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How would growing tensions between PR China and United States affect academia?
As in the title. The relationship between two countries seems to go towards a colder climate and actual war scenarios are discussed (slightly) more openly.
What are possible implications for academia in the long-term? This includes:

Chinese student admission to the US (and their tuition fees)
Hiring of Chinese nationals at American universities
American college campuses in China (e.g., NYU and Duke)
Scientific collaborations between universities in different countries
Scientific publishing
Conference attendance (in the US and worldwide)

Concretely, (no matter how silly this may sound) I am organizing a conference and I am wary of inviting too many Americans and Chinese into one room.
I know, for comparison, that many Iranians are admitted to live and work in the US, despite the very icy climate between the two countries. But I don't whether Americans travel to Iran to the same extent, and there has never been open warfare. On the other hand, many Western academic systems have reportedly toned down or stopped their scientific collaboration with Russia over the last year (see also, e.g., Nature).

I think you need to distinguish strongly between institutions and individuals. Even in case of Russia, official collaborations between institutions have mostly stopped, but individual collaboration, e.g. working on joint papers still continue.

@mlk, I think the answers will differentiate, appropriately, between individuals and institutions, but I don't see why the asker would need to do this.

The question focuses on institutional issues. The closer you zoom in, such as into conferences, the more individual sensitivites will matter.

Looking back at the physics collaboration between USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, I think the last thing you need to worry about is whether scientists from the two countries would get along, should they be find themselves in the same room. The question is rather whether governments will allow them to be in the same room...

What are possible implications for academia in the long-term? This includes:

I don't want to speculate about long-term implications, which may shift a lot depending on political developments. But it's worth noting that we already see several of the things you mention happening to some degree, and it isn't unreasonable to think we might see more of the same in the short- and medium-term.

Chinese student admission to the US (and their tuition fees)

The number of Chinese students coming to the US is already decreasing. There are several reasons for this, including the growth of Chinese institutions, but concerns about the US-Chinese relations is also part of it.

Hiring of Chinese nationals at American universities

This has definitively been stifled or chilled by visa bureaucracy and fears about unfair prosecution. See for example the damaging China Initiative. Some personal stories are given in this webinar.  Although that particular program has ended, it is unclear what will follow and what political winds will prevail.

Scientific collaborations between universities in different countries

Depending on the funding source, some would-be collaborations are already impacted. Some colleagues at US DOE National Laboratories have lists of Chinese institutions "with military ties", and aren't supposed to coauthor articles with scientists from those institutions.

Conference attendance (in the US and worldwide)

This is again subject to visa issues. It is anecdotal, but recently I've heard several stories of Chinese nationals applying for a visa to attend conferences in the US being granted the visa, but only after the conference had completed. There is some suspicion that this is deliberate. However, assuming it isn't, and that this is just a symptom of long and unpredictable processing times, it would still complicate planning conference attendance.

The last three years have, of course, been a bit hard on cross-border travel and collaborations of all kinds.

@JonCuster Absolutely, probably particularly so with China because of how long they stuck with the zero Covid policy. Hopefully, what dominated the last three years won't be as important going forward, so I focused the answer on other aspects.

In terms of arguments or fistfights breaking out at your event, I believe personally there is almost nothing to worry about.
That said, barriers to scientific collaboration between US and Chinese scientists have sprung up, sometimes with dramatic outcomes.  University's responses to this scenario seem varied, but I can tell you there have been times when my school has solicited detailed information about international collaborations in response to these situations.  I believe there may be a reporting requirement on the part of the university to funding institutions (though this feels like it quieted a bit when the US leadership changed).
I think you owe it to your participants to verify that you won't be creating any reportable situations through interactions at your conference.  I can't imagine that you'd be creating any, but you should probably just ask whatever department handles your sponsored projects.
I can't speak to the visa issues, but certainly wouldn't be surprised if visas took a long time to get or if some of the applications for visas got turned down.
Thank you, by the way, for working to create opportunities for people to learn about each other and each other's science.  I remember a Society for Neuroscience conference in Toronto, which was my first conference where Cubans were allowed to participate, and how exciting it was.


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Should a teacher be able to solve all the assignments they give their students themselves?
A moment ago, I happened upon https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/99712/almost-impossible-sudoku-like-puzzle which explicitly mentioned that this student was given a puzzle in math class that his math teachers couldn't solve. And it got me thinking: To me, it feels like a teacher like that is unfit for teaching. After all, how could they impart knowledge they don't have onto their students?
Should a teacher be able to solve all the assignments they give their students themselves? Assuming the assignment is in fact solvable obviously.
Note: The question that prompted this was a math problem, but I'm looking for course-agnostic answers, if possible.

From the linked question, it is not clear to me that the puzzle was actually part of the course (instead of: a little fun for good students with no real relevance to grading and the course topic) and if the teachers who gave the puzzle are the same who couldn't solve it.

From the George Dantzig article in wikipedia, “In statistics, Dantzig solved two open problems in statistical theory, which he had mistaken for homework after arriving late to a lecture by Jerzy Neyman.” A delightful and famous exception!

For required work, yes, but for extra credit, no.

Interestingly, that question appears to distinguish between "my maths class" and "school" as separate entities ("I was set a puzzle in my math class. [..] so I took it into school and the math teachers couldn't solve it.")  Perhaps the class is with a different tutor, not the teacher(s) who couldn't solve it

In "How To Solve It", George Pólya writes: ""There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. Von Neumann didn't say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann." [2nd ed. (1957), p. xv]"

See the story of Joseph Jacotot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ignorant_Schoolmaster

Are we even sure the excercise aimed primarily at any other than a trial & error solution of the puzzle? It may have been meant to excercise mental addition and subtraction in a way that is less boring that "do this sheet of 100 additions and 50 subtractions"? I'm asking because I had math teachers that would do e.g. mental calculation competitions with us long after elementary school. And I've had teachers that would say, if you find a faster/more straightforward way to solve the excercise, you deserve that "gain".

... that is, it is inconceivable to me that any maths teacher cannot do the additions and subtractions needed for the trial and error solution.

@EdV While Dantzig's story is certainly great, his professor didn't assign those problems to anyone.  It's common in upper level courses to point out some of the major open problems in the field.

"course-agnostic" - but you need to limit it to quantitative problems.  Drift over to Philosophy or  Group Psychology and the questions are likely intended to elicit opinion-based answers or projections of one's views.

Is this a question about a school teacher or college tutor, who needs to be able to grade a whole class in a consistent manner? Or are we in academia?

In general, yes, a teacher should know how to do any assignment and, in some cases, should have actually done it. In teaching programming, for example, it is usually a mistake to assign a problem that the instructor hasn't essentially done themselves.
The reason is that one of the tasks in making assignments is to estimate the effort and time required to do the task. If you can't solve the assignment yourself, you are giving an open ended task to students. In almost all situations students have a limited time to spend on any given assignment and that competes with their other tasks.
There is an exception to the above. If you tell the students at the beginning that you are assigning something you don't have an answer to, and will be grading their efforts rather than their results, then you can make this work. The assignment becomes an exploration. At lower levels of education this makes less sense than it does at higher (say, doctoral) where it is natural to explore the unknown.

At school I used to hate doing problems (or science experiments) that had already been done. It seemed to me that they weren't actually problems or experiments any more. Pupils are motivated in different ways. I personally would have worked ten times as hard if I'd known the teacher didn't have an answer. As it was I often skipped the set work and did my own investigations (blew things up once or twice!)

@chaslyfromUK, I do completely commiserate with you, but, on the other hand, why would/should we think that the next gen of kids can so easily become wiser than the previous? E.g., if all that "school knowledge" is really so useless, ... ???

@paulgarrett because there's a lot more data now than there was before, and there will be exponentially more data in the future. Combine that with the exploratory assignments Buffy ends on and it's a lot easier to assign (and execute) assignments exploring the unknown. I've even seen undergraduate courses on data mining that would get a lot of new real world data each year (or even between semesters). Getting big chunks of data and a large set of tools makes it more fun for everyone. And sometimes it leads to actionable insights that can be fed back to where the data came from.

@chaslyfromUK there's some decent evidence from physics lab pedagogy that you're right, and students get almost nothing from just following a set of instructions to do an experiment (other than familiarity with lab equipment). What works much better is giving a goal and equipment and letting the students figure it out, but this is much harder to organise and grade

I tell my students if they cannot show  that they can reproduce a known experiment, no-one will believe them when they show any new results. Even in real scientific experiments, you usually reproduce a known set of results first, to ensure your equipment is working properly.

@chaslyfromUK In many disciplines it's almost impossible to tackle unsolved problems if haven't done solved problems before. How would you teach calculus this way, for example? It's basically all known already.

@Javier - It's a fair point. Actually the best teacher I ever had (as a young teenager) taught us geometry. He treated everything as a problem for the class to solve. He would draw a figure on the blackboard and ask us how to work out various properties. Of course he gave plenty of hints when we got stuck but we (or at least I) felt as though I was using my problem-solving ability rather than simply rote-memory. In an exam where I was asked to prove Pythagoras' Theorem ...

...I hadn't memorised it so with my vague memories I constructed a proof myself. I passed the exam. I am not a maths prodigy, nor did my career involve a great knowledge of the subject. However the transferable skills I learned from this man about problem-solving in general, have been invaluable

@Javier That example is not globally applicable. In my primary and secondary education math was taught as a single class with a problem- rather than property-based approach. I still don't quite know what the word calculus even means, but I work in machine learning for a living.

In general the teacher must be capable of achieving what is they want their students to achieve by undertaking the assignment, but that might not be coming up with a solution.
In the modern world where all knowledge is at our finger tips all the time, the job of an educator is much less to impart knowledge, and much more to guide and mentor students, help them learn where to find information and assess its reliability and to concentrate on the higher level cognitive skills, such as problem solving, synthesis and reflection.
This means that often coming up with the answer isn't the point of an assignment, but rather something about the journey to getting to the answer (or failing to do so).
Taking your example:  It could be about taking a set of puzzles and working out what the common rules are to distinguish solvable from unsolvable problems. Or deducing if the difference between hard and easy puzzles is quantitative or qualitative. It could simply be about learning that some problems are not soluble, but there is still value in working on them.
Many of the other answer here suggest this kind of approach is only applicable at higher levels, like graduate school, but the editor in chief of the AMS' maths education blogs talks here about giving unsolved math problems as homework to undergrads, and Lior Pachter talk here about ones that you could give to K-12 students.
My own maths education started incorporating this sort of "Investigation-led" learning at 15 as part of the UK national curriculum. While the problems set were not insoluble (how many bricks do you need to build pyramids of a height n, and deriving the basic rules of differentiating polynomials empirically), they shared in common that the journey not the end point was the purpose.

In engineering, when students are asked to solve real world open ended problems,sometimes it works out that there is no solution.  Figuring that out is an important outcome.

In the case where there is no solution, why shouldn't the teacher also know this fact?

@user111388 because some problems do have solutions but the solutions have not been found yet.

@SolarMike: Sorry, I do not understand. Why is it not okay that a teacher doesn't know "the answer is X" when the answer is X but it is okay that the teacher doesn't know "there is no solution" when there is no solution? Or am I misinterpreting the answer?

@user111388 Because conclusively proving that there is no solution is often itself not possible, or at least has not been done. Wikipedia has a nice page of things believed, but not known, to be true in mathematics.

@Tiercelet: I still don't understand. It is not okay if a teacher can not solve a solvable assignment, but if the assignment is unsolvable, it is okay if the teacher believes it has a solution? Also, I don't quite understand the relevance of the link - those problems are research problems, (hopefully) not graded assignment problems!

@user111388 The point is that a teacher may incorrectly believe that a question is unsolvable. Research problems are an easy example, but it can happen any time. A couple years ago I got a homework question whose point was to stress the performance importance of a particular algorithm. It asked for the runtime if we did not use the known-best approach, expecting to get the runtime of the naive solution. I realized there was a different algorithm with the same runtime as the one that's usually used, wrote up a proof and surprised my professor quite a bit.

Sometimes there is a solution, but it just hasn't been found yet. Sometimes the teacher just doesn't realize this, and sometimes no one on the planet realizes this. Teachers should know what they're asking students to do and have clear expectations for what they get back; but if they knew every answer to every question possible, they wouldn't be teachers, they'd be gods.

@user111388 -- When we take in real design projects, we can guess based on our experience how things may go, but we can certainly be wrong.  Engineering is a strange beast.  Often, there is no "right" answer - there are many answers and some are better than others.  It may turn out that a project has competing needs, where you can't reach one need if you reach another.  The process of figuring this stuff out is what we want our students to learn.

@ScottSeidman: Ah okay, thank you. But I guess, if the process of figuring this stuff out is the point of the assignment, the teacher should know the process (ie in this cases, "process" subsitutes "answer".)

My short answer to the question is: yes.
Long answer is as follows:
Professors/ teachers should definitely have the knowledge that must be passed onto the students. I find it hard to think of an instructor who attempts to teach a topic that they themselves do not understand. However, again, you must be aware that there are different levels to understanding and even a professor might not understand particular topics very deeply (everyone is human with their own strengths).
So in general, for levels under graduate school, I believe that the instructor must be able to solve the assignments they give to their students.
However in grad school, the nature of assignments change. Of course there are still homework in most doctorate and masters classes but a professor is also directing research of their graduate students and sometimes might assign tasks that they might not be able to do themselves or it is uncertain whether they could do it (a yet unsolved problem would belong to this category).
So, in summary, for education that encompasses teaching of certain textbook knowledge, I believe that the professors/teachers must be able to solve the assignments they give to their students themselves. But for graduate school and especially for research, this requirement breaks down.

I have always felt obligated to solve every problem out myself before handing it to a student. I put myself in the student's shoes to see if an assignment is of good quality. This comes at a price in the way lessons could be developed further, I could cover something else, etc.
However, this teacher is ABSOLUTELY NOT unfit to teach! I have never been very good at puzzles and fancy tricks. It does not make me bad if I am not able to solve it.
My mentor told me this, and I think this comes with age and wisdom. It is important to choose topics you feel are worthwhile to learn at the price of refraining to learn other subjects. Learning tricks like these falls into this category for a lot of teachers.

If assignments are about "knowledge," it might seem that a teacher who does not know the answer to the assignments is unfit to teach. Knowledge, however, is not the end of many (most?) lessons. In many cases, assignments are about skills more than knowledge, and a teacher does not necessarily need to be able to complete all the assignments themself to be able to teach the skill to a student. A basketball coach does not need to be an excellent basketball player themself to teach players how to excel at basketball. Being excellent at teaching a skill is a different, and sometimes non-overlapping, quality from being excellent at the skill itself.
If assignments are about skills and processes, the teacher knowing the answer ahead of time, or even being able to complete the assignment themself, is not necessary for the teacher to be excellent at teaching students the necessary skill. It is sometimes possible to teach skills (and even do it very well) that one does not personally have.

Giving students an assignment which a lecturer can't solve generally should not happen. Sometimes it can be justified (e.g. students involved in a real-life research project, where a problem can have many solutions or none at all), but it has to be made clear to students.
However, one mistake does not make anyone unfit for teaching. Just as students, lecturers need time and process to learn how to teach and be better in their roles. Doing mistakes along your learning pathway is completely normal, but of course one should reflect and learn from them.

I don't think, particularly for extension problems, that it is vital the teacher has solved the problem unaided. However it is certainly desirable, just because they will have a better idea of the difficulty if they have done so.
However, what is important IMO is that the teacher has seen and verified the solution, since otherwise how can they be sure that the problem can be solved? For the linked problem it was by no means obvious to me that there was a valid way to arrange the numbers. (Of course you could ask for either a solution or a proof that no solution exists, but the difficulty of the problem will then be very different depending on which of these you have to do, so the teacher really should know which is the case.)

I guess I disagree. When a student comes to you for help on a problem for which you have not done the solution, how do you guide them? It is very hard to give them the "minimal hint" that will get them over a rough spot and help them achieve insight. Very hard to know where they've got wrong and need to be put right.

@Buffy Without looking at a maths problem, I can always recommend trying to start from the other side of the problem (i.e. pretend it's finished and work backwards) or "if it's impossible, can you prove this / think of an argument for why this is?" or "can you use symmetry to help you?". These 3 ideas apply to every maths problem ever but the last one may well help in this instance, depending on the level of the student. So yes, a teacher, an expert in their field, can help a student without knowing the question, nevermind the solution.

The sort answer is yes if the students learn something and they appreciate the experience.
Knowledge Transfer Perspective: When a teacher presents a good open problem to students, she offers valuable information. A good open problem is one which a lot of people are interested in and for which no known solution exists. If, in addition, the teacher herself has attempted to solve the problem, then she can present to students the approaches she tried, showing why they failed. This adds even more to the value of a good open problem. In the case of a "bad open problem", when not a lot of people are interested in it and/or an actual solution does exist unbeknownst to the teacher, the instructor betrays her incompetence.
Teaching as Service Perspective: A lot depends on the rapport of teacher and students. If no student in class can solve an assigned problem, then students might view, often justifiably, their work as a waste of time. If the problem was chosen correctly so that students are challenged and are successful at solving it, then everyone feels they achieved something and knowledge retention is, likely, improved. Assigning an "impossible" problem (whether the teacher can or cannot solve it) is just putting students down and failing to get students excited about the subject matter. This is a signal of another form of incompetence, that the teacher does not understand her students' needs.

People say that you only understand something properly when you can explain it to others. So, if we say that the teacher has set the students to complete a Sudoku logic puzzle, then as long as the teacher understands and can clearly explain the work, it is no big deal if they can't solve the Sudoku themselves.
However, it is doubtless infuriating when a teacher cannot do the Sudoku, cannot explain how a Sudoku works and does not attempt to complete the Sudoku, yet gives it to their students. As long as the teacher can offer help to the students then they are doing fine.
In my experience, teachers generally know what they are talking about/teaching. However, there are some cases when a teacher has not had much idea about what it is they are instructing on, but I have rarely known a teacher to not attempt/explain the task itself.

Actually, Sudoku might be a poor example. Some are much harder than others. Being able to solve it "in theory" might not be enough.

Good point. I used Sudoku because it is an example of knowing how to do something rather than actually knowing the answer, but perhaps there are more apt analogies.

@Buffy: To me, from a mathematical perspective being able to solve a sudoku in theory (via recursion) is enough. There is no mathematical need to know any of the tricks that fast sudoku solvers know.

Have you considered that maybe the teacher did know how to solve the problem (it is an elementary problem) but was using the white lie that they couldn't solve it for motivation? When I was a teacher, I would do things to "model the behaviour" of going from not knowing to knowing and sometimes that means pretending that you don't know the answer when of course you do.
Also, on the topic of puzzles, some things are better solved by a large group than a single teacher, for instance problems requiring a high degree of computation or (in the case of the 8 queens problem), combination.

Should a teacher be able to solve all the assignments they give their students themselves?
I'd say yes provided that we are talking about a non research level, where the assignments are intended to prepare students for exams. In this context, if the teacher cannot solve a problem given to the students, then the teacher probably is not qualified and/or prepared to the class and thus should not be teaching that subject.
As advised by Krantz in his book How to Teach Mathematics:

If you are going to stand up in front of thirty people or three hundred people and try to teach them something, then you had better

Believe that you are well qualified to do so.
Want to do so.
Be prepared to do so.
Make sure that these characteristics are evident to your audience.

"Believe that you are well qualified ..."? No... You had better be well qualified to do so. There are many cranks who believe they know better than professional mathematicians, want to teach others their crankery, and even prepare lots of 'material' to do so, and definitely these characteristics are evident to anyone with rudimentary mathematical training.

I'm in my undergrad and have asked myself this question in the past. I think a teacher should be capable of scoring in the top 10% of students in the same conditions (time, amount of notes, etc.), and near max points if no constraints.
There is no doubt a gray area when the class is very interdisciplinary.

In general, yes teachers should and must know the answer.
But in very advanced classes such as some specific PhD or Master's classes, the teacher can challenge the students to solve an unsolved problem, or at least explain why a problem is unsolved.
One example is the traveling salesman's algorithm which doesn't have an optimal solution. (please correct me if I am wrong)

I should have clarified from the start that I'm referring to solvable assignments.

"optimal" can be most profit, least cost, minimum time or minimum distance...

Why shouldn't a teacher challenge the students in lower classes?

@user111388: I don't see anywhere were Herman Toothrot (or a commenter) said anything about lower classes (challenging them or not challenging them).

@DaveLRenfro: It seems like this because only higher classes are mentioned -- lower classes seem to fall under the "in general" statement, higher classes under the exeption (starting with "but").

I was exposed to lots of open problems as an undergrad (both CS and Mathematics), as well as proven NP-complete problems (including traveling salesman). But it was stated up front what they were and no one expected us to solve them. (Although we did have to prove certain things were NP-hard or NP-complete.)

Yes, Traveling Salesman has an optimal solution since it is a finite problem. The issue is that there is no sufficiently efficient general algorithm for finding it. But the solution exits. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

@user111388 it will depend on the subject but usually it wouldn't produce any learning but instead complete frustration. In math, for example, it would almost always be pointless because lower level students likely wouldn't even be able to understand what the problem is even asking.  It would be like asking a 4th grader to prove a series converges using the formal method.  In statistics it would be even worse -- the rigorous definitions of probability (using measure theory) required to even address theoretical problems don't even happen at the masters level classes in many/most programs.

there are, of course, exceptions to that but they are pretty rare (at least in stem fields)

In general, yes. But I have on occasion said: Here kids is one that stumps me. I have a proof but it is clumsy and longwinded. Have a go if you are up for a challenge, and I'd be happy to hear from you.
What would certainly not be good is pretending that X is a routine exercise if you actually do not know how to do it.

George Dantzig was mathmetician who famously solved two "homework problems" set by his lecturer, that were in fact unsolved problems in statistics.  So if you happen to be teaching a genius then yes, it's a great idea to set problems you can't solve yourself!

So, the story says the professor DID say they were unsolved problems, but Dantzig was late to class that day, and did not hear that part.

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How to deal with consequential rounding errors when verifying the works of others?
to give a stupid example of a rounding error: on a test, the student is asked to calculate the circumference of a circle with radius 6.2. You personally did the math with π rounded to 3.14 and calculated 38.936, but one of your students rounded to 3.14159, and because of that their result is 38.955716.
Now, I doubt any decent teacher would discard this result as wrong, since the math itself was correct. However, what if this calculation was part of a much larger series of calculations for an academic paper, and the resulting rounding error throws off the entire result? It's easy to just come out and say "if you round X to 15 places instead of 14, your formula makes the English channel 10 meters wider" or "you rounded to 5 places, but if you round Y to 6 places, your result is no longer statistically significant", but it just seems like such a cheap way to give feedback for academics. Another example: "by rounding X to Y+1 places (or Y-1 places) in our formula to determine whether an event happened, we managed to shift 90% of our test group from 'happens 25% of the attempts' to 'happens 75% of the attempts'". It's an extreme example, but something like that
I know that such a remark can be seen as a meaningful one since it's a viable concern, but it's still quite a nitpick, and there's probably a reason why X was rounded to 14 places. Still, I can't help but think that a formula should work regardless of how many places you round X to.
If an academic paper you are reviewing could change result or even be invalidated due to rounding differently, how should that be handled in a peer review?

@NajibIdrissi My concern is less with "how much does it change when altering the rounding" and more with "SHOULD it change when altering the rounding?" For example, what if rounding means your result is no longer statistically significant?

This question should have been perhaps asked at stats.stackexchange.com. Anyway, in the latter case (larger series of calculations), you should of focus on error in the final estimate. If the error is too high for a statistically significant result, one must do more accurate calculations or live with the no-difference result. Anyway, it is even more important to think whether the difference, even if significant, is actually meaningful. I think that is what @NajibIdrissi was trying to say.

If rounding materially affects the statistical significance of the result then it's very important to draw attention to it. Any genuine result won't be much affected.

Do you mean something like p = 0.04999 vs. p = 0.05001? Technically, it isn't a big difference either. It's more a question of what is your definition of statistical significance.

@silvado More like "by rounding X to Y+1 places (or Y-1 places) in our formula to calculate whether an event happened, we managed to shift 90% of our test group from 'happens 25% of the attempts' to 'happens 75% of the attempts'". It's an extreme example, but something like that.

In that case it may be that the definition of "happens" is flawed, because it seems very sensitive to rounding error.

Aren't both results for the circumference wrong because they commit on more digits than they can afford?

@T.Verron more fundamentally, both are wrong because they fail to quantify any uncertainty in the values expressed. The teacher's answer is doubly so for unnecessarily inflating that uncertainty by useless and severe rounding. I had a student who decided to deal with not remembering the exact values of various physical constants by giving a generous uncertainty to the values he could remember, without acknowledging the drastic effect on the final result. He didn't bother to calculate the propagated uncertainty, but if he had (I did), the final result alone would have filled two pages.

Now, I doubt any decent teacher would discard this result as wrong

I'm generally considered a decent teacher, and, yes, I'd consider that result partly wrong and I'd remove a mark or two, because students, especially from certain fields (e.g. engineering), should learn to get the values right, also, not only the math.
There are mathematical tools that allow to evaluate the effect of rounding errors and to deal with uncertainty of parameters in general: if in an academic paper, the authors overlooked the effect of the rounding errors (getting the wrong result or suggesting a model excessively sensitive to the parameters), I'd suggest to reject the paper asking for major revisions, pointing out at the proper literature.

+1 Indeed, rounding errors (and anything else that could've influenced your results) should've been taken into account when analysing the results and BEFORE making any conclusions.

The underlying measurement precision is a key element of the rounding of any calculated number. In your circumference example, the radius is stated as "6.2" units (and not "6.20" or "6.200"). The sensible convention is to use only one more decimal place in the calculated answer as the least precise underpinning measurement. So, the circumference should be 38.96 units. Any other answer should lose marks, (assuming this is secondary/high school or beyond!).
It would often be difficult to establish that authors had not followed the normal conventions of rounding, though stating results to unreasonable numbers of decimal places, given the reviewers knowledge of the likely measurement error, would be sufficient reason to suggest the paper be revised.

Point 1 is part of my confusion. My math teacher told me to add number of  significant digits together and make the answer that many significant digits.

@Nzall Iirc the number of significant digits you can be certain of in the result of a product ab is the max of those in a and b. So for 6.23.14, it should be 3, definitely not 5. Incidentally, see how adding more digits to pi changes the 4th digit in your question.

@T.Verron Yes, but that's digits after the comma. if the student uses 3.14159, he gets 6 digits after the comma.

Digits after the comma matter for the sum. E.g 3.0 + 0.003 = 3.0 (2 significant digits, while 0.003 had only 1). For the product, powers of 10 can be factored out and what matters is the number of significant digits. An easy method I use when I need to remember it is to add a small error and see which digit changes (it's not an exact method of course, but it helps refresh the memory). For example, see what happens with 6.21*3.14159... Digits which change were wrong in the first computation. (And as a matter of fact, I realize that I should have said "min" instead of "max" above...

... so no matter how many decimals of pi you take, 39 is the best certain approximation you'll get: 6.21*3.14159 = 39.01...)

I have created an account on this site only to downvote this answer, but I don't have enough points yet. This advice is severely wrong and will result in wrong answers and a wrong understanding of statistical uncertainty more often than not. Presentation has nothing to do with uncertainty. Nothing. One should never use "significant figures" for anything, never teach the technique, and never presuppose that anyone else uses it either. A truly great exposition and justification of these statements is available here.

When reviewing a paper, one keeps an ear tuned for red flags.  Mishandling of precision issues could be a red flag.  It could go either way (too little precision or too much).  Frankly, if the authors use way too many significant digits for the context, that might catch a reviewer's attention most easily.  Once a reviewer has noticed a red flag, then the fine-tooth comb comes into play and one starts checking the work at a greater level of detail.  This is not desirable from the author's point of view, and it makes the reviewing work much more time consuming.
(The researcher will have chosen an appropriate level of precision, i.e. number of significant digits, based on an error analysis.  But this is background work, not explicitly presented in the paper.)
If the authors did not use enough precision when doing the work, then what happens?  They'll run into trouble before getting to the writing up stage.  Calculations lead to other calculations, etc., and rounding errors build, to the point that the final result is meaningless and then there's no paper to write.
By the way, there is no need to keep this in the purely hypothetical realm.  There's no reason a non-researcher with a reasonable math background can't dip a toe in the water and read some journal articles.  A nice way to get started with this is to take a look at Nature.  When you find an article that piques your interest, then you can take a look at some of the works cited.  You may find that there are some topics and techniques you aren't familiar with, but you can look into any you feel interested in.

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Why is there less funding or scholarship opportunity for business students compared to other background students?
If one compares the funding state between the business background students and the science, technology, engineering, math (STEM) background students in university, one will surely see much difference in the portion or extent of funding. Scholarship opportunities for business students are rare and small.  Why is this the case?

It may be useful to take a slightly larger perspective, rather than comparing just business vs. STEM.  While there is a great degree of variation around the world and from program to program, most higher-level degree funding can be clustered into three general categories:

Doctoral degrees in STEM fields are generally funded by universities or external agencies.
Terminal "professional" degrees, including MBA, MD, JD, DDS, etc. frequently expect students to be responsible for their own funding, often going deeply into debt to do so.
Doctoral degrees in humanities and liberal arts fields are in-between, where sometimes students are supported or partially supported and other times they are not.

There's a great deal of variation, of course.  For example, I believe that the education of medical doctors is supported by some nations (though I lack a reference at the moment).  Likewise, Masters degrees are sometimes considered a "professional degree" that students are expected to fund, while other times they are lumped in with STEM doctoral degrees and funded by the university or other sources.
So, why should this be the case?  It seems to me that a lot of this is simply independently developing markets:

STEM students are typically expected to contribute significantly to the investigation of science and engineering as part of their training, and since these contributions can be very valuable in those markets, it makes sense for external funding agencies to include students in their funding.
Professional degrees are often coupled with very high post-graduation salaries, while the training period is much more one-way, with the students spending most of their time learning rather than making novel (and readily fundable) contributions.
Humanities and liberal arts are also quite important societally, but they are not currently associated with markets flush with capital and an easy set of incentives to pour money into schools either during the program (as with STEM) or afterward (as with professional degrees).  As such, they have generally developed much more ad hoc and patchwork approaches to funding degrees.

Your first point is the strongest, in my opinion. Even professional degrees that aren't coupled with good salaries, or are quite important societally but not exactly flush with capital (MPH degrees) are expected to pay their own way.

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text:
Should I still submit a manuscript to a journal if a member of the editorial board is advancing a competing theory that is incompatible with my work?
I have completed (my first) manuscript, which falls well within the scope of a particular journal.
However, a member of that journal's editorial board (or, to be precise, the editor's student) is aggressively advancing a model that, if valid, would essentially negate much of my work. At this time, the evidence for both competing models remains circumstantial, with the bulk of publications (but not quite a consensus) currently favouring my approach.
Of the individuals on that journal's editorial board, this editor works in the subdiscipline closest to mine, so my concern is that this person would be, from the journal's perspective, the most logical choice for my submission.
Is my unease over the possibility of editorial bias warranted?
What would be the most appropriate course of action in this case?

(Another potentially relevant note/complication: The work in which the editor is advancing this competing model is unpublished, and I am aware of it only because of word from colleagues. I received substantial evidence that the unpublished work exists; this is not based on hearsay. I note this because it makes it impossible to point out the potential for bias or a competing interest by referring to the extant corpus of literature.)

Well, in my field, people are relatively fair; but some fields have a very fierce competition which lets ethical considerations sometimes take a back seat. Nobody can really tell you what to do without some information about either the habits of the field or some knowledge about the personality of the editor.

Many journals will allow you to suggest a handling editor, and pretty much every journal will allow you to specify reviewers that you believe should not review your paper due to conflict of interest.  This is an appropriate situation to invoke these options.
Depending on the particular forms the journal uses for submission, the right place to put an explanation of your concern may be either the submission forms or the cover letter.  You do not need to go into much detail, simply saying:

"Editor X's student is working on a competing model, so I am concerned about bias."

If you are dealing with an honorable journal, that should be enough: this is an entirely normal and reasonable concern you should not have to back this up with published evidence (people understand that scientists talk, pre-publication), nor do you need to denigrate the character of Editor X in any way.  They have many editors for a reason, and many possible reviewers they can draw from as well, and every good scientist understands that it's usually better to be safe than sorry when it comes to dealing with conflict of interest concerns.

Science progresses through the exchange of ideas and theories, the testing of those, and eventually the falsification of some and repeated confirmation of others. I think most scientists understand this process and that sometimes there are competing explanations for an effect that, absent conclusive evidence, are all valid descriptions and worthy of publication. Most scientists will also understand that these observations are true even in areas they themselves work in.
I have no reason to a priori believe that this would be different (i) for your particular field, (ii) for the particular member of the editorial board. In other words, I would give it a try. Alternatively, you can always contact the editor in chief of the journal, or maybe even the editor in question, and simply ask whether your paper would be welcome there. Their answer will already give you a good idea how they would perceive a possible submission of your work.

Moreover, what is the worst that could happen? It gets rejected. It is not a nice experience, but it will happen many many times when you stay in academia. If there are reviews, you look at them and learn how other people read your text. They may find some mistakes, or you find things that were unclear in your text. You improve your article and you submit it to another journal.

@MaartenBuis -- True, but you may have wasted several months if you know the outcome already.

I wish this were not true, but to be quite honest, two important things to consider are how competitive your field is and how detrimental your work will be for the editor (or their student). I had a similar case, where I am quite sure who my reviewer was. I was also aware that they were trying to publish a paper that would lose a lot of "umph" after my paper got published. This reviewer kept recommending that I revise my paper, long after the other reviewer accepted it...until theirs was published. They accepted it immediately after.
However, in your case, it's not entirely clear that the editor has much to lose if you publish your paper. Yes, they have a model that directly competes with your model. But as you describe it, I believe your model is already accepted by the general community. So the publishing of your paper does not put them in a more difficult spot than they already are in. They may have a bias against your model, given their work is evidence against it, but as the editor, it is more difficult to reject your work; they are merely supposed to digest the reviewer's opinions (assuming they see it fit for review) and make their decision off that. Technically, they could reject your paper despite two accepts from the reviewer, but this would raise a lot of eyebrows. You could lose out on corner cases though (i.e. revise and resubmit + reject = reject in the editor's eyes, rather than revise and resubmit).
If there's another journal of equivalent reputation and correct subject area, you might try that first to avoid potential editor bias hurting you on the corner cases. But if it's a decision between that journal or one with the wrong subject matter/significantly lower reputation, I would venture to try that journal first unless you believe the editor has a lot to lose from you publishing your paper.
EDIT: other answers note that you could request a different editor, which is true. Personally, I would be slightly hesitant to do so. My reasoning is that by stating "I don't want X to review my work" is equivalent to saying "I'm quite certain that X will reject my work". Therefore, I would worry that this could be read the wrong way by whomever was assigned my submission (although this should be of little concern for a solid paper). With that in mind, I've never been an editor and I'm genuinely curious what experienced editors think of such requests.

As an editor, I would have no problem with somebody saying they didn't want me to handle their work because they thought I would be prejudiced.  I trust the other editors I work with the reject bad work.  In fact, I'd probably never even be aware of it at all, because one of the editors-in-chief would probably just never put it in my queue.

@jakebeal: thanks for the response, but not quite my question. It's more that if you were an editor and you were given a manuscript to review because the authors requested that editor X does not review it, do you think that might given you a slightly negative first impression of the author?

If they list one or two people they're concerned about conflict with, that's totally reasonable and I don't think I'd have any negative impression at all.  If they list half of the important players in the field, I would definitely be concerned.

The editor could influence the process by choosing referees she thinks may be critical of the paper. Or by explicitly asking the referees to be extra critical.

For society journals in my field, it is common to select up to 3 editors, to suggest reviewers, and to exclude reviewers. The "editors" are typically distinct from the "editorial board"; the former is the small group that decide on the manuscript, and the latter is the large group that conduct many/most of the reviews.
A typical reason to exclude a reviewer is "direct competitor", which sounds appropriate in this case, and you should be able to exclude up to ~3 individuals (editors or reviewers) without any issue--as long as there remain high-level experts to review the manuscript.
If there is an editorial board as I described, in which the main reviewers are known, then you should make an effort to suggest reviewers from this board. This should provide assurance to the assigned editor that a fair review is attainable. If this journal does not publicize reviewers, then in your letter you might take extra effort to suggest some reviewers who are highly-regarded, key figures in the field.

authors: Жанболат Кайпов


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Is it a wise decision to email graduate professors my provisional certificate of bachelor's degree?
I am a prospective MS student. I am considering emailing graduate professors expressing my interest to work as research assistants under the professor's supervision.  Now I have a provisional certificate (no statement of expected date of result publishing) of my bachelor's degree, and I will get the main certificate of my bachelor's degree in the month of May or June. But the application deadline for graduate program is March and April. Is it a wise decision to email graduate professors my provisional certificate of bachelor's degree?

I wouldn't include it in the initial email. The initial email should just be a few sentences where you show that you know what kind of work they do, and try to convince them that you have something interesting to add to the group. I would attach a short CV with your predicted graduation date, but not the provisional certificate.

I have already completed my all coursework and exams of bachelor's degree and waiting for the final result.How should I write this to the professors?  @johanna

@ShamirulIslam Exactly like you wrote it here.

In case of submission of education documents to the university,will the university be convinced with the bachelor's provisional certificate?Doesn't it affect on admission decision?However I will get main bachelor's certificate before the university starts its program on September.@Johanna

@ShamirulIslam When you first make contact with the professor, the official documents do not matter. If you manage to convince a professor to take you on, then you will have to send any official documents you have to the university to be verified. This comes long after first contacting the professor.


text:
Can I submit a paper to an IEEE/ACM journal even if a similar paper is already published by someone else recently?
I'm an undergrad computer science student who has been working on a paper for the past few months, and quite recently I saw a similar paper already published by someone on IEEE.
Can I still publish the paper?
Are there any ways in which I can prove that its an independent paper?

Related: this answer to Fear of someone having the same idea and doing the research before you do

If you have done your research independently, then proving that your work is not plagiarized from the other paper should be almost trivially easy. While some of the core ideas or themes may be the similar, there are so many possible choices in how to go about implementing and testing ideas that the details of your work will almost certainly be quite different --- certainly enough that there is no reason to fear accusations of plagiarism if you didn't plagiarize.
Now, as to whether you can publish or not: the key question here is whether you make any significant contribution in your paper that has not already been made by the other paper.  Since you are aware of the other paper, you must certainly put it in your related work section and discuss how your work is similar or different.  If you can explain a difference that you find to be genuinely significant, then there is a good chance that the reviewers will agree with you, and that your paper can be published.


text:
How to be a cultural representative as an academic?
The fellowship I'm about to apply to requires me to describe how I could be a cultural representative of my country when studying abroad, and how I might serve as a representative of the country I study in when I return back home. I have never thought about that.
At first, I thought about helping other students to reach their dreams or being a connector between two countries as the examples of a cultural representative. However, thinking again, I don't feel it is enough. Yes, doing those will help my country, but any student from any country can also do that. I think being a cultural representative must have these two conditions:

Bringing endemic things from my home (that only some limited places in the world have)
Have an impact to local people

So far, the only satisfactory thing that I can think about is... food. Being a hard working student and not a prodigal are satisfying 2, but cannot satisfy 1 because everybody can do so.

The answer to this question probably depends a lot on whether the "cultural representative" aspect is a primary goal of the fellowship (e.g., if it is designed to enable artists and poets to travel), or if it is a secondary goal (e.g., they want to make sure contact between cultures is a byproduct of what you do).
If it's a primary goal, we probably can't help, and it's probably not for you unless your field is the arts (which I don't think it is).
If it's secondary, however, the big thing is probably to bring your head outside of work and talk about what you'd want to do with your outside time, interacting with the culture around you.  For example, I recently hosted a visiting graduate student through Cultural Vistas "Train USA" program. One of the requirements for setting this up was to provide our plan for exposure to American culture, so I talked about some of the local events and places that I wanted to introduce our visitor to outside of work.  And that's just what we did: my visitor was a good, social person, and enjoyed exploring the area, and though the specific selection of events and places ended up being a bit different than the examples I listed, the spirit was the same.
If the program that you are applying to is similar, then I would suggest it may be good to take a similar approach.  Begin with the plan and assumption that you will be socializing with people outside of your work, and then talk about how others will get exposed to your background and experience through what you would like to do.  Food is a nice example, if that's a thing you enjoy.  Some others: do you play music, or enjoy poetry?  Are there festivals and holidays whose celebration you would want to share?  Are you a movie buff, and want to share locally made good or bad cinema?  The list of possibilities is endless, and depends mostly on what it is that makes you a well-rounded person beyond your research.
Likewise, for the return home think about what people you know at home are likely to ask, and how you will share it with them.  Are you a photographer?  Do you blog? Are there local elementary schools you volunteer at where the kids would like to hear about traveling?  Will the networking connections you build abroad help others to make similar journeys?
In short: think outside the research box, about the rest of what makes you a good and interesting human being.


text:
Is searching in article references considered a systematic way of literature search?
Doing a systematic review, either quantitative or qualitative, requires developing a well-defined protocol as a method of conducting it. This includes defining the search methods used in the identification of eligible articles, which include two methods:

database search using search queries (a main method)
searching in the references and cited-by sections of the selected articles (which are already retrieved by the first method)

Let's assume that an author (of a large review) does their best to formulate the search queries to better represent the review question, but later they realized that considerable amount (e.g. 50% or more) of the relevant articles are found only by using the second method (searching in articles);
Is the second method less 'systematic' than the first one? Does it compromise how much 'systematic' the resulting review is?
If so, does the above scenario affect the validity of the search queries used (i.e. should they be reformulated to increase the recall of search and retrieve more of relevant articles)?
Edit: More extremely: If 90 out of selected 100 articles are found only by using the second method, how much does this affect the quality of the systematic review?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean, because it seems to me that this is either trivial or unanswerable. If the protocol included 1 and 2, then following 1 and 2 is systematic; if you only followed 1 or 2, that would breach the protocol, and not be systematic. Whereas if the protocol included 1 and not 2, then following 1 and not 2 would be systematic; but following 1 and 2 would be a breach of the protocol, and thus less systematic.

Thanks. To make it clear to you: if 90 out of the selected 100 articles are found only using 2, will you be happy with the quality of the review?

Thanks Orion - please do add that to the question: it does help a bit.

I would add to the other answer(s) that you could validate the first approach using the second approach. If your search criteria systematically miss relevant articles in the journals covered by the database, then that's a clear sign you need to reformulate your search criteria because they're clearly not sufficient.
The second thing to add is that any search should also try to find unpublished articles. These are definitely not going to be in databases, but may be cited in papers (thus the importance, at least in my view, of the second approach). It might be worth adding a third approach that involves search conference abstracts, where unpublished (especially recent) work is likely to be found.

+1 for finding unpublished articles in reference lists.

Databases are not complete and published articles do not necessarily reference all pertinent literature so it seems unlikely that one would necessarily capture everything relevant by using just one method.
Databases are probably relatively complete when regarding more recent publications. I would not like to define "recent" however but I see it as mostly post-1990's. But my guess is that databases are centered around more widespread journals and more local journals may not be well-represented. This means that depending on the search area they may be more or less complete. Going back in time more and more will likely not be found in databases so if the topic has a vital history then database searches will cover the "recent".
Reference lists may pick up more older material but that is of course dependent on the authors willingness to research literature. It is possible one might pick up more esoteric references this way but I fear the selection will be fairly random and not comprehensive.
So to use both methods seem like the safest way forward to me. Depending on the subject matter, having deeper understanding for where and when things might have been published in the past may be vital in order to capture most relevant literature on the subject. To venture so far as to say everything will be found is difficult. Particularly during the cold war much was published in for example Russian journals that never reached the west. Many discoveries published in the west were therefore missing out on the eastern counterparts and may not even have been first. Much has thus been lost by lacking translation and that goes for many if not most languages. One must also remember that the publication scene as we see it today was not utilized earlier, when internal reports and local journals may have taken up much research. To rely on just one of the two parts for methodology may therefore be inadequate.

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text:
Guidlines for keeping adminstrative paperwork
I am not sure if this question is best here, workplace.sx, or someplace else ...
I would like to clean off my desk before the semester starts (I am lucky and still have a couple of weeks). My department is far from paperless and many things only get distributed in paper form. While I would love to be organized enough to file away the paperwork from each meeting as it happens, I don't. Instead I have a large pile of all of last years meetings on my desk. I feel like most of these meetings do not directly affect me. I have piles from previous years stuck in my file cabinet. Is it worth saving unorganized papers from meetings or should I just dump them. Is there a better strategy going forward (preferably one that only requires intervention twice a year.)?

I have a red recycling bin next to my desk ....

@DaveClarke would love to hear the thought process behind what gets dumped and when. Is there significance to the red color?

My twice a year strategy is to make sure I sort through my stack at the end of every semester. It's the last thing I do after submitting grades.

If anything is over 1 year old, but not related to an ongoing project or a student currently enrolled, I dump it. I dump stuff related to students 2 or more years after the event. Staff meetings and all of that kind of stuff usually last a year. Red is merely the colour of the recycling box provided by the university. Sometimes I wish for fire to speed things up.

Why not feed everything to a digitisation device, so you can keep PDFs of (possibly) important files, get rid of all paper documents and sort out what's important whenever you have time?

Personally, I would recommend that you start taking notes at these meetings and toss all the handouts. Include the name & contact info of the person doing most of the talking in your notes so that you can contact them in the future if necessary. I use an electronic note-taking tool with user-defined tags to keep track of everything, as I've found it easier to search later on; experiment with different approaches to see what works best with you.
This approach works with most types of handouts, but for things like calendars and class rosters you'll still want to work with paper. Personally, I use something like this; I have two on my desk and I haven't needed more in a while, as I throw out folders when done with them. Even if you just stick them in a huge pile, though, it'll still be less huge than your previous pile, so at least you're better off.


text:
How to tell if a paper is behind a paywall?
I am trying to figure out if a paper is open access or not. My university subscribes to many non-open access journals. Some journals offer mixed models where some papers are open access and others are not.
Some journal websites tell me I have accessed them through an institutional subscription, but if the journal uses a mixed model of open access, that does not mean all papers are behind a paywall. Is there a reliable way to tell if a paper is behind a paywall?
In particular I am interested in knowing if this Nature paper is behind a paywall.

Try downloading it at a local coffee shop or at home.

@JeffE +1 Without using a VPN or anything of course. :-)

FYI Given a DOI pointing to a resource, how can I programmatically know whether the access to the resource is free of charge?

To answer your particular question: When trying to read it from home, it tells me "To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right)." (costs: 30 $US).
You can easily check this by logging in from home, some public WiFi, or even with your mobile device (as long as it is not using WiFi in your university network to connect).

Note that the fact that one needs to pay to access an article does not mean the article cannot be legally accessed for free. For example, JSTOR is notorious for its past habit of charging access to articles that were in the public domain.

For a particular paper you can use the advice provided by OBu above, by trying to click the link over public wifi without logging into your universities library (or you can even use a public library computer or your smartphone)
However, if you want to discover if a particular journal (not article) is open access, mixed access or completely behind a paywall, you can't use this method. for mixed access journals/publishers, the easiest way to tell whether ALL of their articles are behind a paywall or only some is to read the section entitled something like "Instructions for authors". If open access is an option this will always be mentioned somewhere in the instructions for people submitting papers to the journal (because they can pay to make their article open access). The reason why you can't just look up a paper at home and look for "To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right)." is because this may only be the case for some of that journals articles.


text:
The university does not want me to include my advisor's name on my PhD dissertation
My advisor is leaving academia and I will graduating and writing a dissertation on the work that I have done in his lab under his supervision. I have no problem to include him on my dissertation but the university is not allowing me to do that.
Will it be misconduct if I did not list him as a contributor in my dissertation?

This sounds like a very strange situation. I don't think anybody could give you useful advice based on the information you've provided.

Welcome to Academia SE. Unfortunately, I do not think that we can possibly answer your question here as it depends on your university’s guidelines and what mentioning as a contributor signifies according to the university’s rules. For example, at my university, people aren’t mentioned as contributors in a dissertation at all. It may be that your question becomes answerable, if you [edit] in further details, but I doubt that.

Is it possible that the university simply doesn't want your advisor to be listed in the "examiners/reviewers" list? You can always mention your advisor (and his/her influcence on the thesis) in the acknowledgements page at the very least. If your thesis is based on publications with your advisor, then you will also mention that anyway.

I disagree with the closing reason that has been given, since the OP is not asking about policy, but about its ethical implications for themselves. I think it is only unclear what is being asked because of the terminology of "contributor."  I think that what this means is not listing the advisor officially as supervisor or committee member (and that's what my answer assumes).  If the OP will clarify that, then I think this question can be reopened.

If your university requires you to list a different person as thesis advisor, then that's what you need to do---rightly or wrongly, your university determines its policy there, and you need to follow it.
You, however, can certainly make the contributions of your former advisor clear in the acknowledgements.  As with many ethical questions, this can be safely navigated by the application of sunshine: if you clearly state your former advisor's contributions in the acknowledgements, along with the reason that they are not listed as your advisor, then you should not have any trouble with people thinking that you unfairly chose to exclude them.
Note also, that if you later make any peer-reviewed publications out of this work, then if it would be appropriate to list your advisor as a co-author, you can and should do that.

A PhD thesis is supposed to be independent research undertaken by the candidate. This means there should be only one author, regardless of the status of your supervisor within the university.
However, each thesis should have in the front material a page that lists the committee members (and their signatures!) to prove that the thesis has satisfied the rules of the department/faculty/university. It would be most unusual for the university to insist the name of your supervisor be taken off this list.
In addition, of course, you are free to acknowledge any and all assistance you received along the way.

From the description in the question it sounds as though another faculty member has been appointed to take over as the advisor of this student since the former advisor is no longer a faculty member.  Under those circumstances you'd list the committee as it existed at the time the thesis was defended, and you could also acknowledge the former advisor in the acknowledgements section.

At least the "and their signatures!" bit seems to be a highly university-specific statement. I have never seen a thesis that had to be signed by anyone other than the author him- or herself, if at all.


text:
Is there a resource that gives the number of citations per scientist in various countries?
The motivation for this question is attempting to quantify the quality of science in a country.  Getting at quality is difficult, but the number of citations is one way of trying to do so.  Is there any available resource that has computed the number of citations per scientist in various countries?

Somewhat related to the statement "To get at quality is very difficult but the number of citations is one way.": Why is it said that judging a paper by citation count is a bad idea?

I see only statements. What is the question?

@MaartenBuis: See the title: evidently the question is where you can find data on number of citations per scientist by country.

Indeed: the question is where you can find data on number of citations per scientist by country - Wim Hol

I would be surprised if anyone has collected that info. I think you'll need to do a literature search for a past study, or conduct your own study....

Some funding agencies have similar data.  I would check with your national funding agency to see if they have collected this.  It might not be public if they thought no one cares.  I have run into at least data about nobel laureates and number of publications per country.  Per scientist citations might be a stretch.

Related: Research publications per capita?

There is a data set downloadable from SCImago. They used citation data from Scopus. Here is the ranking of the 50 countries with the most citations according to them (full list downloadable from their website; data are between 1996 and 2014).
#  Country          Citations
--------------------------
1  United States    177434935
2  United Kingdom   44011201
3  Germany          35721869
4  Japan            27040067
5  France           24700140
6  Canada           22152666
7  China            19110353
8  Italy            18019464
9  Netherlands      14278721
10 Australia        13772961
11 Spain            12628097
12 Switzerland      10872269
13 Sweden           9417604
14 South Korea      7063429
15 India            6989150
16 Belgium          6691791
17 Denmark          5494671
18 Israel           5079652
19 Brazil           5036027
20 Taiwan           4790230
21 Austria          4334382
22 Finland          4295721
23 Russian Fed.     4289618
24 Poland           3491958
25 Norway           3354827
26 Hong Kong        2951215
27 Turkey           2938841
28 Greece           2702414
29 Singapore        2561645
30 New Zealand      2495935
31 Portugal         2096242
32 Ireland          1999703
33 Mexico           1962572
34 Czech Republic   1867611
35 South Africa     1774278
36 Argentina        1681700
37 Hungary          1660840
38 Iran             1504541
39 Chile            1014687
40 Thailand         976328
41 Egypt            818728
42 Malaysia         670387
43 Ukraine          635570
44 Romania          619956
45 Slovenia         611672
46 Slovakia         561511
47 Saudi Arabia     547167
48 Croatia          459356
49 Bulgaria         455406
50 Pakistan         425467

Now it's unclear from the website how exactly they attribute a paper to a country when there are authors from multiple countries. Note also that, obviously, countries with many papers have many citations. It's fun to re-order the above list on the basis of citations by published paper:
#   Country          Citations per document
-------------------------------------------
1   Switzerland      26.1
2   Denmark          24.94
3   Netherlands      24.56
4   United States    23.36
5   Sweden           23.21
6   Canada           21.4
7   Finland          21.2
8   United Kingdom   21.03
9   Belgium          21.01
10  Israel           20.56
11  Norway           20.17
12  Australia        19.49
13  Austria          19.24
14  Ireland          19.01
15  New Zealand      18.52

Thank you - this is very useful. And fun also. Yes, how to count citations of papers with e.g. 200 authors from 20  different countries is an art by itself. But to arrive at the number of citations PER SCIENTIST by country we still need the number of scientists by country. Any idea where to find those numbers?


text:
Do more people earn BAs or BSs in Linguistics?
I'm interested in the proportion of BAs vs BSs awarded in linguistics in the United States, but it would be interesting to see these numbers for any field really. I haven't been able to find such stats, so even just a link to where these numbers might be found would be very appreciated.

I imagine this is dependent on the country or even the university in question as not everywhere will award BScs in linguistics for instance. (It still baffles me that in some places you can get a BA in physics.)

@astronaut I mean, the whole system of naming fell to shambles when math, one of the liberal arts, stopped being a BA and become a BS ;-)

@guifa I never really got why Math used to be classified as an Art field; it'd seem so out-of-place there.  My speculation's been that, historically, it was seen under Cartesian dualism as a non-empirical field, which presumably justified its separation from the natural sciences, engineering, etc..

@Nat It wasn't classified as a fine art, rather a liberal art. The liberal arts historically included the Trivium (arts of humanities: logic, grammar, rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (scientific arts: music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy)

My school doesn't award ling BSes and I've never heard of a school awarding them (but I haven't looked that comprehensively ...)

My (perhaps flawed) understand that a BA was supposed to be about studying a field (art or science) for the sake of the field itself, while a BS was supposed to focus more on applied use of that field. In a way, a BA was slightly more geared towards preparation for higher degrees, while BS was targeted toward going directly into industry. But that was just my impression based on the universities I attended.

When I was studying linguistics and trying to decide BA or BS, my professors said the BS was not as common because the majority didn't want to take the additional science based classes required. I do not have specific stats. I received my BA in '98 from U of Utah.


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Including a joke in an otherwise correct exam answer as the student
I just read Ethics of awarding points for hilariously bad answers, and it reminded me of my Senior History exam in high school. I was confident in my knowledge and noticed that I had a lot of time left for the second half of the exam (the part where we were allowed to use our historical atlas), so during this second half, I often included a short joke comment between parentheses after the otherwise correct answer. For example, one of the questions I remember asked something about one of the European invasions of WW2, and after the answer itself, I joked about how it wasn't the first time they were conquered and listed a couple of other times they were conquered, like by the Greek, the Romans and a couple other groups I can't quite remember. I think I gave about half a dozen or a dozen jokes like that after relevant, for no other reason or justification other than because I felt like it.
My teacher afterwards told me she found it quite funny to grade my exam, though I cannot really remember anymore whether she adjusted my grades because of them. I don't think she detracted any points and while I can't remember for sure, I think she added a couple percentage points because I showed knowledge of the subject matter beyond what was required. Again, I just did it because I felt like it, though I'm uncertain whether I was influenced by remarks from a substitute teacher that they liked to laugh at absurdly bad exam answers in the teacher's lounge (again, high school, and in a special education school at that).
Now, obviously I didn't do this with the intent of getting a better score or something like that. I just did it because I felt like it, autistic brains are weird like that. But I'm wondering: Assuming an answer that's correct as far as you know, could it be a problem as a student to add a relevant joke to an otherwise correct answer? Could it impact the immediate and/or long term evolution of my grades, education and professional/academic life beyond just this exam, whether negatively or positively?

What exactly do you mean? In most grading systems I know, the teacher has a lot of leeway and usually, nobody can override the grade. So are you asking whether there exist teachers who deduct inofficially points for jokes or who have a worse perception of you?

@user111388 hmm, I might have inadvertently excluded the biggest reason as to why not to do this. I'll update the question.

I still don't understand. Why shouldn't it depend on the teacher how they grade? One teacher may like it and laugh and give you better grades. One other teacher might think of it as a waste of their time and give you a worse grade. A third teacher might not care. All three do exist. is this the answer you are after or something else?

@user111388 I don't know what answer I am after. Why else did you think I asked this? Like, is there some sort of unspoken rule that you need to know the answer to your question before you ask, defeating the entire point of asking questions?

You might want to clarify what you mean. Are you asking whether making jokes might affect your grade? Then the answer is (obviously) "yes, it could affect the grade both positivly or negativly". Or are you asking something else? I cannot answer if I don't know what your question means.

As I understand, your main question is:
Could it impact the immediate and/or long term evolution of my grades, education and professional/academic life beyond just this exam, whether negatively or positively?
Immediate grade: Obviously. People might have different rules on how they grade. Graders are usually humans who are impacted conciously and subconsiously by their students' actions (and how they speak, look etc.) One teacher might like you more for making jokes, one might be angry that you wasted their time, one might not find the correct answer because you wrote too much irrelevant things etc. One might not care. In grading, almost everything is possible.
Long term evolution of grades, life: Most likely not. If you have one teacher in different courses who likes you or doesn't like you because of jokes, this might play into other exams. However, usually, after a course is over, if at all, people care about the grade you got and not why you got it. It's unlikely that anyone will see the exam after the end of the course.
If you get extremly famous, it might be a nice episode about you that you made jokes on exams. Or not.

"If you get extremely famous...". Definitely a line in your Wikipedia profile. But the upvote is for the caveat.

@Buffy: I'd say it also depends on the joke. The one in the question probably not.

Maybe get a line anyway, even if it is bad. Wikipedia profiles are written by others (or so the rules say).

I think the answer to this question is going to depend heavily on the teacher. Still, some points:

The linked question shouldn't be relevant, because that deals with a situation where the joke answer is clearly incorrect. In your case you know the answer and your response makes it clear you do.
If we believe the top-voted answers to this question represent attitudes as a whole, you could have written an incorrect joke and probably still be awarded full marks.
However, there are people who will grade you down if your joke is incorrect. Most teachers would probably grade you down anyway if the scoring were X/10 (as opposed to full marks/no marks).
Finally, your joke had better be funny, because if it offends the teacher somehow it could backfire badly. This is not always clear-cut, e.g. there could be competing versions of history (e.g. opinions on Fidel Castro are heavily polarized with some viewing him as a hero and some viewing him as a villain).

In other words, this should be OK as long as 1) your joke is technically correct and 2) your joke is legitimately funny.

Overthinking, much? A joke is appreciated as a joke, nothing more nothing less and in my practice it would never affect marks (could not possibly have, for that matter). A joke is a joke. An outburst of anger (an infrequent occurrence) would make me regret on the student's behalf that they did not spend that time improving some other answer. Very frequent were little sorry notes for missing a question, as if I, the instructor, were the one being let down. A final category of student exam paper missives (irrelevant to marking) were declarations of love (go figure, as marking was anonymous!).

The problem with writing extra stuff, like jokes, is it can turn into a bad habit. Clear, enjoyable "just the facts" writing is difficult. There are lots of things to pay attention to, and it's always possible to rewrite to make it better. Thinking about what jokes to add is a distraction you don't need. If you must do something, doodle on the paper (I've seen this on plenty of tests and it's fine).
The goal isn't so much to get better at writing test answers. Answering test Q's is practice for writing real essays, or technical articles, and so on.
As far as grading, extra jokes are only a minor problem. Grading tests can be a chore and it's easiest when the grader sees a 100% correct answer, with nothing extra and can write 20/20 on top and move on. Beyond that, we don't always know it's a joke. We might take off a point because you think the Spartans fought in WWII. Sure, if you bring the test back in we'll see it was a joke and fix it, but that's a pain.
And we don't even laugh at joke answers, or enjoy them. During grading we sometimes share ones that are wrong in a very strange way (but we aren't mean about it, and never, ever say what student wrote it).

I never made public hilariously wrong answers, other than discussing them with people helping me mark that paper. I think it is charming and cute with primary school kids, but I felt I should treat undergraduates with the respect adults are due, deserving or not.

@Deipatrous I suppose the last paragraph could be more clear about "even if you write a joke, we won't think it's funny".

could it be a problem as a student to add a relevant joke to an otherwise correct answer?

Yes: The invasion and conquering of a nation isn't funny. Joking about such events won't curry favor with examiners. Although examiners should be impartial, they are human and some impartiality could be lost.

I'm unable to imagine why this got downvoted twice-seems succinct and clear.


text:
Potential issues with uploading copyrighted material to TurnItIn?
My university uses TurnItIn to check student's work for plagiarism and collusion. I think the underlying TurnItIn database includes both submitted work and material it has found by crawling the web, but not material behind pay walls. One major issue with TurnItIn, and presumably all plagiarism detection software, is that it can only compare submitted work to material which is in the database. This means that TurnItIn either misses when students copy from textbooks which are behind a pay wall or matches other sources which have plagiarised the textbook.
My department's academic misconduct committee is thinking about seeding the TurnItIn database with the textbook chapters that are most often used by the students by submitting a number of "assignments" that are copies of the textbook chapters. This would require an individual member(s) of staff to submit assignments that contained copied copyright material. Is it possible that this could get the staff member in trouble in the future? We were thinking about adding something like:

The following submission is intended to seed the TurnItIn database and is an exact copy of FULL REFERENCE.

Would this work, or would TurnItIn realize that it is being given copyrighted material and purge it from its database?

I'd be less concerned about TurnItIn purging it than about the copyright holder suing the pants off you. You'd probably have to discuss this with your institution's lawyers.

@StephanKolassa I agree, but I wouldn't be the one making money off it, TurnItIn would be, so I think they would be more at risk.

Use should check with the folks at Turnitin, but I believe that it makes use of the Crossref database which includes published materials (journals, conference proceedings and books) from most commercial publishers.  See http://www.crossref.org/

Do you hold the copyright in the textbooks in question or have a license that allows you to submit a copy of their work? If not, don't do it. It's a copyright violation.

@BillBarth it is possibly, probably probably, a copyright violation but since any illegal copies in my possession will be destroyed immediately, I won't make a profit, and TurnItIn would be causing the financial losses (if any), I am not sure it matters.

@BrianBorchers TurnItIn includes some books, but it misses many of our core textbooks.

@StrongBad, profit has only a small part to do with it. If you are trying to make a fair use argument in the US, that's one prong (market for the work), but it's not everything. Copyright law allows the holder to control distribution of copies, and by sending it to TurnItIn, you are distributing a copy without permission. Don't open yourself to suit. Fair use is a defense to suit, not a get out of jail free card. You still might have to go to court to defend a suit, which is expensive. Just don't do it.

@BillBarth You are right, they can sue. However, the OP is in the UK which is not nearly litigious as the US. Add to this the fact that the publisher would be unlikely to know it was posted (TurnItIn does not make it publicly available) and the fact that it is literally distributing a single copy, I believe the downside is extremely limited.

@earthling, first, the textbook publisher may be in the US and can sue the uploader there instead of where they live. Second, copyright infringement is against civil law (i.e. not a crime at this scale) and statutory damages are provided for infringement. Are you suggesting that it is ethical for faculty to break the law to catch students cheating? That doesn't pass the sniff test. OP might be only making one copy, but it's still probably wrong. Is that the kind of ethics we want to demonstrate to our students in our zeal to catch their plagiarism?

@BillBarth I do not think it is unethical. The legal side is unclear but I remain convinced the risk to the school and the OP is extremely small. Of course, they decide and live with the benefits and consequences.

@earthlng, so your ethics say, if the legal case is unclear, just do what you want? I think erring on the side of caution here is the more ethical approach. OP doesn't appear to have consulted with their university's legal department for an opinion. I wouldn't go further without doing so. Finally, I think the easiest and best thing to do is to ask the publisher to submit the textbook to TurnItIn.

so your ethics say, if the legal case is unclear, just do what you want? — Oh, come on.  Not basing your ethics on existing law doesn't mean you don't have any.

@BillBarth My ethics do not say that. I believe that something can be unethical and legal but something else can be ethical and illegal. Legality and ethics do not define each other. And, yes, I agree with your suggestion, the publisher doing that would help everyone.

@JeffE, I do not accuse earthing of having no ethics, so don't be so dramatic. Ethics isn't usually about making risk tradeoffs. It's usually about doing the "right" thing in the face of things that you believe "ought" to be different. Taking someone else's property and giving it to another in order to make one's own life easier without bothering to ask the original owner even if you might win a court battle over it later is definitely unethical in my book. I think OP should ask the publisher to submit and suck it up and deal with it if they won't. Catching cheaters is not more important.

I fail to see the difference between uploading copyrighted material to Turnitin, and uploading students submissions, some of which may content copyrighted text. In fact the reason to upload students works to Turnitin is that they are suspected of containing copyrighted works.

This is a bit long for a comment, but I also acknowledge that only someone from TurnItIn could categorically answer this.
Since TurnItIn does not provide access to source material (other than small sections which actually match the submitted paper), I do not see how it could be a copyright issue. I get matches all the time from papers submitted to other schools, yet, TurnItIn does not allow me to see that paper.
Additionally, much of the content within TurnItIn is under copyright (blogs and others) and they do not purge it, further implying that they would not have a problem with your plan.
All that said, unless the content is quite new, or changed regularly, as soon as one student includes content, any other student including that same content will trigger a flag for you.
So, I do not believe your plan will have any problem but I am also not sure you need to worry about it unless you have a special set of texts you believe other students around the world will not have access to.

Our academic misconduct policy says we need to find the original source. This means that when an assignment matches a student's paper at another university, which we cannot access, then we need to find the original source. We think this would help us get back to the original source.

@StrongBad Then I think it will solve your problem.

This answer is very wrong with respect to whether the proposed actions would raise any copyright issues. Providing TurnItIn with copies of any copyright-protected works for which the submitter has neither the copyright nor a permissive license is presumptively a copyright violation. There have been cases holding that submitting student works does not violate the students' copyrights, but I think the issue is still unclear when it comes to you submitting a textbook owned by someone else. Furthermore such disclaimer statements have NO VALUE in defense against copyright infringement suits.

@BillBarth the disclaimer wasn't for copyright protection, but rather for professional misconduct protection (to the extent that copyright infringement is not professional misconduct, or something like that).

@StrongBad, such disclaimers may or may not have any value to you in front of a misconduct tribunal. I wouldn't given them much weight.

@BillBarth Can you provide some evidence of the cases you mentioned? I know LOTS of people have problems with turnitin but I am unfamiliar with anyone winning a case for copyright infringement and would like to see the details of the ruling(s).

@earthling, Google "turnitin copyright issues" and find this 2008 article on TechDirt. Etc.

@BillBarth Since the link said it was not copyright infringement, i think tje jury is still out. I believe the issue is that Turnitin is not publishing that content or making it available to others. However, I do agree that this can vary by country just like dl'ing movie torrents is ok in some countries if nobody is paying.

@earthling, TurnItIn might be off the hook when it comes to student-produced content, but there's nothing in evidence that would clear an uploader of textbook.

@BillBarth Perhaps, but the burden of proof would fall on the accusor. That's why I would like to see a case where your theory is tested.

@earthling, OP might become the first if they follow their current proposed course of action. Why don't you upload a textbook, call the publisher, and dare them to sue you? Then we'll know for sure.

My guesstimate is that this at least in Germany (where I some little knowledge about copyright) this would not be covered by any copyright exception.
But, why not go the official way and ask the publisher?
Or ask turnitin to ask the publisher?

Copyright refers to the right to make a copy, so your scheme violates US copyright law, and that's that as far as the ethical question is concerned. Whether the author / publisher could recover damages from you (or whoever the copier is) depends on strategic questions such as the depth of your pockets. Acting as an agent for a university, the pockets could be pretty deep. Making a profit is not part of the definition of copyright violation. It could also expose Turnitin to legal action by the copyright holder, which means they could have a cause of action against you. OTOH they may realize that it's unlikely that a publisher would actually bother.

Copyright is a legal condition, not an ethical one.

It's a legal recognition of a property right, and respect / violation for rights is an ethical question.

The boundaries of property rights are an ethical question that is independent of the law.

@JeffE, on the contrary and as noted here, exposing a third party to risk of harm without their informed consent is generally considered unethical. If that harm is a lawsuit, then that intertwines questions of ethics and questions of law. They are not always independent.


text:
Ph.D. in UK/Ireland as "Dipl.-Ing." from Germany
Is it feasible for an engineering student from Germany to get into a Ph.D. program in the UK/Ireland? Specifically, what should one keep in mind/try to accomplish in the last two years before finishing the "Diplom"? How would one apply?
Maybe this question can be extended to other combinations of countries, but I didn’t want it to be too broad.

From what I gather (from wikipedia) an EngD is not much different, but maybe more closely related to the industry. Maybe you could add how it is perceived in the UK (and Germany) at the industry,i.e. is it widely known?

I have a "Dipl.-Ing. (FH)" and a "M.Eng." (same FH, both "Elektrotechnik") and did a Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering at the University of Limerick. They would have accept me without the Masters as well, but then you need to first start a "Masters by Research" and then you can apply for a transfer to the Ph.D. course after one year.

In short, yes. If you're talking about the "traditional" 5 year Diplom, it's essentially equivalent to an MSc, which is what most universities require to start a PhD (although some only require a Bachelor's degree). I don't think you need to keep anything in particular in mind when finishing, apart from making sure that you get good grades for your transcript :)
The application procedure wouldn't be any different from other students, although you may have to explain in some detail what your degree is.

Thank you for your answer. I have to admit that I don’t know what the usual application procedure for a regular British Ph.D. student is. Maybe that should go into another question though.

You'll find instructions on the page that advertises a PhD position. Usually you need to contact whoever is in charge and send CV/transcript/etc.

Yes, it is certainly possible.
One thing to keep in mind is that practically all PhD programs in the UK require some evidence of an acceptable standard of English (see here for an example), usually IELTS or TOEFL tests, and depending on your English skills, this might warrant some preparation during the last year of your Diplom.
Many PhD programs also require at least two letters of recommendation, so the sooner you have an idea who might provide these for you, the better.

Good to know about the English tests. Do the letters of recommendation have to be from a university, or are industrial recommendations possible as well?

@Psirus: As someone who reviews admissions applications, a good letter from someone who knows you well is better than a weak letter that doesn't provide any insight. It would be better if you had at least one letter of recommendation from an academic advisor, but it won't help you if it's not a good letter.