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When is it useful to include the code in a thesis?
I am writing my master of science thesis and I am not sure whether I should add some of the code I have written: they are not proper programs, but more like input files to be fed to a commercial program (Nastran) very popular in my field.
My concerns are related to the fact that I am not making any discovery, just applying the things I have learned reading the manual. Still, I feel the code will make the effort I put into the thesis to also learn this language clearer.

I would propose that something like data input would be suitable for an appendix in the computer science field.

When? Always. Including the input files. Everything.

Please include the code. CS papers tend to be unreadable without any code.

If there is any piece of code that is really important for your process, it should be in a float and commented. If there is any new trick, a fluxogram describing the new process should be used. Full code should be put on Github or Bitbucket and referenced, no matter if it is "just preprocessing". Perhaps a Gist? (http://www.labnol.org/internet/github-gist-tutorial/28499/)

@Navin That's very dependent on the paper. For most of the CS papers I write, there simply is no code to include. For many of the CS papers other people write, there's so much code that including it would make the paper far too long. And who ever reads printouts of more than a few lines of code anyway?

My take on this -- in a physics PhD -- was that code that had a bearing on the results should be included in the appendix.  I read in the entire source of my data-processing routines (using the listings package in LaTeX) and included them.
But I skipped bits like 40 consecutive lines of assigning defaults to variables (0s for later incrementing) or writing a default config file:

(check the line numbers in the example)
This is easy to do in listings, as is setting monospaced fonts and code highlighting.
I'm not saying this is the right way of doing it, just a sensible  way.  I may not even have implemented this approach as well as I could have done.
Of course, this will depend on your field.  In my case the code was an important processing step in the results of some tricky new experiments.  No-one is realistically going to want to replicate my code, checking some aspects of it is another matter.  And yes, I do have every intention of making it available as well -- but it would be of limited use given that my coding style could at best be described as "scientist, self taught in Python".

I don't think this is a good approach: I can't see what anyone would want to do with a partial printout of your code. A description of what the code is supposed to do and a URL from which it can be downloaded would both be much more useful.  (Though I assume the main text of your thesis already contains the former.)

@davidricherby, while that's a nice idea it presupposes the existence of a suitable (by which I mean permanent and academic) URL. That option didn't exist for me. The electronic library copy of the thesis may be identical to the paper copy so that's no good. In my case I could save significant amounts of boring code and still include the routines that actually went to work on the data, while the overall process was described in the body (using flowcharts and assuming little or no programming knowledge).

Making your code available along with your thesis can be very helpful to other researchers who are trying to reproduce your results.  I'd encourage you to do this.
However, you should not simply insert a printout of your code into the text of the thesis, since that will make it difficult (practically impossible) for someone to use the code that they obtain from a printed copy of the thesis or even a .PDF of the thesis.  Rather, you should put the code into some online repository (such as e.g. github) so that others can download the code from the web.

I was thinking to put all the codes in an appendix not to interrupt the results-flow in the main body of the thesis. So I will add there also the link to the download page right? And another thing, should I comment the code to explain what I did or just show it?

Even printing the code out in an appendix is a waste of paper- just link to where it can be downloaded.  You should always comment your code.

Moderately small amounts of code can be copy-and-pasted from the PDF, if the packages used for including it are well configured (which is not always trivial to achieve). For larger amounts, a nifty trick is embedding the source files in the pdf.

While I agree that this is probably the most useable approach, it may be the case that thesis regulations require you to include the code - if it is to be considered part of the thesis - as a hardcopy on a DVD or some such. Should be easy to check that, though.

I'd find it massively more useful to have an appendix pointing to a stable repository of code and a description of what the code does than to just have an appendix of code.

In computer science, I am very much used to (and encourage) theses that contain any noteworthy code snippets as floats. In fact, as theses provide virtually unlimited space, there is no need for the extreme brevity of papers and a Concept chapter that describes the rationale for design decisions in the developed concept is usually followed by an Implementation chapter that can describe the implemented version in depth, including (but not limited to) showing presentation-worthy excerpts of the source code.
In most cases, this does not mean that whole source code files should be printed. This is usually referring to a few lines of code, or single methods that implement a specific algorithm.
For input/output files, things are similar, and they may be even more important than code snippets, as they may explain the handling and actual output of a prototype developed as a part of the thesis.
Contrary to various other answers here, I advise against putting any source code in the appendix in the usual case. The appendix is for extensive information that may be needed for further reference, but which is too "boring" to integrate in its entirety in the main body of text. This implies that the information in the appendix should be optimized so it can be taken advantage of in a meaningful way. In other words, the appendix in a (printed) document may be good for human-readable questionnaires or sets of tables, but full source code files should always be delivered in digital form (and in universities I am familiar with, (at least CS) theses have to be handed in as printed documents that are accompanied by a CD). Source code snippets that go into the main body of text as floats serve the same purpose as figures, tables or formulas in the main body of text - they illustrate something which would be too cumbersome to describe in the text.

@Brian Borchers's answer is sound, and it sounds like it would apply best in your case.
However, if you used a particularly interesting or novel algorithm to generate your input files (that is, you had unusual insight into how best to solve your problem that might help others), then in addition to linking your code to an online repository, you could provide a pseudocode description of that algorithm in your main body or an appendix, depending on flow. (If you're not sure if your process is sufficiently interesting, ask your advisor.)

I think you must contact your supervisor for a proper answer for this question because he/she will be the person who is going to evaluate your thesis.
If your course is more into technical stuff you might have to add more code than for a theoretical MSc.
My personal advice is to contact your supervisor/lecturer/tutor and get their opinion.


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Should I admit that I can't find a solution to a math problem?
The problem is pretty much the title. I have a bachelor and master degree in applied math. I have been assigned a small problem to start with, from a professor (who is considered very good in my field) who is willing to give me a reference, which in turn I need in order to apply for a PhD position. Our common goal is for me to work gradually on the problem and, if I solve it, produce a published paper. This is a huge matter for me as do not yet have any publications, and it will (I believe) boost my chances to obtain a PhD position. The problem is that I have been working for a month on this and I have not reached an answer. So, considering that he said that this first problem would be pretty easy to deal with, I am really wondering what to do.
I need an answer on this: Should I admit to this person that is highly accomplished that I am having difficulties at what he asked from me? or should I tell him all I have got up till now even if that is not even close to a solution?

Uh, both? Tell him what you did so far AND tell him what you're having trouble with.

would it be better for your ego to pretend you could solve it, giving a wrong impression to the professor and affect subsequent decisions?

It's not a question of ego. In most collaborations, no one expects you to meet next time with the finished paper: you meet to discuss your progress, and take it from there. If this can really lead to a publication, it's probably less obvious than you seem to believe it is.

Of course tell your professor.  If it turns out that you could not do that problem, he may adjust it or propose a different one to start on.  Even if (unlikely worst case) he says "If you can't do that then you shouldn't be working with me." it is better to find out now rather than later.

I must add that a month it is a very little time to work on a problem. Just be fair, tell you professor what have you done so far. Also, you can try to discuss different problems or approaches with your professor.

Based on your other recent question about your career in math (posted today) and that you just joined (today), I think you might be a little worked up (today). You stated in your other question that you've only been looking for PhDs for 3 months, and you've only been working on this problem for 1 month.  I've spent a month working on just a couple lines of code before.  Leave your ego behind, take a day off, and talk this through with your advisor.

PhD students are supposed to be somewhat 'needy', specially at the start. If they could do without any guidance, they wouldn't need to be phd students :) [yes there are a couple of outliers in the world, but nevertheless]. How much guidance you need/your advisor wants to give you depends on each pair, but I, personally, really hate when one of my students go on the wrong direction and doesn't tell me, because it is highly probable he/she is wasting precious time...

@ina "so no ego then?" No ego. When you're getting into academic research and aiming to expand the boundaries of knowledge, you have to check your ego at the door. You have to be willing to explain what you've tried, where you've failed, what you're struggling with, and you have to be willing to accept criticism - sometimes even harsh criticism, and channel it to make the work better rather than taking it too personally. You also have to accept that others can have good ideas - even some that may directly conflict with yours - and learn your field's standards for how to decide which to accept.

I assume that you are aware that "Advisor asked me to solve math problem X" doesn't even imply that this particular problem is solvable? It just expresses a desire for you to work in that direction and see what results you come up with, possibly only vaguely related to the original issue.

If a professor says "this is easy, you can crack it in a couple days", expect to spend the next three months banging you head against the wall. Sometimes, this is because your professor is smarter and more experienced than you are and can see lines of attack that are not obvious to you. Other times, it is because he is seriously wrong about the difficulty of the problem. In either case, the solution is to go to him, explain what you tried, and ask for advice and help. That's what being a good student means.

No you shouldn't you should just admit that the answer to the problem is entirely too complex for your current understanding.

This is absolutely wrong. "I haven't been able to solve this yet, but was able to try some ideas" is not at all the same thing as "this problem is too complex for my understanding".

I wonder what the alternative to admitting problems would be. Avoid the advisor? Or "I solved it easily, but I will not tell you how"? :)

Maybe he is testing you. Maybe he told you it was easy so you would be under stress and have the problem you are having.

I don't know why you think there are any options other than both.  Of course you shouldn't just say "I'm having difficulties, full stop" without talking about what you have tried.  Of course you shouldn't just say "this is what I did" without also talking about where you're stuck.
You sound like you're worried about making the best impression on this professor.  The best impression you can make here is showing that you have the maturity to deal with doing research: to work hard on a problem, be aware of both what you've accomplished and what you haven't, and be able to ask for help where you need it.
There are bunch of things that could be happening:

You went off in the wrong direction, or missed something, and the professor will be able to help get you back on the right track.
The problem is actually harder than the professor thought, and explaining why you're stuck will make that clear to them.
The problem is harder than you thought, and the professor expected you to need some help.

In all of those cases, the absolute best thing to do is honestly present the work you've done.  The less you worry about framing things to make you look good, the better you actually end up looking.

Good answer. As OP says in another question that they are looking at industry positions too, it's maybe even more important to lose this attitude for industry. There's nothing more toxic than a lone wolf. Always rely on all resources available, and share them (progress) freely with others.

Two more bullets: the professor couldn't solve it but thinks (or hopes) that you can; or he knows it's not solvable and is testing whether you'll admit it.

Also, the process of research is collaborative. It's very rare in math research (and probably everywhere) for someone to just receive a problem and solve it. You have ideas, bounce them off your advisor or collaborators or friends, receive their thoughts and ideas, read papers, repeat.... You don't just flex your genius muscle and extrude a paper! But don't worry, you wouldn't know this unless you get started.

Another possibility is that the problem the professor thought he gave you isn't the same problem you've been working for a month on.  Perhaps the professor was thinking of an easy case, while you're trying to solve the (much harder) general one...

I am a professor of (theoretical) mathematics at a state university in the US.  In recent years I have advised a number of graduate students: so far, one master's student and three PhD students have written theses under my direction, and I currently have two PhD students.
Just now I tried to look back over these six students and recall if any of them ever just solved a problem I gave them with no intermediate discussion or help from me.  This definitely happened once: one of my students did something brilliant over the course of a couple of weeks that became the main core of his PhD thesis.  There is another case where a group of students working in a research seminar with me quickly and completely independently came up with a clever, computationally-intensive way of answering a question soon after I raised it in the seminar.  And my first student was exceptionally strong: to my mind his thesis work was done mostly independent of me, but that did not stop him from asking a steady stream of technical questions both of me and his co-advisor.
I could complement each of the stories above by half a dozen more involving the same students, in which they got very substantial help from me, or -- even more commonly -- simply abandoned the problem because they did not have the prerequisites / could not make progress / was not to their taste / was too difficult, too technical or otherwise poorly chosen by me.  I won't tell such explicit stories, of course, but you should be aware that virtually every graduate student in mathematics could.  In my opinion, thinking that you need to talk to your advisor only after you've solved a problem (even a "small" one, or even a single step of a problem) is a major misunderstanding of what the student / advisor process is like in mathematics.  I don't know how it is in other academic fields, but as a student in mathematics when you start (trying to) do research you don't have a clue.  Somehow you need to get from not having a clue to research success in the span of several years: you do that by getting a lot of help from your advisor.
When I was a PhD student (at one of the top programs in the world, with one of the most eminent advisors in the world) I was very independent.  I would usually meet with my advisor less than once a month.  When I met with him more often, I felt like I was telling him an incomplete story: you asked me about this, and I am trying this, and it is starting to look like it won't work, so maybe next I will try that...I wanted to go through the entire process of acquiring background and trying to solve a problem in all the ways I could think of by myself: by talking to him sooner than that, I felt I wasn't giving him my best effort.  In retrospect I really think I played this mostly wrong: my approach fanned the flames of my independence, but at the cost of much of the help and insight I could have gotten from my world-renowned advisor.  In recent years my professional confidence has grown a lot, and I am much more willing to tell someone "You know, I thought about what you told me [for, say, a day or two] and couldn't work it out.  Here's where I got stuck.  Can you tell me a little more about...?"
Now I work with PhD students and often wish they would check in more often -- both more often chronologically and more often in terms of steps of their own thought process.  I've had so many meetings where it turned out that students were spinning their wheels for 4-6 weeks on something that gets cleared up immediately upon meeting: either I resolve the point they're stuck on (there is no shame in that, by the way; I would much rather a student spend three months on a problem, getting stuck every so often and allowing me to unstick them than spending three years solving the problem completely independently) or they misunderstood what I told them and are going down the wrong track or it turns out that what I suggested definitively doesn't work.
The point is that getting help from your advisor -- substantially and often -- is much of the value gained from being in a PhD program at all.  You should not at all feel embarrassed about asking your advisor for help.  Instead you should work on asking for help in a way which shows knowledge and professionalism: don't just say "I'm stuck."  Explain where you're stuck.  Better yet: when you leave any meeting with your advisor you should have been given at least one specific thing to try out, and when you come back you should report on that (very small, usually) thing.  If it worked...but seriously, it usually won't work, in which case you should endeavor to try to explain why it didn't work.  Just coming and saying "I couldn't do this" to your advisor is not very helpful.  At best, it is liable to elicit your advisor telling you what she thinks will work to solve the problem: this could be helpful...or she could solve the problem before your eyes.
Let me finally say that most thesis advisors I know have relatively poor ideas about the true difficulty of a problem and how long it will take a student to solve it.  (To be fair, you can give the same problem to two students of ostensibly equal background and abilities, and very often one of them will spend months or years longer on it than the other.)  An advisor who thinks that a problem is "quick" or "easy" probably means that it is quick or easy for her.  Also, there may well be (and arguably should be, at least eventually) unforeseen difficulties.  Finally, academics are famous for underestimating the amount of time it takes to do anything: the same advisor who is looking down her nose a little bit at you for taking several months to solve an "easy" problem may well have just sent an email explaining that her referee report will be several months late.
Good luck!

you don't have a clue -- If you had a clue, it wouldn't be research!

What a wonderful answer, very thorough. As a side joke, I would feel like asking what's the difference between "mathematics" and "theoretical mathematics" :-).

And "easy" may mean different things.  I think of things I could do in months, rather than years, as being "easy problems."

Even though quite good answers to the question were provided I will share my story as I hope some people might find it insightful. I am a PhD student (applied math, mostly quantum related stuff as I did study theoretical physics before) just finishing the first year and what I will share is what happened to me for the past few months.
During a conversation with my advisor (and I guess it was not even proper meeting, but just some talking in the corridor of the institute) she told me that I should probably try to prove this one thing, that it should hold. I did that quite fast as it really was very easy. Then I did study some literature, mostly recent papers and I realized that probably even the converse should hold. As it usually goes, this was way harder to prove, but I was unable to find a counter-example, I was capable of developing some idea how the proof should go almost immediately but for a week or so I was not capable or putting together the actual proof.
When I did talk to my advisor during our weekly meeting I did present my idea on how the proof should go based on some assumptions and I admitted that until now I was not able to prove the result properly. Since this was a problem I did come up with myself she did not have an idea how to prove it, but she pointed out that I should look up exposed faces in the literature. Literally, she told me something like: "Look up exposed faces in Barvinok's book". Just that. Even this simple sentence helped me to finish the proof (if it is correct, I have to wait until august to ask her about that).
The morale is that you should talk to you advisor no matter what. In my humble opinion the reason is that those people after working in mathematics for years have a lot of experiences and can point out useful things even if they can not provide the full answer.

Ok, not gonna lie here...I have degrees in RTVF & English, and math set off my panic response in my lovely little anxiety bubble I hid quite well (with the exception of people trying to tutor me in math - there was no hiding it then.)
I do, however, see parallels to my writing efforts to get published, gain traction with those for whom my career was being nurtured, etc. I apologize right off the bat if this is terribly simplistic or irrelevant to your quandary! "Occam's Razor Theory" popped into my head...& all I can think about are all the times I went through the looong litany of ways to achieve my desired end result, always with that notion that at I could quit, when all along, I was missing the point - simplicity is the answer to overthinking.
Everything I'd ever learned from my parents AND the best educators I'd been fortunate enough to have had take me under a wing. That advice was ALWAYS when struggling, seek out that person for whom the work is to be validated, or that mentor somewhere that can help you refocus, etc. Because it's not a bother to them...
No matter the level you ultimately land in a career, there will always be need for collaboration. No one truly goes it alone. And from what I have heard about such things as your current work, there are those who take months if not years to complete - if this is not one of those kinds of taskers that allow for that allotment of time, all the more reason to go to the person in the know for help. It will not be a blight on your abilities, rather a star on your wisdom in doing what needs to be done & getting that info from the right person. (Let's face it, the "right person" getting asked for a bit of help never insulted that "right person!")

I would like to  to add to the previous answers by offer one extra piece of advice.  Before admitting to your advisor that you are stuck, try to find some tangentially related problems and make a little bit of progress on those.  Your advisor will be happy that you have something, and it also shows initiative.  It will possibly give your advisor more ways to direct you in the future.

It's a bit like the general requirements for asking on Stack Exchange sites. Show effort and research of your own and help will be given freely.

The answer by Pete Clark is beautiful and kind and reflects a lot of real in the trenches time.  I will just add a little perspective (more from the worker side, not the manager...never been a prof but did my "union card").
First:  Realize that the incentives of professors and students are different.  A tenured prof in a research setting wants to solve dramatic problems that get him prizes.  These are butt-hard.  There are profs I know who have burned multiple students in a row having them bang their heads against a problem that they didn't solve (in some cases wasting years of their time and not getting the union card).  For the student this is a calamity.  For the prof, it is not.  Now, I absolutely don't think your prof is doing this.  But you need to realize it is an extreme example to show the difference of student and prof.
Second:  I have learned doing a lot of new, hard problems as a consultant that it is easier to be stupid early.  A month is not the end of the world (for an academic) but it would be a calamity in the business world. In general at the beginning, you want to interact and show something, progress, effort, difficulty, etc.  There is a slick way to show it ("here is my progress" versus "here I am stuck").  But in any case, it is better to interact early and get redirected early than later.  This is not just an academia thing, it is a life thing!
I actually do have a huge value for the Message to Garcia (read it).  You don't want to have no initiative.  But at same time if you are stuck...interact early.

Our common goal is for me to work gradually on [a small] problem and, if I solve it, produce a published paper.

A published paper pretty much implies a problem not previously solved.  "small" in that context means something like well-confined.  However, the well-confinedness is a guess.  Fermat's Last Theorem looks like something that should be doable with congruences, and pulling something off with congruences is a lot of routine and skill.  Small problem.  Now it has been proven that within a given framework of congruences, Fermat's Last Theorem is not provable (not false, merely not provable).  This proof ruling out a whole infinite class of "small problem solutions" is, in turn, not actually a small problem.
It turns out that even though FLT seems very much in the ballpark of a lot of "small problems", it's actually on a very slim borderline of "true by a very small margin", requiring a whole lot of new techniques to reel in.
You haven't reeled in your fish yet.  Nobody else apparently did either which may just mean that it's a fish in a boring lake nobody visits.  But it can still be a big fish whether or not it would be edible.
Maybe you just need somebody to show you a different angle of pulling the line.  Maybe you need an entirely different reel.  Maybe the best thing you can hope to do is to get a good size estimate of the fish to alert bigger fishers.
Your have an advisor, not a task master.  This is a perfect point to get his advice.  As a researcher, you are expected to spend your time well.  When you stop making progress, you are not doing so.  Now sometimes you just need to get stuck in a certain place for long enough in order to find a solution.  But that's expensive, and you should make it count.  Getting stuck somewhere where a more experienced person can point you out in 5 minutes is not making it count.  You may or may not be there.
So: discuss.

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Should I mention my blog in my SOP?
I did a bunch of code projects like implement a algorithm or use the code from a paper on a different dataset. These may not be unique (they may be, but I am not sure). I wouldn't say that these projects have the best efficiency/accuracy for a particular problem. But these are stuff that I was just messing around with and got some interesting outputs. I maintain a blog about all these activities that I do. These projects are related to machine learning, a subject in which I am interested in pursuing a MS degree.
Should I mention these blog posts in my SOP?
My SOP is a research statement, and these are not entirely research projects, but they do reflect my interest in machine learning. Would mentioning these projects benefit me in any way?
If you do recommend that I mention them, how should go about that?

Is your blog written in English or the same language of the readers? Is your blog's content mainly relevant to your work, or just a general blog?

Written in English and very much relavant to my work. However there is a general section.

You can add these details into your question, so that further readers can know what's your problem. Anyway, if your blog is well written in English and very much relevant to your work, I don't think there will be a problem. However, personally, I would like to mention it in my CV.

If your blog is written in the same style as your post, you should really spend some time fixing your grammar before sending your blog to admissions committees.

Yes.  You could mention it in your SOP and/or in your CV.
I have received some applications from students in which they mentioned a technical blog, and so far it has always left a positive impression.  In my opinion, keeping such a blog demonstrates:

Maturity in writing and communicating (especially if your blog communicates something technical in an informal way that is not sloppy).
Organization of thought and effort.
Initiative.
Love for learning ideas relevant to your discipline.

Since I myself maintain this blog and also English doesn't happen to be my first language. There is a chance that out of some 10 posts atleast 2 ~ 3 of em are sloppy or poorly organized. Will I be sabotaging my chances if I someone reads those posts ?

I think it's impossible to give a general answer to that.

@Aditya Can you clean up those sloppy posts before you refer to them?

@scaaahu I wouldn't be refering to those posts in my SOP. but there is a chance that someone may read them. Also I don't know which ones are sloppy as my blog doesn't attract too much traffic. So I am guessing 3/10 posts are bad.

@Aditya if they are already in english, why not fix them in any case?  It doesnt help your readers by making a 'bad' post. If the goal is to share information, best do it in a clear way

@user1938107 its like.. if you ask me I would say all of my posts are good. But unless someone reads these posts there is no way for me to know which one of my posts are bad. So I am guessing there are 30% of my posts might be bad. Cause those 30% didn't receive much traffic volume. So I am assuming they are bad. I don't know why they are bad.

@Aditya Ask a friend who is a native English speaker to help proofread your posts.  It would also be nice if you could find a friend who is interested in machine learning so they can check your posts for technical accuracy.

In a notorious question in Academia.SE, JeffE has stated this:

What have you already done? What problems have you solved, or at least worked on? What independent projects have you been part of? What were your key contributions? What did you learn? What did you teach the world? How do your results compare to what was already known? What original ideas are you most proud of? Be specific, technical, credible, and confident (but not arrogant). Refer the reader to your web page for more details. Have a web page with more details: preprints, project reports, source code, videos, etc.

So yes, yes you can.
However, personally, I would like to mention it in my CV.

On the one hand, having a blog shows initiative.  It shows you are interested in your subject and spend a lot of time learning on your own.
On the other hand, when I think of these blogs I don't think of my PhD classmates.  I think of foreign students who have no formal credentials or experience and are desperate to prove themselves outside of the system.  This is doubly true if no one reads your blog, or if it's written in poor English.  Most of my classmates have no time to write blogs because most of their working time goes towards classes, research, or projects that involve other people.
I would say that if you have real credentials, you should not mention your blog, because it lumps you with those other guys.  But if your application sucks otherwise, you may as well mention it because it's all you've got.
(I have a similar opinion on Coursera classes, which is another path taken by students who are desperate to prove themselves outside of the system.  Except Coursera classes are even worse because it's harder to measure what the student learned.)

I didn't downvote, but I find your association of foreign students with low-quality blogging to be somewhat condescending.

Of course there are many foreign students who are very qualified, and in fact they may comprise a majority of students in my program.  But there are also legions of such students who have almost no qualifications and it is those students who resort to blogging.  Basically it comes off as a desperate person's measure, not something you would do if you were any good.

@BenBitdiddle can you give an example or two of such low-quality blogs of "those students"?

@SergeyDymchenko This sort of thing: http://topblogcoder.com It's a good effort, and shows initiative, but I would never list such a blog on a grad school application.  (Note: this guy is not actually a student, but is similarly trying to break into the software community.)

Really, it's not the blogging that's an issue, or the nationality of the students.  It's just that there's a certain type of person who chooses to spend his work energy on blogging, MOOCs, and other online activities, and those are typically the people who don't have real work to do.  If they do it for fun that's something else, but the fact that you're listing it on a CV means it's not purely a hobby.

@BenBitdiddle Hmmm, you must mean people like Terry Tao?  Gee, I'd sure hate to be associated with people like that.

I assume Terry Tao, Scott Aaronson, etc wouldn't list their blogs on their CVs.

sadly that the link is broken. Also, what do you mean of "nationality" when you say " it's not the blogging that's an issue, or the nationality of the students"?

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How important is number of publications and prestige of the publication outlets for getting a tenure-track job?
More generally, what are the most important factors for getting a tenure-track job?

potential duplicate: How important are citations when applying for jobs or promotions?

Also related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1743/what-can-i-do-as-a-graduate-student-to-maximize-my-chances-of-obtaining-a-profes

This anecdote suggests that number of publications and prestige of corresponding journals/conferences is not as important as people usually think:

Summary data of the short list from a past search for an assistant professor in Psychology at the University of Virginia. For this particular search, more than 100 applications were received. The Table presents the 11 applicants that made it to the short-list. All short-list candidates had at least 4 publications and at least 1 first- authored publication. Based on publication numbers, there are clear stand-outs from this group such as the postdoc with 35 publications, an assistant professor with 21 publications, and a graduate student with 10 publications. Further, these candidates published in prestigious outlets. However, none of these three were selected as a finalist. In fact, two of the three interviewed candidates were among the least productive on the short-list.
  This anecdote suggests that some degree of publishing productivity is essential to get into the pool of competitive candidates but, after that, other factors are more important for getting the job. http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.4251

The cynical interpretation of this anecdote is that the only thing that matters is whether A) you know someone and B) the committee happens to like your research topic. However in my experience what's more important is C) how high-quality the committee judges your research, together with it being on a promising topic. "Promising" is of course very subjective, and usually has something to do both with the topic being good science and its ability to get grants and yield interdisciplinary collaborations with others, including others in the department.
Unfortunately, people do get really downweighted for being in an area that doesn't mesh with the department or meet its needs. And those needs often aren't clear from the job ad.


text:
How to cancel an article submission
I submitted an article to a journal that is now under consideration after revisions.
Some potential authors I didn't mention in this article censure the submission. To stay on good terms with them I would like to cancel the submission. The article is not already accepted but I think it will be in few days.
What can I do?

What is a potential author? Someone who should have been an author and you somehow "forgot" to add them?

I think that this question cannot be correctly answered unless we understand more about the situation: if the other investigators have a reasonable case, then withdrawing the article may be correct.  It may also be appropriate to change the author list rather than withdrawing.  It may also be bullying that should be resisted.  Can you please edit the question to provide more details?

Contact the editor of the journal immediately and tell them you wish to withdraw the article.


text:
Is volunteer lab work a good practice?
I met a  professor last year through an online search and expressed my interests to his research and his advanced lab technique, in which I lack of experience.
I also asked for a PhD opportunity from him, he says that he has no money or limited funding now, so I agreed to work for 3 months for free. Would be practical that this volunteer experience could lead to a PhD after this 3 months? On one side I am not happy with working for free, as I had employment for 1 year as a research assistant. On the other side, this potential professor appears nice to employees around and keeps his words, and has good tracks of papers.
But am I just wasting of time, what actions should I take to figure this out before too late?
Supplementary information: He said that he was on travel, so I was off for a while. He did not contact me till I found him. Is this normal or just my altitude should be changed? I feel not well, maybe he does not really want me as a fellow at all?
I am really frustrated, should I go further or not, is he just being polite to accept me to practice the techniques in his lab for 3 months? Am I wasting of time to even practice these test methods?

"On one side i am not happy with work for free" rightly so: if it makes you unhappy even before you start, don't work for free. In some countries it's even illegal to do so.

Related: Nonpaid, volunteering position in a lab

If you WANT to volunteer in the lab as a learning opportunity, it can be a great practice.
If you don't want to, decline the offer and either look elsewhere or come back when his budget can handle bringing someone else in... and hope that he hasn't already found someone who was pleased to work as a volunteer and delighted to be paid.
The world is what it is, not what we wish it should be.

It's a race to the bottom, like interns in (US and other) politics --- practically only middleclass background can afford it, and thus work themselves into networks (to which they were probably introduced via their parents/uncles/... anyway); then it becomes 'the norm' if such an easy source of free labour becomes generally available and you get all-too-samey people running academia as well.  Like UK journalists. Agrh. The world is what it is indeed.

Besides all that has been mentioned, the liability issues stand foremost. Imagine that you work for free and get injured while on that job. The university has no obligation to pay you any compensation. Imagine that you damage a major piece of research equipment. You and the faculty member could be personally sued by the university for the repair costs.
The other side is, what do you get from this? Sure, experience is a great thing, but it only goes so far. Suppose you work for free and have no achievement from the work. What exactly are you going to put on your CV? Do you believe that a future job interviewer will really care to discuss what you "experienced" in your own "free time" versus what you have a valid record of doing?
For the first reason, I do not accept students that offer to work for free in my labs. For the second reason, I always attach credit hours for either formal research or a special topics course to the transcript of students who work for me doing research.

Most universities I've encountered DO cover student volunteers as if they were student employees, and have a mechanism for registering a student as one. If yours doesn't, I'm a bit surprised.

no, i am not a student. i am graduated and have worked for 2 years in this country. The work is relevant to my speciality. does unpaid=work is valuable for the senior? I doubt when the PI said no money,as getting funding is one of the capabilities of being a PI....now we start to work on a small project, i doubt what's next after the 3 months. So why these PIs asking us to work for free, what is their motivations? what do they want? just a cheap labor to perform their project or what?

@keshlam: That could be, and I admit to not having checked in to this option. My ignorance suggests that faculty who offer work for free need to be as diligent about their responsibilities. Thanks.

The most important thing I would work out is what do you want to gain for this opportunity? From your question it sounds like you would like to get a PhD afterwards.
You say the professor has no/little money at the moment. You need to work out if this is likely to change in 3 months. The best way to do this is probably just to ask him.
Such a role may still be useful even if it doesn't lead directly to a PhD position with this professor. He may provide a good reference or may result in a publication. However, you must way up these benefits against the cost of working for free for three months.
Things to consider are what is the reputation of the professor/how much do you want to work with him? What is the likelihood of you getting a similar (paid) role in reasonable amount of time.
Finally, before taking unpaid work it is important to consider how you will support yourself financially. If you can't afford to eat you may need to do something else.

he does have a very good reputation and appeared stick to his words...that's one factor that i consider to at least try 3 months with him...

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


text:
Do Academics use networking websites such as LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Academia.edu?
If they do use networking websites what is the typical use case (e.g., stay in touch with other academics, prospective students, find out what is the latest research development in their field)
If they do not use the networking websites what is the main reason (e.g., websites do not offer desired functionality, not interested in online professional networking)

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is a polling question.

It's not phrased as a poll. The question isn't "Do you use...", requesting 500 responses of "yes" or "no" but, rather, "Do academics use...", for which a single answer along the lines of the following would be entirely appropriate: "A survey by so-and-so found that X% of professors use networking sites for Y and Z purposes, and A, B and C were the most common reasons given for not using them."

Academics are just like everybody else.  Some use social networking sites heavily, others do not.  Different people choose different sites and different ways that they use them.  There is no secret code that we academics must adhere to regarding social networking.

I wish we had a secret code. That'd be way cooler.


text:
Are MOOCs putting teaching professors out of a job?
Have many teaching positions at traditional colleges been eliminated due to MOOCs (massive open online courses)? Is it as bad as industry jobs (for college-educated people) being offshored or automated?
I’m asking specifically about U.S. universities.

The straight forward answer is 'NO'. Though a few students like MOOC courses, classroom teachers can never be replaced by online MOOC courses.

Do textbooks put teaching professors out of a job?

@AndrewGrimm, do textbooks do any sort of verbal teaching, lecturing, or hold discussions with students, either online-based or in physical classrooms?

Tuition costs are doing that.  If things continue where they are going, a college education will be little more than a certification that you have wealthy parents, or a huge loan to pay off; because if you could afford such high tuition with your own job, then you don't need the degree.  The current MOOCs are one response to it, as are other resources such as YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.

No idea about U.S. universities, but I began an MSc because I enjoyed a MOOC in the topic so much.

@Coder Why do you think so? "Can never be replaced" is a strong statement.

What's with this anti-mook racism?! The mooks have every right to be Professors!

@ZeroTheHero Yes, I mean that. Because, anyway university will find a way to deal with worse guys.

@FedericoPoloni Yes it is. I was a fan of mooc at some point but slowly I became lazier. With good university profs I worked and listened to their teaching, I regretted later to have missed it earlier.

They are definitely going to grow in popularity - now that a massive part of the population of most countries have been priced out of universities and even collages.

@user76208 My observation is that relatively few students at the undergraduate level thrive on the format of on-line instruction. Especially in the first couple of years. Personally I rather enjoyed my experience with on-line courses, but I was bringing a highly developed set of self-study skills and and work-completion habits to the table. There have always been autodidacts, but libraries never put colleges out of business. The people who do best in my on-line courses are advanced or non-traditional students.

No. From The Kernel, 2015:

Just a few short years after promising higher education for anyone
  with an Internet connection, MOOCs have scaled back their ambitions,
  content to become job training for the tech sector and for students
  who already have college degrees.
At what was arguably the peak of the hype about massive open online
  courses, the New York Times crowned 2012 as “The Year of the MOOC.”
  That was the year computer science professor Sebastian Thrun announced
  that, after an experiment teaching an online course that attracted
  100,000 enrollees, he could no longer teach at Stanford; he was
  founding an online education startup, Udacity. That same year, his
  colleagues in the department, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, founded a
  competing MOOC startup, Coursera. Harvard and MIT also launched their
  own (nonprofit) MOOC initiative, edX. And universities around the
  world scrambled to partner with one or more of these organizations,
  amidst claims from investors, entrepreneurs, and pundits that MOOCs
  were poised to bring about the end of the university as we know it.
“In 50 years,” Thrun told Wired, “there will be only 10 institutions
  in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at
  being one of them.”...
Yet despite these well-rehearsed and triumphant stories of MOOCs’
  global outreach, the notion that MOOCs could provide higher education
  to everyone quickly proved flawed. The success stories were the
  exception, rather than the rule. MOOCs were lambasted for having a
  high dropout rate; the average completion rate still hovers around 15
  percent, a level that would be unacceptable for a traditional
  face-to-face college class. And when the demographics of “successful”
  MOOC students were scrutinized in one University of Pennsylvania
  study, it was discovered that 80 percent already had college degrees.
  Rather than providing opportunities for the educational “have-nots,”
  MOOCs seem just as likely to further the opportunities of the
  educational “have-alreadys.”...
Thrun has abandoned his prediction that there will only be 10
  universities in the future. What he’s retained is a story in which the
  only reason for post-secondary education is to fulfill the needs of
  employers—something colleges, he claims, do not do well.

I also read that some plausible theories are 1) MOOCs may actually increase student enrollment at traditional colleges; this is still to be determined, but the idea is that students learn enough background material from MOOCs and then want to seek degree-granting programs, namely master's degrees, to take the next step in their area of study (e.g. switching to a data science career), and 2) MOOCs may replace professors who teach in non-degree-granting programs; also still TBD...

At least judging from the excerpt you quoted, the arguments given for the pessimistic view are not as strong as the authors make them sound. A MOOC (particularly, a free one) has a much lesser inhibition threshold for signing up; no wonder that the completion rate is so low! Nor would I expect MOOCs to immediately penetrate the non-formally-enrolled; it makes perfect sense for someone interested in a MOOC to be enrolled at an actual college as well, at least until MOOCs have substituted for everything they hope to get out of a college (which won't be too soon). ...

... I would not in the least be surprised if an enrolment decline happens for reasons other than MOOCs (e.g., political de-funding, a decrease in the prestige of a diploma, or another financial crisis), and then MOOCs will start substituting for colleges by capturing the demand that colleges can no longer meet.

I think they came from the same line of thought that brought the paper will be extinct because computers idea. Or cars would make people stop walking...

As someone who is on a team running an MOOC, I would say that it depends on the context.
The main advantage of an MOOC is that it reduces the cost of access to standard content. If you are a teaching professor who teaches fundamentally the same course over and over, and there isn't a great deal of teacher-student interaction required, then it may be an issue for you specifically. However, an MOOC is not able to provide a great deal of interactivity with the teacher (largely, these types of courses are record, submit, and market), and an MOOC cannot replicate the experience of being in a lab or on a research team with peers who are all working on similar topics.
The main effect I have seen is a positive impact on smaller, less-resourced universities. For example, if a small university doesn't have the financial resources to hire enough faculty who are published experts on a topic, but published experts have created a course on an MOOC, then the university in some situations can have a professor "teach" a course in which 90% of the content comes from web-based sources. Larger, better-funded universities can still differentiate themselves by saying "we have the guy who made the course/wrote the book/etc.," and for the professor, this would be a new revenue stream because he can now reach the whole world with his course, as opposed to one university.
The changes brought by these new systems aren't going to be "bad," but MOOCs among other new systems are going to change the educational landscape, and it is good to think in terms of how you can make these changes work to your advantage.

Side note, but it's pronounced "moock", not "M.O.O.C."... so that means it'd be "a MOOC", not "an MOOC". :)

@Mehrdad, some people abhor making acronyms 'pronounceable' saying simply "It's an acronym - not a word."

@CramerTV: Oh, didn't realize that :-) next time I see someone like this I'll be sure to talk about S.C.U.B.A. diving and L.A.S.E.R. surgery and Z.I.P. codes and such... =P

@Mehrdad, haha - yes.  Many of us have selective outrage about various things.  The fellow I was thinking of decried people calling the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) 'jitters' - among others.

@CramerTV: Okay now that is definitely outrageous :-)

@CramerTV Sometimes I say "S.Q.L." instead of "SEE-kwəl", and people start twitching...

@CramerTV By definition, an acronym is an abbreviation that is pronounced as a word (as was the case for scuba and laser, though those are arguably words in their own right now, or for S.H.I.E.L.D. or U.N.C.L.E. or U.N.I.T. for various fictional spy agencies, or for the cutesy names the US Congress often gives bills, for instance the approximately 2.6 trillion bills known as the “F.A.I.R. Act”). If an abbreviation is not pronounced as a word, then it is not an acronym at all.

@KRyan, next time I see him I'll be sure to let him know.

@Nat that's why I call it EssQueueEll

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Employment of postsecondary teachers is projected to grow 13 percent from 2014 to 2024, faster than the average for all occupations. Growth is expected as enrollments at postsecondary institutions continue to rise, although it will be at a slower rate than it has been in the past. Many jobs are expected to be for part time faculty.

So the answer is NO. If MOOCs would put postsecondary teachers out of job on a large scale, their number would not be predicted to grow.


text:
Does careful selection of graph colors in a manuscript have any positive impact on reviewers?
I have just completed an article in which results are interpreted by means of 3D-plots; there are almost 15 plots in my article. Since plots could have a major impact on the reviewers’ decision, I am little worried about the colors used, which are actually very bright. Do the colors used in my plots really matter? If so, what type of colors should one should use in graphs?

I wouldn't risk annoying a reviewer who'd discover that his gray-scale-printed copy is unreadable.

@liori : And why gray scale printed copy would be unreadable?

Why?  Sometimes distinct colors come out the same (or nearly the same) in gray scale.

@IgotiT: red and blue are notoriously hard to tell apart on a gray-scale print.

Worth a read but by no means a dupe: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/44640/monochrome-vs-grayscale-in-scientific-journals/44648#44648

I have commented on color schemes while peer reviewing. I wouldn't reject a paper for it, but I have said that I can't properly distinguish lines/points with this color scheme, and it's been a bullet point in my recommendations to revise.

If you use jet and I review your article I will first cry, then get angry, then cry again and probably try to communicate that you should change your colormap.

@AnderBiguri : what is this jet ?

@IgotiT the jet colormap, the most used colormap in science for long time

A lot of them will say that you should either not use color or not use it without other attributes that will allow your graph to be clearly understood when printed in grayscale or black and white. This is to make it journal-friendly, among other reasons.

Some people will tell you that colors shouldn't matter because only data should matter.  Those people are wrong.
All human readers (including reviewers) find some graphical presentations easier to digest and comprehend than others, and the choices that matter include color.  Of particular note, it is often important to consider color-blind readers, who are up to 10% of males, depending on population, (though many fewer females).
Color sets that work well for color-blind readers often work well for non-color-blind readers as well.  You can find a number of good resources online to help you decide what colors to use, such as this "Color Universal Design" site, among many others.

well I agree that colors shouldn't matter. Unfortunately they do! :)

Another thing to keep in mind is that for heat maps and similar plots, gradients matter, and that the rainbow color map is notoriously bad for skewing how people perceive data. A good paper that touches on this is http://www.kennethmoreland.com/color-maps/ColorMapsExpanded.pdf

Colours doesn't matter; data does. But when you present the data you want to make them easy to interpret - and colours, line styles, etc. are tools to enhance or bury the readability. So colours do matter.

If someone tells you presentation doesn't matter, don't even give them a graph. Give them a huge table of numbers.

@PyRulez I've suffered through papers like that...

The link to "Color Universal Design" seems to be dead. Perhaps this link has the same content? https://jfly.uni-koeln.de/color/

In very general terms bad design from trying too hard has more of a negative impact than lack of sophistication. So the best advice is to keep things as simple as possible.
Some basic guidelines are :

Keep to a consistent colour palette : it doesn't matter too much if this is bright primaries or more muted tones but be consistent. Primary RGB or CYM are both fine as are teal, beige and maroon but don't just mix and match and keep to one palette across a single document.
Think about what information you are trying to convey. If you need to use different colours to make superimposed plots distinct then use as many contrasting colours as necessary. If you are just making a simple side-by-side comparison of quantities then stick to one or two complimentary colours.
Don't use graphic effects (such as drop shadows and colour gradients) which are not strictly part of the information you are trying to convey.

The basic thing to take away is only use graphic elements and colours when you have a clear idea of how they help to make your information clearer. If your graphics work as monochrome flat images then stop  there, only add additional complexity to graphics where it has a clear and definite purpose.

Yes, the choice of colours matters and http://colorbrewer2.org/ is a good place to find colour combinations that work well.
Also think about whether 3D plots are really the clearest way to present your data. Though occasionally unavoidable, there are usually better options. 3D plots work best in an online, interactive form, so if people are likely to read your paper as a PDF or in printed form, avoid them if you can. Can you show the same relationships in 2D form? Would a contour plot or heat map be sufficient? If so, one of those is probably a better option.

Recently, the default colormaps of several programs were changed:

Mathematica has a blue-orange-yellow colormap (before: white-blue)
Matlab (and this) has "Parula", which is a purple-blue-green-orange-yellow colormap (before: jet)
Matplotlib has "Viridis", which is purple-blue-green-yellow colormap (before: jet)

Unfortunately, I couldn't find specific information about Mathematica's changes (i.e., why did the choose this specific colormap). However, the linked posts for Matlab and Matplotlib provide some insight, which mainly agree to the answers provided here.
I highly recommend watching the video from the author of "Viridis": He explains, how he created this colormap, how you could create your own one and why "Parula" is a bad colormap.
Additionally, I'd like to point out that "Parula" is non-free according to a post of Steve Eddins from MathWorks:

The colormap is, however, MathWorks intellectual property, and it would not be appropriate or acceptable to copy or re-use it in non-MathWorks plotting tools

YMMV, but I recommend the "Viridis" colormap, because it enables gray-scale printing and is "compatible" to many kinds of colorblindness. You can find the RGB-colordata on github.

R also uses viridis

Of course, because a picture is worth a thousand words. A well-chosen bar-chart, a clear graph, add a lot to an already good paper.
Yet, since reviewers sometimes review "black-and-white" printed versions, it can be useful to combine colors with different line styles (solid, dashed) and markers (circles, squares), especially when curves cross.
Remember however that some journals require additional charges for color figures. If this is the case, and you cannot afford the cost, it would be a pity if you convince reviewers, but fail to convey your nice results to readers, because of poor graphics.

authors: رضا محمدزاده


text:
What are polite appellations for teachers in British universities?
Teachers in primary and secondary school usually are called as Mr.[surname] or Miss/Mrs.[surname]. However, cases in universities are more complex. It seems we need to call a teacher who is a professor professor or prof.[surname], and a teacher who is not a professor but a doctor Dr.[surname]. But not all teachers are professors, so what about
1)one whose name we know but neither a professor or a doctor?
2)one whose name we know but we do not know whether he/she is a professor or a doctor?
3)one whose name we do not know?

Do you mean when addressing them directly ("Good morning, professor X") or when referring to them in a sentence ("This course is taught by professor X")? In the former case, you can't go wrong with sir/madam.

@FedericoPoloni I mainly mean salutation in letter.

If you're writing a letter to someone you don't know, google them first and call them Dr or Prof as appropriate.  Their departmental webpages will usually make this clear.  In the UK very few academic staff are professors (unlike the US).

Here's an answer based on my experience in the United States.  I don't know how well it generalizes to other countries, but some issues may be similar.
You can't go wrong calling someone Professor or Doctor unless you know for sure that it is inappropriate and they know that you know.
At the college level in the U.S., it's common to refer to your teacher as Professor X regardless of whether their official job title includes the word professor.  (The primary teacher of a college course is considered to be acting as a professor for that purpose, even if their official title is visiting scholar or postdoctoral associate or whatever.)  This may not apply to grad students, but it can cover just about everyone else.
When possible I'd avoid gendered titles like Mr. or Ms., and specifically Ms.  The issue is subconscious sexism: some people tend to use fancier titles to address men than to address women in comparable positions, and calling someone Ms. may make her wonder whether you are one of those people.  (If you are such a person, then you should mend your ways, and even if you're not you could still be mistaken for one.)
On the other hand, Miss and Mrs. are far worse than Ms., because they indicate marital status.  You should never address an academic as Miss or Mrs. unless she has explicitly indicated that this is what she prefers.

Downvoted because not everywhere follows US academic titling conventions, and this question is about the UK, not the US.

Within an academic setting while you might run into a Dean or a Duke, generally Professor is the highest honorific you will need. Therefore, I suggest calling everyone you do not know Professor. If they are not a Professor, or do not want to be called Professor, they will correct you. It seems to me to be a lot less pompous to say "actually, I am only a doctor", then it is to say "actually, I am a Professor/Dean/Duchess/King".

If the professor in question is a nobleman, you can find the appropriate form using these very simple criteria.

@FedericoPoloni I do hope you intended that as sarcasm, if so, bravo!

Everywhere I've attended and worked in Britain, I've called teachers by their first name and been called my first name.
It also depends on what you mean by a college. Most universities are not called college (and if they are going to, say, Birkbeck College, one would say one is going to university.  Most colleges are technical colleges, or colleges of further education (I've attended or taught at http://www.burton-college.ac.uk/, http://www.nulc.ac.uk/, http://www.southstaffs.ac.uk/), which have no professors, and few staff with PhDs - although there are also colleges of higher education which would have professors and where most staff would have PhDs (but most of these have become universities).

In Australia it is typical for staff, and students, to refer to each other by first name.  So much so that other than in staff directories I find noting people's titles against their name to be socially obscene.  On the other hand we have a clearly hierarchical distribution of academic work functions and in this case we refer to clusters of staff by their title or pay level to refer to an expected set of responsibilities (Associate Lecturers don't lead research culture).  I don't think there's any reason for students to have need to do so, excepting doctoral students as apprentice academics.

In the UK a professor is higher status than a Dr. and not nearly as common So a Dr. won't be offended but they might be snippy about the lack of local knowledge about them if get that wrong.
I spent a while worrying about this when I first got to university as it seemed like a minefield. With that in mind I can tell you UK universities usually list the staff on their websites and often a Dr/Prof will have their own page which tells you all about them and their publications etc. So, you can usually find the answer to this without having to worry. Just in case though, I'll give you an answer for each one.
1) one whose name we know but neither a professor or a doctor?
Mr/Ms (Ms is best for women because it can offend someone if you assume anything about marital status when you don't know them)
(and sign off your mail 'Yours Sincerely,')
2) one whose name we know but we do not know whether he/she is a professor or a doctor?
In this case google is your friend. You will be able to find out. I would not advise emailing an academic to ask them for anything without first finding something out about them (or their research at least) first.
(and sign off your mail 'Yours Sincerely,')
3) one whose name we do not know?
Dear Sir or Madam (and sign off your mail 'Yours faithfully,')
In all three cases how they end their letter to you will tell you how you can relax. If they sign off as 'Jim', you can lose the formality (especially if that's not even their real name ;-))

Mr/Ms
Why not ask what they prefer to be called?
Again, ask them.


text:
What is a authentic source of civil engineering BS graduation rate in united states in the last few year?
What is a authentic source from multi-institutional study of just civil engineering BS six years(preferable six year year, but otherwise it is okay) graduation rate in united states four year college and the research is conducted in one of the year in last five years?
If not, does somebody have access to this paper and snapshot a quarter of page from that paper for evidence?
http://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/(ASCE)EI.1943-5541.0000244

Have you considered trying to contact the author and ask for a pre-print?

Check out the American Society of Engineering Education's "Engineering by the Numbers" publications here: http://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications/publications/college-profiles
There are samples available online, but the full reports do have a cost.


text:
What is the percentage of Bachelor or higher degree holder that finish calculus 3?
What is the percentage of Bachelor or higher degree holder that finish multivariable calculus in US?
Please list your reference

Is "calculus 3" standardised in the US? That is mind boogles to me

For students that finish three semesters of calculus @Oxinabox

@Oxinabox: There's a strong tradition in the US of teaching calculus as a three-semester sequence: differential, integral, and multivariable.  It's not standardized in any formal way that I know of, but it's very common.

Some universities have two semesters of main-stream calculus that include multivariable calculus, while other universities use 3 semesters to cover the same material.  At universities that have 3 semesters of mainstream calculus students are often required to take only 2 semesters for many STEM majors.  Furthermore, there are non mainstream courses (e.g. "calculus for business" or "calculus for life sciences") at many universities.  I think you're interested in how many students complete manistream Calculus III.

The CBMS survey of undergraduate mathematics programs at http://www.ams.org/profession/data/cbms-survey/cbms2010-Report.pdf has the most recent relevant data that I'm aware of, although I don't think its broken down to the level that you'd like.

See also the Bressoud report: http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/cspcc/InsightsandRecommendations.pdf This report summarizes a lot of the data from the 2010 CBMS survey.

@NateEldredge so those 3 calculus units are all the calcuslus someone with a undergrad math major would do? (So no undergrad complex analytics? )

@Oxinabox: Undergraduate complex analysis courses certainly exist, either required or as electives, but they usually aren't labeled "calculus".

I would go with around a 1/4 at a large University of 20,000 students. There might be 4 sections of Calc 3 taught each semester with 100 students in each section. So 20%.

As a side note, I always wondered what was included in the word "calculus" in America. At my (European) undergrad uni we had something called "analysis" that included sequences and series, differentials and integrals, vector (multivariable) analysis, complex analysis and Fourier analysis. This was given over 4 to 5 semesters. Geometry, algebra, linear algebra and topology were separate courses.

I think that the fact that this question has many comments, a good answer but (currently) net vote of 0 is since it lack motivation. Why do you want to know this? (Yes, "idle curiosity" would be an answer…)

In the US, mathematics majors typically take calculus (for two or three semesters) along with students majoring in engineering and the physical sciences.  Students in these courses typically don't write any proofs and often aren't asked to read proofs or even apply carefully stated theorems.  Later the mathematics majors will take one or more courses in "analysis" in which the methods taught in their calculus courses are given a more rigorous foundation.

The Conference Board on the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) is an umbrella organization representing the main mathematical sciences professional societies in the US.  They've done a series of surveys of undergraduate mathematics programs that include numbers of enrollments in courses at various levels.  The most recent published survey was from 2010.
See
 http://www.ams.org/profession/data/cbms-survey/cbms2010-Report.pdf
and the summary in chapter 1 of
  http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/cspcc/InsightsandRecommendations.pdf
Sadly, I don't see specific data on Calculus III enrollments.
However, there are about 300,000 students per year enrolling in mainstream Calculus I in the fall semester.  A smaller number start in the spring or summer.  Many of those students won't make it through Calculus I and II, much less enroll in Calculus III (at many institutions only a few STEM disciplines require Calculus III while other STEM disciplines and non STEM disciplines don't require it), and not all of these students will go on to complete bachelor's degrees.
So I'd be surprised if more than about 100,000 students per year graduated having successfully completed Calculus III.
For comparison, about 1.8 million students per year completed bachelor's degrees in the comparable time frame of 2010-2011.  Thus the percentage is small (likely less than 5%.)

Do those numbers match your university?

What about advance placement students. I would think a lot of students pass out of Calc I

My institution requires Calculus I and II of all students (they're all majoring in science or engineering), but only requires Calculus III of students in some of the majors (many of the engineering and science majors don't require Calculus III.)  Thus we're not representative.  At the University of New Mexico (a more typical big state U with about 25,000 students), there were 123 students in Calculus III this semester.  See  http://www.unm.edu/~rst/Schedule_of_Classes/Spring2016/SCHM/index.html

See the "Insights" report that I cited above.  A relatively high percentage of students who take AP calculus in high school either don't take the AP exam, fail the AP exam, or end up retaking Calculus I in college.

So the UNM data match reasonable with your numbers.


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Why don't typical US colleges offer more online courses?
Why don't typical US colleges offer more online courses so that all of the classes could be taken online?
Online courses are cheaper, more profitable and more efficient to produce quantity of student(which translate into more people can be educated); students don't have to spend time traveling to classes. Students could simply hand in homework online and colleges can just open up a lot of computer labs for the students to take exams in exchange and lay off some lower quality professors. Also, students can have more time to themselves to interact privately on the computer and all formal discussions can take place within the class online.
Also, the government would be able to pay less financial aid and students would have the convenience of learning the class material on a cell phone.
The most importantly,students can join a reputable college outside of thier home city and able to save the charge of dormitory
Also, isn't that it is better to eliminate the high cost private college by competition and let more low cost public university survive by let our government became richer from giving away less financial aid?

Why down vote this?

"Online courses are [...] more efficient" More efficient at what? Transmitting skills? Then [citation needed]. In my experience fewer student do well in them. Further, don't kid yourself about the professor hours needed to run on-line courses well. It is significant.

Also colleges aren't just there to teach classes they are there to engage students, get them involved in research and other extra curricular activities and create a strong academic community. That is difficult to do if students are rarely on campus.

This seems like a rant disguised as a question.

Students could simply hand in homework online and colleges can just open up... — Those two bold words strongly suggest that you have not thought seriously about this.  Neither students nor colleges can "simply" or "just " do anything.  There are always costs, and tradeoffs, and unexpected hurdles, and unintended consequences.

I think there are multiple reasons, I'll touch on some:

Currently online courses tend to fill a gap for students who otherwise would not be able to complete many courses.      This allows non-traditional students to have a chance at academically being competitive, although traditional students sometimes utilize them as well. They aren't designed to replace traditional courses, but to augment them.
It's harder to verify who is actually doing the coursework.
      This seems like  a fairly important issue, after all, you want potential employers to be confident that the degree a university bestowed means something - namely that you earned it. As a university, you want to be sure that your students aren't cheating.
Market saturation.      In-line with the previous bullet point, if classes were very cheap for many students, universities wouldn't be able to charge as much in general per student. This essentially translates to a lower value "per degree". This effectively tackles you point about joining "reputable" universities - the general train of thought is "If everyone can get in... is it necessarily reputable?" (Definitely a con from the university's point-of-view as they can potentially inflate their importance by limiting degrees conferred.)
Points of failure.      An online class, depending on the format, could potentially require a large amount of bandwidth. This means the university would be footing the bill to effectively run these courses, and the facilities to run quality web-based courses may not be cheap. While it's true the lectures could just be recorded or utilize some sort of learning software, decreased student interaction tends to lead to lower grades overall (Source: multi-year TA)
Decreased profit.     Arguably, I believe colleges make a fair amount of money by physically having the students on campus. "Butts-in-seats" mean that they charge more longterm for dormitories and food. Increased physically facility usage allows colleges to approach benefactors for more money, citing student use and need of expansion. Benefactors want a dorm with their name on it, not a server rack.
Collaboration.     Not the bad kind, mind you. Like @WetLabStudent mentioned, physically being at a college or university exposes you to ideals, people, and methodologies you might have never come in contact with. The ability to interact with a large spectrum of people is an important skill for the vast majority of students to develop.

This isn't an exhaustive list, but I hope it raises some of the issues. If I missed a few more major relevant points, feel free to comment.

Also, isn't that it is better to eliminate the high cost private college by competition and let more low cost public university survive by let our government became richer from giving away less financial aid?

As there are computer lab in the college with someone who supervise the exam, it is the same to see if the student are cheating.

You forgot one: Developing a good stand-alone online course is incredibly difficult—much harder than writing a textbook or developing an in-person class—and universities are generally unwilling to give faculty the necessary time and resources to do a good job.

Some high profile university do offer several programs online, such as Georgia Tech, which offers an online masters program (http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/).
I believe the reason more colleges do not offer these courses is simple.  American brick-and-mortar universities are very good as selling "the college experience."  Universities are very good at convincing (mainly) young, high-school graduates to attend.  They do this by having a nice looking campus, with (usually) a really nice gym and theater they can show perspective students.
Most universities require freshmen to live in the dorms, and have a meal plan.  The university also has several sports teams that parents and alums pay to watch.  There is also a dining hall and a bookstore (and sometimes a swag store) that students tend to frequent.  Online students can't spend money buying stuff on a virtual campus.
Finally, adding online courses would mean hiring more profs.  This coupled with the fact online courses are usually cheaper means that the university would be better off having more in-person courses, and accepting more students to stay in the dorms, eat at the campus dining hall and see campus sports teams.

Another issue: online learning requires much more self discipline. Precisely, one of the points you make "students don't have to spend time traveling to classes" is part of making them successful. The daily commute is establishing a routine, and just by sitting in class, they are absorbing information, and a pace is set.
In an online program, you don't have a class telling you what you should know. You have little pressure to keep up studying. In all practical ways, you are entirely responsible for your own study. We can agree that with ideal students (spherical, massless, and in a vacuum), that should be sufficient, but experience shows that, in most cases, it isn't.
Also, online discussions are not the same as in person. Writing on a forum keeps a permanent record, and gives you time to think and rewrite your arguments. But you loose spontaneity: it takes some time to get back and forth, and it becomes easy to talk through each other. In particular, if you are explaining some concept to me, and you misunderstand my doubt, it may take some time before we both realise it. In person, I can give you feedback until you say "Aha! I know what you mean!".
A chat is a bit better in this respect, but it is still slower to type, and you loose visual feedback. If you explain me something, you want to know if I am following you, getting more confused by the moment, or completely ignoring you. Furthermore, the clarity of a chat decreases with more than two participants.
The closest thing to real life would be a video chat. But still, given the quality of audio, you have to make sure you don't interrupt others (that can make getting into the discussion difficult), you are in a completely silent room, all the hardware and software is functioning properly (never a given! At work, we have professional equipment and a team of great IT support, and still, every now and then, our remote collaborator cannot join our meetings), etc.

In my home country, there are a number of online degrees, and they have exactly this problem: not even half of the students complete their degree if they take it online.

This is in addition to the practical problems raised by Ramrod, since in Europe many universities offer online degrees where you just take the final exam on campus and everything else happens online.
From my experience at universities in Europe and the US, there is a really big difference in the attitude to an undergraduate degree. In Europe, a degree is something you complete and you end up with a record of courses you took and you performance in them. In the US, it is more about the experience: you live on campus with everyone else, you eat on campus with everyone else, you take the same basic required classes with everyone else. It's not just about getting the knowledge and a degree: it's about the college experience. You can't get this experience through online classes, so such degrees would be vastly different from the degrees on campus students get.

I mean more option for the student are always nice, also people can meet each other at the college library for the campus life...

@Victor By the time you have the same amount of social interaction as for an on campus degree, you are literally doing an on campus degree.

I mean people can meet each other at their hometown not at Harvard or Yale...

@Victor How many people in your hometown are doing a degree at the same place as you?


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Under what circumstances is it beneficial for an advisor to seek sole authorship when their advisees deserve to be listed as co-authors?
I have seen several questions on this site which suggest that there are (presumably and hopefully rare) occasions where an advisor seeks to publish work as the sole author on a collaborative project that they are working on with their advisees.
Some questions which highlight these occurrences:

My advisor submitted a paper with my work without including me as an author
what do you do if your PhD advisor publishes a solo paper on your topic?

While there has been some discussion on this site (e.g., here) about whether the advisor should be listed as a co-author on a student's paper, in my field (in the U.S.), it is common for the advisor to be listed as a co-author on their student's papers. So, I'm writing this question to come to some understanding of the "opposite" problem:

When it (rarely) occurs, what are the benefits for an advisor to seek sole authorship when their advisees deserve to be listed as co-authors?

In my (admittedly naive) view, it would seem that the advisor would benefit more from co-authoring papers with their advisees than trying to pass the work off as their own, if nothing more than to show (to, e.g., tenure/promotion committees) that they are actively engaging their student researchers in the research activities of the group. Perhaps an element of "ego trip" is involved here as well, but I wonder if I'm missing something more fundamental as to why this happens on those rare occasions.

Edited to add — I certainly do appreciate that there is variability in the ways that different departments/institutions in different parts of the world do things, and am attempting to gain some understanding about the not-so-obvious (from my perspective) motivators that lead an advisor down the road to the aforementioned behavior.

I'd really like to hear an answer to this too... I can't think of any reasons beside egotism and abusive behavior patterns.

I can't see any advantages for denying a student a deserved authorship. There are a small number of truly pathological jerks out there, so I have seen it happen--but only once in a reasonably long career. Another possibility for why we so often see questions of this sort is that students occasionally fail to understand that criteria for authorship, and perceive misconduct where none has occurred. Today's question where a research subject wants authorship may fall into that category.

I recently attended a presentation given by someone else where I had prepared more than half of the slides and my contribution was not acknowledged. To someone in the audience it would have appeared that the speaker had done all of it. Maybe this was the speakers intention. In my experience people tend to overestimate their own contribution to collaborative work (which is understandable because of an unavoidable bias). I guess when you are in a position of power as a supervisor it is easier to get by without anyone correcting this perception (especially those below you).

@Miguel In the talks that I give (at conferences, for example), I do not acknowledge my co-authors since their names appear on the title slide, and I think that is pretty common in my field. However, if your name did not even appear on the title slide, then that is pretty low if they did not acknowledge your contributions.

@Mad Jack Yeah, no name either.

High-up advisors may play down the contribution of students and incorporate data into their papers without malicious intent.
Students sometimes overestimate their contribution. Providing data from measurements a technician could have done is not reason enough to be a co-author but they should be mentioned in the Acknowledgements then.
The more authors a paper has, the less is the individual contribution. I came across a grant agency (Europe, cannot remember which one) that counts papers at 50% or less if there is a certain number of co-authors or if you are not first or corresponding author.

In my (admittedly naive) view, it would seem that the advisor would benefit more from co-authoring papers with their advisees than trying to pass the work off as their own, if nothing more than to show (to, e.g., tenure/promotion committees) that they are actively engaging their student researchers in the research activities of the group.

I tend to agree with your sentiment here. The problem is that not every evaluation committee (for tenure, for promotion, for regular end-of-the-year raises) is that sane.
Example 1: in my old university, we had for some time a hard tenure rule that required applicants to have a small number of recent single-authored papers. In applied computer science, basically nobody writes single-authored papers. It is simply not done. I don't know any concrete cases, but I would not be surprised if that rule led to some "single-authored" papers where the work was really done by a master student.
Example 2: I have heard of universities in Asia that base end-of-the-year raises on accepted papers. The concrete amount is dependent on the number of authors, as well as on the place in the author list, making it very attractive to "forget" authors or put the supervisor's name first.
Here on academics.SE, we tend to forget that academia varies more than we think, and just because a certain unethical behavior would not make sense in our university, there is no reason to believe that this is true everywhere.

I somewhat disagree with your last sentence: This question to some extent originates from the realisation that there might be something else and is asking for it – so it illustrates that we are aware of it to at least some extent. Also, in my experience, we are much more aware of the diversity of academia here than the vast majority of academics.


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What is freshman undergraduate engineering enrollment in total nationwide in the US?
What is freshman undergraduate engineering enrollment in total nationwide in the US in three most recent years?
I mean the number in total from in every discipline of engineering field.

According to the National Science Foundation's report "Science and Engineering Indicators 2016", as of 2013, there were 124,437 full-time freshmen enrolled in engineering programs.  See Appendix Table 2-21, which also includes data from past years.  Their source is "American Association of Engineering Societies, Engineering Workforce Commission, Engineering & Technology Enrollments, Fall 2013 (2014)."  AAES doesn't appear to have any more recent data available.


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What is the dropout/switch major rate for engineering bachelor?
What is the average dropout and switch major rate for US 4 year engineering college for students entering bachelor's degree program after 2010?
It is pretty hard for me to find any good reference.

I assume you have read the document STEM Attrition: College Students’ Paths Into and Out of STEM Fields November, 2013 where it says: A total of 48 percent of bachelor’s degree students and 69 percent of associate’s degree students who entered STEM fields between 2003 and 2009 had left these fields by spring 2009.


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Affiliation on a paper - moving to a place where I actually did the work
Me and a person from University X wrote a (pure mathematics) paper together. Most of the work on this paper happened when I was visiting University X during last summer (they were kind enough to provide a room for me and invite me to give a seminar). It is also worth mentioning that X is located where I come from, so given that I can be quite mobile in my work, I would probably be spending most of the summer there in any case. I am currently a PhD student at University Y, located abroad, and I'm just about to finish my degree. Once this happens, I am going to sign a contract with X (the paperwork is waiting until I graduate).
Now that the paper is finished, I wonder what affiliation it would be ethical of me to mention on the paper. It goes without saying that I should mention Y - that's where my position is at the moment, they are the people giving me funding. However, I would also be happy to mention X - there are various reasons why I would want that, some more valid than other. Would it be right of me to do so?

Somewhat related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/89465/57621

The way this is usually handled is that you list University Y as your affiliation, and in the acknowledgements of the paper, include a sentence that says something like:

Much of this paper was written while the second author was visiting University X; he would like to thank the X Department of Mathematics for their hospitality and support.

If you end up doing significant further work on the paper after you start your job at X (e.g. major revisions in response to peer review), then you could list both universities as your affiliation.


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A paper split in two parts - how to cite it in CV?
I recently cowrote a paper which came out somewhat long: 40+ pages. We uploaded it to arXiv in this form, but afterwards decided that it would be preferable to publish it as a series of two papers. (It was a natural decision given the length and the fact that it naturally splits into two weakly interacting parts. On the other hand, there is arguably some added value in having a combined version of the paper available somewhere.) At this moment, one of these parts has been submitted to a journal, the other one is still work in progress (the introductory sections need to be written almost from scratch).
What is the best way to record this on a CV/publication list at this point? Of course, it goes without saying that arXiv preprints are not nearly as important as published papers, but it seems it would be honest to own up to all of my writings in some form.
Options I see:
a) Just reference the preprint on arXiv, and worry about the rest when the other papers are accepted,
b) Mention both the preprint and the submitted paper with an awkward note explaining what is going on (perhaps this should also involve uploading the half-paper to arXiv).
(If relevant, my field is pure mathematics, I'm a PhD student about to graduate. I do need an up-to-date CV.)

How soon do you think the second paper will be ready to be submitted?

@NajibIdrissi: This depends on subfield.  It's probably average in algebraic topology or mathematical physics, but it would be unusual in combinatorics.

@NajibIdrissi: It's a bit above the average. It would not be particularly unusual to have a paper of this length, but it's longer than optimal. Also, it combines some rather different tools, so we were worried it would be hard to find referees for the whole thing.

@AlexanderWoo In theory, a week or so should suffice. In practice, these things tend to drag on.

Option (a) does seem to be a better choice at this point in time. Later, when one of the parts are published, it would be better to list only the published article instead of the preprint. If you are concerned about the visibility of the other part of the work, you may upload a preprent of just the other part to make sure there are no overlaps in your publications list.
Once both papers are published it would make sense to only include those articles without the preprint entirely.

This answer is under the assumption that the second paper will be publicly available within a few weeks - before job applications you have submitted are likely to make their last round of decisions (which takes longer than you might think):
I would list the two papers you will submit on your CV, with a note about their relationship to the ArXiv preprint, so:
Paper 1, submitted, longer version available as ArXiv.blahblahblah
Paper 2, in preparation, to contain material from ArXiv.blahblahblah not in Paper 1.


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In what order should I list bibliography entries by the same author?
Suppose that a bibliography contains two entries by the same author, published in the same year (and for the sake of simplicity, with no coauthors). Which order should they be listed in? At least three possibilities come to mind, and as this link shows at least two are considered in practice:

(Alphabetical) In alphabetical order, depending on the titles of the papers.
(Historical) In order of appearence, taking into account months and days of publication.
(Logical) In the order which makes the most logical sense, so that if paper B uses results from paper A then A appears before B.

Which of these is the most widely accepted / the most formally correct?
One instance where this question often comes up for me in practice is when writting a CV. Is there a difference between a publication list of a single person and a bibliography that happens to include two or more papers by the same author?

For papers: Whatever order BibTeX outputs.  If the copy-editors care, they'll change the order themselves (but they usually don't).

How to cite them in a bibliography depends entirely on the citation and bibliography style of the journal or publisher responsible for the material in question.
If you have a style where everything is listed in alphabetical order, and assuming that the years are identical then you could decide either using alphabetical order of the title as a "tiebreaker." However, some publications would recommend listing the bibliography items in the order in which the works are mentioned in the text.

If it is for the journal article, you should not be concerned with the order, instead, you should cite the relevant papers in the natural flow of order.
For example, in paper A author says that using ABC technique certain problem can be solved while the conventional XYZ technique fails. Lets say paper A was published in 2017. Later in paper B by the same author, published in 2018, he proves that technique XYZ has such and such and such flaws.
Then the natural order would be e.g. "In [B], it was demonstrated that XYZ produces inadequate results under normal circumstances. The same authors have proposed in [A] that using ABC technique, such these inadequacies could be removed and performance enhancement of 80% could be achieved."
Just an example from the top of my mind. But note that this does not follow
(i) Alphabetical order
(ii) Timing of publication.
Hope this helps.

But the question was about the order in the bibliography, not the order they were cited.

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