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How to deal with students who lose their digital work?
In my courses, students work on large, on-going projects, but submit some parts each week, showing their progress. All of the work is done on a computer or table.
Mid-semester, I always get reports from students of technical failures, e.g.:

Deleted entire project folder.
Reformatted hard drive or upgraded system without backup.
Sent computer to be repaired, cannot work on project until it returns.
USB not unmounted, files broken.
Device containing project folder lost or stolen.

I want to create a policy which is not so harsh as to turn all of these students away. At the same time, I worry if I am a little lenient, students will start claiming problems every time they forget to do their homework. What is a good policy that is not too harsh, recognizing that technical problems do happen, yet which cannot be too easily abused?

"The dog ate my (digital) homework."

"Sent computer to be repaired, cannot work on project until it returns." Do they have access to computers at school? All the other points can be mitigated through regular backups, but if you don't have a computer, you can't work, even if the files are safe...

Have you ever had a single case of a this happening where the student was clearly not just making an excuse?

@TomAu No, the excuse should be the 'cat' ate my homework. There is no 'dog' on Unix, but 'cat' will overwrite whatever you pipe it to ;-)

Ask every student to publish his/home homework software on https://github.com/ with an open source license

@BasileStarynkevitch makes sense... I even store my documents, pics, and academic material on GitHub after having some really bad experiences with exFAT partitions...

You should deal with them in the same way that you deal with students who claim to have lost non-digital work.  Here are two reasons:

This is not really any different from when students complained that "the dog ate my homework."  Both paper and digital formats are susceptible to being damaged, lost, or destroyed.

They will not get any special exceptions from their boss when they lose important digital documents in a real job.

My students do most of their work in digital formats and I've never made special exceptions.  I suppose I would do so in some unusual circumstances (say, a university server where they were told to store their work had been hacked).
If you want to help them develop better digital work habits, introduce them to backups, Dropbox and/or version control.  But I don't think that is your job.

I would expect an employer to provide backed-up storage for any data its staff need to produce and store to perform their jobs. If the university is providing backed-up storage for students' project work, there's no excuse for students losing data due to not having back-ups. But if the university isn't providing backed-up storage, then the "It's just like a job" argument is disingenuous.

@BenCrowell Then it's not appropriate to say "Well, an employer wouldn't cut you slack if you lost your work so nor will we", since an employer would take measures to ensure their staff don't lose data, whereas the university isn't doing that for its students. You can't claim that a student has the same responsibilities as an employee if you're not also giving them the same level of support that  an employee would receive.

This stuff happens! In my undergrad I have to find a computer which could read my HW from the floppy, because no computer in the professors office could.

@DavidRicherby: Not all employers provide automated backups for everything (in fact even if they provide backups it's usually only for some network drives and crucial project areas, not your local My Documents) and, even if they did, that doesn't cover documents you've left open in Word for five days without saving. There's still plenty of scope for comparison here.

SVN/Git is your friend. Never complain about lost copies or inadvertently deleted documents again.

@BenCrowell You've missed a third option: a bunch of responsible adults (say, a company or university department) get together and hire another responsible adult to look after their data for them. If my data disappears, it's his fault.

@DavidRicherby: "since an employer would take measures to ensure their staff don't lose data" - then make the employer a client who is expecting that their freelance contractor (the student) can take care of their own data.

@Mast Until your VC server crashes and you made no backup of your backup.

If it's no-one's job, it's probably yours -- the teacher. I spend (waste?) time teaching them how to back up their work.

@Lilienthal So you accidentically deleted your homework folder on the same day as your VC crashed? I know Murphy is though, but you'll need to be both stupid and unlucky to achieve that.

@Mast You'd probably be surprised by the number of people running a local VC server on their developer machine and think themselves safe from any mishap.

This is a fascinating result to the question. The answer with the most votes is not addressing the question except obliquely by answering to not create a policy. Even the answerer admits to this in their answer ("I know this goes against what you have asked"). It's a fascinating effect of democratic validation not working. I would then conclude that in this case the best answer is the second most popular answer since it addresses the question.

@Ootagu Hopefully, the author of the question solves that by accepting another answer

Based on this question, as well as based on your previous questions (e.g., here, here, or especially here), I get the impression that students in your school are leading the teachers on  quite a bit. I have been teaching large undergraduate courses (400+ students) at a public university in central Europe for years, and many of the problems you often seem to stumble into are pretty much unknown to me. For instance, I can literally remember a single incident where one of my many students claimed that he could not finish his homework because he lost data due to a technical problem. You, on the other hand, make it sound like this is a regular occurrence.
As I don't think that your students are somehow inherently more prone to lose data due to no fault of their own, the logical conclusion is that they are (at least in the majority of times) just making up excuses. Hence, the question is not "how to deal with students who lost their digital work?", but rather "how to deal with students who claim to have lost their digital work?".
My answer to this question (and, incidentally, also to your other, previous questions) is to treat your students as adults. Among other aspects, this means that they are responsible themselves for any technical issues on their end, the real ones as well as the made-up ones. Yes, this will mean that occasionally, somebody will actually be struck by a problem innocently, but at a university, adults are supposed to handle problems by themselves. To me, this is a large part of the learning process at a university - there is no safety net that catches you when you are behaving unreasonably (and, yes, not correctly backing up your homework definitely falls into this category).
So, my answers to your problems would be (formulated a bit more politely, but no less directly):

Deleted entire project folder.

Too bad. Do it again.

Reformatted hard drive or upgraded system without backup.

Too bad. Do it again.

Sent computer to be repaired, cannot work on project until it returns.

Use one of the computers in the university lab, or borrow a computer from a friend.

USB not unmounted, files broken.

Too bad. Do it again.
(Also, speaking as a computer scientist, this is so unlikely to happen on modern file systems that I would be very much inclined to think that you are lying to me.)

Device containing project folder lost or stolen.

Restore from backup. If you have no backup - too bad, do it again.

Re: USB unmounted - Windows does "corrupt" files (or the whole disk) sometimes, but in reality most of the data is trivial to rescue, with a plethora of user-friendly file recovery software available such as Recuva.

+1 for 'treat your students as adults'.  They're not at school anymore and don't need to be babysat.

Though I see your point, in many cases "Too bad. Do it again." is a ridiculous proposition if what has been lost is anything between 9 months and several years worth of work as a large project can be. It would effectively be expelling the student at that point.

@Vality And so what?  If a student isn't taking the absurdly trivial step of backing up months worth of work, it's hard to see how that's anyone's fault but their own.

@Vality No, in the worst case it would require the student to re-take the course. This is a completely reasonable consequence in my opinion.

I could not agree more. University students are, by definition, adults. Treat them as such. Expect adult behaviour. People respond according to their treatment; the rules should be clear, and FAIRLY applied. Pandering to these apparently bogus claims is unfair to the honest students.

@Superbest: Cheap USB devices are surprisingly easy to brick.

We also have to be careful of a wide-spread myth: that employers do not give leeway for error. In practice the more important the project the more leeway is usually afforded (partly due to seniority and power of the corresponding staff); the less important, the less leeway is afforded (partly due to the less power the corresponding staff hold). If you look at errors made by the executive or the next level lower, they are given tremendous leeway sometimes even praised for making errors.

@Ootagu I'm not sure how this relates to my answer. Are you saying students should learn that mistakes never have consequences, because there's a chance that they will be getting away with them also later at work?

@Ootagu Also, speaking of "wide-spread myths" - I think the idea that high-ranking executives are not normally punished for mistakes is one of those. Honestly, as an executive it's normally much easier to get booted than to keep your job for a prolonged period of time. I think it just looks like they can get away with anything because what the general public may consider a "mistake" the company may be fully on board with ...

@xLeitix No, I don't actually think its good to get away with things for any people involved in a given work situation. But I do question the oft quoted principle of action-consequence we are taught at all educational institutions. There is more going on in the "real" world and because of that students ironically are not prepared for the real world due to not being taught how things really work from their so-called "schooling." This actually can hamper the ability to improve problems and certain sets them up for frustration.

@xLeitix your second comment was very revealing. I hadn't thought of that.

A few years ago, these were legitimate (if sometimes dubious) problems.  With the arrival of free and easy-to-use cloud storage, however, there is no reason that anybody should ever have to lose data again.
Dropox has a free account that provides 2 GB of storage, automatically backs up any time that you are on the network, and gives the ability to undelete files and roll-back to previous file versions across something like a month of time.  Since it's cloud-based, it can be linked to another computer should one be broken or stolen.  As long as your students aren't doing something extremely data-heavy, like art & design, the 2 GB limit shouldn't be a problem.
Given this, why not set up a policy as follows:

At the start of the class, state that students who work electronically will be expected to keep good backups such that "the digital dog cannot eat your homework." Introduce the class to Dropbox as a recommended solution, but let them know that any cloud-based backup is OK (there are lots of other solutions available too, but Dropbox is currently the best for both universal availability and simple user interface).
Then, during the semester, if somebody comes to you with a tale of woe, treat it like you would somebody failing to show up for a quiz.  There might be extenuating circumstances, but they are rare and probably come with the equivalent of a doctor's note (e.g., a campus police report on stolen property).

Dropbox, however, doesn't really solve the problem, since it's not a backup service. If a student (accidentally or not) deletes the file from their Dropbox folder, it will get deleted from the cloud, as well. What's really needed here is a version control system, like GitHub or BitBucket, both of which offer student accounts.

I'm afraid that you are incorrect.  Dropbox does offer the ability to revert to previous versions and to undelete files, as I mentioned in the 2nd paragraph of my answer.  This has been much to my relief in the past, when a postdoc who had recently joined a large collaboration accidentally deleted several years worth of data.  We had it restored within five minutes of discovering the problem.

Well, what do you know. You can indeed get your last 30 days of history for a file. Maybe that's a newer feature that was added since I started using Dropbox, or maybe I've just been oblivious. Thanks! Though, I still think a version control system would probably be better, at least for long-term programming projects, especially group ones.

@jakebeal: Lucky you noticed within 30 days. Version control is better.

Of course version control is better if you're dealing with groups that can handle it.  I've evolved from RCS to CVS to SVN to Mercurial over the years (with git when forced).  However, when working with less computer-savvy students or collaborators, I have found it's often necessary to compromise for the increased usability of a solution like Dropbox.

I disagree with the statement that of all options, Dropbox is the game-changer here. I strongly object to the idea of asking students to store any of their study-related data at a 3rd party for privacy reasons.

Could you clarify how you see the privacy issues for Dropbox as any different from, say, a university's own servers?  Their privacy policy is virtually identical to the sort of thing you'd see from any university IT department.  In short, I see it as there being only two options (unless you're dealing with highly sophisticated CS students): 1) ask your students get a 3rd party involved (their choice, internal or external; Dropbox is just the easiest recommendation at the moment), or 2) follow the notoriously unreliable "hope and pray" backup strategy.

Agree in part with @O.R.Mapper. We should be teaching the how of backup, but not endorsing particular solutions (in some institutions, endorsement of Dropbox by teaching staff would be frowned upon or worse). An external disk or the University's own server would be equally acceptable solutions; in fact, from a student's perspective, the University's system should be preferred since there is a burden of local responsibility on local IT staff to provision reliable systems for their use and (hopefully) a professor-accessible audit trail/accountability chain in the event of failure or data loss.

@jakebeal: The information how well any given student is doing in their studies is a piece of personal data that is shared exclusively between the university (so data about that on their own systems is ok) and the student. Providing that data to a third party would be a breach of privacy, which might violate both the confidentiality rules by the university as well as local laws the university has to comply with. The issue is even more serious when the third party is bound to rules of a different legislation, where personal data may be less protected against external, e.g. governmental, access.

By all means, abide by local laws and university policy, of course.  Likewise, I agree that if the university IT staff is able to provide an acceptable solution, that's great and simplifies everything. The reality of student backups, however, is that they will probably go into the hands of a non-university third party, whether it be Google, Dropbox, Apple, BitBucket, etc.  You can recommend one or you can let the students pick, but that's the current nature of technology and the market for pretty much anybody except strong CS students.

@jakebeal: My point was that as university staff, I would not - not even implicitly - ask students to use such a 3rd party service. Consequently, the availability of DropBox & Co. is irrelevant to my expectation of how reliably my students should backup.

My point is that if you ask them to back up, and you do not explicitly push them into a university-provided solution, you are implicitly asking them to use a 3rd party service. What else can an average non-CS undergraduate use? iCloud, Office365, Abode Creative Cloud, Google Drive... lots of companies are offering bundled backup solutions to your students, and unless you dictate that they not use them, they will expose their data to these companies.

Since when does Dropbox have "free 2GB storage"? A few months back I had someone try to send me small document files via sharing on Dropbox, and the free account wasn't even able to open the several-MB documents that had been shared with me. I was told I could jump through a bunch of hoops installing software on my computers/mobile devices to unlock more storage, but at that point I just walked away.

@R..: Dropbox has free 2GB storage if you install it and create an account, and has done since launch. Clearly it failed to deliver files from you from someone else's account (at least, failed to do so before you lost patience), but file sharing isn't relevant to someone using it as a small personal backup.

You say your students already:

submit some parts each week

Simply ask them to submit the whole project folder (perhaps in a zip) instead. If they lose their work, they can always roll back to the last version they gave you.
Advantages of this:

Requires no extra training for the students. They already know how to send you folders.
Requires no extra work by you. You already have a system for dealing with folders they send you, just keep using that system.

Disadvantages:

If the projects are very large, it may be difficult to send them. Many email providers have size limits on attachments, and uploading large files takes time. Although you could just ask students to send you a link to their DropBox.
Files use more space on your disk.
There is some latency associated with recovery. It may be some time until you (or the TA) see the student's request for the last version. If, like I suspect is commonly the case, they have a habit of "losing" work a few hours before the deadline, they may email you saying they lost their data at 3 am, and claim that they couldn't finish the work in time because you didn't reply quickly enough.

Alternatively, you can require them to use a version control system, such as git (there are other version control systems, but I've never encountered a reason to use them over git besides "the rules say I'm not allowed to use git"). With GUI tools like GitExtensions and TortoiseGit, not to mention numerous tutorials online, this is extremely easy to figure out even for novices. Set up repositories for them, and communicate that they will be graded for that week on the last commit before that week's deadline (also solves the "but you looked at the wrong branch" problem - if they have several branches, they can make sure their final commit is to the preferred branch). Advantages over the "send whole folder" method:

No busywork on your part required. You don't have to go into twenty emails, download attachment, rename and organize it every week.
If they lose data, they don't require your intervention. They can check out from their repository themselves.
As git will only upload the difference between states, if there are large files that are static between revisions, subsequent commits will be small and take up little network bandwidth or disk space.
Students get experience with a good version control system that is widely used in the industry.
Students learn first hand about importance of versioning. Likely, individuals who managed to get in college will immediately understand that the more frequently they make commits, the less work they'll need to redo if they lose data. If for some strange reason they cannot comprehend this, you can explain it at the beginning of the course.

Disadvantages are:

Students (and you!) must now learn git (or whatever system you choose). Although, perhaps "you better go learn git right now or you will fail this course" is not a bad thing for students to hear at certain points of their education.
Students may try to get tech support for git from you, or get upset when you tell them to go elsewhere (such as stackoverflow) for that.
You must set up a repository for them to use. However, your school's IT department would probably be able to help with this, and even the worst case scenario of "set up a free account on BitBucker or github" is not that bad.

I generally agree with your statements, though I'd object to suggesting students to use external services outside of the realm of control, and legal range, of both students and the university such as DropBox, BitBucket or Github (especially if they are the only way to do things).

In particular, a free account at GitHub makes all the project publicly accessible. This will not necessarily be OK all of the time.

@E.P. The free student accounts give you 5 private repositories on GitHub.

Bitbucket gives free accounts to academic users. They might not be as popular as Github, but I've found it works great. I used it for my thesis. Github's expire after two years, so there's a chance the students might have already used it up. Also, I'd be very surprised if the university didn't have a VCS available, either one for the whole course or repos the students can set up individually.

@DaoWen GitHub provided free conversion to Pro 'cause of the pandemic. Isn't that better than the student account?

Possibly what you could do is give your students an educated fair warning. Show them how to make backups!. Knowing how to backup data, especially for system administration, is an invaluable skill, and can save people countless hours of time and frustration. My teacher expects us to make backups of our files regularly because of the possibility of data loss, and since she told us how to do it (if you don't want to do tarball, or zip backups, you can use cloud services such as Amazon or Dropbox to save files), there's no excuse to have lost anything. A CS student should be competent enough to not have this happen!. Frankly, any CS student should be aware of, and familiar with

How to make a backup of important files in Linux or Unix using tar -cvf [file_name] [folder_name]

How to extract using tar -xvf

How to make backups in windows using either Windows © tools, or simply making zip files of important folders.

How to use online services such as dropbox.

How to write shell scripts to perform regular backups either in Bash, or if using Windows, .bat files.

If you provide them with this knowledge, which should only take about an hour, or even provide a handout or a web post about this issue, and inform them that data loss is common, and steps need to be taken to prevent this, then they are completely liable for any irregular data loss that occurs. Also, you are in the clear a a teacher, and have given your student an invaluable lesson on data management and possibly Linux/Unix/Windows skills they didn't have prior to meeting you. Of course these are just suggestions. I do wish someone would have taught me how to make a simple tarball backup script on day one. Would have saved me much grief. Happy teaching! :)

Well, I doubt with that attitude you would be a very good teacher Ben. Some students would benefit from knowing how to make backups. That's all I was saying. I don't think your resonse is very constructive, and frankly I think you may just be bitter. It IS tthe teachers job to enlighten his/her students and helping them learn how to make backups would be an enriching experience and solve the problem the poster was having. It is an insurance policy that helps him and his students.

If you are a golf coach and your students are encountering golf shoes for the very first time then it is part of your job to teach them how to tie their golf shoes.

I too ran semester-long projects with mostly freshmen and found it sufficient to "strictly" enforce a lenient late-work policy:

I always accept late-work until a stated buffer time before grades are due
I assign one or more drafts/pre-work (i.e., outlines, notes, actual drafts) of all major assignments for a non-negligible portion of the total assignment grade.
late work is always assessed a daily diminishing penalty starting at the due time, regardless of reason for lateness; I don't have the formula in front of me, but I think it ranges from 15 to 2 points/day

I inform the students at the beginning of the semester that I'm not in the business of gauging the validity of their excuses, and have instead a generous, consistently applied policy which will allow them to recover (through diligence) when life gets in the way.
The net effect is that the draft phase of the assignment is the only one where they can completely lose their work before I, at least, have a backup copy. At this early point the consequences of a data loss aren't failure of the assignment (unless they neglect the importance of the draft phase, for which I have no sympathy.)
In practice, I've found that the policy has the desired effects:

My non-slacker students who have occasional life or technical issues have been able to recover with minimal final-grade impact
I don't have to waste mental overhead on feeling unfair, debating whether I'm being lied to or manipulated, or worrying about being biased in my adjudication of excuses
The slackers we intend to punish with a strict due-date policy are still astonishingly capable of using the generous policy to hang themselves
Students almost never completely write off an assignment (or the course), because the diminishing penalty preserves enough value that it always makes sense to do the work (isn't that the real goal?)
I get to feel like my students learn the more valuable life lesson of how-to-dig-myself-out-of-holes-of-my-own-making-through-working-hard-to-catch-up as opposed to the alternative lessons of how-to-burn-with-perceived-injustice or how-to-shrug-and-never-complete-the-work-because-it-will-no-longer-be-accepted.

I realize it takes a philosophical shift to let go of the notion that we need to reject late work. I also realize this answer is basically just a variation on the current most-popular no-special-policy answer, but the implementation differs enough that I thought it might help you approach the problem from other angles.

It may simply be that Ben has unluckily come across more students with academic integrity issues than many of us.  A sensible compromise is to say to the class that certain 'excuses' for non-submission of work are not really going to hold water, and others would require some actual evidence, or a properly formed description of what has gone wrong.
Regardless of your outlook, things do go wrong, I have been involved in many cases of USB drives failing and even the most reliable forensic and data recovery tools being unable to recover the data.  This is more-so if a drive suffers from certain types of electrical damage.  However, I agree that CS students should at least have some good practice under their belt in terms of data management, backup and continuity.
However, are they really adults yet?  Of course not!  All the statements about them being adults and now they need to learn to be adults.  Listen to yourselves, please - they will be a few years in post before they become more adult and start to take real responsibility for their actions.  I train new employees on a monthly basis and the main thing is to allow them to shadow someone with sound technical skills and integrity, they need to 'learn' to become professionals and as such build the skills we expect of a professional practitioner (our domain is IT Security) - they certainly are not all ready when they arrive from University to make sound business (or in many cases technical) decisions.
There is nothing wrong with showing them good data management techniques and actually I would argue that as a practitioner of over 20 years service, its is imperative to show them the principles of data management.  One solution does not fit all, some IT security organisations would rather their employees do not use the services of Dropbox (for various security and non-dislosure reasons), however as a basic backup facility and data repository, it is ideal for students.  We train all of our staff in data management, so why would you not educate students?
I liked the fact that Joshua took the time to show how to use the tar command (and extracting from a tar file) using Linux.  To support this, there is an excellent (if perhaps a rather Unix biased) tutorial at: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/, which covers the (basic) use of tar, gunzip and to be fair provides a very nice introduction to Unix. Most of this will work on Linux too, with the odd usage exception and of course side-effects may differ.  Therefore, even if you lack expertise, it's likely not a good enough excuse not to provide some sort of guidance.  That guidance may just be to make use of a suitable resource that provides the skills or knowledge, and that's what a good teacher does - you can't be great at everything (and remain a modest and well-balanced human being).

+1 for There is nothing wrong with showing them good data management techniques [...]

However, are they really adults yet? Of course not! — [citation needed]

However, are they really adults yet? Of course not! they aren't, and they won't as long as you don't treat them as such! All of them know hard drives crash every now and then, and USB sticks get lost, and they should take preventive measurements against it. It is part of your job to teach them how to do it best, though. I may not be qualified to take the best technical decisions, but I know it, and I know when to ask the senior.

I do not work in academia, but have faced almost identical problems many times as a business owner.
The underlying problem is that:

You do not want to allow people to consistently take advantage of the system
But you also don't want to be too harsh with "innocent" people who have found themselves in a tough situation. (we've all fail to achieve an expected goal every now and then due to circumstances outside our control)

I always address this problem using some form of this basic pattern:
 - Be lenient on first transgression
 - Be strict on future transgressions
 - Do not "judge" the quality of excuses.
For example, this is what I might do in your case:

Have a "known" policy of allowing one transgression.
Have an "unknown" policy of affording leniency on the second transgression. (Always afford leniency, but don't tell people that you will do this until they find themselves in hot water. This will help you to not have to fail people who took a "strike 1" when they probably shouldn't have, but then found themselves with a legitimate problem later on)
Afford zero leniency on the third transgression.

What is really nice about this type of policy is that you don't have to be the arbiter of who has a "good" excuse. People always have a good excuse, especially the people who are gaming you and the system. You can consistently execute this policy the same way for all students. It will allow the "innocent" students to always succeed. It will allow the "players" to succeed just as long as they are taking their studies seriously overall. And you will be able to fail incapable students without even having to listen to their reasons for not having done their work because after all, you already gave them two chances and statistically, it is extremely unlikely that they had three legitimate "emergencies" in one semester.

Use Git!! Why? Both your and my question have the same answer: "You must award failing grades for failure to submit assignments." Git is so pragmatic, its usage will solve your dilemma and provide students will practical experience with a ubiquitous technology!
Git is a source code management platform that functions as a repository for safe-keeping of all code revisions. In doing so git enables independent collaborative efforts to be merged safely into branches, each of which carries along with it a required message and an exact differential of the code between commits.
Sure, diligent frequents to the great outdoors like your computer science students working offline in the wilderness will inevitably eventually have their laptop eaten by a bear, their digital work for class mere free radicals in the wild.
While close inspection of one's abrasions and tattered garbs can reveal much about wild ursa and truth, an emotionally-detached audit of your classroom's Git repository can actually do a much more practical job. Honest efforts committed throughout the course will shine brighter than his sunburned scratch marks -- and an empty repository will surely ease your apprehensions regarding lending no leniency at all.
Using Git is an amazing part of the software development process. In fact, utilizing git as the central repository for digital work allows for brilliant collaborative efforts among the student body. Perhaps a test would be the random distribution of APIs among the students and the assignment to write code to implement it. You my consider not divulging the function of the assembled code until the next day, when you can put it together, together!

This is entertaining, but hardly an answer to the question "what do I do with the students who lost it?"

@Davidmh You are absolutely correct! I have modified my response accordingly.

Well speaking as someone who until recently was a student and someone who doesn't like to see all the slackers get off, but on the other hand, I have had technical issues before.
I would say:
1. DropBox, AeroFS, Google Drive, etc. are everyone's friend
2. CrashPlan and Time Machine are also everyone's friend.
With those two, most excuses will be gone.  If you introduce them and students are too lazy to use them, then I don't see a lot of need to feel sorry for them.
I had a laptop get stolen once while I was in school, and I lost all of the data on it, mainly because it was all less than a month old so it was not included in my monthly backup (and things like DropBox didn't exist at the time yet).
On the other hand, I had a Macbook with a dying hard drive that randomly corrupt files and/or refuse to boot while I was in the middle of my MBA program.  I would re-install Mac OS and it would work for another week or so until it exploded again.   With DropBox and Google Drive, it was a simply a nuisance rather than a disaster.
You can also mention to your students that:
a. You don't recommend changing or upgrading their computers during the project
b. You don't recommend upgrading their OS during the project
c. You don't recommending them using a beta OS or changing OS during the project.
d. They should be careful what they install on their computers.
i.e. the computer should be a tool to do their work and not something to play with and hack on.
The answers suggesting to use CVS, etc. are a bit silly unless the students are computer science students.  Version control tools offer less benefit when dealing with binary files and the learning curve is steeper.

One of digital media professors laid down the rules (this was back in 2004 or so) under which he would accept the "my files were lost".  You needed to have three different back ups, in three different locations.  For example, physically at your residence, physically on campus on a portable drive, and online on the campus storage, all of which magically lost the files at the same time.  Note that campus storage, like many modern-day cloud backups, in theory could recover files deleted (though doubtful they'd spend the time for a student's lost paper).
Since the chance of all backups being lost simultaneously is for all intents and purposes zero, he was able to all at once

Make his policy of not accepting "my digital files disappeared" as an excuse.
Encourage better than good backup strategies.
Give a reasonable exception to policy (reduces complaining) while knowing full well no one would make use of it.

A story a few years back: My ssd failed on me, and in the same week a certain individual with a certain file hosting service was arrested, with the file servers being shut down. Luckily, I had only recently moved to the cloud and still had an external hd with a two-week old backup on it.
My teacher gave a bit of leeway, warned me about using dubious hosters and gave me a week extension period. I'd advise a strict position, except when their backup service is legitimately compromised. This could even happen to a major service.
I guess a more legitimate file hoster wouldn't have had this problem, but it's still ultimately out of your control. I now use a combination of an external hard disk (or two, depending) with Google Drive and OneDrive for easy file transfers to my phone & tablet, as well as an additional backup.

This is in no way an answer to the question, "What is a good policy to apply to students that lose digital work?"

@ff524 What about the middle paragraph? The rest may be a bit too much fluff, but I stand by the fact that an answer is present.

did you edit that in a minute or two after first posting? I don't remember seeing that when I commented. If you edit your post, I'll be able to reverse my downvote.

@ff524 Yeah, I realised I had forgotten something important, so I quickly amended that.

From the sound of it, the assignment is being submitted little by little, over many weeks. In that case, students can retain their previous weekly grades, but lose credit for the most recent iteration.
Say it's a matter of 10% a week for ten weeks. The student has successfully made five submissions, earning up to 50% for those weeks. In week 6, the files get lost. The student gets a 0 (out of 10) for week 6.
Hopefully, the file will have been recreated by week 7. If not, then another 0 for week 7, etc. until the end of the course.
Basically, the student gets credit on an ongoing basis for successful early submissions and loses credit for each week of "failure."

authors: Vladimir F Героям слава


text:
Why do many instructors avoid giving personal introductions?
I recall that as an undergraduate, very few of the older instructors ever presented basic details about themselves. While I can understand how most would not reveal much about their family life, I cannot understand why few told about their academic background, research interests, work history, or other details which seem connected to the course. This was not the case with the younger instructors and graduate student teachers. Now that I teach undergraduates, I wonder if these older instructors knew through experience that it is best to keep quiet about one's background. Is there a good reason for instructors to keep back such information?

Maybe they just don't see the point of repeating what is already on their webpages?

I honestly don't see that any of that is relevant for most classes. Either they know and can teach the material, or they can't. If there are relevant aspects, where they can bring their experience to bear on the class's material, that's great, but it won't always be true and isn't always the best way to teach -- or the most comfortable for the instructor, depending on their own personalities and those of the students. If you want to make friends with them, great, but that isn't what the lecture sessions are for.

I agree with @keshlam, most of this information (academic background, research interests, etc.) is irrelevant. But I've noticed a similar phenomenon in which some instructors (grad student TAs and faculty alike) don't give anything more than their name, and sometimes not even that. It's not exactly common, but common enough that I would wonder if there's a shared reason for this.

In MBA classes, relevant work outside academia is very relevant and arguably offers more weight to their credibility when introducing themselves to a class.

@Paul: That can be true in other fields too, especially for folks hired as "professors of practice." If the professors feel it is relevant, there's certainly nothing stopping them from citing it. But if they don't feel it is, and they don't want to waste the class's time with it, there's nothing requiring them to cite it. Especially these days, when students who care can often find that info themselves.

I am not sure whether this is in any way related to the age of the instructor, but the primary reason that most people I know don't do a "this is me and my vast experience and research results" style introduction is that it is all too easy to come across as bragging. Even if you have the best intentions and just want to explain your background to the students, so that they can judge your qualifications for themselves, it may sound to them like you are really just showing off.
Most students assume that the instructor knows what he's talking about, until they have solid evidence to the contrary. There is really no reason to explicitly talk about your experience beforehand.
That being said, if you feel like a short introduction of yourself will add to the course, go ahead. In the grand scheme of things, I am sure whether you talk for 5 minutes about yourself in the beginning of a course is the tiniest of issues. What I would avoid is what one industrial lecturer in my alma mater did. This guy spent 5 - 10 minutes of the beginning of every lecture talking about himself and his company (and was ridiculed a fair bit for this by the students :) ).

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sort: votes


text:
Are there any negative consequences to an instructor attempting to achieve "all A's from everyone"?
Instructors can use reflective teaching to analyze their teaching, in the hope that they can improve their course for subsequent terms. If a teacher focused on insuring that all students earned A's, would that bring about unintended negative consequences.
Here are some examples:

If some students did not earn an A because they failed to understand some material, the teacher would attempt try harder in the next term to explain this material more clearly and to also identify or correct the course readings.
If some students did not earn an A because they were uninterested and unmotivated, the teacher should try harder to make the lessons more interesting.

Assume that students only earn an A by demonstrating that they have achieved the course goals, the teacher never lowers their standards for what is an A, and students not made aware of this goal, would such an "all A's from everyone" focus create any intended problems?

Just to clarify: trying to explain material more clearly, correcting course readings, and making lessons more interesting would not be regarded as "negative" consequences. Instead, you're asking about other potential negative side effects that may result from doing those things?

At my university it isn't even possibly to have everyone get all A's. Marks are scaled to a Mean of 65% and a standard deviation of 5-10%.
So if everyone in the course new there stuff and the exam/test average was 85%, then it would be scaled down such that the average was back to 65% and probably only people who got >95% in the exam would get a A.

@Oxinabox that would be a case of changing the standards for what constitutes an A from year to year.

Yes, are their potential side effects that I am not noticing?

@DavidZ No, it just means that the standard for what constitutes an A is "The student is in the top X% of the class."

@DavidRicherby: Yes, but David Z still has a point.  The standard that you quoted is a relative standard.  David Z means that if grades are purely relative then they do not have a consistent standard in absolute terms, i.e., relevant to mastery of course material.  Most people I know want some kind of absolute standards as well: if you hire an A calculus student at an engineering firm and find out they can't take the derivative of xsin(x), contact the instructor and hear "Yes, but the other students were even worse", you would be justified in being unhappy with the grading scheme, right?

@PeteL.Clark It is vanishingly unlikely that a whole class of students would deviate so far from the mean so your question is based on an essentially false antecedent.

@David: From one mathematical scientist to another: I would take it as a favor if you did not throw around mathematical terminology in the absence of mathematical reasoning. Several points: (i) There is no fallacy whatsoever in an analysis based on an event of small positive probability. If you evaluate the probability to be sufficiently small then you will take that into account in any expected value computation, but the word "false" certainly does not apply here.

(ii) You sound as though you believe that the probability is small because of some mathematical or statistical theorem. This is unsupported reasoning: student performance on exams is manifestly not randomly distributed in many contexts. You sound like you don't believe in academic exams in which everyone gets the highest possible grade or everyone fails. But such things certainly happen. In certain kinds of exams -- e.g., qualifying exams -- this highly non-normally distributed performance is quite common.

Finally, you speak about "the mean", by which you evidently more than a single class of students. Could you explain what you mean by "mean performance" on a calculus exam, for instance? I think you must well know that if I switch from one course, instructor, university, region...to another I could show you one whole class full of calculus exams every one of which has superior performance to another whole class of calculus exams. The question of what is mean performance in some global sense seems (sincerely) interesting, albeit very hard to calculate and sensitive on your definition.

No, there are no negative consequences.
The key is this sentence right here:

Assume that students only earn an A by demonstrating that they have
achieved the course goals

That being the case, grading becomes evaluating the following:

If everyone in the class is able to do everything that they should be able to do... mission accomplished

Edit: I teach pilots how to land airplanes safely.  Students only earn an A by demonstrating that they have achieved course goals (they land the plane), and I never lower my standards for anyone (you don't get an A unless you land safely).  As for the third criteria, I don't make students explicitly aware of my goal, but let's face it, it's implicit in the training.
My argument comes from seven years of personal experience:

Are there any negative consequences of me making sure that all my students are able to land the plane safely?  No.
Are there any negative consequences of me not making sure that all of my students are able to land the plane safely?  Yes: flame and then newspaper headlines.

@DavidRicherby - I've edited my answer to provide some argument from my personal experience.

@SteveV. Thanks. That makes a much better answer. Having said that, it seems that landing planes really ought to be a pass/fail grading. What would it mean for a pilot to get a B?

@DavidRicherby - Flight checks are pass/fail, actually. Letter grades are used as a (somewhat crude) tool to indicate training progress toward flight check success, e.g. C = You will not pass your flight check with performance like this.  B = You might pass a flight check if you fly like this.  A = You should pass a flight check if you fly like you did today.  Letter grades are therefore not very valuable alone, and always come with secondary comments, which is where the real evaluation happens.

It's not clear to me how a teacher would know whether students missed an A because they "failed to understand some material" or whether they were "uninterested and unmotivated".
If most people are getting an acceptable mark then repeatedly changing the course to try and make it more interesting to a small portion of the class could lead to:

actually making the course less interesting to a larger group of people - not everyone will find the same things interesting.
making the teacher(s) less capable of teaching the course well since they're now less familiar with the outline.

Also, if a specific course gets a reputation for a high level of As being achieved, it could potentially attract people that want to take the course because they expect an easy A. I don't think that's really much of a problem though, and shouldn't put people off making an interesting and well explained course.
So: while there are probably no real disadvantages to aiming for all students to get an A, a poor implementation has potential disadvantages and if "all students should get an A" becomes some kind of department standard (or maybe even just a personal goal), it has potential to cause stress, annoyance, and low morale as it may be an unobtainable goal for staff to meet.

The potential disadvantage is that wanting every student to get the top grade results in the teacher spending all their time with the weaker students. The stronger students, who can get an A without extra help, don't get stretched and find the course dull and unmotivating. Thus, the next generation of people who might take the subject farther, even to research level, get switched off and do something else.
You're also assuming that every student is capable of getting the top grade, and they're not. However much time and effort you put in, you will not get the weakest students up to the level of the top grade. Your time and effort are valuable: it doesn't make sense to invest them beyond the point where they've stopped having any effect.
Also, what does it even mean for every student to get an A? If your entire grading system is essentially a single binary decision of "Can do X" versus "Cannot do X", wouldn't a pass/fail system make more sense?

Upvoted for the first two paragraphs, which in a 'standard' academic setting are absolutely correct. Regarding the third, any objective-based grading system is ultimately pass/fail, where A = "can do X", B = " can do some subset of X" and so on.

Surely you mean A = "can do X well", B = "can do X", and so on!

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text:
Is there a service that can store and mail official transcripts from any school?
I have studied at a number of schools. Most graduate programs require "transcripts from all previous schools". The last time I applied for a program, I spent a full day applying for transcript requests, as each school has different forms, Web systems, payment methods, etc. Is there a service that can hold all student transcripts and mail out official copies when one applies to a new program?

To my knowledge, there is no such service. Receiving universities want their copy to be certified correct by your university and sent in a sealed envelope such that you could not have easily tampered with it. No university is likely to trust anyone but the originating university to handle this process, so such a service has not been created. It would be very easy for some third party to allow you to create a transcript with whatever grades and courses you liked, and only through careful auditing could a university be able to trust that your records were properly transmitted. As such, it's easier, cheaper, and more reliable for the Registrar at each university to handle this on their own.

Often schools and jobs only need official transcripts at the very end of the process.

@StrongBad, OK, so what's your point. I don't understand what you're getting at. I can get a copy of my official transcript sent to myself and send scans/photocopies to people who need unofficial copies up front. Then when they need an official copy at the end of the process, I can get that sent. I think that proves that there's even less of a market for a transcript-sending service.

Sealed and dated, should be emphasized. If I were to send a transcript dated from 3 years ago to an application, I could have easily flunked 2 more degrees in that period or something.

@BillBarth I think you summed up my point. Just because you are applying to a bunch of schools/jobs doesn't mean you need official sealed transcripts for each application. You may only need official transcripts sent to the school you are going to attend.

@StrongBad, oh, sorry, I thought you were trying to convey something else entirely!


text:
Is "read the syllabus" a sufficient transfer of responsibility?
In my experience, most instructors spend a large portion of the first period in a term talking about the syllabus. This seems to serve to pass responsibility onto students:

Students see the deadlines. No student can claim to not know about an assignment or deadline.
Students see the course rules. No student can claim they did not know they were breaking a rule.

In the past, some students have tried various methods, such as skipping lessons, then claiming to not know about requirements, in an attempt to get the support of the administrators to back their case of "I didn't know".
I have lots of material to cover within the term, so do not like to waste lots of time with talking about the course and would rather get started. Is "here is the syllabus, read it" sufficient for passing responsibilities onto students? If students do not read it (many won't) is the responsibility nevertheless still passed?

From the students' perspective, this is similar to giving them a textbook and asking them to show up for the final exam. There are three reasons I see the need to start with discussing the syllabus.
First, talking about the syllabus is an opportunity to introduce yourself and the course, learn more about the students you will be teaching, and set the stage for the semester. It is a beginning of your semester-long relationship with the class after all. Skipping the overview is like taking a road trip without looking at the map first.
Second, it takes more than one repetition of same material, and preferably in different forms, for the material to be absorbed and comprehended. Thus, when the responsibility is passed to the students, their understanding of the syllabus will not be as good, no matter how diligently they read it. How important is it to you that they understand the syllabus?
Lastly, the students are denied opportunity to ask questions and discuss the syllabus and the course progression, if that is not covered in the class. Sure, they can email you, or ask during the office hours, but the entire class will not be on the same page.

+1. I think just telling your students to "read the important information in the syllabus" is a sufficient transfer of responsibility, but not of information - you put very well why it's still not a good idea.

At the very least, tell them why they need to read the syllabus -- that there is important information there about dates and deadlines and such. Also, a quick overview of what the class will cover -- it shouldn't take "a large portion" of the period -- may help students be confident that this class will cover what they thought it would, so they can drop it immediately if they were wrong, and can help set the term in context ("why is he teaching this? ... oh, it's in preparation for that").

It depends on what you mean by "sufficient".
Sufficient for passing the blame to students when they don't do what the syllabus says, and getting administrators to side with you in case of dispute?  Yes.
Sufficient for actually getting the students to do what the syllabus says?  No.
Sufficient for covering yourself?  Yes.
Sufficient for a class that runs smoothly and that students find satisfactory?  No.

This is very much culture-dependent. When I was an undergrad in the UK, it was certainly not the case that every (or even, as I recall, any) lecture course began with a whole lecture devoted to administrative matters. That didn't stop things running smoothly or cause students to be dissatisfied.

In Austria at least most professors would expect you to read the syllabus yourself and not having to babysit adults, so I agree with David. From my vantage point of 1 year studying in the US, the high student fees change the student - teacher dynamic which does manifest itself in things such as these or interactions during consultation hours. Imo if an adult isn't capable of figuring out that they should read the syllabus they should never get a degree anyhow (wait we have deadlines in a course? What a surprise!)

I very much agree with @DavidRicherby (though we did study the same course at the same time). However, I think there is an important distinction to be made between deadlines and paperwork (which I feel are legitimately endlessly repeated to feckless students), and the continual discussion of what is or is not in the exam which, at worse, can contribute replacing any genuine sense of broad engagement with a subject with an exercise in regurgitation.

Here's my take, since I my experience disagrees with Orion's and Nate's answers.
I stopped handing out paper syllabi some 10 years ago. I put all my course information in the web page and on the first day of classes I spend less than 5 minutes at the beginning saying so, and maybe going quickly over the grading scheme and the assignment regime.
Over the semester, the number of hits on the page is proportional to the number of students in the class, which shows me that most students look at the page a couple times a week.
The last time I had an "I didn't know" issue was 12 years ago, and that same day I got an email from another student in the class saying that the "misinformed" student was cheating about it.

But you do spend five minutes explaining the syllabus. I don't think that the question was specific to paper vs. website. It is always nice to have up-to-date syllabus to refer to on line. To use Nate's analogy, it is your project plan where you show what was done and what's coming up next.

I wish all my students were so attentive to the material I put on-line. And yes, I not only tell them about it but their first assignment requires them to swear that they found the documents (and the instructions tell them exactly where to look).

To add to Nate Eldridge's answer, in project management it is important that all concerned really know what is supposed to be done. If you write an instruction and have others read it, you will likely have as many misinterpretations as people in the group. To run a successful project it is therefore vital not only to share such information but actually to make sure everyone is on the same page. If you think about it, you may have an idea, you write it so that it is clear to you, someone else reads it and they say it is clear to them, but there are at least three transfers, your thought to writing, your writing to someone's reading and read text to forming an opinion about what is written, so plenty of opportunities to go wrong.
So to cover yourself, you can claim you have done what is necessary by providing a text, but in reality and to provide the best transfer of knowledge, a written paper is far from enough. So the answer depends on what is important, that students really understand or if one (just) wants to fulfill the rules.
I often think of courses as projects with myself as project leaders and students as project members. Despite much effort, it is of course still impossible to reach perfection.

Management roles are much more than just passing down responsibility.
Legally / ethically one way or another may be sufficient to pass down responsibility, but your goal is not that you can punish students who do not obey the rule, your concern should be that the students are following those rules.
In other words, you goal is to have them proceed according to your rules, because it produces better learning experience for them and easier workflow for you, less headache for everyone involved. Students who do not submit assignment by deadline, do not follow formats, they look for you beyond your hours or emailing you with unnecessary questions etc are generating you extra work, extra problem you don't need. It is primarily not a liability issue, it is "lets make things work!" issue.

I agree with Nate Eldredge's analysis. The question of whether responsibility has been successfully transferred seems to have "yes" for an answer. However, I still want to point out some tips for making sure students are aware of their responsibilities and the course structure, which is presumably a desired outcome.
Spending 10-20 minutes in the first lecture talking about the syllabus (which nowadays is normally distributed electronically) can be good to ease the students into the class, making the transition from the break a little smoother. I will often project the syllabus in front of the class so everyone can follow along. I also encourage online discussions (using Piazza) in my class, and many of these discussions turn out to be procedural. Very often a student will be confused about a policy and not know where to look for clarification, and another student will respond online with the correct information before I even know there was a question. You can also make announcements this way and remind students of exams and things. This will certainly "transfer responsibility," since students who miss class will still have access to online posted announcements. Finally, I devote a few minutes every once in a while while lecturing to reminding students of policies and upcoming events. The human brain has a physical limit on how much new information it can process at once, so breaking up lecture to give some procedural explanations can give a needed break from the material, and perhaps even increase retention. You mention not having enough time to cover all of the material you want to, but making the lectures too information-dense may end up having the opposite from the intended effect, and students may end up retaining less. For courses like this, with a lot of material, I think it's fine to keep the lecture pace moderate and assign the students to read some of the material on their own. I'm not suggesting a dramatic change of pace, just a moderate slowdown, but anyway that's not really on topic.

While having a well-written syllabus is a very good idea, it does not absolve you from responsibility.

Students may have missed the first few classes (many universities allow students to register for courses a few weeks after the first day of classes) and be unaware of the syllabus, or its importance.
Students may forget that something was on the syllabus by the time it becomes relevant.
The author of the syllabus cannot predict the future. There may be events which force a change of the rules (eg. you get sick and have to reschedule an exam, inclement weather causes school to be canceled) and compromise the status of the syllabus as "always correct".
The syllabus may be unclear.

You should definitely have a syllabus, and tell students that reading it is mandatory and they risk failing if they don't. But it would illogical to assume that by doing so, your job is done. The syllabus is a set of guidelines, not a legally binding contract drafted with the assistance of a qualified attorney - the reason is precisely this difference in applicability and scope.

I don't take up class meeting time with a discussion of the syllabus (though on day 1, I do highlight aspects of the course that might be different from what they expect). Instead, I give an online quiz about important policies from the syllabus. The quiz serves dual purposes:

demonstrates that they can use the online quiz system (if not, it's
early enough for them to solve the tech problem or drop the class)
demonstrates that they have understood key parts of the syllabus

My goal is not to transfer responsibility. As Nate said, I want them to follow the syllabus so that the class runs smoothly. Nothing a teacher does will ensure that every person always follows the directions, of course, but the more students understand what's expected of them, the easier it is to teach them.


text:
How to cite a dataset, when my calculations relied on the data?
Occasionally I need to present some figures that I calculated with custom scripts against a dataset, such as a dictionary, text corpus, or some form of lexical database. The calculations are my own, but the dataset was created by other researchers. When presenting my figures, how can I write an APA-style in-text citation in a manner which makes it clear that I relied on the dataset, but that I did not take the figures from somewhere explicitly stated in the dataset? I do not wish readers to blame that source I cited if my figures are wrong.
Here is a simple example:

'E' is the most frequently occurring vowel in the Spanish language and appears most often after the letter 's' (Brown, E. K., 2014).

If you are computing something from a dataset, then you need to explain what you have computed and how.  This should resolve the question of citation fairly naturally.
For example, with the example you have given, you might say something like:

Using the Spanish-language corpus in (Brown, E. K., 2014), n-gram frequency
  computation indicates that
  'E' is the most frequently occurring vowel in the Spanish language and
  appears most often after the letter 's'.

Because the computation is yours, you need to explain and attribute it correctly, as you may have made a mistake in your interpretation, or the dataset itself may be biased.  Thus, it is best to use a few more words and given the reader a clear explanation of the relationships.

+1.  You need to use one phrase just to identify the dataset, and cite that identification, then use a separate phrase to state your result.


text:
Computer science degree vs. post-bachelor computer science certificate
My background:  I'm currently 1 year out of my undergrad in psychology and I currently have a job working on a educational grant project at a university.  I've lost some interest in the field of psychology as a whole and I'm considering going back to school for computer science.  When I expressed this interest to an adviser at my old school she mentioned that I might be interested in a post bachelor comp sci certificate.  The certificate is 30 credits and can probably be done in about half the time that another bachelors could be completed in.  I asked her if any of the graduates of the certificate program had had any trouble getting into graduate school with said degree and she said no.  However, I believe there is probably more to this than she let on considering that it is her job to promote this program.
Question:  I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with these type of certificates?  I know that I will have a more complete computer science education with an undergrad but I'm wondering if it is completely necessary.  All said and done I would like to get a masters in computer science because it seems like the smart career move.  Will I be limiting my job potential by only having a certificate and a bachelors in an unrelated field?  Is graduate school really possible with just a certificate?  My dream job would be working for a company in research and development for human to computer interfaces.  I also have a fleeting passion for gaming and music production, but I consider these to be more hobbies than serious career interests.

I am a retired software engineer from a well known company in U.S. Your dream job is to work for a company in R&D for HCI. My advice might be useful for you.
In the old days, the HR department of those companies received hundreds of paper resumes everyday (I carried bags of job application letters for an HR staff before. Don't ask me why I did that, just guess.) Now, they receive hundreds if not thousands of e-mails per day.
The way they filter the job applications is by looking for key words. When they have an HCI job vacancy, they look for computer programming experience, psychology and others. So, your major is important for your future job hunting.
Now, your question, do you need a degree or a certificate is good enough? In my opinion, a degree is always preferable unless you cannot afford to it.
Many companies do not recognize those certificates. They would wonder why you didn't get a degree. Is it because you were not good enough? or some other reasons. You would be filtered out. Remember, they receive hundreds of e-mails everyday. By the time they read all of them, it's 5pm. When they see you have a CS degree, a psychology degree and some working experience, they'll call you for an interview.

There are two issues: whether it will be a formal barrier (i.e., you'll be screened out before anyone ever looks at your application carefully) and whether it will impress people.
For graduate school applications, there's no way you'll be officially screened out for this reason.  There are several programs aimed at encouraging post-baccalaureate certificates to help women enter computer science.  They attract excellent students, so grad schools are happy to see these applications; furthermore, if any grad school ever turned down applicants with such a background just because they had no "real" degree in CS, they'd be in big trouble on gender equity grounds.  So you have nothing to worry about there: grad schools are aware of these certificates and willing to consider applicants with them.
Of course, there are still issues of people's personal reactions, for example how rigorous or extensive they think the program is.  It presumably depends on the program, and also perhaps on which courses you take within the program.  If take you challenging courses and do well in them, ideally do some sort of project with a faculty supervisor, and get strong letters of recommendation, then you should be in good shape for grad school applications.  As a sanity check, you should ask about the placement record of previous students in the program: without some reason to think otherwise, you can expect you would end up somewhere in that range.  If they all do well, that's a very good sign; if some but not all do, then you need to make sure you end up in that top group.
As for industry, CS hiring is much less credential-driven than some branches of engineering (where there are more regulatory or liability issues).  If you can demonstrate talent and skill, then nobody will really care what your degree is in (except sometimes for research jobs that require a Ph.D.).  There are some tricky issues: for example, some of the top tech companies get enormous numbers of applications and have to filter them rather brutally.  However, even there the filtering is more often by prestige (did you get impressive grades at a top university) rather than the field the degree is in.

+1 for "If take you challenging courses and do well in them, ideally do some sort of project with a faculty supervisor, and get strong letters of recommendation, then you should be in good shape for grad school applications." but also +1 for "ask about the placement record"

It is good to hear that grad school is definitely possible with this type of degree.  I think in the end this is the route I'm going to head towards.  My sense is is that companies would be more concerned about a masters degree in CS than my undergrad degrees.

It depends largely on how "strict" the employer in question is regarding qualifications. Some companies—particularly larger corporations—don't have the ability to recognize that the certificate might be equivalent to a bachelor's degree. Then, you really need to be able to demonstrate that you have the requisite credentials, and it's hard to "mix and match."
However, smaller employers are generally able to make those distinctions. However, the issue with these faster-paced programs is that you might not have the same breadth of experience as someone who has the bachelor's degree; the four-year degree holder may have internships and other work experience that will make them a more suitable candidate.
In general, though, you are right to be skeptical of what sounds like a "sales pitch," and do your own homework to make sure that it's recognized. One way to do this would be to contact some companies in the area and see if they've had any experience hiring graduates of this program. (You could also ask the sponsor of this program to identify some contacts for you—with the obvious caveat that you'll be getting the "success stories.")


text:
Editorial perception/bias regarding preprints in bioinformatics
The quality of a journal manuscript submission being equal, does posting a preprint on arXiv or bioRxiv hurt your chances of publication in a journal? I'm asking about bioinformatics, for journals such as

Genome Biology
Genome Research (CSHL)
BMC Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics (OUP)
PLOS Computational Biology … etc.

So what's the perception regarding having preprints of a paper for the journals in the above list? Do you think it could hurt ones chances slightly for acceptance?
I checked the policy of these journals, and preprints are not considered prior/duplicate publications, and are allowed. On the other hand Cell says they will consider it, but want you to talk to the editor first about your motivations etc. Doesn't sound very open to preprints. And ISMB partners with Cell Systems as far as I know.

Obviously you need to take this up with each journal separately as it seems that they have different policies. Most journals publish (or should) their policies so you may be able to find it without asking specifically, but ask before you jump.

I've checked the published policies of each of these journals (as mentioned in the question). My question is regarding the perception in the field, which may be different the cold policy statement. Papers may be considered for publication but still be considered less valuable. I'm not sure if that's the case.

In my experience, preprints are the norm in bioinformatics. I do not know how journals perceive them, but these days I rarely read a new bioinformatics paper I have not already seen as a preprint. If a reputable journal has a bias against preprints, it cannot be very significant, because most papers I find interesting have preprints.

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What can I do with a book summary?
I finished reading a textbook of about 250 pages. For my personal reference, I created a summary in note form of about 30 pages. Formulations are close to the original text with some variation on my part, and there are literal quotes. I don't consider it a replacement of the book (obviously?).
What can I do with this summary? Is it fair to give it to friends who are interested in the topic? What about students? Can I even publish it online?
I am aware that laws may play into this. The book has been published in the U.S., I live in Germany.

The practical answer is likely to be "Whatever you want."

The only thing that springs to mind, as far as the US goes, is "Fair Use". You should be fine to do whatever you want with it.

Fair use probably does not cover such a summary, although I agree with JeffE that in practice nobody is going to sue you.

There are two questions, namely what you can do legally and what the community would consider acceptable.
Legally, distributing such a summary is probably a copyright violation if you borrow too much from the original; in the U.S., it would be considered a derivative work (the legal definition includes "abridgment" and "condensation" as forms of derivative work).  In that case, it would be illegal to distribute it without permission from the copyright holder.  On the other hand, you are not likely to get in trouble unless you offend the author or publisher.  The easiest way to offend the publisher would be if they view your summary as competition that might decrease sales of the book, but they might take a strict approach to copyright enforcement in any case (it depends on the publisher, and I would guess that a nonprofit publisher might be more understanding than a big commercial publisher).  In practice, the worst case scenario is probably being forced to take down any copies you had posted online.  You could be sued, but that seems unlikely to me.
The research community is likely to take a less strict approach than the law.  If you distribute the summary privately (e.g., just to friends or students), then nobody is likely to find out or care.  If you post it online, then it's more likely to attract attention, but it won't necessarily be negative attention.  That depends on how you've written it.
You should keep several things in mind to avoid causing offense:

You should be absolutely clear about what you have done: what's a direct quote, what's a mildly reworded version of the author's words, what's a summary in your own words.  You need to be careful about distinguishing your own interpretaton from the author's, and you can run into trouble in two directions, either by seeming to take credit for observations that are explained in the book, or by seeming to attribute your own ideas or organization to the author.  This is a difficult balancing act, which is easy to mess up.  Even if you are very careful, the author may still feel that you are distorting the emphasis on different topics, for example.
You should be very careful about correctness.  I would be unhappy if someone circulated a summary of a book of mine that had mistakes in it.

I would not recommend asking the author for permission, since that would put the author in an awkward position (of having to either endorse or object to your summary).  If the author discovers your summary and complains, then I feel professional courtesy requires you to make changes or take it down.
Personally, I would probably not post it online, but opinions could differ.

You can:

Criticise it: Do you disagree with the authors about some topics/methods? Do you have some ideas on how to enhance the book? Discuss them with your peers.
Rephrase it: You can rewrite the summary with your own words and publish it as Notes on XXX where XXX is the book topic.
Publish a Book Review out of it.
KEEP it to refresh your knowledge about the topic. In case you forgot or its not directly related to your research.
Depends on the topic, you might write a blog about it; if you have one.

Maybe that was not clear enough from my question: I'd like to know what I am allowed to do.


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Citing my work that appeared in a many-author paper
I recently co-authored a paper with about 40 other authors. This was a position paper that appeared as the output from a workshop, and my name appears somewhere in the middle of the list.
My contribution to the paper was a literature review section, which told the history of our field in a novel way, emphasising common themes that hadn't been commented on before and introducing new terminology to describe them.
I would like to re-capitulate this work in a new paper, following quite closely the story I wrote for the joint paper, although re-writing the text and condensing it quite a bit. This would be as an introductory section aimed at a different audience than the previous paper, which is why I want to say it again rather than just citing it.
The question is about how best to cite the previous paper. On the one hand I could just say something like "we closely follow the treatment given by XXX et al (2017)" without mentioning that it's my own contribution. However, I'm worried it might look a bit odd that we follow the literature review quite so closely if it's not clear that it's my own work I'm citing.
So I'm wondering if it's appropriate and/or permissible to flag up that I wrote that part of the XXX et al. paper, e.g. "we closely follow the treatment that one of us (YYY) gave in XXX et al (2017)." There is nothing in the XXX et al. paper that identifies this section as my work, so the reader would have to trust me on that.
In case it's relevant, the previous paper is mostly history and philosophy of science, whereas the new one is aimed at a technical audience in evolutionary theory and cognitive science.
I note that this is related to Citing a result due to a single author that appears in a paper with multiple authors, but the context and my reason for wanting to single out one of the authors are quite different.

My opinion, in biomedical field: I think your last suggestion is fine. Something along the line of:

"Previously, I (or, ugh, "The author of this paper") contributed a
  review of the history of making omelette using rice cookers in a joint
  paper (cite the old paper). In this paper, I/The author of this paper
  will further document the application of rice cookers with fuzzy logic
  and pressurization mechanism in omelette making."

I think it's important to take credit and show the work development stream. But more so, you should make sure the audience will not credit this new work to the first author of the said article. That'd be unfair to those authors.


text:
In biology, can one publish results that were already published in a conference proceedings?
In my old field (a subdiscipline of computer science) it's not unusual to publish a preliminary version of a paper in a conference proceedings, and then later submit an updated version to a journal, presenting essentially the same result.
My question is, is it possible / accepted to do the same thing in biology? (And theoretical evolutionary biology in particular.)
I ask because some colleagues and I recently developed an evolutionary model that shows some surprising results which are quite relevant to current work in evolutioanry biology. We submitted it to a modelling conference and published it in the proceedings as an 8 page paper. However the feedback I've got from biologists suggests that this result has quite a big potential audience and deserves to be publised in a journal of reasonable impact, where biologists will read it.
To be clear, the journal version would not just be the same text as the conference version - it would be longer, including substantial new analysis as well as more details and context that couldn't be included in the conference version. The question is just whether it's possible (in biology) to present the key result from the model as the main result of the journal paper, or whether the new paper would have to take the form "we present a new analysis of the model previously published in [conference proceedings]". (The latter is possible of course, but I worry that it would limit the impact of the paper, since the new analysis is a much more incremental advance.)

Surely this must happen all the time - especially as new topics in new fields grow from theories to be established and accepted processes / facts etc

Yes I believe this is possible, but depends on the policies of the specific journal and the nature of the conference publication.
Actually I know of cases where journal editors contact authors of work published in conference proceedings, and suggest submission of an extended version in their journal. This would typically happen in a relevant sub-field where both journal and conference publications are possible, such as bioinformatics.


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Publication database backend for academic web sites
My institution currently tracks its members' publications by sending them an email every six months and then manually compiling publication lists from the replies. I am looking into updating the organisation's web site, and I would like to implement a system where users can maintain their own publication list on their academic web page. This data should go into a central database, so that we can (for example) easily pull up the last six months' worth of new publications for reporting purposes.
My question is whether there is a standard solution to this problem: is there any free or commercially available software that will allow us to set up a user-editable publication list system with a database backend?
If it's relevant, we're looking at using Wordpress as the backend for the whole site, with one of the many "user profile" plugins being used to create the individual personal pages. (This is all being done on a shoe string budget.)

What about something like http://blog.mendeley.com/mendeley-use-case/display-your-publications-on-your-own-website-using-exhibit/

Or maybe http://bibbase.org/

This is exactly what http://www.diva-portal.org/ is for: DiVA portal is a finding tool and an institutional repository for research publications and student theses written at 37 universities and research institutions.

This sounds like a job for an institutional repository (though you don't have to publicise its existence as such...)
The two most commonly used open-source packages for repositories are ePrints and D-Space, though there's a few others. Anecdotally, D-Space is somewhat more complex to set up than ePrints, though I've only got experience of the latter.
Both have comparable levels of functionality, including metadata feeds/export, and it should be easy enough to export material into a Wordpress site - I've certainly seen it done, for example in this rough proof-of-concept. I'll see if I can find a more polished example.

Thanks, this is very useful information! (For clarity, the specific way I want to embed it into WordPress is for each user to have a profile page, handled via a Wordpress plugin, with their own publications listed on their profile page. This way they will be able to post to our institutional blog using the same user profile.)

A commercial service designed to solve this problem is Epistemio Outcomes. Users can maintain their publication list, in most cases, by just confirming results of an automatic search. The publications of scientists within an institution are aggregated into the institutional list of publications, with automatic deduplication. Aggregation is automated, therefore no more emailing and manual compilation of lists from the replies will be needed. Scientists may embed their own list of publications on their personal pages, while the institution may also embed the aggregated list on its page. The lists of publications can be exported at any time, in a variety of formats, for reporting purposes.
Disclaimer: I am affiliated with Epistemio.

If you are not opposed to using Elsevier / Mendeley, there is a very nice Mendeley Plugin for WordPress.
You can maintain your publication list in Mendeley and can easily build publication lists by using WordPress shortcodes, such as
[mendeley type="groups" id="XXXXX" filter="author=XXXX" sortby="year" sortorder="desc" groupby="year"]

Through the filter attribute, you can build different lists from the same Mendeley group, e.g. based on the author, year, tags, to name a few.
An example for a publication list built with the plugin can be found here (archive.org link).

Nobody in academia is really a fan of Elsevier, but they have a product called Pure that provides a fairly comprehensive solution for tracking research activities, including publications but also conference attendance, grants, collaborations, etc. I've used it as a faculty member at my current institution (it is used by all Danish universities) and my experience has been positive from that perspective.

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text:
Are faculty job applications evaluated on a computer or on a paper?
How are faculty job positions in a US university evaluated? Do the committee members get to view (and discuss) electronic copies of a candidate's application before the hiring meeting (and possibly filter out some applications before the formal meeting), or is everything done in the meeting? I am asking because I think one needs to prepare the application differently in the two circumstances. If electronic copy of the application is emailed to the faculty members, then one can insert hyperlinks in the research statement E.g.:

"blah blah blah [1]"

where clicking on "[1]" would take you to a website.
But if a printout is given to the committee members, one needs to make sure all the info you want to convey is in the printout e.g. web addresses will need to be spelled out instead of being embedded.

Probably depends on the university and the committee members. If you are going to cite a URI, I would spell it out in full -- make it a real footnote. You can also make it a live link in case someone is viewing it online, but don't assume they're going to do so.

We've had a variety of practices. Some of it depends on the computer literacy of the admin assistant doing the application file processing. We've had cases of electronic material (PDFs) being printed out and then rescanned back in as the staff person did not know how to collate multiple PDFs into a single document.
[HEAD PALM] Sigh...
To be entirely fair, some of our faculty are also very visual-tactile and will prefer print out the dossier and read it there, rather than online.
In other words, you can't assume anything about how the files will be handled. You should be explicit in the URLs. If you have media files on disk or thumb drive (photographs, video, source code, simulations, etc.), then you should also post a visible link to an archive location.

I was (twice) on a hiring committee for a tenure-track math professor. Applicants uploaded their applications via a central repository (MathJobs) and we evaluated them asynchronously. I read a lot of applications at 11:00 pm on my laptop; one of my colleagues printed everything out. We only met to discuss candidates we thought highly of.
You should write a self-contained research statement that does not require hyperlinks. It is probably harmless to include them; for example, your bibliography might be hyperlinked, or your research statement might say, e.g. "A visual demonstration of this phenomenon can be found on my web site at [URL]", where [URL] gives the full URL and is a hyperlink. This probably won't help you, but it might, and I can't imagine it hurting you.
One thing you should also do is to update your personal web page. Preprints of all of your publications, teaching materials (e.g. syllabi for past classes), slides for talks you've given, etc., etc. -- anything you hope a hiring committee might look at should be there. Ensure that googling your name, together with either the name of your university or of your subject area, will lead to the searcher finding these materials within three seconds.
Fields other than math might vary. Good luck!

I'd add to this that you should setup profiles for yourself on Google Scholar, Web of Science, etc. This will make it easier for evaluators to look at the impact of your research by seeing who has cited your work.   You should also provide links to these profiles from your personal web page.


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Can a reference (not self) be over-cited?
I am proof-reading a student's PhD thesis and I find that the student repeatedly cites one reference, up to 40 times in one single chapter alone.
I suspect that this reference is an influential work and provides a lot of material but I feel this is too much. Apart form the obvious advise (don't cite as much), what effective strategies can one use to reduce the number of citations e.g. comment at the start of the chapter that "this chapter builds on the foundational work \cite{ref} done by Prof X..."

Is this perhaps an indicator that the student should've read a little more widely?

Is this paper simply a good review, and the student very afraid of plagiarism?

Can a reference be over-cited?

Assuming you are using in-text citation, it is necessary to cite the reference in-text every time you use information from it.  So, there is no upper limit on the number of times a reference should be cited.  Increase the number of citations until there is no ambiguity, and then stop.  40 times is not that many.
In most styles each reference is only listed once in the reference list.

Saying "you have two many citations" sounds like a petty complaint to me.  I suggest not saying that.


text:
How to reference different sources in a list?
I am writing my master thesis and I am not sure how to reference/cite different sources in a list.
I have a small list like:

The benefits of an "incredibly interesting topic" are:

benefit 1 (ref 1)
benefit 2 (ref 2)
benefit 3 (ref 2)
benefit 4 (ref 1)
benefit 5 (ref 3)

I think that putting the reference after each point is a bit intrusive, but I don't know how else can I do it.
Is there any convention of how to reference in this scenario?

I think the method you've proposed, while cumbersome and intrusive, is also the correct way to do things, as you will be assigning a specific item to a specific source. That is the point of citing original source material in the first place. So while it may be somewhat unsightly (particularly if using a Harvard-like style in which the authors are listed as part of the reference), what you're doing has the advantage of being unambiguous and completely legitimate.

thanks. I supposed that was the case, but I needed some confirmation since my supervisor is unavailable recently :S

one way to make it less "ugly" is to inline the list rather than separating out as bullets

@Suresh: That actually depends on how many references there are, and how they're cited. It also depends on the length of the individual items. Some of the ugliest paragraphs I've seen are list-based descriptions with tons of Harvard-style references. It's nigh unreadable.

fair enough. And yes, unless you use short numeric references it could be a nightmare.