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My advisor wants me to reinvent the wheel
My advisor introduced a model 15 years ago, published a lot of papers (including PNAS). Now, he makes me incorporate this model into well-established model from the neighboring field of research. I think he just tries to stay in the known waters (cite his own papers, etc). Of course, he is well aware (but not proficient) that everything we try now to research was already published in this neighboring field.
What should I do?

Continue to reinvent the wheel with minor modifications (people from the neighboring field will probably laugh)
Try to switch the project (although it will be hard)
Freelance in the "spare" time ;)

Edited after Piotr's remark. Hope that nailed it down a bit.

Hi! Thanks for asking a question on Academia.SE. However, here we discourage open-ended questions (e.g. "life advice questions"), see http://academia.stackexchange.com/faq.
Could you rephrase the question nailing the main point (i.e. advisor on insisting on developing a certain projects; e.g. is he aware of the previous work?).

Have you asked him if this is a warmup exercise, and he also has in mind some problems from this neighboring field which previous techniques have been unable to address?

The issue seems to be that your advisor isn't willing to acknowledge that the problems he's attempting to work on have been solved. I would recommend bringing the relevant papers to him and discussing with him how his proposed projects differ from what already exists in the literature. This way, either (1) he'll clarify how his projects are different from the literature, or (2) you may be able to demonstrate to him that the problem is indeed solved.

If this is early in your PhD studies, your adviser could be giving you this task knowing that it is solved to test your capabilities. Generally, when you are new to research methodology, you will want to try to repeat previous work to make sure that you know that you are doing it correctly. A test where the correct answer is unknown is a poor test. Your adviser could be taking this approach with you while not explaining his purpose in doing so.
If this is the case, none of your three alternatives are really appropriate, although the first is the best. If you are being evaluated on how you solve a known problem, then you need to solve it very well. Then you will be given better and more exciting work.
If your adviser genuinely thinks this is a worthwhile novel problem to pursue, then see the other answers.

That's an interesting take. Is it common for advisers to "test" their students in this manner?

I don't think this is a test. He asked me to reproduce others work before in the explicit manner.

@Paresh - I've only had one PhD, but it happened to me. Not in the high stakes pass-fail kind of way, but in the assess your skills kind of way so that my adviser knew where to start training me.

Some of the answers presuppose that your advisor knows what he is doing and that perhaps you need to change your attitude.  Perhaps they are mistaken. No good advisor would waste his or your time by "testing" you on well-covered ground. There are some stubborn people around who may have a distinguished publication record and who may lead the peripatetic life of the in-demand speaker, but have an acute Achillies heel when it comes to having underlings implement the superannuated visions they cannot implement themselves.  The important point is that this is academically low-value work for them, but your time is not valuable. This situation is more likely to arise if your advisor is not paying your salary; it's less likely if you are on soft money. I don't know what advice to give you, except to say that I have been in this position, have rolled with the punches, and in the end there were no publications. And this was a case where the advisor announced to his team that others (better funded and staffed groups) were implementing the kind of thing he wanted (with some minor differences). No matter--he still wanted his team implement his "vision." It was professionally damaging for all parties involved. I decided it was pointless for me to work supporting professors and their students on low academic value, poorly remunerated work if I was not getting published, and made plans to leave. I hope that others in similar situations do likewise.

it is not easy to leave. I want the prefix (PhD). It is maybe possible to switch advisers. "Vision" thing is annoying as hell.

I'm not a Ph.D. student any more--I'm further along in my career to the point that the kind of sacrifices and opportunity costs that you might be able to assume at this point in your career are no longer sustainable for me. You may have to stick it out and work hard to find something the competing group overlooked, or else find another adviser. You have to be as hard-nosed. I joined a group, no publications--I'm out, whether I'm needed or not. Your remark on "vision" suggests that this affliction (how many books of the Bible begin with mention of the vision of some character?) is not uncommon.

If you are already very far along in your PhD (which I assume you are doing) I would finish the PhD. If you are still at the beginning, and feeling like this is not where you want to go, and it does not teach you the skills you need, I would consider trying to switch.
But first and foremost, try and talk to your supervisor about your frustration. Of course, keep it civil and professional. You might be able to give your current research a twist that makes it more appeal to you.

I was trying to suggest in talks with him that "everything is already published" (exaggerating a bit) and we are not proficient in this field.

What did he reply to that?

he replied like any other scholar, "Our approach is novel and it will bring us fame" (exaggerating a bit again ;))

It could also be that your supervisor more clearly sees the bigger picture, what makes you so sure that this will not be good science.

Like I wrote, the whole "path" have been already discussed and published. What I'm asked to do, is introduce his twist and go the whole path again with minor differences in results (from previous published works) and a lot of self citing.

What is the nature of the "twist"? Will the twist allow you to come up with minor differences in results but do it cheaper, faster, or better?

like any other scholar — I don't think that word means what you think it means.

@JeffE what do you think it means?

I don't think it means someone who pushes their own approach because it will bring them fame.

He could be intransigent--I've seen this firsthand. In my case though, the "PI" managed to alienate a good scientist who happened to be a highly proficient scientific programmer. I was on a conference call which culminated in emotional accusations & the severance of a long-standing professional relationship. (This was the tip of the iceberg.) Has this kind of thing happened with your adviser and any of his former colleagues? If not, you might want to keep your nose to the grindstone. My approach was to see if papers came out, no matter who was to blame--even me. No papers, I'm out.


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Ownership of the code
My advisor sets the problem. I implement the solution for this particular problem and for the set of similar problems using a programming language.
My question is, can I put the code in the public domain, if I decide to do so. And can I run the code for other people in exchange of co-authorship for their papers?
Again, my advisor did not ask me to write the code, he asked me to solve the problem.

Github != public_domain.

You don't state whether you work on this problem under an employment. If yes, then typically the employer will hold copyright, otherwise you should retain copyright in your work.

Also, this depends on your country.

Is your supervisor OK with that?

Regarding the second part (authorship for using) - it deserves a separate question; could yo ask it?

@FedericoPoloni agreed, fixed.

@PiotrMigdal I think the advisor is OK about me publishing the code, however his reaction of my co-authorship with other researchers could be different ;)

@NPcompleteUser As cbeleites answered, you may require citation, but not co-authorship for using it. Sure, if the code is useful and they will want you to modify it, then yes. Or you can advertise your expertise (by putting this code) and willingness to being a co-author.

If I document my code well, others can use it without my help, but if I document it poorly, others need my help.  Ergo, if I document poorly, I have a better chance at co-authorship than if I document well.

@gerrit hehe, that's why usually codes from academia suck in readability ;)

Dude. Just ask.

Most of the universities I've worked for have been quite explicit that they consider such material as "work for hire" meaning that they own the rights. In that case you need to find out what the university policy is.
Often you are allowed to open-source the code, but you have to find out.

I'm in the United States.

My question is about the difference between finding a solution for a particular problem, and implementing it (maybe in my spare time) as a program for some general-case scenario.

As I read the paperwork they make me sign every year, anything I do to solve a problem I've been given is claimed to belong to the uni. In principle you could fight that claim, but there is some risk. IANAL, but if you are planning to take this work with you, you should (1) talk to a lawyer and (2) firewall it carefully: only work on it on personal computers, using personal software, not while sitting in your office, not communicating with anyone about it over your employer's network, etc. etc.

@dmckee It may depend on place. Also, if it is not patentable (etc), it is very unlikely that he will get into legal problems for sharing work (especially without license claims). Anyway, I did put some code (for my paper) on GitHub and used Creative Commons license, and I am still alive (as of today ;)).

@dmckee thanks for the IANAL part, will keep in mind.

@PiotrMigdal Much of what I write for work links against GPL'ed stuff so the university hasn't a lot of choice about that. But If I tried to set myself up in business selling something I wrote when I worked there they might become interested and that is when those forms become an issue.

@dmckee Sure, if it is about making business (or has potential for that) then it is a different story. Anyway (at least for research-only stuff) even if one cannot open-source something, perhaps one can still publish something (e.g. on GitHub) with appropriate (e.g. (C) Univ. of XXX) license.

Copyright differs a lot between countries. However, here I'd recommend to come to a mutual agreement without thinking about copyright fights in the first place.
That is, try to convince instead of trying to win a copyright fight.
In my experience, in academic context some strong arguments for FOSS licensing are

Reproducibiliy is becoming more important. And this includes calculations. Questions about correctness can easiest be answered by "look at the code".
The academic currency are citations. It may be much easier to convert a software into citations (by requiring users to cite you) than into money (this requires a whole lot of infrastructure)
if it is a larger software: in academia people change institutions fairly often. FOSS licensing is a way to make it clear and legal that you have the right to maintain (and use) code even after you leave that university.
If you stay in science, this makes a steady state of technology clear and legal: when you change institution, your new institute profits from the work you bring, and your old institution can profit from the fact that you can still look at this work. You profit by not re-writing wheels.

As for

can I run the code for other people in exchange of co-authorship for their papers?"

Only running code IMHO is something that would be acknowledged, but it isn't enough of a scientific contribution for becoming co-author. So: No.
However, what you can do: write a paper and require users to cite this paper.

A few points about the  German copyright in this situation:

Copyright for computer programs is the one topic where German copyright is similar to the UK/US copyright systems.
Basically, if you write the program in order to do work related work, the right of use automatically belongs to your employer (i.e. they automatically get a license), and your wage is considered to include the appropriate license fee.
In Germany, It doesn't matter where and when you do the programming (it can even be in your spare time at home), what matters is whether it is to "fulfill the tasks and directives [of your employer]"(rough translation from the court decision). IMHO the employer doesn't need to specify that you should program this, it is enough that you decide to solve the task he assigned you by programming.
This is different from UK/US I think, and of course it doesn't apply to programs that are not related to your work.
However, things can be different in academia. Lots of German PhD students have working contracts that do not cover the scientific work (the work for hire is looking after lab practica, teaching seminars, etc.). In that case, IMHO the university doesn't hold the copyright automatically.

"Copyright differs a lot between countries." Used to. Not so much these days as hammering out a consistent set of rules on the matter is big business in diplomatic circles. But sometimes the small differences that remain can make a big difference in the outcome of a dispute.

@dmckee: I guess one of the practical differences is what rights employers get automatically. Put for the program you are right, that is very similar nowadays.

Only running code IMHO is something that would be acknowledged, but it isn't enough of a scientific contribution for becoming co-author. So: No.  I think that depends on how involved running the code is.  An advanced model can be quite involved to run, and considering input and parameters there may be several iterations between people.  In my opinion, in some cases, I think running code can be enough for co-authorship.

You really have to ask someone at your department, or take a look at the employment agreement you signed.
My experience is that I often just discuss with my advisor what we are going to do with the code, release it or not, and if so, under which license. A lot of the more general code I wrote is released under a GPL2 license. The problem of ownership often only arises when money is involved. The institutes where I worked until now where very positive towards making any software available under a public license.

+1 for discussing the fate of the code before writing it.

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How to add citation for a whole paragraph?
If I write a report and a whole paragraph is based on one source but not cited verbally it seems unnecessary to include the reference after every sentence:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua (source 1). Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat (source 1).
Now I found a Phd thesis that puts the reference after the last dot of the paragraph to indicate that it is based on this very source:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. (source 1)
Is this a common practice? Is it generally understood? What are other ways to add the reference for a whole paragraph?

"Recall the following results from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum (source 1):"

In LaTeX, just wrap the quote inside \begin{quote}...\end{quote}

Possible duplicate of What kind of citation is needed for a whole paragraph?

Generally it is sufficient to cite each source only once in each place where you refer to material from this source. "Place" may be one sentence, one paragraph, one definition, etc.
If you cite a paragraph verbatim from another source, put it in quotation marks or in a quotation block and add one reference to the source at the end.
If you have a whole paragraph referring to one source but don't actually quote it, it gets a little bit more tricky. You have to make sure that a reader clearly understands that the whole paragraph is based on the source you are citing. A simple citation in parenthesis just added at the end of the last sentence may not be sufficient to make this clear. One way to cite in this case is to write something like "The following argument is based on (source)" at the beginning of the paragraph in question.

This problem is one that I commonly come across. In some disciplines one puts a reference after the last sentence in the paragraph, after the final period. I personally do not like this way of doing it and it may not even be formally correct in most disciplines. Instead I would suggest that you start the paragraph (or paragraphs if appropriate) by simply stating where the material has been sourced in the first sentence of the pragraph(s). Exactly how you formulate this depends highly on the content and what you need to write. It can be something dry such as "The following information is from XXX (1979)" but you can probably see how you can weave in the reference in an introductory sentence or two so that it makes sense and clear that you extracted the information from there.
The main point is of course to make it clear to the reader where the information comes from. Clarily will be more important than nice formulations in this case.

This happens to me often. I have several tips that I use when writing:

the placement: it should not be in a section / chapter explaining your work, algorithm, method, findings. Probably, it'll be in Discussion, Related works, Introduction or Conclusion
if it deserves a whole paragraph, it deserves a sentence. Some examples:

The proposed method can be compared to the work of [John Doe, 2006]. The work in [1] addresses the problem (...) while the method proposed here (...)
In this chapter we introduce a related problem examined in [1].
The first important step in this direction was made by Doe [1] and here we summarize the most important findings.

in general, you are putting some reference in relation to your work. Be precise with expressions referring to each paper like the work proposed here, or the previous results and similar.

if you have more than 1 reference to compare with, introduce them one by one, paragraphy by paragraph.. If you mix them, you'll have to cite every sentence or two to avoid the confusion

you don't have to cite at the end of each sentence, you can cite at the end of each idea. If you're making a logical conclusion and just add a cite with the concluding sentence, you're giving proper credit.

One common approach is to include the citation  in the first sentence, and then use "they" and related words for every subsequent sentence so that the connection between statements and reference is clear.

Smith and Jones (2000) conducted a study on X and Y. They performed X analysis. They found that blah blah blah. They concluded that foo foo foo. Their studies highlight that blah blah blah.

The clearest way to show that the entire paragraph is taken from someone else is to set that paragraph off in some way. The two most common ways are to indent the entire paragraph or set the entire paragraph in italics (or both).
The writing should make it clear that the author is not claiming any part of the paragraph as his/her own work and the example in your question simply does NOT accomplish that. The sample could mean that the last sentence is cited and the rest is not, meaning the author is claiming the first sentence is actually his/her own.
It is quite messy to cite each sentence individually and it does not help readability so, better to indent/italicize the entire paragraph.

Sorry, I didn't refer to cite verbally but to write a paragraph reflecting the knowledge taken from only one source. I updated my question to clarify

I do not agree with putting it in italic or indenting it. That would be fine, in my opinion, if it was taken word for word from somebody else. But, the way I understand it it's just a paragraph based on the paper [Source 1].

The problem doesn't seem to me to be one of how to format a citation for a full paragraph. Instead, the problem is that you have a lengthy paragraph that draws upon one source for many assertions (claims or statements something is/is not so) or facts. This starts to approach a plagiaristic form of writing.
Another problem is that you are basing your entire paragraph on a sole source, and trusting that it is right (or, maybe, the writer simply doesn't care - I see that a lot with the writing of students who just want to get an assignment cranked out). If you are writing a thesis or dissertation, the care and concern for veracity of the information should, I hope, be greater.
Try including more of your own thoughts, reasoning, or explanatory writing. If the paragraph introduces explanatory statements or other work by you, then breaking up the flow with the appropriate in-text citation from the single source isn't an issue, as it is less frequent than once every sentence. Or, find other sources that support or amplify the material in the paragraph, add in the necessary associated verbiage, and cite them too.

What if I have a paragraph in e.g. a background section, where I'm summarising an earlier work that is a primary inspiration for my own work that the reader may not already understand, but is essential to understanding the rest of the paper?

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Other evaluation systems than exams
I live in a country where the quality of education is poor.
The primary goal seems only to be to teach us how to pass exams and not to learn the material for knowledge sake. It appears that their sole focus is for us to score well on tests so that we can get into a better college an maybe get a good job.
It is only about exams and I feel like I am being deprived of an education.
As I am not familiar with other education systems, I would like to know if there are education system where there are evaluation systems other than exams or where there is less of an emphasis on teaching to the exam?
Are there systems that evaluate a student's performance based on writing papers of doing projects?

I've avoided them like the plague as I loathed writing then, but some classes expect a term paper that makes up a large part (probably sometimes all) of your grade.  There are also term projects. Besides, what do you mean when you say "at the first place?"

Even in many countries where the education system is considered good, there's a huge overemphasis on teaching to tests and not to learning (e.g, US, Japan, etc).

As Gnometorule mentions in the comments, you'll find a variety of other types of assessments.
The three most common ones for end-of-course assessment are the exam, the project, and the paper, but they definitely aren't the only things that can be used to determine a grade.
In literature classes, and I'd imagine the majority of humanities classes, papers are a more common form of assessment.  Even exams, when given, are more paper-like being in essay format.  In most math courses, on the other hand, you'll tend to find exams are more common.  In computer science courses or the visual arts, projects are probably more likely the substantial source of grades.
It's also not uncommon, at least in the US, to find other elements of courses counting for part of the final grade.  Participation can be an important element of discussion classes, or classes where interaction with other students is very important such as in music or theatre courses (and those may also have a performance/recital as part of the grade, though that may be considered a test of sorts).  Homework may also be counted as a portion of the grade.  Portfolios, which can be a sort of mix of hybrid of homework and/or smaller projects, are also relatively common.


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Business cards for a postdoc: what affiliation?
My wife just started a postdoc at an R1 university and needs business cards for a conference and her future job hunt. She asked me to design them for her.
Normally, I'd put her current (postdoc) institution, but because the temporary nature of the postdoc position (1 year), and because she'll be presenting her dissertation work at the upcoming conference, it seems like the cards should perhaps brand her individually rather than as part of her institution.
If possible, I'd like to avoid creating some business cards now and then creating new ones again in a year or so. This would mean I would want a more general business card — one less tied to her current institution -- but I want even more for her business cards to be professional (following current best practices), and to not cause any confusion.
I see these options:

Include both her grad school and postdoc institutions.
Include only her postdoc institution.
Include no institution, but instead use the card to describe her and her research. Use these business cards for a longer while.

Is there a common practice for postdocs?

I would use a personal email (e.g., gmail) rather than her current postdoc email (e.g., @R1.edu). Also, does she have a personal webpage rather than a school webpage? I would list that rather than her profile on R1.edu.

What is R1 university?

@Ooker Research I University (also here) It's one way to classify universities in the USA. R1 is a large, research focused university.

I second @RichardErickson's great idea, having a personal website independent of the university allows whoever is interested to get in contact regardless of where you are, even if the card you make has the name of an institution.

@RichardErickson: I think that might not be such a good idea. It implies a sort of distrust and dissociation from your institute. If you could add a personal website, that would cover the case of the institute address being revoked.

@einpoklum I disagree. A one year post-doc position does not have a strong association or level of trust to their institution. "Disccociation" will occur in <1 year regardless of what is written on the business card. I know a College dean who once told me "never love something that cannot love you back" when working with academic institutions. One reason for our different view points may be cultural. I'm not sure where you are from, but in the United States, postdocs often receive poor treatments from Universities. Hopefully where you are located treats post docs better!

Business cards themselves are not a terribly common practice for postdocs in my field (some combination of biology, physics, others). I think I've been handed one at a conference maybe once or twice.
I don't have a simple answer, but here are the factors I'd think about:

Don't put her institutional email on it, because it will expire quickly once she leaves - it's better to use a [professional-sounding] external one. (Similar factors can apply to university websites, but they've been better in my experience.)
Consider how likely it is that she'll use the entire run of 100 or so cards in the next year, before having to change the affiliation.
I would probably not list an affiliation that isn't current on a business card. She may, however, list that affiliation in the conference program if she's talking about her dissertation work - or it may be obvious from her coauthors.
Will having no visible affiliation make her look like a crackpot? This depends on the culture of the field. Probably there are no strange unaffiliated people presenting their Unified Theory of Russian Literature at the MLA Convention, but in physics, it's an issue.

I have seen (in applied maths) the following two self-advertising methods used by job-hunting postodocs more often than business cards: (1) put a slide at the end of your presentation where you say "Hey, I'm looking for a job" (2) print it on a t-shirt and wear it at the conference.

@FedericoPoloni But it would still be helpful to have a short, preprinted paper with contact details (-> business card) for interested people who talk to you about that slide/t-shirt.

@FedericoPoloni: People print stuff on T-shirts? What kinds of things do they say?

... then they should be. You meet someone at a conference, want to leave your contact details to him. Do you start dictating your email or phone number? Spell out your name? Nah. Give them a business card.

@jvriesem If I recall correctly, just "I'm looking for a job" / "do you have an opening" with some personal data -- maybe a very short CV-like thing.

@einpoklum: No academic under 50 has ever handed me a business card.  Rather, when you meet someone, you learn their name and their institution, which should be enough to find contact information.  (Let me know if it takes you more than ten seconds to find a contact address for "Pete L. Clark.") If you really want to exchange email addresses, you take out your phone and it's done.

@PeteL.Clark: So you can be the first. Seriously, taking your email address by phone requires ~20-45 seconds (including finding the phone, pulling it out, swiping it on, going to contacts, new contact, "What's your name again?", etc.. Taking your business card requires 3-5 seconds. The difference is more significant than you think - both in terms of your ability to make contact with more people but no less importantly due to the implicit commitment in going to the trouble of adding your details to someone's contacts.

@einpoklum: As I said, generally it is enough to learn someone's name and institution, which is something you should be paying attention to when you meet people anyway (and is much helped out by name tags).  If you can remember names, you can contact people even when you haven't had a one-on-one conversation with them.  Anyway, if business cards are used in certain academic circles, there's certainly no problem there.  In my circle (and for people under a certain age) use of them would look strange.  To each their own...

@PeteL.Clark - Maybe if a small investment of time and $ in a card reduces the likelihood of getting confused/forgetting a name, we should embrace it? There's a huge set of issues about what "looks strange" and what types of people are seen to be too self-promoting in academia. I'd advocate for distrusting that intuition.

The cards should list the employee's current place of employment, just like business cards for any other job.  The only thing that should be different for a postdoc is that you should make sure the image file for the cards is easy to update when she gets a new job.

Is there any good method to update business cards? Everything I can come up with sounds more expensive and/or cumbersome than "throw them away and get new ones".

@FedericoPoloni Recycle them and get new ones. Unless you're going for super-fancy business cards and buying in bulk it shouldn't be a big expense.

@FedericoPoloni I get them printed in a print shop in the alley of a poor neighbourhood.  It's cheap.

I ordered business cards online.  Very affordable.  You upload your layout.  If you save your file you can just edit it next year.

when being more mobile stage, It is also extremely helpful to be easily searchable in one or two places that you also keep up-to-date - if someone looking her up during or after the postdoc cannot find her on a webpage somewhere then it is missed opportunity when someone is trying to be supportive of young career researchers. Try to choose from linkedin/researchgate/googlescholar/googlesites) to keep up so that when someone does a simple search of her name and some 'memory'  words related to her expertise, they can find her and be better reminded of her exact expertise/interests.

Good answer, but it was unclear what was meant by "making cards easy to update".

@jvriesem that's a software/graphic design issue, I won't give a detailed answer.

First, is the University sending her to this conference? (i.e. paying for her attendance, flight, hotel, etc...) If so, I would consider her a representative of the University and her business card should reflect it, email address and name of the institution. If the work presented was performed at a different University, then this should be evident in her presentation.
Second, When I was at an R1 University and wanted business cards for a conference, they had a few approved templates that I could choose from and then they printed them for me. Their might be rules about using a "non-approved" design. Check with her University.
Lastly, keep in mind that the quality of her research and presentation is much more important than the branding on her business card.

+1 for pointing out that Universities have approved design templates. They often have rules about using the university logo and related media, including the font. Sometimes they even have a deal with a print shop that the cards must be printed through that specific print shop. (Hehhh, business....)

Here's a format I saw recently.
Two-sided card.
Front had:

A photo, name and current email*
Summary line (a la LinkedIn 'tagline')
Current Employment info (Postdoctoral Fellow, Univ of ABC)
Academic Highlights (PhD 2013, R1 Univ., M.S. 2010 XYZ College)
Shortened link to profile page (linked in)*

On the back:

PhD research: One line summary
M.S. Work: One line summary
One line Skills list
Github link

*
1. An email account that is unlikely to expire: most academic accounts can be kept alive or at least auto-forwarded.
2. LinkedIn or other 'permanent' and up-to-date profile page. About.me or even just google sites works. Investing in a domain name is also advisable.

There actually exists and Univ of ABC (http://ufabc.edu.br/en/), and it's not an acronym for anything...

If this is your private business card then you can pretty much put on it what you want. AJK's comment on using a long-lasting email is a very good one. I would perhaps also add the information that she is a post-doctoral researcher but leave away the affiliation -- adding that to a "private" business card suggests to any receiver that in this moment she represents the university, when she does not. Also, the university would likely want to see its own design guidelines followed when its name is mentioned.
If this is a university-issued card or the university has asked her to create a card then it should follow any design guidelines of the university and get some sort of approval.

I favour the following approach to create a lifelong point of contact.
Dr FirstName Initial(s) LastName
Biologist/Chemist/Physicist/Whatever

                                                      FirstName@LastName.com
                                                      http://LastName.com

This will require buying LastName.com. (Given that it probably won't be available, you might need to compromise a little.)


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Do researchers study topics outside their field for fun?
This question is partially inspired by this one. Do researchers, who actively publish, even have time for that? They seem to be a busy lot. I am not talking about publishing outside the filed, but about studying for the sake of learning just for fun and curiosity, as a form of amusement.
Is there any known case of a researcher who, by studying a topic outside his/her field for fun, had an insight for a novel approach or solution?
It seems that studying is only done (by researchers) when "it might be useful". Is that true?
That, maybe, would explain why most of the researchers I know, speak at most, three languages. They would have little time or incentives to learn the fourth or fifth.

Yes, I do. Maybe there are some studies or surveys on this?

Do the non-researchers you know normally speak four or more langauges?

It seems that studying is only done (by researchers) when "it might be useful". -- Apparently you've never read my papers.

It seems to me that the greatest minds flow around a whole lot of fields. John Nash, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and many others have done important work in multiple, nearly unrelated fields.

The legendary physicist Richard Feynman took a year off physics to do biology experiments for fun.

If you enjoy learning additional languages, or if you need to learn more (e.g. a postdoc or sabbatical in a country whose language you don't speak), then you can make a project of learning another language.  But what does it matter whether a person speaks more than three language?  I don't understand your question, I guess.

Yes, definitely.  There a top researcher in my field (EE) who regularly writes and publishes papers on Philosophy, Theology, and Apologetics.

Noam Chomsky is a prominent example. He is a trained linguist but is very active in political theory

The answer depends in the definition of "study". If reading for fun a textbook is studying, it wouldn't be surprising to find a lot of researchers "studying" unrelated fields in their free time. In fact, it could be one of the ways graduate students are said to procrastinate.

Given the high number of researchers the chance for a Yes as an answer is incredible high. Look, a bumble-bee and it flies - I wonder how it manages this.

@axsvl77 Though whether you would call that research is another matter. He did publish in History though, and it was not what you would call successful

Fundamentally, a researcher studying a different field "for fun" is in no other situation than anybody else studying "for fun". It's a hobby, just like reading, going to the theatre, or sports. Some engage in this hobby, some do not. Whether they "have time for that" is really the same question as whether they have time for any other hobbies - some do, some (especially on the tenure track) are maybe a bit crunched for time, and choose to use their little spare time on something a bit farther removed from their daily work grind.

Is there any known case of a researcher who, by studying a topic outside his/her field for fun, had an insight for a novel approach or solution?

I am sure there is. Note that "having a an insight" is not a particularly high hoop to jump over. My students "have insights" all the time, the question is whether they are important, work well enough, and are generally more useful to pursue than the myriad other ideas they could use.
My gut feeling is that you rather meant whether somebody had a big breakthrough in a different field as a "hobbyist". I think this used to be more common in times past. I can't really think of a recent example (at least in the STEM fields), as plenty of time and resources (both of which a hobbyist definitionally does not have much of) is required for major breakthroughs.

I think it depends on what you mean by "a different field". I think it was the last year that a virtually unknown mathematician (I recall reading something about him being a college teacher for several years) made a significant breakthrough in a branch of mathematics. I would say that that counts (unless I got some of the important details very wrong).

I don't think that this is what this question is about - I think the OP is looking for e.g., a chemical science researcher publishing e.g., in math, not just anybody who is not a research mathematician.

That being said, I am sure if it happens its in math - by its very nature, math supports major breakthroughs by amateurs more than the experimental sciences. I guess this is also the reason why math is overrun by cranks, while we never hear somebody claim that they have discovered the Higgs boson with the detector in their backyard that they built out of a coffee maker.

Well, there is always the case of theoretical physicists discovering something which (some years later) turned out to be quite fruitful from mathematical perspective, and the converse. I think I've heard about several such examples in the twentieth century, though I can't confidently cite one.

Actually I used a bad wording... I meant who delves deeply in other fields without the intention of doing research, e.g. a biologist who does research about the social behavior of a bird species, and studies fluid mechanics in the spare time. Then, by coming across a new simulation method, has the insight he/she can use a similar approach to explain an observed behavior of those birds.

@tomasz while I'm not doubtful that what you suggest can happen, it's getting harder and harder nowadays.  AFAIK any highly publicized (as in newspapers etc) math breakthrough that has come out of nowhere in recent years by some "outsider" has turned out to be by actual research mathematicians who just have, due to some bad luck on the job market, not been able to get good academic positions.

Richard Feynmann - Nobel laureate in Physics - took a sabbatical in which he studied microbiology. Although apparently this wasn't too successful, he did have some insights which helped the professional microbiologists.

My main interest and background is in psychology but I work as a trauma researcher at a hospital. I recently developed a new metric for trauma patients that takes a fully new approach to identifying major trauma for quality assurance processes. I presented the paper at the 2016 Trauma Quality Improvement Program where it was described as a groundbreaking shift and won an award. (Here's the abstract if you're interested.)
After talking with a few people, I found that a lot of the major advances in various areas of study have been made by people who are new to the field. This is usually because people who are trained in a field tend to just accept the ways things have been done, whereas someone with a different background can bring new approaches to problems that had just been accepted.

That's very inspiring, and a good point to make. Thank you for sharing that.

Do researchers study topics outside their field for fun?

At least in France or Europe, there is a very strong incentive to do that: funding agencies (e.g. ANR in France, or Horizon Europe in the European Union) are explicitly favoring multi-disciplinary research projects.
Imagine you are a computer scientist. The Covid-19 pandemic is opening a lot of funding opportunities. But for example to "simulate" a pandemic on software, you need to be expert in programming (as a computer scientist you are) but also to understand what a biological virus is, and to interact with medical doctors explaining what the Covid virus is.
Another example is of course research funding related to global warming or climate change. By definition it is multi-disciplinary.
A third example is Bioinformatics. It is mixing difficult computer science problems with biology.
Yet another example is simulation and prediction of galaxy collision. This involves both programming skills and top level skills in astrophysics, relativity, etc.
Organisations like CERN (or even my employer CEA) are paying a lot of researchers in different areas. Remember that the World Wide Web was invented at CERN.


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What is the best way to appeal an unfair qualifier exam decision?
Recently, I took the PhD qualifier exams for my department. In my dept. there are 3 exams, each covering a subfield (say subfield A, B, and C). First you are given an hour to work through several problems, and then you have another hour to present to several professors, who critique your answers and ask supplemental questions.
I was well prepared for all of my exams, and did excellently on exams B and C. Exam A did not go as well. During the oral part of the exam, I was asked a question using term Z'. I stated that I am unfamiliar with this term and asked for clarification on its meaning. I was given a vague and unhelpful explanation, along with some chastisement about how this term was "fundamental" knowledge. This wasted perhaps 5 minutes or so of the exam and make the remainder of the oral part fairly awkward. Though I believe I solved the problems correctly, I left with a bad feeling about the terminology issue.
After the exam, I looked term Z' up on Google. Seems it's a very uncommon term for Z. The textbook I was being tested on used Z, as did all 3 of the courses I've had on subfield A.
A few days later I got the results of the exams. I failed exam A, but will be allowed to retake it in the future.
For the sake of identifying what I did wrong, I spoke with one of the professors who administered my exam. I asked what I should focus on for the next time. He said "the fundamentals." I asked whether the terminology issue was the deciding factor and it apparently was not. Instead, he thinks I don't understand absolutely fundamental concept Y. Oddly, he also complained that I used a more general form of Y. (So, which is it? Do I understand Y really well or not at all?) The most I can make of this is that the terminology issue made him and the other committee member think I'm an idiot, and then they were much less fair to me from that point on.
He then asked me to solve a problem which he made up on the fly. I used one version of Y to solve this problem, and he complained that (though correct) how I did this demonstrates that I don't know what I'm doing. The annoying thing about this is that I'm a TA for undergrad class A right now and the way I solved this problem is exactly the way the book the dept. uses does. It seems that he'll complain regardless of how I do things.
I now believe this exam was not fair, and this professor likely will be on my exam committee next time. I doubt I'll be able to pass if he continues being so unfairly critical of me.
At this point, what are my options? I am considering appealing to the dept. head, but I don't want to make things worse than they are right now. I could make enemies in the dept. if I appeal, and I'm not sure if there are other options I should consider.

If multiple professors are telling you that you need to improve in some area then maybe they are right. What did you advisor say?

In this case, the one professor I've spoken to is definitely wrong. (I don't know what the other committee member thinks as I have not met with them.) My advisor was present at the final committee meeting where all the decisions were made, and he did not have any specific knowledge suggestions. They did suggest that I might have been rude, but I don't think I was. The professor I asked did not seem to think I was rude, just ignorant.

The path of least resistance may just be to study and retake that portion of your qualifier. It will be a very, very small bump in your long journey for a PhD.

There is nothing to study. The professor I spoke with's claims about my knowledge are contradicted by their own statements as well as my performance on another of the exams (which builds upon knowledge of field A). My concern is that I will not pass when I retake the exam because this professor will continue to not give me credit for things I do correctly.

@Omen, Z can't be applied in that sense as it's an adjective, but that's possible for Y. Unfortunately, it appears that what's intuitive for me is probably not for this professor. (The more advanced form of Y I used on the actual exam is most intuitive to me, incidentally, but he hated that.) Still, I think determining what they want to see and just giving them that on a retake is an approach worth considering.

It is hard to know the exact issues for an oral exam we were not present for and for which we are hearing only the candidate's version.  Based on your own description it sounds like you feel very strongly that you know the material flawlessly and were treated unfairly.  I'm sorry about that.  However your description did not convince me that that's what actually happened: rather it sounds like the committee had some issues with your performance that you don't yet fully understand.  Since you are allowed to retake the exam, you should find out as precisely as you can what went wrong and what they want you to do better.

I was well prepared for all of my exams

Isn't that for the committee to decide?

and did excellently on exams B and C.

May I ask: is that the feedback you got on exams B and C: that you did excellently?  Or was it just that you passed?  It matters: if in two out of three exams that committee really felt that you did "excellently", then they think you are an excellent student and there will be a lot of support for you to stay in the program.  Also, do you have the same examiners for all three exams?

During the oral part of the exam...The textbook I was being tested on used Z, as did all 3 of the courses I've had on subfield A.... I asked whether the terminology issue was the deciding factor and it apparently was not.

You gave a very long description of something that took "five minutes" of a one hour exam and was explicitly said not to be a cause of your failure.  You are focusing very strongly on whether it was reasonable for you to know the terminology.  But then afterwards you just looked it up on the internet and decided that it was not something you need to know without talking to anyone else about it.  That's a problem.  Another observation is that -- and this is something that happens to lots of students - you let your entire performance get derailed by an inessential minor point.

For the sake of identifying what I did wrong, I spoke with one of the professors who administered my exam.

You should speak to every professor who administered the exam.  Exams are not failed because one of the committee members didn't like your performance: at the very least the majority felt that way, and much more commonly they all did.

The most I can make of this is that the terminology issue made him and the other committee member think I'm an idiot, and then they were much less fair to me from that point on.

I wasn't there, but I think this is not a very good guess.   Since there seems to be a lack of clarity about the result even after speaking to one of the examiners, I would consider asking for a written evaluation of your performance.  It would be a good idea to discuss this with your adviser first and make sure that this will be properly viewed.  I think it is a very reasonable request: you passed two out of three exams and will take the third one again.  You really want to know clearly -- and spend time thinking about and taking into account -- the reasons for the failure.

. I used one version of Y to solve this problem, and he complained that (though correct) how I did this demonstrates that I don't know what I'm doing.

I don't understand what that means.  As you've told it, it certainly sounds annoying.  But he must mean something by it.  Your conclusion

It seems that he'll complain regardless of how I do things.

is the most negative and unhelpful possible one.  Does this faculty member have a reputation in the department for being so unreasonable?
You mention that your adviser was there for the deliberations [but I guess not for the exam itself?].  That should be extremely useful: you can get your adviser to explain their decision to you.  If he does not understand why you failed despite being at the deliberation, then you do have a problem.  If that is the case, definitely bring up the prospect of getting a written decision that you can then go over with him.

They did suggest that I might have been rude, but I don't think I was.

Whoa.  Your advisor thinks that you may have been rude to the exam members, but you have just brushed that off because the one exam member you spoke to didn't specifically mention it?
I'll give you the honesty of a lifelong academic who is a complete stranger to you: to me, you do sound a bit rude and disrespectful.  You look for confirmation on the internet that you are getting asked silly questions.  You say "In this case, the one professor I've spoken to is definitely wrong."  And you write

There is nothing to study. The professor I spoke with's claims about my knowledge are contradicted by their own statements as well as my performance on another of the exams (which builds upon knowledge of field A).

To hear a student who has failed an exam say that there is nothing to study the next time around is a huge red flag.  Maybe you know the material well according to your own standards and previous experience.  But if you know it perfectly: you are in the wrong place.  No one who has nothing to study belongs in academia: you already know everything, so you have nothing to learn.  Also you happen to know that your examiners are wrong, do not understand the material as generally and intuitively as you, and cannot even make logically non-contradictory statements in explaining themselves.  Well, look: either you're right or wrong about this.  But if you truly feel this way, then either way, at the very least this PhD program is not for you.

Thanks for the detailed response. Your suggestion to get a written evaluation of my performance is excellent, and is precisely the type of suggestion I am looking for. To clarify, what I am not doing is looking to get confirmation for my story. I am merely looking for avenues where I can pursue this matter further.

I want to clarify a few points (limited by time). With respect to my performance on the other exams, it's both my belief as well as what was said by the examiners during the exam and my advisor. The "red flag" of not needing to study is my honest belief here. What they say I don't know is rather fundamental and I understand it very well. To give an analogy, the professor I spoke with claims I don't understand something similar to the fundamental theorem of calculus, but somehow I simultaneously understand something similar to the divergence theorem.

There are aspects of the fundamental theorem of calculus that are not covered by the divergence theorem.  If I asked you a question about the fundamental theorem of calculus and you replied with the divergence theorem then that certainly might demonstrate a lack of understanding. My point is that there is no such thing as perfect knowledge of any academic subject at the PhD level, so "no need to study" is a very distressing thing to hear from a PhD student.

This is not to say that I understand why the professor believed that your performance on the exam was not passing: going by what you've said, you haven't received an intelligible explanation yet, and you deserve one.  Nor do I understand why you are getting quizzed on the spot or on material that occurs in the text for an undergraduate level course.  It should not be possible to fail an exam in which you answered all the questions -- excepting the terminology question -- correctly.  So you should speak to the other examiners and to your advisor and get more specific information.

Thanks again. My analogy was flawed. In short, I used a vector form of an equation they wanted a scalar form of. The vector form is more general (and is taught in undergrad courses, so it's not esoteric), and reduces to the scalar form with the appropriate conditions. I don't claim to have flawless knowledge, but I do claim that nothing I have heard indicates my knowledge is so deficient to fail the exam.

+1, especially for "Another observation is that -- and this is something that happens to lots of students - you let your entire performance get derailed by an inessential minor point." -- I thought reading this sentence that it was very likely what was going on, and then saw the OP's answer further down the page which seemed to confirm it!

I want to post what I did do for future reference.
Ultimately, I've decided that my best bet for passing quals is hitting a home run on my retake. One thing I did find helpful was speaking with someone at the ombuds office. They informed me of the procedures I would need to go through if I were to file an appeal. Given that, if I fail the retake and I believe the decision is unfair, I will appeal without hesitation. I would recommend talking to someone at the ombuds office to anyone else in a similar situation.

So, what happened?

Retook the exam. Passed with flying colors. I thought about my first exam more and realized I made another mistake (from nervousness) which they might have taken as evidence that I don't know the fundamentals. Can't know for sure, as I never received very helpful feedback. I did spend a fair  bit of time over the semester analyzing what I knew poorly in the subject (not necessarily things that would be on the exam) and thought this was a helpful exercise.

Congratulations.  I'm sorry that you didn't get more helpful feedback: that is always frustrating.

I am a student in a doctoral program as well and have had three encounters with three professor's who are close in behaviors and thinking.  If you have a disagreement with one of them the other two makes it hard for you.  There is no way of knowing unless another professor outside their circle pulls you to the side and explain what is going on. Correction it was four of them. I received a B grade from two of them and an A- from the other two.
In their classes they make you feel insignificant and a bother to be there and critical of every thing you say all because my political views were different.  However, in other professors classes I was able to show I am worthy of a PhD.
So, I understand what you are going through. I would go to the top and ask for a conference with all parties on the test committee and have someone there from outside who knows calculus and be a witness of your understanding of the theorem.  I do not know calculus on your level but I know when someone is bias and that one failed you displays bias.
The more top people know what is happening the better but speak to an academic attorney first before doing what I suggest or anyone else to guide you.  Find news articles where colleges been sued for your type of issue and contact those lawyers.
I hope things works well for you.
Experienced Student

"[S]peak to an academic attorney first before doing what I suggest..."  To me this sounds like telling a baseball player who is unhappy with the umpire's call to "Speak to an athletic attorney first..."  Suing your university for failing you on an oral exam makes as much sense as suing your baseball league because of an umpire's call: the organization itself is the ultimate arbiter of the decision.

Also please note the OP's answer, in which he mentioned that he passed the exam the next time he took it.  Good for him!  This was six years ago.


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Special (non-english) character in name. What to do as author? Internationalize or not?
In German, as well as in other languages, people have Non-English characters in their names. e.g. ß, the umlauts etc..
I frequently face problems when flying, opening bank accounts, etc., particularly abroad, since replacing the ß with ss changes more more than 25% of my family name as compared to how it's written in my passport.
Obviously it is desirable to write one's name for submissions, the way one's name is written correctly. Can one expect to run into problems, and will sooner or later end up with different publications being published under different spellings of the name, or is it safe to go for the correct spelling?

People with names in foreign Latin scripts have been publishing in English-language journals under the native rendering of their name since the dawn of academic publishing. You should not expect to have any problem.

The problem might be in making sure you are searchable, but I think modern technology has come to cope with this issue well.

google (scholar) for example is aware of the similarity between ß and ss and manages to find ß-names when the search query uses ss (and vice versa).  ideas.repec.org doesn't :/

Are there any other researchers with the same surname as yours? If so, picking the non-yet popular variant may be beneficial.

Well, according to the answers you got, you'll probably have trouble to some degree. I'm not sure how much this helps you feel better, but you can at least use a name that sort of looks like your real name, and can even use the real one if you really want to! You know, there are billions of people out there who don't have such a privilege. And to those people transliteration into the English alphabet can cause a serious problem that makes it quite difficult to identify a person online, e.g., how many Wei Wong's are there when their original spellings may be different in their native language?

As nobody has done so, I want to mention the following (without deriving any recommendation): While most special characters of the Latin alphabet have a straightforward fallback, namely just removing the diacritical mark, ß (along with þ, ð (Icelandic) and ə (Azerbaijani) does not have this and thus will pose additional difficulties for people who do not have the character on their keyboard. Moreover, author names are often put into small-caps or all-caps, where ß usually becomes ss (it will take some time for the captial ß to reach scientific publishers, if at all).

@albert generally we don't create new tags unless they seem to be needed beyond the single question they're applied to. When creating (or suggesting) a tag, you should clearly define its scope and identify other questions that could benefit from it

First of all, always be consistent. Whatever you decide, that is what you will always have to use.
Considering the first point, might be better to strive and use your real name as it is with the non-english characters. You will have less problems in the future to prove your authorship in case questions rise. Complain to systems who do not accept your non-english characters...

Unfortunately. this is a very real problem for many people. Any major "irregularities" in the name of an author—particularly the first author—can cause problems. You don't even need to use non-English characters.
I know this from first-hand experience. I have very little problems with most of my papers—except for those I have published with two colleagues as first authors, one of whom has a hyphenated last name and the other whose name contains an apostrophe (compound Dutch name). On a regular basis, I need to write places like Web of Science to correct the publication records (e.g., the paper is listed as a cited reference, but somehow they can't seem to connect it to the original record, depriving us unfairly of citations). This has actually been a bigger problem with the hyphenated last name—the paper has about six or seven citations (provable!), but only one is listed in Web of Science. (Google Scholar seems to find them all, though.)
Other problems will also crop up in attendance lists, email accounts, registration for conferences, and other things where Unicode acceptance in databases is limited.
Note, however, that your professional name does not need to match up with your legal name. For instance, many female academics keep their maiden name if they started publishing under it when they were graduate students. This is the case even if they've legally changed their name after getting married. And I agree with Armand that it is more important that you use a consistent name—once you decide which version you want to use, stick with it!

I would think one should always use the standard tranliteration (ß->ss; ö->oe; zh and kh for those uncommon sounds in English; etc.). Starting to use non-standard versions can only cause problems for those trying to find you. I think the consistency is not with what you have used before but what everyone has done before.

The "standard internationalization" of my name includes an apostrophe, which, as I've mentioned above, would make my life substantially more difficult.

You don't even need compound names, hyphens or apostrophes, people frequently misspell my name for no apparent reason.

@user11596: mine, too. Fortunately the typical misspelled version is even more uncommon as name and both google and pubmed search engines suggest the correct one (though who knows what kind of search history they have of me)

For the given problem which I assume to be "Heß", I'd go with the ß spelling:

For me the most important reason for this recommendation is that in German "Heß" and "Hess" two different last names, and both rather common ones. Thus using the transliteration not only creates confusion whether or not the name was transliterated, but also roughly doubles the basis of people who could possibly be meant (e.g. inside Germany ca. 20000 Heß + 18500 Hess)
Over the last decade or so, there has been a tremendous improvement of dealing online with characters outside the absolute standard latin character set. I think this will continue, so using the ß will become less and less of a problem. As you say, google already knows how to deal with it.
Worst thing that happens in addition to maybe sometimes being transliterated to "ss" or even "sz" (which is very uncommon in German, so while Germans would be aware of the possibility that Hess could be a transliterated version of Heß, Hesz would be considered something really different) would be that you find your name misspelled with a β (beta instead of s-zett). However I don't think that this will happen much more frequently than people misspelling my "natively pure ASCII" last name by exchanging the last "e" by an "i" - and having a common problem means that scientific data bases know better how to correct it.
People may not know how to pronounce it, but that is very common with any kind of foreign name.

I'm strongly advocating for keeping your name unchanged, as far as:

most software can write it down (software = Word, HTML and LaTeX probably);
it's based on latin alphabet (that is, to every character you can assign a character on the English alphabet).

If you follow the Rule 2, you should be safe since most indexing software strips off all "decorations" from the letters.
For me, I hate when my name is written without diacritics, because it's simply not me. And heavens, we're living in 21st century and we have unicode and stuff!
Actually, ß is a true nutshell, since it has a unique transcription to English (ss), but it's not based on stripping diacritics. I'm not aware of how big difference is ß and ss in German.
With my journal typesetter hat on: I would allow ß in your name in an article. I wouldn't allow a cyrillic name, for instance, if the author insisted, I would keep both forms -- cyrillic and transcribed.

In the new orthography, ß means that the previous vocal is long, while ss means previous vocal is short. In the old orthography, ss would only be used between two short vowels (otherwise ß), and a lot of names (including the one in the question) are based on the old orthography, i.e. "Heß" is spoken just like "Hess".

@PaŭloEbermann You lose pronunciation when stripping accents or when converting ß to ss. Well, you lose pronunciation when you let people from other countries pronounce your names. Me with h and j in a Czech name and spending time in France, I should know :-)

To make less problems with computer search and indexing tools of various perfectness, I would suggest to use consistently English characters only in your English publications. If the non English character is basically an English character with extra crown or something the like, probably it will not be any problems with the proof of the authorship.
While of course keyboards can be easily configured to support national characters as well, think about the foreign users. Would they be capable of typing your special character into search box? Most likely, they will type the Latin equivalent instead. Smart search engines will treat it as the same, others may just not find the results. Various specialized sites with own databases may be important to you yet have less search capabilities than Google or Yahoo.
The possible alternative is to use the widely known several letter Latin alternative of that character that may exists (sch, zh, etc). However search tools are even less likely to treat special character and its multi letter alternative as the same. Also, doubts if it is the same name are much more likelty.

Sorry, no, I'll never be Tomas, since that's not my name.

Would they be capable of typing your special character into search box? — Oh, come on.  It's really not that hard to enter Meškauskas (or Tomáš, or Heß, or Erdős, or Łącki, or Ølår, or whatever), even using a foreign keyboard.  Now, whether they'd bother is a separate question.

Finally, I've been mentioned right next to Erdős...
A counter argument to the above would also be that (scientific) search service providers have low incentives to improve their search engines if everyone starts publishing under names based on the English alphabet. So all those named Tomáš, or Heß, or Erdős, or Łącki, or Ølår face a public good problem....

@sheß The point is, I'm still recognized as "Tomas" in most search engines. If "Heß" is easily recognized as "Hess", the go for it without any doubts. Most scientists have a brain and know that when searching for you, they might need to use ss.

eventually the web will be internationalized and yes, by all means, no worries...
unfortunately we still have work to do, so yes, by all means, be yourself...but be wary of compatibility issues: be they server, browser, ua, country-specific, etc., you're more than likely to run into an issue here or there trying to implement a non-english character in your name across the web...
one example: i'm fairly sure that while approved for urls, the double german s in your name is not supported by iso-159, which unfortunately, seems to be the charset flavor of the month...i bet you can't have it in a twitter handle, per se; and even this example is going to widely vary, as each service is going to have its own details, and implementations....

You appear to be using persay (a misspelling of per se) to mean for example, which is not what it means.

its meaning would have helped in your diatribe

The phrase per se means "by or in itself" as in "Using a word incorrectly is not a problem per se, however it often conveys to the reader that the remaining content might also be incorrect."

What exactly do you mean by "iso-159"? There is ISO TC 159, which is a standard on ergonomics. A widely used (and somewhat similar sounding) encoding standard is ISO-8859-1, and that one does include ß.


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How to become a reviewer for an engineering journal?
I am a PG graduate working in an engineering college as an assistant professor. Currently I have got one and half year of experience in teaching.
How to become a reviewer for an engineering journal? Do I need to pay money for that? Or by publishing paper in that journal can I become a reviewer?

You appear to have to very separate questions… could you post them separately?

You've made several grammar mistakes. Here, that's no problem, but on a CV I think it would cause the CV to be tossed out immediately. I would recommend paying meticulous attention to grammar when preparing your CV, and asking someone to proofread it if necessary.

I have edited this question to focus on the part that the answer is mostly related to. The original version of the question asked two totally unrelated questions.

The short answer for formatting a cv is that you should do it like others applying for similar jobs (or already in those jobs), but make it easier to scan if possible.  So find home pages of people who have jobs like the one you want, and read their cv's to see how they format them.
Now for your second question:
Most editors are often (constantly?) looking for new reviewers.  To get a chance to review a paper, you should

let the editor know you'd like to review and
give him or her some reason to trust that you'll do a good job.

Accomplishing (1) is easy: simply send an email or tell the editor in person (for example if you meet him at a conference or visit his university).  Now (2) takes a little more work, but isn't hard.  Trusting you to review a paper is typically a low-risk gamble for an editor.  If you don't violate confidentiality (talk about the paper with others in more detail than you should), then about the worst outcome for the editor is that you fail to write a report, or write a lousy report.  That's less than ideal, but if it happens, they'll just ask someone else to review the paper.  All that is to say, you don't have to work too hard to convince an editor to let you review a paper.  So how do you do it?
As you suggested, one good way is to publish in that journal.  Others are publish in another related journal;  give clear intelligent talks on research in an area related to the journal; get a recommendation to the editor to use you to review, from a friend of yours who is more established in your field.
Once you do get an opportunity to review a paper, make sure you do a good job.  Mainly this involves: submitting your report on time, making a clear recommendation to accept or reject, and supporting your assessment with the strengths and weaknesses of the paper.  If you'd like more detail, that's another question by itself.


text:
I am an Undergraduate Student who landed a job as a Data Scientist. Should I pursue a PhD and can I do it while working full time?
I just graduated with a computer-science bachelor’s degree and accepted a job offer as a data scientist with a well-known company. It is a research role; so I’ll presumably be working towards goals that are also academic in nature.
Now is it possible for me to find an advisor who would be okay with me working full-time? I’ve interned for this company and they have no issues with sharing any research as long as no confidential data is involved; so I will be able to publish and share some of my work with an advisor.
I am really enamored with the idea of having a PhD – for the sake of having a PhD (which is silly, I know). However, I’m hesitant to put my life on hold or quit my job so this is the only option left to me.

They hired you on a research role, and you have only a bachelor?

Well I interned with their Data Analytics team for 2 summers and part time through 2 semesters. It seems I made a reasonably good impression across a long ass time lol.

At least part of your question (Should I pursue a PhD?) appears to be off topic (see this discussion). Your second question about working full time during a PhD, has already been answered here.

OK. I just wonder what kind of research role is, that requires only bachelor qualifications for working towards academic research. I am not sure I understand your question: Will you have a particular research topic in the company and you ask if it's possible to find an adviser to supervise you on that particular topic? Or you ask to do things in parallel (different topic of PhD)? My guess is that in both cases the answer is probably no for many reasons

@RichardErickson I did see the question about pursuing a PhD while working full-time but I believe my circumstances are different enough to warrant another question (since parts of my work will actually be a part of my PhD research)

@PsySp perhaps I've misled you. When I say a research role, it is research towards solving specific problems. Not just general research. However there are a lot of projects with a lot of different data sets so I probably won't be handicapped by my work. As for the actual topic of interest, I have a general interest in deep learning. I am working on a paper right now about some work I did during my internships and am juggling a few specific ideas right now about what I do next (in terms of the project).

@kksred I see. You want to use the work done in the company as part of your PhD. This is very hard to answer since we do not have info regarding the particular topic. I think the best way to find out is to consult your local department, the people with expertise as close as possible to your future project, who will be able to judge if this makes a valid and potentially fruitful research plan. If yes, then I do not think you will have big problems admitted to the PhD program. But be careful that they might ask you do some master classes.

There cannot be a definite answer to your question, because we lack basic information regarding the project, arrangement etc.
I think the best way to find out if something like that is possible is to consult your local department where you finished your BSc, the people with expertise as close as possible to your future project, who will be able to judge if this makes a valid and potentially fruitful research plan. If yes, then I do not think you will have big problems admitted to the PhD program.
As a side note, observe that you might be asked to deal with some Master level courses/exams etc which, if you work full time, and depending how difficult is your department, will not be a piece of cake.

I agree with the piece of cake comment.  Also, note that a great way to find out if you really want to be Superman and proceed with your idea would be to start by taking one class per semester while working full time, and see how it goes.  Also, having an academic track record (of several graduate level courses taken while working full time) would be a good way to convince a potential advisor that you really can do this Superman feat.  (There are some people in the world who could do such a feat, and you may be one of them.)

@aparente001 How is it possible to take one class per semester? I never heard of something like that, usually you have to take the whole curriculum in a pretty tight schedule  (+thesis etc). The only way to do so, while working full time and also keep track of your potential PhD is indeed to be a very very committed person (and I ignore the logistics of study, attendance etc)

You can take classes towards a Master's part time, and you can also take classes as a non-matriculated student.

The best thing to do is talk to the computer science department at your old university and/or if you know which university you want to attend. It would not be easy having a full-time job, and studying for PhD, even if you only take one course per semester.

I cannot agree more.  I am having trouble pulling off a full time unpaid internship (Practicum for CIS degree) and trying to learn Japanese.

Same here, 14 hours of Ms classes, 2 Teaching assistant classes and teaching 2 courses as an adjunct instructor. :(

You officially have me beat sir.

Should you pursue a PhD?  This is something that only you can make a decision on.
Can you accomplish a PhD whilst working full time?  This falls under the wide umbrella of things that cannot be answered by others.  There are too many variables at play.  The only one who can know if you can accomplish this task while working full time, is you.
Opinions can be shared on if setting out on the PhD journey is a good one at this time, or what struggles you will face may be when working on said PhD but these will not be answers.

Please take extraneous discussion to [chat]. If there are any questions on voting or closing, please feel free to visit the [help] or ask a question on [meta].


text:
How do I read a textbook or monograph with good comprehension?
I’m not a native English speaker but my reading ability is good. However, when it comes to academic books, I feel that my comprehension is slow. What strategies or methods can I use to help me improve that? I am in the field of computer science.

You might want to get some testing done with an educational psychologist to see what's slowing you down, and what coping strategies are recommended.

I doubt there is any need for a psychologist... Reading computer science textbooks is difficult for everyone. Probably what's slowing OP down is the vast amount of unfamiliar material, which is often not explained clearly.

You are not alone. Even highly educated native speakers find academic books hard. For the reasons for that see Michael Billig's book Learn to Write Badly (Cambridge University Press, 2013). It might amuse and comfort you.
Assuming you have to read a whole book, the strategy I suggest is to go through the thought process that the author should have gone through before putting pen to paper by asking yourself the following questions in the order given:

What single big question is the book trying to answer?
You would hope to find that stated very early on in the book, in an introduction or preface. Sometimes that may not be clear: that is not your fault.
What is the answer?
Sometimes considerate authors tell you the answer just after they have told you the question. Frequently authors are not considerate in that way. A good place to look is any chapter headed "Conclusions".
What in outline are the author's reasons for that answer?
Chapter headings might provide an answer to that, but sometimes you will have to dig a little deeper, skimming the beginnings and ends of the chapters themselves.

Don't be afraid of skimming the book to try to find the answers to these questions. Until you can answer them, simply ploughing through the book will be hard and unrewarding work.
 4. How does the author support each of the reasons given?
To answer that you will probably need to do a bit of ploughing, but don't expect to understand all the detail first time through. Keep constantly in your mind where the book is going, that is Questions 1-3 above.
When you have done all the above you can go into as much detail as you  need to master the author's whole approach.

I would even break that down further into determining what each chapter is trying to answer first and then building the larger picture of the book. If it's a paper it would be analogous to ask what each section is trying to say/prove. Keep breaking down the book/paper to the smallest part you understand and build up from there.

One piece of advice I heard was to read the first chapter and then the last chapter to get the « feel » then read all of it... The more you read - the better your vocabulary gets as well...

A similar approach is presented in Paul Edwards' resource How to Read a Book (https://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf). He further emphasizes what to write down and how to take useful notes.

Here are some additional ideas
*read the preface-the preface provides an overview of the entire text. It explains the purpose, intended audience, features of the text, and often a summary of each chapter. Students are in such a hurry to read the often don't know why they are reading and understanding the purpose helps.
*read the objectives/questions in each chapter-most academic texts have objectives/questions that are addressed in the chapter because explaining what you will teach before teaching it is a tenet of western instructional design. If you know what to expect in the chapter it is easy to follow the flow of the text. Again many students skip this to read without purpose.
This pattern of sharing objectives before details applies at the chapter level as objectives and at the chapter section level as main ideas for paragraphs. Academic writing is a most always deductive in nature.
*summarize-you can try to write a summary or try and explain the text to someone who is a non-academic. The best thing I ever did to understand my own studies was to explain to nonexperts. It really  forced me to see the point in simple language. If you can teach it to a novice then you know it.

Many textbook publishers, authors, and editors go to a great amount of effort to create useful review questions and exercises, as well as designing the chapter outlines and summaries for readability.
If most of the issue is language-related, you could try a few of the following strategies:

"Pre-learn" vocabulary: Look at chapter summaries/vocabulary lists and looking up definitions of key words (in the book's glossary, ideally, or in a dictionary/online).
After reading chapter summaries, go to any examples in the text first, especially if they use code or math or process diagrams. Because these are less reliant on language, you may be able to get the overall idea quicker, then read about it.
You can check your comprehension, if you're not sure about it, by doing exercises (especially those with answers in the back of the book) or trying to answer review questions. (Your professor may have recommendations for places to find good questions with answers to check on this material.)
Talk with other students and professors about the material. If you write out answers to the book's review questions, others may be willing to look over and discuss what you wrote.

Even if you what you're reading isn't specially structured for learning, you may be able to do some of the above. On top of that:

Become more familiar with how researchers talk about the subject by listening to online talks and going to on-campus talks.
You could look for materials in your native language that cover similar material, to help you understand some of the shades of meaning in the concepts. For instance, you could search for your course text on Google Scholar, look at the list of works that cite it or the list of "related works" and see if any are in your native language.

At least in mathematics, but also partially in CS, there are quite visible "levels" of the book.

The general concept.
The basic ideas, the "what".
The details, the "how".

You might want to read a book multiple times, first gasping the "what". In mathematics there is a very clean separation in definitions and theorems (the "what") and proofs (the "how").


text:
How do I reference a literature review?
I have a paper which is a literature review about a specific topic. How can I reference some texts from this literature review if I want to paraphrase that in my research proposal for PhD?

If we wish to point readers towards a large body of work which you do not want to discuss in detail use the same citation style as for any other citation, but preceded by "reviewed in" e.g. (reviewed in Smith et al, 2016).
If you want to discuss ideas or conclusions first expressed in a review, use exactly the same citation style you would you for primary material.

If it is a small quote (1 or 2 sentences) you can put it between quotation marks " ... "
If you want to quote a paragraph, the most used ways is to indent the text you quoted sometimes with or without quotation marks.
However, I beleive the previous two cases are only necessary when you need the exact wording. Although it might be necessary some times but it is usually not the case. You can reword the important part you want and cite the review article. An even better way is to check the original research paper that the literature review cited then you cite that ( unless what you needed was a critical analysis done by the literature review author)

I agree, and I'd add that the best idea is to cite the literature review as providing a useful overview of the literature, and then go into depth about the most important papers, reading the originals and also citing them directly.


text:
ATINER - is this a legimate conference? pros and cons?
Background:
A close acquaintance of mine is a tenured faculty member at a minor US college, having worked there for several decades. They are very well respected for their contributions to the college, students, and community, but they really haven't played a research role. This individual isn't the best when it comes to navigating the perils of the Internet, which brings us to the scenario and question...
Scenario:
For both fiscal and, I suppose, for personal reasons, they want to submit a paper to the ATINER conference. I think that submitting a few papers may change their title and pay grade, which would help them before moving towards retirement within the next decade, as their family has some financial issues.
Question:
Is this a legitimate conference, and what risks of participating? It appears on librarian Beall's List of potentially predatory conferences. However, from my inspection, it seems to be established, but perhaps low quality. I cross-referenced a couple of their past speakers and the talks do indeed appear on actual people's CV's.
So, to reiterate, my acquaintance is not a researcher, per se, nor desires to be known as one. With that in mind, what are the pros and cons of submitting a paper and giving a talk? I mainly want to protect my friend from harm.

I closed your question since we do not like to evaluate individual conferences (see this), but the proposed duplicate may help you (in particular point 6 of this answer). Once you decided this, you could ask a question about whether it’s reasonable to visit a predatory conference knowingly.

I cross-referenced a couple of their past speakers and the talks do indeed appear on actual people's CV's – That’s not necessarily a good criterion. People may just not have noticed that the conference as what it was, or they intentionally used it to boost their CV because whoever evaluates them doesn’t notice.

@Wrzlprmft Thanks for the feedback. Your second comment raises a good point. I'll consider the linked answer.

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


text:
How binding is a PhD application for theoretical vs. experimental physics?
Quick background: I'll be applying for PhD programs and most likely want to study theoretical condensed matter (though I'm open to other theoretical and mathematical fields). I find experimental physics alright, but it really doesn't excite me.
I've heard that I should apply as if I'm pursuing an experimental physics track, though, because it's less competitive, and then transition towards a theory group once admitted. Is this sound advice? It came from a rather respected source. Still, I am wary about misrepresenting myself and also concerned about getting stuck in a path that I don't intend to be in.
Any insight into how admission committees handle the experimental/theory dichotomy would also be appreciated. Thanks.
Additional Info: I'm applying within the US as a citizen. I'm finishing a MS in physics at the moment.

If you go for experimental physics, you'll presumably be competing with less people, but most of them with more experimental background than you.

Also, where are you applying to? Admissions are radically different in different countries.

@Davidmh I'm applying within the US as a citizen. I have some experimental background and currently am working with simulations, somewhere between the two.

I'm not sure how these things work in experimental physics, but I imagine that, at least in some universities, Ph.D. students in experimental physics are admitted with financial support from some professor's research project.   Then the professor, who had relied on the availability of the student to help keep the lab functioning, would be rather unhappy if the student unexpectedly abandoned the project.  It's also possible that the department's theory groups don't have money for the student --- I think research grants in theory tend to be smaller than in lab sciences.

It feels as if you are throwing darts at a dartboard.
How about you choose some departments to apply for, based on reading about what the people there are doing?  Perhaps you could visit a couple of your strongest candidate schools, or at least email or phone them?
In other words, work on finding a good fit before submitting your applications.


text:
Is it possible that an incremental work may get selected by a top conference?
I am a PhD student in computer science, working in theory. I was recently reading a research paper, which was submitted to a tier-3 conference last year.
It gave me some idea (which may not work), which is a kind of incremental, but yields a significant improvement of the run time.
The only problem I am facing right now is where I should submit this research paper. Although idea is not big as per me, my colleagues are saying it is significant and I do not realise as I have been working on this for three months. This is not related to my PhD project. I asked my supervisor and he said it seems okay to him.
Question: Is it possible that an incremental work on research paper may get selected for a top conference? I have hard time deciding to which conference I should submit. I have little experience as I have already published two research papers but that does not seem to help much.

It's possible, in the sense that there's a non-zero chance of acceptance. A couple of factors strongly contribute to this chance: How well can you explain the significance of the problem? How big is the novelty delta, for example, are there some entirely new concepts? How big is the runtime improvement? How rigorous is the evaluation?
In essence, you need to write a very strong paper, which is naturally easier for some contributions  than for others.

As I spoken to few colleagues it seems to them that significance of the problem is high, Idea is good.

@Complexity My point is not that your problem must be significant (it certainly has to be), but that your paper also needs to do a particularly good job to communicate the significance. Especially when the problem was not considered at top conferences before, you have to be careful to get this right.

If the work is significant and a good contribution, then it should get selected to a related good conference. The selection also matters if the conference you are submitting is related to the area you have contributed.

I ask my supervisor he said it seems ok to him

What do you mean by ok? If he agreed to submit to the good conference then go ahead and give a try.
Nothing wrong in giving a try to submit it to a top conference and if you are unlucky then submit it to a lower grade conference.

Result seems ok as he has not gone through entire work he said he can't say more.

I am afraid of this word "OK", sometimes it means nothing. So you only can tell what kind of contribution you have made (have you modified the algorithm, you have optimized some code etc.)

@Complexity - Is there a professor you can get to read your paper and (ideally) go through your work? It seems like your supervisor ought to make time to look at this before your deadline, if you ask early enough.

@Aaghaz Hussain I have spoken to post doc's

@Complexity if you are confident enough, go ahead with the submission (Plan A: submit to the top conference. Plan B: If rejected, refine and submit to another ). In case of plan B also failed, refine your manuscript and repeat B.

@Complexity "OK" doesn't help us much. "Your paper is oooohkaaaaay," means it isn't bad but there's nothing really positive to say about it. "OK -- submit it!" means "Submitting it is a good idea", which suggests it's pretty good and has reasonable prospects.


text:
How to write a brief research statement for a postdoc application?
Please give an idea about the ideal length of a brief research statement and its format. Should I write about the research that I have done in my Ph.D. or should i propose a new research idea for post-doc research?

The best thing to do is to try finding examples of research statements written by people in similar positions. Many people put their research statement on their website. From these you can see the style and length that is typical in your field.
Your research statement should discuss both the work you have done and the work you want to do in the future. It should also discuss the bigger picture that links these together.
Generally, less is more. People instinctively write long research statements describing all their work in detail. This instinct must be fought, as no one will read a 10-page research statement. For a postdoc, I think 2-3 pages (not including bibliography) is typical, at least in my area of theoretical computer science. Faculty-level research statements will be a bit longer.
Keep your audience in mind. (I.e. does the person reading this know your area?) Proof read and polish meticulously. And definitely ask other people to look at your draft and give feedback.
Good luck!

I have often seen a limit of 2 pages, i.e. one sheet of paper. It depends, though.
Write a bit the research done, write more about new research you want to do.
While you are at it, it is important (IMHO) to highlight links to other researchers and outputs (both existing and prospective).

What kind of prospective links? Is that in terms of same field of work? Should I highlight links with researchers whom I know? How can I manage to explain links with other researchers whom I have never met or worked with? Is this part really that important? If yes, how?

It depends, read the calls. Definitely highlight existing collaborations. Sometimes the universities want to to state with whom you could collaborate in-house.