and shift to something that suits you better.  Moreover, it's possible to do this at every level (though it's harder to make large shifts the deeper you go), undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, and even beyond.
In short, you can think of academic areas like the Tim Minchin love song says: "If I didn't have you, someone else would do."

It may help your search if you change the question slightly. You have been doing very well in all subjects, and you enjoy them all to some level. So the questions "Am I capable of passing exams in (subject)?" and "Would I enjoy studying (subject)?" are not giving you very informative answers.
Rather, consider asking: "Could I imagine not studying (subject)?" For me, this helped eliminate a few options from consideration when I was choosing school subjects, and has continued to be a useful guide. At the school level, I decided not to continue with studying chemistry - not because I was bad at it, or hated it, but because it didn't grab my interest for further study. Likewise, when applying for university study, I decided not to go for French, because although I like the language and literature, I felt that I didn't need a degree in French in order to satisfy my interests. And so on. On the other hand, the things that I have chosen to pursue are topics that I can't imagine being without.


text:
If a PhD position I applied for and didn't hear back from is removed and relisted, does this mean I was rejected?
I just wanted to know your opinion about an issue. I have contacted the supervisor of a research project for doctoral student position and I was encouraged to apply. By the way my experience really fits the position.
I applied through the online application platform and after that I didn't receive any mail regarding my status. Then the post for this research position was removed last week and I just saw that the position post is online again.
I think that they are not interested in me, because if they did I think they would have contacted me and not put the post again to search for applicants.
What do you think? Am I rejected?

Hey, welcome to academia. I don't mean any snark by that--that's the way it's done for some inexplicable reason. If you eventually apply for a faculty position, expect most of your applications to go into a black void, never to be answered. It's really annoying, and I wish people would at least use a form letter for closure.

Reposting a search does not mean that all the applications received so far are unsuitable. It often means that they have not received the volume of applications they expected/wanted and are worried, without having necessarily looked at the applications, that they might have missed qualified applicants.
Given you applied on line and never got a status update, it is always reasonable to ask if everything is okay. Given the position has been reposted, it is worth asking if you need to resubmit your application. Sometimes HR and electronic systems do not carry applications over from one position to the next.

actually they received my application because they asked me to send originals of diplomas. I'll ask that if i need to apply again.

If the project supervisor encouraged you to apply previously, it should be fair to inquire about the status of your application. Maybe just ask for a confirmation that they received it.

If the professor is not responding, why not just give the professor a phone call or drop by their office to talk?  It may be best to first set up an appointment for the phone call or office visit.


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What is the difference between CS and Informatics degrees?
I am interested in pursuing a degree in Computer Science. Universities I've reviewed have "Major In Computer Science" , but give "Bachelor's in Informatics or Computing". There is no "Bachelors In CS", I simply couldn't find it. So are Informatics and Computing the same as CS ? or IT?
When I was looking for programming jobs, degree requirements were mostly CS. If I go to the university I mentioned above (Major in CS, but Bachelor's in Informatics), will I be able to write in my CV that I have CS knowledge?

"Informatics" is a synonym for "Computer Science," but neither of those is a synonym for "IT."

Are you looking at schools in Europe or the United States? From what I understand, some European schools traditionally describe computer science as informatics.

@aeismail Would you tell us what is the difference between IT and Computer Science/Informatics ?

@aeismail  Informatics is a synonym for computer science in Europe, but definitely not in the US.

@hawk (In the US) The difference between CS and IT is analogous to the difference between biology and medicine: CS covers the theory behind computing, IT covers the application of computing to daily life.

This greatly depends on the country the university is in, and the language spoken there. For example:

In Croatia, informatics and IT are really roughly a same thing.
What you want to study, in the strongest technical uni in the country, would correspond to something maybe best translated as computer studies (with a possible specialization in computer science).
A computer scientist from Croatia speaking with another Croatian might get slightly offended if somebody called him an informatician.
In France, the only term they have to describe computer science is informatique, and the person doing that for a living would be informaticien.
Many French people will be talking about "informatics" when speaking in English.
When I personally speak in English, I would never mix the terms computer science, and informatics. If I wanted to refer to somebody who might not be doing research (any more) I might switch to computing, or be more specific with the field.
I might be biased since I'm Croatian and come from that culture, and I'm not fully sure what the difference between IT and informatics is, but there's a definitive difference between informatics and CS in my mind.

The bottom line would be: don't look at the Universities title when choosing, look at their program instead. Look for classes whose descriptions match your interests and skills you want to obtain. If the program matches with your interests, that that is most probably the right university for you (without talking about the Uni's quality right now).

I live in Georgia. Faculty is called CS so I suppose they mean CS? They "teach" C#, C++ and Java. I don't really care about courses as here the only way to get education in programming is internet, so I just want to get the right bachelors.

@MishoMetreveli If you want to pursue a career beyond your home country, people would most likely ask what you know, instead of what your degree is called back home. I understand the confusion, but I recommend not getting stuck to the names/titles, but focus on being really good in what you want to do.

Yeap I understand and learn a lot on my own, from internet, books,courses and will work as a freelancer to get some experience. But as I know when you send a CV they are just filtering it and people who have no bachelors in mostly CS or rarely I.T. don't get employed while they may have more experience than others.

As an additional example that you may (or may not, no problem) want to add: In German, Informatik is the only common term. Computer science (or any direct translation from that) is often seen as a misnomer for the university discipline, because that evokes incorrect assumptions about being inherently connected to computers (the machines) rather than the theory of information and how it is processed (i.e. "informatics"). IT has a more practically oriented and more general scope, referring to any slightly development-related job from software development to web or multimedia design.

Sadly, I believe the most accurate answer is: it depends on who you ask.
Examples: Where I live, there is Whatcom Community College which has a Computer Science degree that dates back to the 1990s or earlier.  It was largely about "computer programming" (which I'm going to mix together with "software development" as basically describing the same thing).  A local state university WWU's Computer Science department also focused on computer programming.
In contrast, WCC's "Information Technology" (a.k.a. "IT") focuses more on tasks about how to set up and maintain computer networks and already-created computer software.
However, when I became a college instructor, I met a co-instructor who had an older Computer Science degree from another state (California), and he was not a programming expert.  His expertise was in handling computer networking and troubleshooting situations on networks that were already set up.  When I spoke to some business leaders (managers/owners) and told them my opinion of Computer Science referring to programming and IT referring to implementations, the majority disagreed and felt like my terms were reversed.
penelope's answer goes to show that people have different opinions.  I would be inclined to go the safe route, and assume that Informatics, like the other terms, are actually not completely defined by a single centralized source that everybody agrees with.  If you think you can get more specific based on some patterns or trends that you notice, I caution you to be careful because my experiences indicates that people don't universally use the terms the same way.  So if you're making an important decision based on what you think the terms mean to some people, then verify before proceeding with any dependent assumption.
(Despite all that I just said, I've still noticed nationwide posts do seem to refer to skills like technical support, and upgrading/maintaining infrastructure like handling backups and network services as being "IT".)


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Inline referencing chapters, sections, subsections, etc
I am currently in the process of writing my Master's thesis using the LaTeX class supplied by my university. This class uses a document structure similar to report: Starting with chapters, then sections, then subsections and so on. Citation style is IEEE, if that's important.
What is the correct way to reference all these text-divisions within my flow-text, especially when reaching \subsection{} level and below?
Example A

As shown in chapter "Foo" and section "Bar", [...].
[...], for further details see subsection "Baz" and subsubsubsection "Qux".

or Example B

As shown in section "Foo" and section "Bar", [...].
[...], for further details see section "Baz" and section "Qux".

or something completely different?

You can use command label, e.g.,

\section{My Section}\label{section:MySection}
\subsection{My Subsection}\label{section:MySubsection}

Then you can use:

...Sections~\ref{section:MySection} and \ref{section:MySubsection}...


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How to get a book indexed by Google Scholar: How to upload to Google book search and what makes a book scholarly?
I have seen similar posts to this one, but none of which answer my specific questions. The google scholar help documentation states:

Documents larger than 5MB, such as books and long dissertations, should be uploaded to Google Book Search; Google Scholar automatically includes scholarly works from Google Book Search.

What is implied by "uploading to Google Book Search"?
I see no way to upload to the search.
How does google scholar determine if one's book is scholarly?
Criteria for articles include abstracting and bibliographies. Since books do not usually contain abstracts, is the entire criteria for scholarly containing a bibliography? If not, what is it?
(See https://scholar.google.com/scholar/inclusion.html#content)

It's interesting, when I googled your excerpt from Google Scholar Help it returned this page: https://scholar.google.com/scholar/inclusion.html, but the page does not actually mention this part. It looks as if it was updated recently, maybe even as if somebody removed this part after you posted your question here.

Hello, that link does not include it. It is included on a separate tab: https://scholar.google.com/scholar/inclusion.html#content

Based on the first line of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books (Google Books was previously called Google Book Search), I presume that documentation is outdated.

Last I checked Google Book search lacks any criterion for deciding whether a book is fiction, or at least they don't allow ordinary users access to it. You can't restrict a search to works of fiction, nor to non-fiction.

Presumably publishers should upload to Google Books, rather than authors, since the latter is constrained by contracts and copyright law.

As at the time of writing, the other answers here are incorrect: you certainly can manually add entries, including books, to your Google Scholar profile. That is done directly on your Google Scholar profile page: there is no need to use some other indexing system.
When you are logged in to the Google account that corresponds to your profile, you'll see this "+" icon on your profile, which allows you to add records:

Select "Add article manually", and when you get to this dialog box, select "Book", and enter the appropriate details:

Perhaps just as importantly, you can also select records to delete (when Google Scholar's algorithm incorrectly adds someone else's publications to your profile), or you can select records to merge (when Google Scholar picks up slightly different citation details and thinks that a single publication is actually two, very similar, publications).

Will such entries collect citations and appear in search results, however?

If the reference details are valid, then yes, citations will generally be tracked, because Scholar will be able to see corresponding entries in other publications' bibliographies. I'm not sure what you mean by "search results" though. They should appear in Google Scholar searches, and possibly in general Google searches too, although the main book publisher page would probably win there.

Your answer explains how to upload a citation to Google Scholar, rather than uploading to Google Book Search (as per the question).

@user2768 The OP wants to get the book indexed by Google Scholar, and was led to believe that uploading to Google Book Search was the mechanism to do that. It isn't required, hence my answer. The OP has posted as a classic  XY problem: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem rather than restricted their question to the actual issue.

@MichaelMacAskill Perhaps explain that in your answer.

@user2768 You are more than welcome to provide an answer you think would better respond to the question.

@MichaelMacAskill I don't think another answer is necessary, I'm merely suggesting that you edit yours for completion, especially as your comments already contain the material

As far as I know, Google Scholar collect documents automatically from multiple academic repositories and there is no way to manually add any content.
This (apparently updated) Google Scholar help page mentions that you can simply make your pdf available on your university web space and it will be taken care of automatically. Example:
www.example.edu/~professor/jpdr2009.pdf

In case you don't know how to do that you can ask your IT department.
If this is not convenient, you could enter your publication in your university publication repository. I would assume that any other repository (e.g. arXiv) would also do the trick.

For regular articles, I agree. My misgiving about this is that the Google Scholar Help page supplies specific instructions for "books" (larger than 5MB), implying in the process that the normal methodology will not work (see the link above).

I think the point is that one does not directly arrange that one's own documents are indexed in Google Scholar and such. Indeed, if that were possible, it would seriously degrade the usefulness of Google Scholar, since there'd be no quality control. So one must hope that someone else finds one's work of sufficient merit...

I agree, which is what my second question was addressing. My first question does not refer to uploading to google scholar, but rather "google book search," which they specifically say you can do in the help documentation in the link provided above.


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what is the best software for drawing mechanical mechanism?
I want a software which I can use to draw mechanisms like this picture:

Update:
the author told me that : "the figure was made in Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator by tracing the hand-drawn kinematic diagrams."

where does this image come from? have you asked authors?

this is from paper "Design of Multi-Grip Patterns Prosthetic Hand with Single Actuator" .. i did not ask the author

This type of request is usually something authors will gladly address. Since this images comes from recent paper (2018), you should write to corresponding authors or journal editor, asking how this image was produced. In fact, providing such information is part of obligation when people publish work, your request will not be unusual at all.

I thought it is inappropriate to ask the author about how he drew his pictures. thank yo for your respond I will try to contact with the author.

@ndpl the idea of publication is to allow people check your work. Tondo that people need to know your methods

@ndpl Do you expect author to refuse OP?


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Removing supervisor name
A few years ago in my university, K. N. Toosi University, I was assigned a supervisor by the university. She suggested that I work on Natural language processing and I did so.
The problem is that I wrote the code and did every scientific part myself. It was half way through the work that I realized that she has very little knowledge about NLP and almost nothing about text summarization. She didn't provide any facilities or grants of any sort for me. I wrote the paper after graduation and she just proofread the work and she didn't add anything to the paper. Remember she just gave me some suggestions on changing the order of some parts.
Now the question is, does she deserve to have a name in my paper? Is it ethical to add someone's name as co-author just because they are your supervisor?
She and I had a falling out a few weeks back. I asked her two months ago to do the revisions by the journal and after all this time, she didn't do anything (I had personal issues and the journal didn't have much time to edit the paper). I got mad and told her everything about how she treated me and it is absolutely not ethical for someone to choose a field of work and not have any knowledge so the grad student has to do all of the work. She said and I quote "I don't need your paper and I will send an email to the journal saying I don't take responsibility for the paper". I told her it's fine by me and I won't publish the paper there. I emailed the editor and apologized for the problems. She told me it's fine if I have to submit it later or to another journal.

Yes, she deserves to be a co-author. She was (is) your academic supervisor assigned by the university. If you don't want any trouble in future, keep aside your ego and keep the paper as it is. Don't remove her now. It's too late.

Conventions for co-authorship vary between fields. In my field, mathematics, someone who made no real contribution to the work would not be a co-author. Supervisors are not automatically co-authors. But please be aware that your field may have different standards for co-authorship.

@Coder She said she won't agree to any publications. At most what i can do is thank her in acknowledgement or just not publish the paper. (2 years of my life was spent on that and I also participated in a related contest and I was placed second.)

@AndreasBlass honestly if the problem is getting recommendation for my Ph.D. i just get it from another professor. I have already have a great reputation because of my grades and lots of projects.

@Guardian I see no connection between my comment and your reply to it. In particular, I wrote nothing about "getting recommendation for my Ph.D."

@AndreasBlass Dear andreas, sorry I mislead you, i meant that since she has no contribution and I don't need her recommnedation, there is no need for me to include her. It's very important to emphasis that she didn't give any grant/money/support for this work and it is purely my work. So math or computer science, there shouldn't be any difference.

Whether you need a recommendation from her is irrelevant.  Whether she is your supervisor is irrelevant.  If she made a substantial intellectual contribution, she should be a coauthor; if she did not, then she should not.

The last comment by JeffE is the answer here.

Whether you need a recommendation from her is irrelevant. Whether she
  is your supervisor is irrelevant. If she made a substantial
  intellectual contribution, she should be a coauthor; if she did not,
  then she should not.
  She didn't contribute in any substantial way. So she will be removed.

I recommend you ask a third party if your supervisor did indeed make substantial contributions. Your question sounds as if it's written in anger and your motive in avoiding the supervisor seems to be as much spite and malice as anything.  Once your mutual anger dies down, you may see this differently; others may see it differently now, and you may be doing irreparable harm to your reputation by acting this way.


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Publishing a paper without paying an article-processing charge
I need to publish my paper in law but, to my knowledge, journals charge money in the form of an article-processing charge. Any tips on how to publish your research for free?

Submit to a subscription journal and indicate you do not want open access.
Here's an example of a subscription law journal.

+1 Indeed! Publishing charges are mostly confined to open-access journals or open-access options with journals that offer both paywall access and open-access. ... and no need to figure out any "clever" solution to the problem.

Not all journals have page charges, though they were common in the past. Journals without page charges depend for revenue on subscriptions or sponsorship by a professional organization (or grants, or ...). Open access journals and open access options have quite high charges as that is their main (only?) revenue source.
Some journals in some fields will waive fees in some cases. If you are an independent researcher, for example, or work at a small place with infrequent publishing by faculty. But you need to ask the editor when you submit so that you don't waste time.
I don't know about law, but a journal published by a professional association might be willing. On the other hand, they might require membership.
Don't wait until the paper is deep in the process before you ask. Be sure you understand the consequences of publishing anywhere.
Also, I doubt that Open Access journals are likely to waive their, much higher, fees. And, there especially, you need to ask at the beginning of the process so that you can withdraw if necessary.
Note also that some universities and research organizations will pay fees for employee publications and it is fairly common for grants to cover such fees, though you need to plan for that and win such a grant.

Apart from subscription journals there are non-commercial journals, some of which are free to read and to publish in, such as Journal of Machine Learning Research. Some institutions such as universities or scientific societies run their own journals and some of them are free to read and publish in.
Also there are subscription journals that ask for page charges that are in fact voluntary and hardly anybody pays them.
Furthermore, many subscription journals allow authors to put the accepted version of the paper (before final edits) on free repositories, which basically means that everybody can read it for free even without paying Open Access charges.