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Submitting to a venue when you are a member of the program committee
My question is about submitting a paper to a venue (journal or conference) when some of the authors of the paper are also members of the program committee (PC) of the venue (i.e., they will review papers for the journal or conference). I call this a PC paper.
In any modern conference or journal management system that I have seen, PC papers don't seem to pose any particular issue: when logged in as a PC member, you do not see pending submissions of which you are an author, and of course you are never given one of your own papers to review. I have never participated to a PC board meeting (to decide on which papers to accept or reject), but I assume that PC members would be excluded from discussions about their own papers (as is routinely done for conflicts of interest). In conferences where the accept/reject decision is taken by a PC chair or editor, of course they are not allowed to submit papers, and this of course I can understand.
However, in my field (theoretical computer science), I have heard that submitting a PC paper is generally frowned upon. Further, there appears to be a tradition that, on borderline papers, papers by PC members will be rejected in priority.
Hence my question: Is there indeed a bias against PC papers in academia? If yes, is there any ethical or practical justification for this?

btw is there any difference between submitting papers to a conference where the author is PC member and submitting to a journal where the author is Editor? I mean on the ethical level of the question, not the practical. If it is common in journals, I do not see why would it be different in conferences.

I think you discuss everything that is to say about the topic yourself. Yes, there are some communities were submitting as a PC member is frowned upon. In most communities, it's no issue, and some conferences even specifically encourage their PC to submit themselves. Academia varies.

@xLeitix: But in the communities where this is frowned upon, what is the justification for it? There has to be a reason, right? Or is it a completely gratuitous custom?

@PsySp, in my experience it is fine for a journal to handle submissions from members of the editorial board -- they just get processed by other editorial board members.  But editors of a special issue, or the editor-in-chief, don't get to submit.

No is not frowned upon, at least in our field (TCS). I can provide numerous examples  for that. I saw it many times. PC members submit their papers, but they are handled of course by other members and, afaik, the whole process is not visible to them until the notification date.
Note that, some conferences (like IPCO) have strict rules. They explicitly say that no PC member shall submit a paper, alone or as a co-author. But if the Call for Papers does not mention, I guess a PC member is free to submit the paper.
What I have heard though is that even if a PC member submits a paper, it is claimed that higher standards apply to that paper (but I am not sure).

Thanks for your explanations! Do you know why higher standards would apply to PC submissions even for conferences that do not disallow them? For conferences where the call for papers disallow PC submissions, do you know why could be the reason for the conferences to disallow such submissions?

For the first part, it is just an unproved claim. Personally, I do not believe it because at the end of the day it is just reviewers who make the review, comments, scoring and the paper is sorted analogously. I am guessing it is there to satisfy people who disagree with such practices. For the 2nd part, I cannot answer whey some conferences have such strict rules. I am guessing it's related to the very limited number of accepted papers (IPCO has 30) and they want to show complete fairness.

@a3nm Also, probably, because in such (small, but very prestigious) conferences the whole PC committee discusses about all potentially accepted papers. Something like unanimity vote?

It does seem to vary depending on subdiscipline.  In systems conferences, it used to be acceptable for PC members to submit, but they were often discouraged from submitting too many.  But I remember one conference where the chair said specifically that PC members shouldn't be discouraged or discriminated against -- hurts young faculty in particular.
Modern review systems do a good job of handling anonymity, but any conflicts make any face-to-face meeting more challenging.  HotCRP is way better than easychair for this by the way.
With cochairs, even a program chair can potentially submit to their own conference, though it still can look bad when it gets in.  But it does help with institutional conflicts.

Adding my own answers to add some other reasonable justifications I heard from colleagues about why PC papers are discouraged:

If a conference has a significant proportion of PC papers among the accepted papers, it gives to outsiders the impression of being a closed "mutual gratification" community, where the PC is accepting their own papers. Of course, this perception is also tied to other signs of how healthy a community is (e.g., does the PC rotate sufficiently, etc.), but a simple way to avoid giving this impression is to reject PC submissions entirely or at least discourage them. This seems to me like a reasonable argument.
If the conference is not double-blind, reviewers of a PC paper may be influenced by the fact that authors are members of PC, and may also be influenced from their interactions while discussing reviews of other papers (where you may get a positive or negative impression of other reviewers). This problem can be patched, of course, by making the conference double-blind.

I have seen this scenario. In the first 5-10 or so years of the conference, almost all the papers were written by PC members or their Ph.D. students. (Reviewing was not anonymous.) Gradually as the conference intellectually matured, larger numbers of papers by non-PC members began to be accepted. The same was true of a new journal in that field.

If yes, is there any ethical or practical justification for this?

Especially if the venue only attracts of  small number of submissions, one justification is reviewer anonymity.
In some conference systems, PC members can see all reviews except for those of their own papers. Based on this information, it would be easy for a PC member with an own submission to infer the identities of the reviewers of her paper.

I am not sure how this can be done. Could you please elaborate?

Let's take an extreme example: If there are 10 submissions, 15 PC members and each paper should have three reviews, then usually each PC member reviews exactly two papers. So, as a PC member with a submitted paper, I can look at the reviewers of the other papers and just identify those reviewers who only have one review.

You know that PC members send the papers for review to external reviewers right?

Sure, but despite that, the PC member identities are normally not revealed to the authors of a regular submission. In this case, they are.

@lighthousekeeper: Interesting idea. I've never heard of anyone trying this out, though. In practice I wouldn't have expected that all members of the PC get the exact same number of papers, so I would never have thought that this would work, but OK, I guess it could. Of course, an easy countermeasure against this is to disallow reviewers with submissions from seeing who are the reviewers for submissions that they are not themselves reviewing.

@a3nm Indeed, in practice, you will rarely have 100% certainty, but it certainly makes an informed guess easier. The countermeasure would work, though.

I once raised this issue with the HotCRP review system, but I didn't convince its author to do anything about it.
The problem was that even if every reviewer gets, say, 15 papers, if you see that some reviewers have 15 papers but 1 reviewer has only 12, and you're conflicted on 3 papers, you have a good idea that reviewer saw your papers.  But it's all inexact.  for instance, maybe that reviewer only was assigned 12, or assigned 14 but not 15.
I agree that other PC members shouldn't have access to the number of reviews others  have, at least if they have conflicts.


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Should I lead an applause after introducing colloquium speaker?
I am introducing my first speaker at my university and, since the speaker is rather famous, I wrote a 1-2 minute introduction.  The crowd will be interdisciplinary and between 100-400 people.
Should I lead the audience in an applause at the end of my introduction, or just finish with the title of his talk and a nod to him?  Or something else?
If it matters, it is an interdisciplinary topic, a public audience and in a science department.

Yes, always lead the audience in an applause before the speech, because after it, depending on the speaker, they might be no longer willing to applaude :-)

In my opinion, the speaker earns that applause at the end by doing a good job. I will only give moderate applause before a presentation, but I will applaud vigorously at the end if I thought it was valuable.

For a public lecture, yes. You are inviting the audience to show their appreciation for the speaker and the effort it takes to address a public audience, and to acknowledge the opportunity afforded them to see and hear the speaker.
In turn, when I first start speaking to a public audience -- regardless of whether I get a welcoming round of applause -- I always thank the audience for coming to my talk. The combination of welcoming applause and sincere appreciation towards the audience makes for a positive shared experience, right from the start.
Things are different for non-public talks, such as at your department's colloquia, or a workshop, or (non-keynote) conference speaker. Here, the vibe is that the talk is expected and, in some regards, a routine part of the job of an academic. Showing up and presenting is expected, rather than a treat, or something out of the ordinary.

"Please welcome our guest ..." and applaud with the crowd.
Presumably you have attended to invited speeches before?

There is not always applause before colloquia.  In math at least it seems to be uncommon, though I agree it's pretty common for large public lectures.

@Kimball, Yes, you have isolated the dilemma.  We don't normally applaud at the start of colloquia, but we also don't normally have large public "special" colloquia.

@user1717828 I honestly can't remember whether there was usually applause before the large public math lectures I went to, but I think the answer is usually yes when there is an extended introduction to the speaker.  If you do it then at worst the speaker will find it unexpected.  If you don't, then there's a possibility the speaker may be a little disappointed.

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Do computer scientists care about the complexity of specific games still?
One subfield of computer science that used to be quite popular is the computational complexity of playing particular games. At the end of the 1900s there was a slew of research on this, examine games ranging from the universally known such as Go and Chess to the more obscure such as Sim and Domineering. A look at the Wikipedia page shows that many papers along these lines were published not only in specialty venues, but top CS Theory venues as a whole such as SIAM Journal of Computing, J. Combin. Theory Ser. A, and STOC.
Over the past years, there have been a number of papers along these lines, primarily targeting computer games such as Bejeweled, many classical Nintendo games, and Pokémon. These later publications tend to be not published in peer-reviewed venues, or published in venues far less mainstream than the previous wave. Looking at some algorithmic game theory proceedings and journals, I’ve noticed few have papers on particular games. Instead, they tend to focus on AI playing games or more wholistic theoretical concerns not restricted to particular games.
My questions are:

Is this assessment of history correct?
Assuming the answer to #1 is yes, has something changed in the culture or interests of computer scientists that has lead to this?
Are results along these lines no longer considered publishable?

Some context: I’m a young computer science researcher who hasn’t ever paid much attention to this field, but who has recently started dabbling in examining the complexity of games with my gaming buddies. I decided to do a preliminary literature review and was surprised by this pattern I’ve noticed.

A substance-related question like this might be a better fit for CS.stackexchange, perhaps.

@henning I was back and forth on it, but I feel like this is ultimately more of a question about cultural attitudes than about any particular technical points, which is why I decided to post it here. It is certainly true that answering this is probably outside the experience of anyone who isn’t a computer scientist (maybe a mathematician or economist?), but it’s fundamentally not a question whose answer is statements about computers, but rather a question whose answer is statements about computer scientists and their behavior.

This might be a good question for cstheory.stackexchange.com I think your assessment is correct, although I’ve never looked into it. I think the issue is that the first few examples of NP-complete games are interesting, but there is not so much interest in example number 83.

@Thomas That is a good point, and raises the question of what is “interesting enough.” Someone tried to prove that Magic: the Gathering (a physical card game) was Turing complete a few years ago but wasn’t able to finish the proof. IIRC there aren’t any known examples of physical games that are Turing complete, though some building games like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress are. Those are pretty different from two player strategy games though.

(Expanding my comment.)
I think your assessment is correct -- it's much harder to publish results of the form "game X is NP-hard" today than it was last century -- although it is not something I've looked into.
I think the reason for this is the following.
The first few examples of NP-hard games are interesting. It means we can say "many games turn out to be NP-hard". That helps motivate research on NP-hardness and helps scientific communication with the general public.
However, once, say, half a dozen examples have been established, what is the value of adding more examples? Of course, there is value in having more examples, but it becomes more marginal. Each successive example is less surprising and doesn't really change the above statement.
Moreover, many of these proofs are quite messy -- not the sort of thing a reviewer is keen to work through.
Note that this phenomenon is not exclusive to results about games. I think there are many papers that struggle to get published today even though they'd sail in 30 years ago. For example, Karp's 21 NP-complete problems is a celebrated paper, but a similar list of NP-complete problems would struggle to get published today. The reason is simply that those 21 examples were surprising then, but are not today.
An important side note: In essentially all examples, the original game is not NP-hard because it has a finite, albeit extremely large, state space. Thus the NP-hardness is proved about some generalization of the game. Such as Chess on n-by-n boards with slightly modified rules.

+1: The comparison to Karp’s list is really good. It hadn’t occurred to me, but is a really good comparison that supports your narrative quite well. Something that’s implicit but not drawn out of your answer is that papers like these aren’t progress within some sort of framework. If I was to discover a new class of functions that the Sensitivity Conjecture was true for, I would be building towards something: proving the sensitivity conjecture for all Boolean functions. That’s not the case here.

My impression was that interesting games (suitably generalized to arbitrary-sized boards) tend to be complete not for NP but for polynomial space. Is that impression accurate, or was I just looking at a biased sample?

@AndreasBlass Yes, most games involve unbounded alternation, which naturally leads to PSPACE-completeness. However, I'm not an expert on these sorts of results.

@AndreasBlass Yes, many games are EXPTIME-Complete or PSPACE-Complete. The Wikipedia article I link to in the OP has a table with many known results.

@AndreasBlass Yes, I should be more precise in my answer. I changed "NP-complete" to "NP-hard" to capture all the harder classes.

I think it's worth emphasizing that this answer is mostly about NP-hardness proofs in general, not just about games. NP-hardness results that get attention from the research community either (1) propose new general techniques (like Erik Demaine and Bob Hearn's "constraint logic", which was deservedly published in a top complexity conference) or (2) close a long-standing open problem (like Wolfgang Mulzer and Günter Rote's proof for minimum-weight triangulation, which was deservedly published in JACM). [cont'd]

... NP-hardness results for problems with "merely" popular appeal, as opposed to technical appeal, generate considerable popular attention, but get less traction in top technical venues.  (Consider, for example, Erik Demaine's proof that Tetris is hard, or his more recent result on Rubik's cubes.)  [Disclosure: My Demaine number is 1.]

More generally for talk of "polynomial time" to make any sense you need a problem with a "size variable", that the upper bound on the complexity of solving the problem can be either a polynomial of or not.

I'm going to say that your assessment isn't correct (point 1). I'd also suggest that the Mathematics site here might be an even better venue for a question such as this. Here is why.
It isn't so much that game theory (complexity, solvability, completeness, ...) isn't interesting any more, but that it is the techniques applied to any given game can be new or old. The same is true of Mathematics in general. If I prove a new and wonderful theorem of any sort in math or cs, using "well-worn" techniques, it won't be interesting to very many people. You can make a lot of cookies with a a good cookie cutter. However, if I prove something with a novel and previously unknown attack, people will go wild. Well, those deep in the particular weeds of that field anyway. Whoa, a bitcoin powered AI cookie cutter. (Sorry.)
My own work from long ago is an example (Math Analysis). At the time I wrote it there were only about five people in the world who could read and analyze it comfortably, including myself and my advisor. I say that just to indicate how obscure a sub-topic it was, not to suggest anything about my ability. The main result was "very nice and a bit more than most dissertations offered", so said another professor who tried to grasp it (a committee member). So far, no big deal. However, the main result used a completely new methodology and a seemingly orthogonal attack on the problem. That is what made it interesting enough to be published in Trans. AMS. It just wasn't the sort of thing that would occur as a matter of course to others, even weed-dwellers.
On the other hand, it was getting extremely difficult to prove much of anything in that small area then as the ground had been so well trodden. The study of Analysis moved on to other areas in which less was known and more could be learned. Suddenly there were lots of papers in the new direction and few in my chosen somewhat weedy field.
But a paper now, to be published in Classical Real Analysis, has to be quite interesting in its techniques, not just its results, unless, of course, it concerns a classic unsolved problem.
So, I think the issue isn't whether games are interesting or not. It is what is new that you can show about how to attack an interesting game. And the problem gets harder and harder as the field gets more and more "trodden."
But that, I think, is true of any mathematical field, including much of theoretical computer science. Show us a new way to attack problems and we will wake up.

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How closely can I follow a cited mathematical derivation in my PhD dissertation?
There is a well known result from 60 years ago that only ever has its result quoted these days.  I found a 20+ year old MS thesis that had a very clear mathematical derivation of the result from first principles, although it doesn't have any (meaningful) citations.
The derivation is so clear I would like to include a detailed outline of it in my dissertation because I think it really illuminates why we do what we do in our lab, which is what the dissertation is centered around.
It it ok to put something like "Following the derivation of [MS source], first performed by [original source], we start with..." and walking through the 4-5 page derivation to get to the result?  It's obviously not plagiarism, since it's well known and I am citing the source, but it isn't original work.  On the other hand, something that was done decades ago would never be mistaken for original work in 2016, and I think it would really add to my motivation/background chapter.

Maybe it is different question, maybe not... Is it good idea to introduce the derivation by "Following the derivation of [MS], first performed by [original]" and copy-paste the derivation with larger margins, larger paragraph spacings and other proper methods of highligting?

The short answer is that you can indeed put properly cited, sourced, attributed background material in a background section. Because what is the background section for other than for you to present what people have done before you?
You obviously need to include enough of your own work in this document. However if a relevant derivation has been done before you cite it, possibly review it for the ease of the reader or completeness of your own expository structure and get on to the stuff you have done.

The appropriate wording for something like what you envision -- making clear that you are closely paraphrasing another publication -- would look like this:

Since the derivation of the result by [ABC, 1956] is not widely available in common textbooks, the remainder of this section closely follows the excellent outline provided previously in the MSc thesis by DEF, see [DEF, 1987]. In this thesis, the author shows that ...

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When is it appropriate to use a university seal as a graduate student, post-doc or research scientist?
I am applying for tenure-track positions at other universities after having recently completed my PhD.  I am still technically a graduate student until my degree is conferred in a few months, and I am employed and acting as a post-doc in the meantime.
After wondering if it is acceptable to use my current school's seal on the letterhead for my research statement, statement of interest, and the like, I decided to look up general guidelines for when to use the seal, and I couldn't find much.
Another answer mentions it is unacceptable to use a school's letterhead for something totally unrelated to the university, but it does not answer the general case for when a graduate student (and above ranks) should use the seal.  In my special case, I think me going on to become a tenure-track professor in the same field is very much in the interest of my advisor and our school.
With that background in place, I think the general question is the better one to ask here: When is it appropriate to use a university seal on a letterhead?

Please do not post answers as comments.

It is my personal understanding as a professor and former chair of a program that you can use the letterhead for job searches as long as you retain a position of some kind at the university: postdoc, doctoral candidate, visiting professor, lecturer, research scientist, etc.
As an appropriate proxy, use the letterhead as long as you have a university e-mail address (that isn't an alumni one).
Once you're no longer affiliated with the university because you graduated or separated, then you should not use the letterhead.
[Note that use of letterhead for job searches is a special case. Do not use the letterhead for other personal purposes - such as writing a letter to your congressperson - if you're in a liminal position as the possible blowback can be hazardous to your career].

Here is job market advice on the Chronicle of Higher Ed blog Vitae which encourages PhD candidates to use letterhead when applying for tenure-track jobs: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/50-the-professor-is-in-why-letterhead-matters


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Intent behind Recommendation Letter requirement?
What is the inherent idea of having a recommendation letter/ "letter of reference" requirement in academia, especially while applying to grad schools?
I understand that if the person giving the recommendation letter is a bigshot or even fairly well-known, people would be ready to take his word regarding the applicant's caliber.
However, if the person recommending is previously unknown to the university you are applying to (of course, they may use Google to dig up some information, or they may not want to), what weightage does his word carry? If I am on the other side, I won't be inclined to trust the judgement of a person whom I don't know. What I would want to do is to judge the caliber of the applicant for myself, but that's a separate issue altogether. (Judge yourself, or trust some metrics...)
Now, in general, if "the other side" is a decent enough university, it will have applications coming from all parts of the world. Then, situation no. 2 (above) is more likely than situation no. 1. So, what is the intent of having a recommendation letter requirement in the second case?

Surely an opinion from someone you don't know is better than no information at all.  Also, a really good letter will not just state the writer's opinion ("I think Jane Smith is awesome") but provide evidence, even if subjective evidence ("Jane Smith wrote an awesome paper in my class that showed a deep understanding of X, Y and Z").

@NateEldredge I think the question is still fair (and something that puzzles me as well) - why would an university care about what a prof. entirely unknown to them on the other side of the planet says about a student, no matter how fuzzy or concrete the information is? I "get" recommendations when everybody knows each other, or when the school actively approaches a prof. to rate an applicant, but if both of that is untrue I also kinda fail to see the value.

@NateEldredge Also, surely, an opinion from someone who is clearly not impartial and has presumably much more the interest of the applicant than the interest of the school in mind is not necessarily better than no information.

@xLeitix - (reg. comment no. 2 in particular) I'm glad you got my point precisely! When you don't know the guy who's writing the letter, you can't be sure about his "impartial"ity/motivation/interest. Then why bother about this formality at all? That was exactly what I intended to ask. Thanks :)

@NateEldredge - I like your sentence no. 1 and it commutes with the answer below. However (minor nitpick), I don't think it is fair to call it "evidence", in the spirit of xLeitix's comments, which are also (exactly) the spirit behind my question. It may be intended as an evidence from the recommender's side, but it can't really be deemed an evidence if you don't trust the guy's judgement. I think you take this into account when you write "subjective".

I think this comment is a fairly decent effort towards suggesting the futility of having such a requirement, especially since the possibility of situation no. 2 can't be ruled out!

I agree with BrenBarn, but perhaps it will be useful to express things slightly differently.
To understand the purpose of letters of recommendation, it's important to think about the context.  In my experience, the default assessment for a graduate school application is "not enough information" or "insufficiently compelling case."  Most of the time, a rejection doesn't mean the committee felt there was enough evidence to prove the applicant was unworthy (although it can mean that for particularly bad applications).  Instead, there just wasn't enough to justify admitting this applicant rather than the competition.
For example, grades are not very useful.  The ceiling is low, the standards are inconsistent, and in any case getting good grades is a quite different skill from doing good research.  Undergraduate research can be a more useful indicator, but it's still pretty limited.  Some students have much better access to high-quality research opportunities than others do, so it's hardly a fair comparison.  Plus many undergraduate research papers consist of straightforward work on specialized problems, done with considerable guidance and under some time pressure.  That's a little closer to professional research than classwork is, but still not so close.
So the basic setting is that admissions committees are desperate for information.  Judging research potential is really difficult, and it's at best loosely correlated with most of the hard data in graduate school applications.  This is the context for letters of recommendation.  If you have interacted closely with the applicant on a substantial undertaking in this field over a period of months or years, then you are in an excellent position to judge their suitability for graduate school.  If you can convey this information to the admissions committee in a trustworthy and reliable way, then it can be far more valuable than anything else in the application.
Of course not all letters are useful.  A letter saying "Joe got an A in my course" reveals nothing beyond what the committee could have learned from the transcript.  More depressingly, some letter writers say substantive things but are not in a position to do so compellingly.  If you are completely unknown to the committee, with no reputation or track record of prior students, then your letter will carry less weight (and even less if you don't at least have the excuse of being young).
This isn't as much of a problem as you might guess.  Many people in the field have a reputation, even if they have never met anyone on the admissions committee, and they have an incentive not to hurt that reputation by writing foolish or biased letters.  If necessary, someone on the committee can get in touch with them to ask further questions.  Plus there are all sorts of opportunities for consistency checks (for example, if someone repeatedly says each year's top student is the best in years, that will be noticed).
However, there's still a genuine problem.  A small fraction of applicants just aren't in a position to get compelling letters of recommendation, no matter how talented they are.  They are going to be rejected through no fault of their own.
That's a sad outcome, but it seems to be unavoidable.  If we had a more reliable way to judge research potential, we would eagerly use it.  The point of letters isn't that they always help with the decision, but rather that they often help.  When they don't help, the application joins the pile of rejections due to lack of information.
For comparison, one of the comments reads:

Now, ideal case, if A=B in ability, two possibilities arise - (1) If recommendation letter matters, then A gets picked over B (which is not fair),

Indeed, it's not fair, but it's impossible to gather enough information to make fair and reliable judgments in every case.  Ultimately, the admissions committee has to accept that some wonderful applicants will be rejected because they couldn't prove how wonderful they were.  (Not using letters of recommendation would reduce this type of unfairness, but at the cost of greatly reducing the information available to make good decisions in the other cases.  It would amount to partially randomizing the decisions, which would not be in the department's best interests.)
To put it rather starkly, fairness is not the admissions committee's primary goal.  Instead, the primary goal is to admit as strong an incoming class as possible.  Letters of recommendation greatly help on average in achieving that goal, at the cost of disadvantaging certain applicants.  This is a price departments are willing to pay.

Now, that's just what I was looking for! Thanks :)

For the sake of transparency, let me point out why I find this answer accept-worthy. Every caliber metric has its limitations, those of entrance tests, GPA's and GRE are fairly well known. Clearly, things are no different even for reference letters, something that I have always been skeptical about. Clearly, this metric is much more unreliable than others IMO (a very specific personal opinion). This answer doesn't pretend that we are living in a all-is-perfect-paradise, and just confirms my skepticism.

(contd.) I mean, specifically with this fragment "They are going to be rejected through no fault of their own. That's a sad outcome, but it seems to be unavoidable." My point exactly! This is why I find it accept-worthy.

At a minimum, a letter of recommendation is no worse than, say, a Yelp review.  The person who rated Joe's Hamburger Shack 5 stars is a total stranger to you, but knowing that that person liked it is still more data than you previously had about how good the place is.
For a grad school application, there are few sources of concrete information.  Hard data like grades, GPA, and GRE scores cover only a fraction of the relevant qualities of each applicant.  It can certainly help if the admissions committee knows the recommender, but even if they don't, the mere fact that that the applicant is considered qualified by an active researcher at an accredited instituion is a significant gain over the other information available in the application.
Also, as Nate Eldredge mentioned in a comment, a good letter will not just state the belief that the applicant is qualified, but will give reasons.  These reasons, again, come from a person who is presumed qualified to evaluate them, and are therefore more valuable.
It is true that if not only the recommender but also their institution is totally unknown to the committee (e.g., a recommendation from Prof. John Doe at East Podunk Community College), the information may not be helpful, and could even be viewed skeptically.  But I don't think this is a common case.  Even if no one on the faculty personally knows or has collaborated with any professors at, say, Harvard, you can bet that it means something to have a Harvard professor recommend someone.  Although that's an extreme case, the same principle applies to other schools in varying degrees: even knowing that the school exists goes some way towards establishing credibility.
How much weight these are or should be given is debatable, but there is simply no other way to get the information in recommendation letters, namely a qualified professional's judgment of the applicant's quality.  It may indeed be that in some cases the committee views the letters as unhelpful because they are too vague, but if many letters are informative, then vague letters are already "bad" in comparison, and provide a means of winnowing the applicant pool.  Even in a hypothetical case in which only a few letters were helpful, the school doesn't really stand to lose anything by having them, and stands to gain useful insight that they can't get any other way.
Also, I would be interested to see some numbers on how often the admissions committee really does not know and has never heard of any of the people writing the letters.  An important thing to consider is that in many cases one or more of the letter writers will have been consulted by the applicant to get advice on where to apply.  Thus, there can be a self-selection process at work: professors know professors at other institutions, thus they advise their students to apply there, and then they write a letter of recommendation.  I would guess that this significantly increases the likelihood that some of the letter writers will be known to the admissions committee.  In effect, the same people are not only recommending the applicant to the school, but recommending the school to the applicant (by suggesting that they apply there).
A little edit: Based on your comments, it seems you are also worried about situations where, e.g., the letter writer is "biased" towards recommending the applicant.  There are two responses to this: one is that everyone knows that.  The recommender wouldn't be writing the letter if he were biased against the applicant.  The recommendation is not supposed to be "impartial" in the sense that it mechnically assesses some attributes of the applicant.  It's just supposed to be the honest opinion of a real person who interacted with the applicant in a real academic context.
More generally, there is simply no getting around the fact that virtually everything in academia operates on trust.  When you submit an article to a journal, the editor has no way of knowing whether you plagiarized the text, falsified the data, etc.  When you apply for a job and list dozens of publications on your CV, the search committee probably does not look up every single one ot make sure it really exists.  For better or for worse, academic procedures are built on the notion of receiving "credentials" that indicate you are to be trusted.  When someone receives a letter signed "Prof. John Doe, XYZ University", they assume that Prof. John Doe really is a professor at XYZ University.  It is of course possible to fabricate such credentials, but to handle that problem would require a complete overhaul of academia.  The basic reason people trust a letter-writer is because academics trust each other not to tell brazen lies about who they are, where they work, etc.  They understand that the recommender may not be totally objective in his or her assessment of the candidate, but they nonetheless assume that the assessment is made in good faith by a qualified judge; that's all that matters.

As a letter writer, I'd say that about a quarter of the time I know someone in the department that the student is applying to (and they know me.)  However, the admissions committee might be a much smaller group of faculty that doesn't include the people that I know in that department.  I have sometimes gotten comments like "Send us more students like Joe- he's done really well in our program" from faculty that I know at other institutions.

I'll start by complimenting you on a very well crafted answer. Now, being more specific, I really like your full para 1. That itself (and alone) is "+1 and accept"worthy IMO. I feel that a better part of this answer pertains to the question's situation no. 1 ("known people"), and not to situation no. 2 ("strangers") which is what I was specifically referring to. In fact, in para 4, you only reiterate this point when you say "It is true ...()... be viewed skeptically." Then, the rest of the answer is intended to suggest that situation no. 2 is not "a common case" (contd.)

(contd.) That may or may not be true, and in any case, I don't have the numbers to claim either way (nor am I inclined to dig up these numbers, I'm not doing a survey!). But, even if it is less frequent, the possibility of such a situation arising can't be ruled out. Take for example (your example!) Harvard. It will get applications from all parts of the world, and it is clearly humanly impossible for the profs there to be acquainted with all profs in all these places, all over the globe. Thus, the possibility of situation no. 2 arising for real in academia can't be ruled out.

@New_new_newbie: Of course, but as I say in my answer, what is the downside?  The worst thing that can happen is that you receive letters from people you never heard of.  Well, so what?  Even if only some of the letters are useful, that's better than nothing.  It doesn't make sense to stop asking for letters just because some of them might not be helpful.

True, but in that case, if applicant A was in situation 1, and B was in situation 2, the recommendation letter adds weight to A's application and B loses out on that. Now, ideal case, if A=B in ability, two possibilities arise - (1) If recommendation letter matters, then A gets picked over B (which is not fair), (2) If it doesn't matter, you have no way of picking one over the other. But if it doesn't matter, why ask for a recommendation in the first place?

@New_new_newbie: I think it is true that the application process is inherently "unfair" in this sense, but that's just how it is.  There is no way of ever knowing that "A=B in ability".  Even if you worked with both people for 10 years it might not be possible to be sure about such a judgment.  The decision just has to be made based on the available information.  What you're describing could apply to any aspect of the application (e.g., two people with different GRE scores because one is better at taking tests, even though both are "equal in ability").

You are right, A=B is unlikely in practice, but note that I said ideally. That was to prove a point - the futility of a recommendation requirement! Other metrics can also fail (again u are right), but I just don't see how this metric works at all, that's why I posted. Thus, in a nutshell (and with no offence meant), I find this answer definitely helpful (+1 worthy for sure), but only borderline accept-worthy. (That also ONLY because of para 1). This is because it doesn't offer much about situation 2. (I'll accept if any other answer doesn't fill the gap) Anyways, thanks for your time :)

"knowing that that person liked it is still more data than you previously had about how good the place is." How do you know the recommendation letter writer did not lie in the letter? Then the data  you get is wrong. In that case, how could it be better? There are plenty of reasons the letter writers lie. You're naïve.

On the other hand, hard data like grades, GRE,etc are unlikely lies. They tell you what the student can do. What we really should do is to ask the testing agencies such as other universities and ETS, etc.  to have better measurements so not only we know how much the students know, but also what kind of potential the student would have. China, S. Korea, Taiwan and India all have college entrance exams and some have graduate school entrance exams, they produce good students. Please look at mail boxes in STEM departments in a typical university in the US.

I wholly agree with @BrenBarn's answer.
From the comments it seems clear that the question is also suggesting that there is a bias for a faculty member to write a good letter in the interest of the student over the interest of the other department. I would like to argue that this is faulty reasoning (even if it happens). I think this amounts to a little bit of game theory.
At the outset, we assume a faculty member has no relationship with the department s/he is writing the letter to. Assuming the faculty member writes a compelling letter, it may get noticed and there is some chance that that letter will lead to the acceptance of the student.
If the student is accepted and performs well, the faculty member's word will be more valued by the department during the next round of selecting PhD students and the faculty member may receive an email saying "Send us more students like Joe- he's done really well in our program" as per @Brian Borchers' comments. If the student is a flake, the faculty member's word is now (what is the word?).
This means that the next time that faculty writes a letter to that department it will be dismissed, even if it is compelling. Moreover, this may reduce the stature of the faculty member's entire department in the eyes of the other department.
So, in the end, I guess my answer is that to some extent faculty letters can establish a relationship between different departments. To the extent that they do, such letters are valuable.

+1 for the sincere effort and trying to enhance Bren's answer above. But again, why does everyone keep missing the point that I'm trying to make, which is applicant B (in situation no. 2) potentially losing out to applicant A (situation no. 1), just because A's institution/recommender was known to the department, while B's reference letter was viewed "skeptically" and hence, counted for nothing!

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


text:
Infusing Graduate Studies with High Quality video content
Recently there has been a revolution in graphics technologies, which can aid in explaining (math and other) concepts visually to people (for example, the high quality content produced by 3Blue1Brown on YouTube).
Is it possible to infuse the current academic system with such kind of technology? It would, in my opinion, be of enormous help, especially at average universities who can only hire average professors.
The question of course is one of scalability and cohesion with the current system.

Needs teaching rooms with sufficient equipment...

What sort of degree programs are you interested in? What fields?

Your question pre-supposes that watching a video online would be more educational than sitting in an actual physical class. I'm not sure if that is true.  It might be, but I don't think you can just assume it without evidence.  Perhaps this should be your first question.

Any class that can show PowerPoint can show YouTube videos. I've had many professors show a short video in class when they thought it would illustrate a point better than their own drawing/explanation. Professors are free to assign videos instead of reading if they think it helps. So that's pretty easy. For a larger change, you may look into research on MOOCs and "flipped classroom" ideas. Works well for some students, terrible for others, and can be considered as a supplement or as a replacement (supplement seems to work better).

The answer to this question ("Is it possible to...") is "Yes". Is that actually what you want to know?

@Flyto Well I meant of course, is it possible to do it successfully and such that it contributes positively to the system at a large scale

Ah. I'd say the answer is still "yes". When I teach, sometimes I show the class a video. If these videos were of higher quality, that would be helpful. Perhaps I'm missing the point, though.

Let me discuss two aspects of a good course that are most important to the student: Content, and Learning. There are others, of course, but I'll leave them out of this discussion.
I don't think that content and learning are independent, but they are quite different things. So, if you are asking if improving the content of a course would help improve a course, then sure, it would. But I think only at the margins.
But learning is much more than content. If it were only content, then you could go to the university bookstore, purchase 15 or so books and then carry them to the registrar's office to collect your MS degree. Um, no, I don't think it works that way.
Perhaps you are confusing education with entertainment, at least a bit. If you listen to a brilliant lecturer speak, in a classroom or (more likely) at a conference, you won't really learn a lot beyond what it will be important for you to study. It is the study, not the content or the brilliance that will result in learning.
For learning to occur the student needs to do a lot of work, solving problems, writing, getting and evaluating feedback. Then, more problems, feedback, etc.. Eventually some insight will emerge, we hope from the hard work. Learning involves changing the brain and developing long term memory and connections between ideas. Content alone, even brilliant content won't do that. Only hard work, usually involving repetition will.
Perhaps I'm a case in point. I'm probably just an average professor and I worked at mostly just average universities. But my students learned a lot and some of them have gone on to surpass me, getting their own doctorates and now teaching at top universities. Some others became leaders in industry and government. But I never relied on fancy videos. I just made them work hard on meaningful things and gave them a lot of feedback. I also let them improve on their mistakes by resubmitting old work. How the content was delivered mattered much less.
And, of course, you can't interrupt a video lecturer to ask them a question. So, if you miss some point, you are just stuck until the video ends (assuming it is delivered in a classroom situation, rather than offline in a "flipped" classroom). And then you get farther and farther behind the presenters ideas.
My philosophy of teaching is that it matters much less what I do in the classroom than what the students do. So, course design starts with the exercises and projects that the students will do to actually learn. Over the years I came to rely much less on lecture and much more on reinforcement of key ideas (not presentation, reinforcement).
But, I didn't always think that way, sadly. At one time I developed the absolutely perfect way to teach (hmmm, lecture on) statistical sampling. I created the absolutely perfect lecture. When I delivered it, brilliantly, I think, I noted that only about 5% of the students actually understood what I was talking about. OOPS..
On the other hand, I've had the experience, teach math and/or cs, as have many others, that when I stumble through a lecture and have to figure it out as I go along, backing up and moving forward.... that the students afterwards thank me for giving such a nice lecture. That is because that stumbling is how they often have to work and seeing a prof stuck in the same way is both reassuring and shows them how the "smart folks" really work.
And note, of course, that great content already exists. Great learning and great teaching is another thing altogether. And don't denigrate the "average" professor or the "average" university. A lot of deep learning goes on there. Likewise a lot of really incompetent people graduate from top schools. I've met some of them and some of them are public figures.

Maybe what I was saying came off a bit differently than what I had meant. I do not in the least mean to denigrate "average" universities/professors. Good researchers/teachers/people are to be found everywhere.

Hard work is clearly very very important, and the privilege to have a real dedicated teacher guide you is extremely desirable, but I am not talking about replacing these, merely augmenting them, just to sprinkle in some visual intuition that would be very hard to convey on a black board for example.

At the margins, as I say, but don't expect any fundamental transformation through something that is as passive as a video. Make it interactive and it will improve a bit, possibly a lot. Learning is about what you do, not what you see and hear for nearly every student. (Caveat, there are exceptions - visual learners - but they are rare).


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What to do during summer?
So I just finished my 2nd year as an undergrad majoring in mathematics. I plan to continue on to a Ph.D afterwards, but only recently did I realize how behind I was... I haven't done any research, completed any projects or summer programs. I haven't done any outside reading so I don't really know much about any particular subject. Everyone I know in my program has at least something, so I'm worried that I'm really late in preparing for grad school.
I know I should probably consult a professor or advisor, but school's ended already... and admittedly, I've been a little apprehensive when talking with professors since, well, I don't really know anything in the first place, and I know they're very busy, so I eventually just awkwardly ask some questions and leave ASAP having not understood much.
In short, I'm just very confused and don't know what to do from here on out... so any advice would be great.

It seems like you've got two entirely separate problems here: 1) lack of direction and 2) how to make summer plans late.  Can you please choose one of them to focus your question on?  You can ask the other as a separate question if you like.

Well, I suppose its more 2)... really I just feel like it's 1) and I'm hoping 2) would remedy that...

I haven't done any research, completed any projects or summer
  programs.

That's okay.  You've only just finished your second year of undergraduate studies.

I haven't done any outside reading so I don't really know much about
  any particular subject.

That can be remedied!  How about taking some summer classes in a community college, in a branch of science that intrigues you?

I've been a little apprehensive when talking with professors.

You're going to need a bit more chutzpah in order to get your money's worth out of college and graduate studies!  Perhaps you could transition into feeling more comfortable with professors' office hour visits by focusing primarily on visiting the office hours held by grad student teaching assistants for the time being.
It is very common for second year students to be hit hard with an appreciation of how little they know.  Try to ride this storm of self-doubt while reminding yourself of that fact.
It would be great if you could find one or more mentors, either on your own or through a matching-up program.  The mentor might be a faculty member who serves as your undergraduate advisor -- the person who checks your proposed schedule and advises you about what courses to take next year, etc.

Edit 5/20
There are several ways to break the ice.
Ask for some undergraduate advising -- s/he will check your unofficial transcript against your proposed schedule for next semester.  Make sure you have this conversation in this person's office, not over email, because what we want to happen is for the professor's natural mentoring instincts to kick in, so that one thing leads to another.
In the experimental sciences, one can ask for a tour of his/her lab.  You might want to ask your question over at Mathematics Education as well.
Spend some time reading the research descriptions of the faculty in your department, to see whose area intrigues you, then take a look at some of their papers.  When you find one that gets you intellectually excited, make an appointment like this:  Dear Professor So-and-so, I've been reading your "title of paper", and wonder if I could make an appointment to come in and talk with you about this area of research?"  Or something like that.  Researchers love to talk with people about their work.
To get matched up through a formal matching up program, you need to look closely at your department's website, or ask your department administration if there is such a thing.

During the school year, attend lots of seminars.  Be bold about chatting with grad students over cookies afterwards.  If no one is bringing cookies, juice and paper cups, bring some!

Thanks for the encouragement! I just don't know exactly how I would find a mentor, though, now that school is over...

School is over, research is not. Actually, as the potential advisors have less teaching duties, you might find it even easier to find someone who is able to spend time on supervising you and giving you a little research project. Around my place, most of the potential advisors would be happy to help a student who wants to learn more than he or she has to.

If any of the other suggestions provided by excellent people here doesn't suit you, then a fallback option I would recommend is instead use the semester to plan your future strategies for next semester and prepare yourself to be more comfortable in implementing it come fall!
I would suggest picking a class/subject in your major that you will preferably be taking next semester. Then don't wait - start now! If you don't know what the course is really about (I know I rarely do in advance!), you can try to meet with a professor who will teach the class, with a department chair, or with your adviser, or you can write a short email. Let them know you want to get a jump on the next semester to prepare yourself for advanced studies/research in the future. If a general class schedule or syllabus is available, even better!
Then set yourself a nice schedule for the summer - giving yourself plenty of time to actually relax and recharge your batteries for the coming semester - and get cracking! Next semester you should be generally better prepared and be able to learn the subject deeper and more readily than others, rather than scrambling to learn what you need to keep up. You should hopefully be able to ask more insightful and interesting questions, participate in class, and maybe also go to office hours and ask even more advanced questions about the material to move towards mastery. With the extra prep you'll likely be able to also do better grade-wise.
All this extra contact and work will not only improve your education, but if you have been shy this can be your first deeper connection with a professor. After you've had time to work with them and become more comfortable, and if things are going well and they are recognizing you are a good and dedicated student who wants more than just a degree and to move on, then you will be in a great position to ask them about research options in the future - or for recommendations/introduction to another professor who you might want to work with.
You can also apply this same "show up, participate, ask questions, go to some office hours/meetings" strategy to other classes, and begin to make more contacts - naturally! It's much less stressful than it seems at first, and you might develop some valuable skills and meet some really cool people. You can then repeat all this strategy the following semester as well, and begin planning for doing research/independent study during a semester or over summer if that suits you.
Finding people you work well with and have more advanced connection to you beyond just class will also conveniently be able to help you with getting research, work with you when you hit more advanced topics, and as a bonus can also be the source of future reference letters which are actually useful because they know you outside of class!
Rather than panicking, I'd suggest you take a deep breath and instead work to prepare yourself so in the following semesters and next summer you will be ahead of the game rather than behind. And if you continue to follow through and put in the effort and use good strategy, you'll find yourself likely enjoying the process more, having better connections, being more prepared, and generally making the most of your education - and maybe even being in a better position for  an advanced degree, too.


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How to cite a reformulation of an older theorem?
I'm currently in a position where I need a result from a paper where the formulation is a little unwieldy, in that it depends on some notations and concepts that aren't useful to my work. I found a reformulation of this result in a book (not a new result, just restating the same theorem in different words) that uses different notations and is easier for me to relate to what I'm doing.
Is it appropriate in this situation to cite both the original and the reformulation like this:
"Theorem X, formulation from Y, based on Z"?

How significant is the reformulation?  Would anyone who understood all the concepts involved be able to immediately see they are the same theorem?  Or be able to do so with a little work?  Or would it take an expert to see the equivalence?

The equivalence is obvious if you're familiar with the terms involved, and I've seen the other formulation in several other publications other than that book as well so I'd say it's probably reasonably well known among experts.

Yeah, I would probably write something like "Recall the following theorem of X given in [1], brought here in the equivalent formulation as presented by Y in [2]".

Citing Y besides Z is almost definitely a good thing!

I recommend restating the theorem in your own paper.  You can then say: "We now restate a theorem of X [citation], since in this context, it is more convenient to write it in different terms/notation. The version we give here is based on the book of Y [citation].
Theorem: ....."


text:
Abusing privacy
About a year ago, I was studying at a university. I had a subject with a tutor; since my family moved to a different city, I also moved to a different university and discontinued my studies at my former university.
I do not use my real name at Facebook for obvious reasons that we all know. In a public group in Facebook about ancient Iran, I posted an article and the tutor I had at my former university commented that my real name is something else: he also mentioned that I discontinued my studies at the former university: he also mentioned that I did not attend his classes.
Is not this abusing my privacy? He could sent me a private message if he wanted. To be honest, I am offended and want to make an official complaint to my former university. So I want to know if his act is indeed abusing my privacy and what is the best thing to do?
I also should mention that I sent him a private message on Facebook and asked him that one should respect indivisul's privacy in the hope that he will delete his comment but he did not.
His Exact comments were:

Sorry for interrupting mate. I just visited your profile which shows
  you reside in somecountry. Just would like to know if your real
  surname is somename. If so, I reckon you were my student in tutorial
  sessions in Engineering Mechanics in UTS ayear ago; However, you
  stopped attending the sessions after the first few ones.

Have you actually lied for any of these things on your Facebook page (saying that you graduated from this university, when you were not)? If so, starting a war might backfire

Is the tutor an employee of your former university?

No, I did not lie. The tutor is an employee of my former university. He even was not sure if I was the one he knew. His exact comment was "is you real surname somesurname ..."

Do you have any ideas why the tutor exposed your name and history? Or how did he found your article in the fb group?

He, and I were members of the group so if I posted something to the group, he would naturally notice it. He looked at my profile and by looking at my profile picture, he recognized me.

There is probably no case on the real name being leaked, because it's hard to defend that you put your own picture on expecting someone who knows you to be smart enough to see through your grand plan. (You may, however, faked that your picture was stolen and cancel the account.) The part that the TA disclosed your academic record, maybe, you can look into FERPA regulations. But I'd just communicate first, he may not have any malicious meaning, and just wanted to have a friendly reconnection.

@Penguin_Knight: Australia seems safely outside of FERPA's jurisdiction, though perhaps they have some equivalent down there.  (Even so, in my opinion trying to pursue this formally at the university level is probably not the way to go.)

@PeteL.Clark, Thanks! At the time when I answered the institute was not revealed. So the FERPA comment.

@Penguin_Knight There is definitely no case on the real name being leaked, because it's against Facebook's terms of service to use a fake one.

@FedericoPoloni, wow... didn't know that. Thanks!

I am not a lawyer, and I am not giving you legal advice.  If you are in the US, you can view this matter from the Family Education Rights and Policy Act (FERPA):
http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html
Here are the key issues that should be considered:
1) FERPA gives parents certain rights with respect to their children's education records. These rights transfer to the student when he or she reaches the age of 18 or attends a school beyond the high school level. Students to whom the rights have transferred are "eligible students."
2)  Generally, schools must have written permission from the parent or eligible student in order to release any information from a student's education record.
If this person published your name AND gave details of your educational record, then I think you have a legitimate complaint, provided that the tutoring was a service of the university.  If you hired this person privately or joined a group that was not formally affiliated with the university, then the university will not pay attention to this complaint.

I would only mirror some of the answers already provided - one of them asking if the tutor is an employee of the univiersity. If so, there may be a violation, however if you disclosed elsewhere online you are/were a student at the university, then there may not be - even if the tutor was an employee. The fact you discontinued studies from a non-employee would not be a violation of privacy as well. Typically, as long as its something private you made public, then the expectation of privacy is waived.
I assure you, the internet is not a pretty place. Watch what you disclose online. Wish you the best in any event and since this implicates a legal issue, no answer than an answer by an attorney is an attorney you'd want to trust.


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Does engineering undergrad performance matter for masters in management admission?
In Masters in Management (MSc Mgmt/MIM) admissions, how much weight is generally given by the Adcom to the applicant's undergrad performance, especially if it's an unrelated one like engineering?
Does it have any bearing if the applicant's undergrad performance is poor but his other credentials are excellent?
What kind of credentials should such an applicant aim to acquire before applying (Other than the GMAT, TOEFL, etc)?

I'll speak from my own experience.
I had only a 2.9 GPA in my major, Economics. But I had a 3.5 overall.
What may have helped me was my GMAT score (over 750). In any event, I got into several top level MBA programs, including the one of my choice.
It helps to work a year or two before applying to an MBA program. A "gap year" (or more) is probably more valuable for this degree than for other graduate degrees.

Thanks Tom! But I'm referring to MiM/MSc Mgmt here, which are courses meant for candidates with little or no experience. In fact, some of them don't accept candidates with more than 1 year of experience.

The engineering major is good in a way since they know you can handle MBA math.  But they won't really cut you much slack for poor performance or say it is irrelevant.  What is relevant is that you had a chance to get good grades and didn't.  They are looking for people who excel in whatever they do (engineering, economics, literature, etc.)

Your undergraduate GPA is important for MIM because it is one of criteria where the admission team can evaluate your profile.
However the damages done by a low GPA can balanced by a high GMAT score, internships and a strong SOP.
I've also come to understand that it helps if your country of origin is not highly represented in the college of your choice (disadvantage to Indians).


text:
How to inform an adviser I am ceasing work with him?
There's a lot of text here, I do apologize.  Many thanks to those who read it all and provide commentary.
Background: I have worked with my adviser for ~7 years now carrying out research with him in the field for many seasons, receiving my BS under his guidance, and TAing for him for several years until I decided to begin my MS with him.  Early on, he had been having family issues and at a point near the beginning of my MS, he informed me he would be focusing less on work and more on his family due to his focus having destroyed his family.  I took this as a passing phase as he had done before, but he has proven me wrong.
Overall Situation: My adviser currently has negative intentions to his students, the department, and the school.  He does the bare minimum in courses- teaching ~1 class per quarter, showing up late, leaving early, is never in his office (I'm not exaggerating, he does not use his office. He arrives to campus, teaches, and leaves); has a very negative attitude with the department and school with never submitting forms or reports on time as well as not attending some department meetings (or commencement); and constantly sends emails to faculty and students informing them of how he is being screwed by the school (receiving reimbursements months later and having to deal with overdue bills and credit card charges).  No students respect him within the department and his classes are the lowest rated to the point of being a joke.  His reputation is so bad that when his next grad class is offered this coming winter, I feel it will be canceled because absolutely none of the students intend to enroll in it.  Research-wise, he has been collecting data on a large project for ~15 years and has not published anything during that time.  Currently the data and work sits and we are again in the middle of a summer when he intends to write something (this has been stated for each of the last 4 summers straight and it never happens).
My Situation: My thesis has gone no where.  Meetings are constantly cancelled and put off by him, he has provided little to no literature (even then only broad background papers that he had me read for my BS), has shown no advancing interest in exploring ArcGIS with me to understand how to manipulate data.  Some lunch meetings have taken place, over the past two years, but they end up being social and minor mentioning of work is as far as the conversation gets.  The last two meetings I had with him were group meetings with 2 other students working with him (the other third already left for another project) and the meetings solely revolved around their projects and how I could help/guide them.  Being roughly 6 months prior to graduation, I am currently assembling text and running analysis on data entirely on my own.  Emails to meet and go over the process this week have gone unanswered.
Currently: Recent statements from other faculty and students are that in recent meetings my adviser has been using me as an example to state students need to submit 'final' drafts 6 months before defense.  The department has a deadline of one month before defense for a completed 'first' draft.  I am under the impression, given the past actions of my adviser, that he may be setting me up to make a point to the other faculty that 6 months beforehand is needed because he did not have proper time to read and review it.  All of this would be fabricated from his own lack of meeting and involvement in my thesis writing.  I am absolutely appalled at how he claim such expectations when he himself has put zero effort into the project whatsoever.
SO, with all that background, I sit here with ~20 pages of some spotty text and images and am very close to deciding, enough is enough, I would be better off dropping this project and ceasing work with him, and in turn picking up a project with another faculty member.  I would rather spend a bit more time investing in a new project and doing that than finishing this and continuing to have to put up with his actions.
My question is, with what I have informed you of here, how do I do it?  Also, along those lines, if I do decide to do this, would it be entirely unprofessional to inform the other grad student who just started up her project to drop it and go to another adviser? (She has already commented I have been more of an adviser to her providing background readings, information, and 100s of Mbs worth of unprocessed data for her project...)
Cheers

I am agreeing with @scaaahu on both parts of your question:

How to inform an adviser I am ceasing work with him?

With what you are writing it sounds like your adviser already gave you an out ("he informed me he would be focusing less on work and more on his family due to his focus having destroyed his family"). In addition to that, he seems to care about nothing at the university any more. Therefore, I think it actually doesn't matter at all how you tell him, just that you tell him as soon as possible and more importantly: start looking for a new adviser right now. You do not want to waste any more time on the project.
I would just tell him that the project is not going as you wished, that you need more guidance, that you think he will not be able to give you that and that you are looking for a new adviser and project. If you can honestly say you are thankful for his guidance (maybe in your BS?) say so, otherwise just say nothing.

Would it be entirely unprofessional to inform the other grad student
  who just started up her project to drop it and go to another adviser?

Yes, I think it would be unprofessional. Tell her that you are leaving and, if you know her well enough or if she asks, why you are leaving , tell her in the most objective way you can. Then she can decide for herself.

I have done minor edits to your answer. I hope you are OK with them

Thanks for the response.  I do have 2 other faculty members I can ask for another project, and they've known for quite a while that this may be coming.  I guess a more generic question from me is, would you recommend to do this in email, in person (what if I can simply not get a meeting with him in a timely manner?) etc?

That is great, that you have already 2 other possible advisors, that makes it less risky for you. If possible I would do it in person. If you can not get a meeting then a mail with an explanation why you are not doing it in person and the offer to meet and talk about it would in your case also be fine. How long to wait? - I don't know.

I am a faculty member and have seen similar situations in the past, both in my university and in others.  In fact, a few years ago the son of a friend told me about a similar situation in his university (though less severe than yours).  I have advised him to quit and switch to another adviser; he did that and he is just now finishing his Ph.D. and is doing extremely well.  Similarly, I will advise you to switch adviser.  And you should tell the younger student in the lab why you are leaving.  Students should count on their peers for honest opinions.


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My Plan to Get into a CS PhD Program
Some background:
I graduated 3 years ago from a big state research university.  I had an irrelevant sociology major and graduated with a 2.9 GPA mainly because I had no inclination that I would ever want to go to graduate school and thought it was more important to just make sure that I had a job to support myself and graduated on time.
After graduation I had a crappy office job for 2 years and took some random IT graduate courses which lead me to eventually get a job as a programmer at a large marketing firm for about a year and I got really interested in the more complex world of computer science especially computer vision, modeling and simulation.
Which brings me to now.
I will be beginning a CS Master's program this summer at a medium sized state university with a concentration in Modeling and Sim.  I plan to to the thesis option and I've already begun contacting professors about research opportunities.
My GRE score is 162/155/4.5 but I didn't study because I found out I had to take it at the last minute.  With some prep I think I can at least bring that up to about 165/160/5.
All that said, do you think that with my thesis, a publication or 2 and a stellar GPA my masters work would over-shaddow my crappy undergraduate career enough to get me into a good PhD program.
My dream department would be Caltech.  But I'd at least like to go somewhere reputable if I'm going to bother with a PhD.
Diversity note in case this helps my cause: I'm female, 1st generation college student, armed forces veteran.
TL;DR
BAD UNDERGRAD: 2.9GPA/unrelated major
If I do really well on my CS Masters program, get some research published, and get my GRE score up to like a 165/160/5 do you think a top program would ignore the transgressions of my youth?

I'm not familiar with the US system but I think your Masters research will be more important than what came before. If you get involved in solid research resulting in good publications at recognisable venues, and you apply for PhD's in areas where you have developed the start of a good track record, I think you would be a strong applicant. (Even excellent undergrad grades don't translate into excellent PhD candidates: some students may excel in taught environments but not in unstructured research, and vice-versa. Hence, in my book, proven research ability trumps undergrad grades wrt. a PhD.)

This is me: http://3dpancakes.typepad.com/ernie/2005/03/re_phd_with_low.html

My opinion is that you will be a shoo-in somewhere if you can do good work at the Master's level, while building relationships with the faculty. The fact that your undergrad degree was in sociology almost makes your low GPA irrelevant.
Definitely aim for Caltech if that's what you want, and there is faculty you want to work with. But don't get too hung up on big name schools. There are lots of other schools which maybe aren't as highly ranked but could be a good fit for you.
I recommend reading this book, which helped in writing my statement of purpose. The author is another person who graduated below 3.0.
Here's a personal anecdote to give you encouragement: I was a mediocre undergrad at a big public university, then went to work for a number of years before deciding to enroll in a part-time Master's program at a smaller state school. I had a great experience working with my final project advisor, who encouraged me to apply to a PhD program. I am still working on publishing the results, but in the meantime I have been accepted to a PhD program for the coming year. I never imagined it would happen, but it did. If I can do it, so can you.

Thanks for the encouragement.  My preference for Caltech isn't so much the big name as it is its ties with NASA.  Although, going to a different school I could still aim for internships and/or fellowships at the JPL and still meet the same goal.

Given how far away from your original undergraduate degree you've moved (several years' work experience, change in degree program, and so on), it makes it very hard for a PhD program to give your undergraduate transcript too much weight in the admissions process. You will also be able to stress how far you've come as part of your application, either in the statement of purpose or in a "other notes" section—and you should take avail yourself of the opportunity.
As for being female and a veteran, that will matter much more to schools than being a first-generation college student. (Being a female applicant in CS certainly can't hurt your chances if you're a qualified candidate.)


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How to time-efficiently supervise students to learn a new topic while working on a project?
I'm currently a post-doc and I'm supervising several projects at once - some of them distantly, basically only via videocalls.
In one of the projects, which I found very promising initially, there are 5 students, 4 of them at the university abroad, so I can meet with them only rarely in person. While all of them have mathematical background I found out, that it's not what I expected as it seems, that the quality of courses dropped significantly in this university due to internal conflicts and abrupt management changes. Moreover, it seems, that they have basically no knowledge of quantum mechanics, which is required for the project and which they were taught in some introductory course. When I asked them, it seemed, that most of the courses were done in a "read it yourself" way with some easy-to-pass exam.
Knowing this and not having time to basically teach a QM course distantly, I decided to send them my favorite textbook and told them to go through it chapter-by-chapter, as it contains many easy exercises making it easy to comprehend the basic QM concepts. Additionally, I offered "a group consultation" in a way, that students would send me their questions beforehand and I prepared a slideshow and some PDF with equations trying to explain the topic in as much mathematically rigorous way as possible in our time frame, providing also a list of topics, sources and general directions you should go through if you want to understand the topic in-depth.
But, it converged into another 2 problems:

Students are not nearly as involved as I expected them to be, despite most of them having at least a part-time job on the research project as they like to code and run some simulations and quite obviously consider the rigorous background to be somewhat superfluous (even when I tried to explain very clearly, that it's important if they're aspiring to become more independent researchers and also fully-functional in the scope of the project).

I originally meant (and stated it clearly), that they should ask questions about the chapter so that we'll consult it coherently with their study progress. While it's the case sometimes, many times (with increasing tendency) the questions are very broad and obviously motivated by some popularization videos rather than specific to the current chapter. While I'm also explaining these, it's usually taking a lot of my time as the question typically isn't trivial and, most notably, it requires some additional mathematical knowledge (i.e. representation theory) they don't have and will obtain after several months, if studying as planned.

Shortly, I'm not sure how to proceed here as the students are obviously willing to work on the project, but their lack of knowledge in some subjects (albeit they should possess it) is hindering progress and the consultations aren't really as useful as they could be. Do you have any similar experience?

Are all your groups working on the same project? That is, are they independent and replicating the work/tasks of other groups? Or are they each doing different things?

@Buffy Two of them are working on a project mostly supervised by my colleague where I'm only overseeing the software implementation. The remaining three are working on the same project fully under mine supervision.

I have had luck with using a  mailing list (old tech, I know) to which every student was enrolled as well as contributing faculty. This might work for your "three" group. And maybe separately for the other two.
The advantage of email over other social media is that they don't need to be connected at the same time.
The rules were that anyone could ask questions on the list at any time of the day or night and anyone could answer. I had to monitor the conversations so that I could correct wrong answers and sometimes provide answers and guidance myself.
I could also point them to resources that they needed to examine at the moment and prompt them with questions and such.
My experience was that most questions got answered within a few hours and, after a while, I only had to jump in occasionally.
If you use this with the "two" group, I'd suggest that the other faculty member take the lead and you just add what you can when necessary. This might reduce the burden on yourself, or not, depending on how much the software is a block for them.
While my course only met in person once a month (for several hours) it was a 24/7 operation throughout from the student standpoint and not especially burdensome on my part. But you have to encourage them to answer as well as ask. They can also carry on a group meeting or "strategy session" online this way but non-synchronistically. That can be helpful for people in different time zones.


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Is it possible to get a researcher position in a prestigious institute with a degree from a not very well-ranked university?
I'm currently in the 2nd year of my Ph.D. and I'm really interested in my future career options. I'm attending a double-degree study programme in two European universities, none of them being among the top ones. But, I'm employed as a researcher (not only a Ph.D. student) in a supercomputing center in one of them (member of PRACE, 3 years ago in top 40 from TOP500 list) since the beginning of my Master's degree, thanks to Dean's award for my Bachelor's thesis. Five years ago it was a top university in my country (slightly under 300 in QS WU rankings), but then the directorship changed and the ranking dropped drastically (to my shock completely out of QS WU rankings). The second university shares a pretty similar fate - from about 300th place to 520+ in the last 7 years (I have no idea, what happened), but still maintains at least 151-200 position in my field. In general, I feel, that while both of the labs I'm working in are good and productive, the problem lies in some other faculties who do not focus on research enough.
Is it possible to hope for admission into a researcher position in some well-ranked university in the future? I'm not talking only about post-doc now, but also in a long-time horizon. This situation makes me feel really inferior, so I'd like to now, if my researcher career direction is tightly bounded by this situation or if there is a possibility to overcome rankings with good research results over the years after Ph.D.

Yes, it is.
When you apply for a postdoc position several things will be important:

what you have done (i.e. does it fit with the future PI's research
agenda),
how successful it was (i.e. did you publish your results
    in a top journal) and
you know what you want and you are burning for it

The name of the university might matter as well but once you graduated from your PhD your personal profile should be distinctive enough and the name does by far not matter as much as after your undergrads where everyone looks the same expect from the university name, marks average and some internship.

Thank you, I'm happy to hear that! Also, just out of curiosity, do you have any experience with improving once position few years after post-doc, after already working in some lower-ranked institute?

Yes, top 500 uni to top 3 uni

Well, that's even better, I wouldn't think it's possible at all :-)


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How to respond to an unofficial PhD offer?
I applied to 10 schools and have heard formally from 3, 2 rejections, 1 admission. I just received an email from another school (a very good one) saying that they are seriously interested in me, but would like to know if I am still interested in them. While I am very interested in this program, which is in my top 4, since I have not heard from the other 6 schools, I am not ready to make a decision. Does saying yes now mean I am committed to accepting their offer?

Saying that you are still very interested in them does not represent at all that you are committing to them.

Give them an unofficial "yes". Only when their offer of admission becomes official can your answer be official.

If they are still "seriously interested" in you, then that is not an offer on their side.
If you are still "seriously interested" in them, then that is not a firm commitment from your side.
Decisions are not binding until the ink is dry.

+1 to this, and unfortunately, some less-than-scrupulous institutions/individuals will actually fail to honor commitments even after the ink has dried!  Reputation means a lot.

The department in question most likely just wants to make sure you haven't accepted an offer somewhere else - or received an offer you will definitely accept over them; saying that you are still interested is not a commitment from you at all.
Some applicants will wait till the last moment to decline offers from departments, even ones that they know for sure they will not accept (e.g. if they have been accepted by a better department (in their estimation) already). The department is just trying to find out whether you are in that position. (To students in that position, don't do this! Decline offers as soon as you know you won't be accepting, your fellow applicants will thank you!)
In your position I would write an email saying that you are still interested and also indicate that it is among your top choices (as you have said in your question).

Letting schools know will not only make fellow applicants happy, it make the admissions committee members life easier too.

I'm curious how you would word a letter like that. Declining an offer without the "excuse" of accepting one somewhere else. Should you mention the offers you have?

Here is what I wrote back in the day (I make no claims about this being good): "Thank you so much for offering me admission into your graduate program. I was very impressed by [[University]] [[other details like faculty/students I had talked to, etc.]] and so I had a difficult decision to make regarding which graduate program to choose. After a lot of careful thought, I have decided not to accept your offer. I will mail the response form to you as soon as I can, but I wanted to let you know my decision now, since it may affect applicants on your wait list. [[Thank you so much again, etc.]]".

In fact now that I look at it, I cringe a bit, but oh well, it is done now. As a non-native speaker I think I get some latitude from people about wording and style of such things (or perhaps this is merely wishful thinking on my part).

Sometimes I got a note back asking if I had chosen a different program (usually with the comment that it helps them to know their competition); for me this only happened for the last set of schools, so I did have a specific name to tell them. If it had happened earlier I would have told them the schools (four for me) which I was choosing among at the time.

I would suggest making such replies as terse as possible, while still being polite. After all, to some extent you're just another piece of paperwork in the pile to get through. They are not interested in your reason for declining, unless you were in particular negotiations with potential advisors.

Now that you have an admission offer, it is reasonable to contact all (or at least most) of the other schools you have heard from. Any school that you would not attend, email them and say that you have an offer from X and are no longer interested.
Email any school that you want to attend instead of X and tell them you have an offer at X, but would rather attend their school (give a good reason that is not simply their ranking). Tell them the deadline you need to let school X know by. If one of those schools Y gives you an offer and none of the other ones do, you tell X no and Y yes and there are no issues. If a couple of those schools Y and Z accept you, you tell Z yes and X no. You need to tell Y that since the offer you also got an offer from Z that is too good to pass up. This way they will see you were not wasting their time.
The difficult case are the schools you are not sure about. If only school Y accepts you after you tell them about X, then turning them down for X is not ideal. So while it is not ideal, things happen, and no one will hold it against you for long.