text:
Are there ethical guidelines prohibiting penalties against potential research subjects who have not yet provided consent?
Are there any ethical guidelines that would prohibit the use of penalties against individuals who sign up for a research study but have not yet provided consent and are therefore not yet officially subjects?
Please provide references.
Background
In the psychology department, we have an online recruitment system, whereby every time a student signs up for a research study for extra (course) credit they occupy a 'seat' out of a limited number of seats. This limitation exists due to the fact that research credits are distributed fairly among researchers to ensure that everyone is able to recruit in proportion to their needs.
Online studies pose a particular challenge for the recruiter because the participant is afforded the opportunity to complete the study by the end of the semester and there is no guarantee that they will follow through. The problem is that many students do not have the courtesy to cancel before the deadline if they decide they no longer wish to participate, and in doing so they are preventing other students from participating. Not only is this behavior not fair to other students, but it also means a loss of potential subjects for the recruiter. Although this scenario applies to online studies, there are certainly other scenarios where careless behavior results in major inconveniences to the recruiter, for example people not showing up for appointments (i.e., in-person studies, experiments).
If those signed up for a study have not yet provided consent (i.e. are not yet officially subjects), what are they protected against? Specifically,
1) Is it admissible to issue penalties, such as, for instance, a loss of research credits?
2) Is it admissible to communicate a general warning to all individuals using the system that a failure to cancel their seat or to show up for appointments could involve unspecified penalties? (In this case, there would be no penalties but the warning would serve as a deterrent.)

Obviously you should avoid threatening with penalties when you "don't intend / can't" carry them on.

@Lohoris It's a Kiyosaki penalty: we will talk disparagingly about you behind your back.

It is possible that both prospective subjects' withdrawal would create problems for you could be true, and that it would be unethical to punish prospective subjects' withdrawal beyond not giving any reward. You mention that not showing creates problems for you, and it very well may, but that does not mean that people cannot be allowed to withdraw without penalty.

N.B. If I were doing recruitment, I would calculate for a now-show percentage factored in. Ergo, if records in your department say that 20% of people will be no-shows (I would expect that others in your department might have figures for this), I would recruit for 125% of your need + maybe a safety margin.

@JonathanHayward Having a safety margin is doable but complicated because as a researcher you are assigned a certain number of research credits. If you recruit past 100% (of what you have available), you are essentially taking credits from other researchers, which means a loss of participants for them.

My inquiry has unfortunately been misinterpreted and I was too late to correct it, especially the first edit to the title which implied that penalties would be used against those who withdraw from the study (and which implies a coercion to participate). That was clearly not my intent. The hypothetical penalties were intended primarily for those who do NOT officially withdraw from the study and are thereby preventing others from signing up. The title has now been edited to prevent any further misinterpretation.

From the US Code of Federal Regulations (45 CFR 46), in the section on seeking consent:

An investigator shall seek such consent only under circumstances that provide the prospective subject or the representative sufficient opportunity to consider whether or not to participate and that minimize the possibility of coercion or undue influence.

Note the use of the phrase "prospective subject" - this clause refers to the investigator's conduct towards potential subjects who have not yet given consent. Presumably a penalty or threat of a penalty would constitute "coercion or undue influence."
Specifically regarding research participation for credit, the APA Code of Conduct Section 8.04 (a different section of which was mentioned by Stephan Kolassa in his answer) says

(a) When psychologists conduct research with clients/patients, students or subordinates as participants, psychologists take steps to protect the prospective participants from adverse consequences of declining or withdrawing from participation.
(b) When research participation is a course requirement or an opportunity for extra credit, the prospective participant is given the choice of equitable alternative activities.

+1 for section 8.04 of the APA guidelines, which is directly relevant to the OP's field and which I completely missed. I'll be deleting my answer, which is misleading. Thanks!

The BPS Code of Human Research Ethics 10.1.3 is a little more flexible and allows for an equitable alternative to be a different class (or possibly major).

Those are good citations, but it's not clear to me whether they actually apply (in theory or in practice) to "penalties" that are directly related to the compensation participating in the research.  A strict reading of those guidelines would suggest that you would have to pay/credit everyone just for asking them to participate, regardless of whether they actually said yes, since not compensating them would be an "adverse consequence" relative to the compensation they would have received had they participated.  As my answer shows, universities do in fact "penalize" students in this way.

I'd go so far as to say that the "alternative activities" should match, as closely as possible, the educational objectives that participation in a study would have.  If there are no educational objectives associated with participation, I strongly feel that participation has no place as a course requirement.  Courses are to educate students.

@ScottSeidman: that's not how it works, though, is it? The reason students are... "encouraged"... to participate as subjects is not because there's a direct benefit to them in being a subject. It's because there's a reciprocal benefit among the students, all of whom need subjects, if they all serve as such. You can't "closely match" the educational benefit, since benefit is to have subjects of their own in return. It's a trade in kind, and exchange for things someone "needs" is coercive (side project: propose this maxim to a drunk Libertarian).

There's no requirement for benefit in the Belmont report, just a requirement that the subject understand the risk/benefit balance before making an informed decision about participating.  The needs of the investigator have nothing to do with this.  Are we really even talking about student led research?  I wasn't aware of that.

I can only assume that if it's for credit, students should participate to learn about the research process.

@SteveJessop My department has never had problems recruiting subjects. We made being a subject mandatory be causes it teaches the students things that are hard to learn from lectures.

Your question title is about consent, but the situation you describe seems somewhat more specific: you're saying that the person signed up for an experiment, and then, not only did they not consent, they didn't show up for the session at all.
I don't believe it would be unethical to deny students participation credit for not showing up to the experiment session they signed up for.  If they show up but then decide, based on the information they receive there, that they don't want to do it, that would be a different story and it would be hard to deny them credit.
I found several examples of departments doing basically just what you describe.  Here is a PDF describing the research participation requirements for the Pysch 1 class at UC Santa Barbara.  This includes a reference to the sort of "unspecified penalties" you mention:

As a participant, if you chronically fail to show up for experiments, the repercussions may include, but are not be limited to, removal from the research participation pool.

A similar page at Hunter College says:

The first time you fail to notify the researcher of your expected absence and do not show up, your name will be submitted to the administrators of the pool. The second time you fail to fulfill your responsibility to notify the researcher, you will lose the option of participating in research for the remainder of the semester, and will be required to read the articles and take the quizzes. If you do not cancel or show up for the studies, you will be penalized by having to participate in an additional hour of research (or do an additional article and quiz) for each additional appointment missed.

Yet another page at George Washington University says:

If you don’t show up on time for a study, and you have not cleared this in advance with the subject pool administrator, you will lose one point of credit. In other words, if you don't show up on time for one study, you will have to earn one additional point of credit to make up for what you lost.

Googling for psych "research requirement" "receive credit" "show up" and variations thereof will lead you to pages at more schools.
Most of these policies appear to allow some leeway in that they suggest students won't be penalized for a single no-show, but only after multiple no-shows.  No doubt you should discuss this with your school's IRB.  However, the above examples make it pretty clear that there are reputable institutions that do penalize students who don't show up for experiments they said they would do.

I am surprised to see no comments or upvotes on this answer. Clearly, the fact that many universities do use penalties suggests that the issue is not so clear-cut. Are they all breaking ethical guidelines? How do they justify this practice? (These are questions worth exploring)

@AlexR guidelines are just that, guidelines. Note that the APA and the BPS have different guidelines and I bet the guidelines of the AMA are also different. They presumably justify the behaviour because the penalty is related to not showing up and not to withholding consent.

Our students are required to be a participant for 10 hours of psychology studies or to complete an alternative assignment. We use an online system to administer the subject recruitment and allocation. The recruitment protocol for studies simply say that the online system will be used. Since the IRB is very familiar with the system, no more details are needed. This is the same as if we the Mechanical Turk is used, but if a less well known system is used, the IRB will want lots of details.
The way the online system works is when a subject gives consent, meets all the inclusion criteria, does not meet any of the exclusion criteria, completes the study, and is debriefed, the experimenter ticks a box on the online system. This gives the student credit. If the box is not ticked, the student does not get credit. The students are only allowed to register for the 10 required hours. If for some reason a student does not get credit for some of the hours they registered for (e.g., because they did not show up, refused to consent, or did not meet the requirements), then they can write a 1000 word pass/fail paper related to the experiment. This way they are not directly penalised for not showing up. The alternative assignment and its marking were negotiated with the IRB. The IRB also requires we notify them every time a submitted alternative assignment is given a failing grade.

Actually, this is in the APA code of ethics cited by StephanKolassa - "When research participation is a course requirement or an opportunity for extra credit, the prospective participant is given the choice of equitable alternative activities." Nice example of how it can be done.

I would wonder what happens when you get a much shorter answer back indicating the student had reason to believe the research was invasive junk.

@Joshua they would fail, we would show it to the IRB and they would most likely agree that we are not being unreasonable.

This arrangement applies when participation is a requirement (and most likely for introductory psych courses only), but what about research participation that is optional (e.g. for extra course credit)? -- the latter is much more prevalent.

I never liked forced inclusion in research studies for credit.  If participation in research has an educational objective, then alternate work designed to MEET THE SAME EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVE needs to be offered (like working on the investigative side of a similar study).  If participation for credit has nothing to do with education, than my uneducated opinion is that the subject pool is being coerced.  The concept of voluntariness is a big part of the Respect for Persons principle expressed in the Belmont Report.

@ScottSeidman In principle you are entirely right. In practice, requiring students to participate in studies solves a huge issue for psych. research, inconveniences the students only a little, and arguably even provides some (maybe a bit fuzzy) educational value to the participants. Hence, most psych. departments and students are pragmatic about this.

@AlexR it works the same regardless of if it is extra credit or required. They can either be a participant or write an essay.

@ScottSeidman and that is what we try and do with the essays. We have our desired learning outcomes and we think they can be achieved by either being a participant or writing an essay.

@xLeitix recruitment of young healthy subjects is not generally an issue for departments. The requirement really is about learning.

@StrongBad I'll take your word for this, but this is definitely not what I have heard from our psych. department.


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What do I do if I really only figured out what I want to research just after applying
I recently finished a round of PhD applications.
I always knew I wanted to do research, but when I applied I didn't know what sub-field of Computer Science I wanted to do my research in.  I was already out of school a year when I decided that I may never figure it out just by sitting around, so I just bit the bullet and applied to a PhD program with what I knew.
Naturally, a month or two after I applied, I realized that what I really wanted to go into was robotics, which I have very little experience in at the moment and which I didn't mention in my personal statement.
I'm pretty good at teaching myself things.  Give me another few months and I'll probably be able to learn quite a bit about the subject, and I'd bet anything I could put together some decent projects that could make me impressive enough to get into a good robotics research track, but I've already applied to a bunch of schools and it's at the point where if I'm getting in, I'm not getting in for anything robotics related.
So, here are the options I see in front of me:

Turn down the offers I get, try again next year when I can be more focused and well-researched on which programs/professors I want.  This feels like giving up, and I'm always nervous about putting things off, especially for a year.
One of the schools I got into happens to have a good program for robotics, but I doubt my application was on any of those professor's radar.  I could contact professors from that school and ask if they'd want to work with me, but I don't know what I'd say with so little robotics knowledge.  Another school I applied to but haven't heard back from has an even better program for it, so if I am emailing professors, there's still time to email professors from that school as well.
Go to a school I got into, and just hope I'll be able to switch programs.

I know I ultimately have to decide for myself what to do, but any advice is greatly appreciated.

You've probably already made your decision, but in case anyone else stumbles upon this:
I always knew I wanted to go into academia. I finally found something I loved (physical geography, specifically climatology), and jumped in. Some time in my 2nd year (& as an MS student, I only should've had 2 years), I realized that I'd been focusing on academia, but not what I actually enjoy. I got through; I learned a lot about my subject, critical thinking, networking, writing and myself. I'm so glad I went, but I could've done a better job if I was more aware of the options within my discipline (I'd only had 2 courses when I applied), and especially if I'd known the culture of my subject.
What I'm trying to say is, if you know you can teach yourself pretty well and make some impressive projects, you're not "just sitting around." You are exploring your field. In the meantime, you should research faculty, read some papers, and figure out what you want to dedicate your life to for 4+  years. Because a PhD program isn't just about building robots: You're learning the culture, writing papers, creating posters, networking, writing grants, applying for fellowships, teaching in the classroom and mentoring/teaching in your lab...If you love your subject and your projects, it will be worthwhile, though sometimes you will not think so. If you discover, once you really start digging in, that you don't actually want to sleep, eat, and breathe robotics, all the rest of being a PhD student can be miserable.
That's just grad school in general. Specifically about your question:
There are more things to consider than which school and which program. Grad programs usually accept only 5-20 students per year. In my experience, more than 10 is a big cohort. You may be one of the top applicants this year, but next year you may be outshone. So there is definitely some merit to accepting whatever you get. You never know - you may find something else in CS that you get really excited about. If you're certain you're interested in robotics, see if there is someone in engineering or physics or wherever the robotics people are, who will be your outside faculty member. They may even take on more of your project than your official PI/chair, they could even be a co-PI.
Grad school isn't like undergrad (pretty much in every way except that you're on a campus) - if you want to change departments you have to reapply. If you have to change depts, go to the other dept's journal clubs, get into a lab & be their best student, make yourself invaluable. In your new letter, emphasize your interdisciplinary background and how that will benefit your studies and the department in general. Impress the PI of the lab you've been working in & they'll write a great letter of rec, appeal to the selection committee on your behalf, go to bat for you against admin. It's possible to change, but there are significant obstacles.
Good luck! I'm curious to know what you went with, when you make your decision.

I saw this sort of thinking/discussion all the time. Something like, I'm a second year Ph.D. student but I want to start another one, because X is big and I'm excited about it. This is a bad way of thinking about a Ph.D. program.
Here is the thing:
One of the main pitfall of PhD students is that they can't get their mind into one problem.
Here is another fact:
During Ph.D. you learn how to think and read/write as a researcher, regardless what you are working on.
Advice: I say choose one among all the offers you get. Drop all, unless you have a pretty good damn reason for it (e.g., got a job at NASA).
Answering 'what I want to do for research' always changes! Thats the nature of research. You can not keep up with all trends during Ph.D. First, you need to think, read, and write as a researcher; and you learn them during a Ph.D. Then, you can follow the trends as a postdoc or an academic.

While I see what you're saying, I've been ambivalent about my current course of research from the beginning, and I really don't wan to get shoe horned into one area of research that's very different from what I want to do.

Unlike Dave Rose, I absolutely think you should pursue your interest in robotics if you find you truly enjoy it. You can (and should) figure that out right now by spending a long weekend with an arduino.
However, I really don't see much need to reconsider your applications, unless any offers you receive are incredibly specific. Many CS PhD programs don't require (or allow) you to work in a particular group or with a particular prof until you've completed the first year or so of coursework, but if a program accepts you with the explicit understanding that you'll work with X on NOT_ROBOTICS, then you might want to decline.

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Untrue negative comments on RateMyProfessor website
I pay close attention to how my rating scores/comments are like on the RateMyProfessor website. Very rarely I reported inappropriate comments (which violated site guidelines) for removals, and the average score has been decent (4.8).
Since last week, after I reported a comment (with improper language which violates the site guidelines), very suspiciously the same student (who is angry about their bad grade) has been trying to (even until now) leave 10+ intentionally untrue, deceiving comments with low scores.
My average has now been brought down to below 4.0. I've been frustrated because this severely compromised all true comments left by previous students. I reported this to the site and am still waiting for a response. Any suggestions?

Why does this matter? Who cares about such scores?

It may not matter to my offically evaluation by the school. But this is a common source which perspective students look at, and it's just frustrating that all recent comments are simply untrue and deceiving.

"Any suggestions?" Stop worrying about RateMyProfessor and the like ;-)

I would say that, besides it being perfectly fair to care about one's own reputation online, this could have some professional consequences. My understanding is that many undergraduates still check this website when deciding whether to enroll in a course. The difference between a very good score and a mediocre one may be relevant to course enrollment. It may not apply to OP, but some (non-tenure-track in the US) faculty lose money for under-enrolled courses or even lose their contract if their course enrollment is too low.

@user2574706 sounds like you need to get 500 of your friends to write equally untrue positive comments about you, to drown out all the untrue negative comments about you.

@user1271772: probably not a good idea to suggest cheating to the OP.

@gszavae See this answer of mine for a more elaborate response. The point is to give the right importance to certain assessments, because whenever one starts to have some public visibility (and having hundreds of students per year is a kind of public visibility), there will be always someone criticizing their work, however good it is.

Even Neil deGrasse Tyson got hate storm after Pluto demotion. Nobody is perfect.

@AskarKalykov Well, that was deserved. Captain Emacs - Reinstate Pluto. ;-P

Have people already started selling out fake positive Ratemyprofessor reviews, like they do for Tripadvisor, Yelp, Twitter followers, Facebook likes, etc...

Quick reply to those saying "Don't worry about it" - students use this to pick courses which affects your enrollment which may impact your employment (depending where you teach); (employers) schools will look at RateMyProf too.  Good ones will consider this to be "another point of data" that may or may not corroborate other data; good ones will realize that sometimes angry students hate-bomb profs, but not everyone in the hiring process is experienced enough to know/do this.

I'm curious what you'll do if you get untrue positive (and yet, deceiving) comments instead?

As the comments suggest, just ignore it. You will always have disgruntled students even if you do a great job. Some will blame you for their own shortcomings.
But the best "defense" against such negative comments is the positive comments from those who think you served them well. If those appear also, then a reader can easily judge it for what it is.
If you want to "sabotage" such things, just point other students to the site, without comment. You don't need to "defend" yourself when your other students naturally do so themselves.

I'd lose a lot of respect for a professor who pointed my to a rating site, however indirectly that might be.

@pmf, why is that? Certainly they can say what they like there. Or say nothing at all.

@Buffy because even an indirect hint can be read as a suggestion to vote there or as support for such sites.

@FrankHopkins, that's possible of course depending on what you say. Or you could treat them like adults. "This course is being discussed at ..."

@Buffy I'm not saying I would necessarily react like that, but OP seems to assume at least some of their students are a bit ... let's say childish, have low media competence etc. "This course is being discussed at" makes it imho sound official, which is okay if OP is okay with that, I wouldn't want to elevate such a site by that, but personal choice, also for the wording. And in general valid advice, with the caveat that - like all actions - it can be seen negatively by someone and arguably you support a system you don't like (but OP seems to be fine with the system, so that might not apply).

When one student portrays themselves as a dozen, it starts to look like a chorus of voices against, and typical prospective students would not likely have the media literacy to be able to distinguish between that and an actual consensus of dissatisfaction. I think it's a fair question.  At least the student hasn't gotten OP fired under false claims of sexual harassment [yet; may not be possible]; I have seen that happen when students really want better grades & institutions don't want to protect their faculty or grading integrity.

@WBT, yes, but (a) it may be obvious, and (b) it is likely contrary to "terms of service" and so the OP probably has recourse. Since they already mentioned dealing with the site explicitly, I didn't see the need to address it further in my reply.

Let's assume that your primary concern for caring about your rating is that you want students to see you in a positive light for some reason that you hold dear. Further assume that this is personal for you, and you recognize that RateMyProf reviews do not hold much weight for your chances of tenure.
There are two very common scenarios that happen when the average student visits RateMyProf. It is typically your average student that will put weight on RateMyProf, and it is typically the average student that will spend time writing a review for you on RateMyProf, so keeping the average student in mind is important. I believe then that there are two types of profiles on RateMyProf that very accurately reflect how professors are when they put their teaching hats on (of course, sample size is huge here):

You generally have a high score, positive comments, and a few comments that suggest you probably got a PhD in tormenting students in classrooms.

The students will notice that the majority of comments and ratings suggest you are a great teacher, you care about your students, and most importantly you are good at teaching the average student (this seems to be the case you fall under). Students will accurately be able to flag the relatively small number of negative comments and assign those as problems on the part of the student writing that negative review. After all, there really is nothing to gain by students from writing a good review for you other than that they appreciated you as an instructor. On the other hand, in this scenario, the incentive to write you a bad review is driven by spiting you, and it's pretty easy for the average student to recognize when that is happening.

You have a low to low-medium score, a record of bad-subpar reviews by the students, occasionally there are some shining reviews among all of the bad ones

Students viewing this type of profile will probably be correct in their assessment of your inability to teach to the average student. Students looking at a profile like this will likely identify that, for some reason or another, your teaching style is not suitable for them and that students are probably being more truthful about their negative reviews then the outlier of the previous scenario. It is much more telling when many students write bad reviews, because it indicates a pattern of poor communication instead of an outlier. On the other hand, students looking at this type of profile will notice some of the 'glowing' outlier comments and probably recognize that those students are the ones that are either harder workers or are relatively gifted to their peers and would have succeeded anyways. To the average student, those great comments don't hold any value because it does not apply to them.
There are other scenarios that are more difficult to distinguish, particularly those of average score, because the lack of polarity makes it difficult to assess what is going on. But based on my experience as a student that has used RateMyProf to help me choose courses, and from many conversations I have had with friends in the fraternity/sorority system as well as other student organizations, many of the average students can accurately assess (with a sufficient sample size of reviews) whether a professor is going to be a good or bad educator/instructor for the average student.

This discussion about racism and sexism has been moved to chat.

When one student portrays themselves as a dozen, it starts to look like a chorus of voices against, and typical prospective students would not likely have the media literacy to be able to distinguish between that and an actual consensus of dissatisfaction.  I think the assumption in this answer that the average student-reader can distinguish is not warranted.

You didn't ask a specific question, but I can give some suggestions that I hope help put the matter in perspective.

You are frustrated. Frustration is an emotion that's both legitimate and understandable in the situation you describe. Allow yourself to feel that very real emotion—but, while respecting its reality, recognizing that you can make choices independent of feeling the emotion.
You have acknowledged that the site's average rating does not have serious consequences for your career, and I suspect you also understand that the effect on readers of the site are also limited. So the stakes are not high here, which can be reassuring.
You have engaged with that site's official procedures for curating comments. You can't control the outcome of that engagement. So let them do whatever they do (obviously responding helpfully to any queries they send back) and otherwise turn your mind to things that you value and can affect.
You can't control what other people do, even a student who is acting maliciously. As above, you can choose to turn your mind to things that you value and can affect.
Letting go of things you can't change might feel unsatisfying. That's a perfectly legitimate way to feel. Regardless, you can choose to spend energy on other things. Easier said than done, sometimes, I know! but recognizing that emotions don't have to be solved or overcome is, I find, a great help in making choices when negative feelings are around.

Create your own review.
Briefly explain your teaching philosophy. Perhaps make an addendum: very briefly mention the disgruntled student's reviews. (I don't think it would look good to mention the exact rating though.) This is optional and just shows the data (rating) is falsely skewed.
If the RateMyProfessor staff haven't taken down that student's 10+ comments, they're also unlikely to take down your own comment. If I was a student looking at a professor's page, I would want to know the rating and 10+ comments are ingenious.
You might want to also check out the "I'm professor [you]" button.

In the same philosophy as the comments asking the OP not to care: it seems even more uncouth to care to the extent that you get involved on RMP.

@Eric I don't think it's uncouth. Note, I didn't suggest for that professor to give themselves a 5 star rating nor make multiple reviews. It's merely a symbolic gesture to shows that they care. To reiterate, one review. Beyond that, "Additionally, we encourage teachers to engage with their profiles by creating a professor account and providing feedback." So the rest of my answer would still apply regardless of how you feel about the first part.

Look at it objectively.

Objectively, a student would be much more skeptical of a RMP page with a professor's presence. They would fear students reviews aren't objective and that the professor is trying to hide something/has a motivation/can't accept criticism without picking a fight (whether or not any or all of those are actually true).

And we may agree to disagree about the uncouth-ness of the matter, but I think the comments do suggest that to invest in the ratings on RMP is ill-advised, and to comment says publicly "I do very much care," but perhaps not in the postive spin your comment suggests.

Objectively, if you're looking at a set of data (e.g., ratings) and it's falsely skewed, you're going to want to know that the data is not representative! No feelings about it. It's just flat out incorrect to say "Objectively, a student would [feel this way]." You're merely injecting your own subjective feelings.

Have a charitable interpretation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity All such a review would do is suggest the rating is skewed incorrectly and show the professor cares. If you can't see that, read too far into it (something sinister), it means little. If I was the professor, that's what I would do. Also, it's clear from my answer that they shouldn't make a big deal about it. I'm done debating your perception. Walk on your own eggshells.

I am receiving many pings due to your deleting and reposting comments. If you need to say something further: Let us continue this discussion in chat.

I would avoid any professor that cared enough about a negative review on rmp to make a post on it like the plague.  Ugh.  What Eric is saying is completely correct.

I really don't care about your subjective opinion on the matter. I explained why one's subjective feeling doesn't matter with respect to data. Additionally, the post should be about the prof's teaching philosophy. The false skew is just a heads up, mentioning.

A slightly different perspective, even if the end result is the same of other answers.
Is that site well-designed?
You reported the untrue and duplicated comments.

If the site admins act on it, it means that the site works: the problem is solved.
If the untrue reviews stay there, it means that the site is completely bogus: it's not to be trusted at all with anything.

So you should not care either way. Not "because Internet", but because if this problem isn't solved, the site itself becomes irrelevant.

From the site's point of view, this is a "he said, she said" situation. They don't know which of the reviews are untrue. It's not like the site either works or doesn't; the proper distinction is "yellowness" (in the sense of "yellow press") -- i.e., how much the site is willing to tolerate unsubstantiated rumors. Neither extreme is viable (every claim is technically a rumor; on the internet, nobody knows you are a dog), and different sites will settle in different points on the spectrum.

I'd consider what you say an opinion, I wouldn't be so sure about that. Plus, if the same user posted more than one review, then it is a technical flaw of the site.

That'd indeed be a case where the site admins are at fault.

So if the untrue reviews stay, the site is useless? And this means that student will no longer trust it? But how should this work?

@user111388 yes. If this is a site where anyone can write any untrue thing and it just stays, the site itself is pointless and you should ignore it. Or sue it. Talk to a lawyer.

So if somebody writes an untrue thing on Stackexchange, one should forget this site?

I'll note that this isn't a new site. It has been around for years. They don't try to determine the "truth" of anything. It is just opinions about courses and faculty. Some of it isn't so nice. If you teach you can probably find yourself there.

@user111388 if the post gets upvoted and stands out, yes.

@Buffy and… it's still irrelevant.

It's sad how 4 people upvoted the "untrue thing on Stackexchange" when it's patently wrong, as I explained.

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Appropriateness of a second-authored article in external review file for tenure
I am wondering what others thought of including a second-authored article being included in an external reviewer file for tenure review in the health sciences. This is my second tenure review, since I transferred institutions, and my tenure did not transfer from my original institution where I was granted tenure.
I can include five articles in my external review application. For one of my main areas of research, my collaborator and I provide equal leadership, so we generally switch between first and second authors. The article from our work that I would like to include has me as the second author, not first. Do others believe that it would be strange for a reviewer to see a second-authors publication included in a file?

Is it possible to include a comment in a summary of the articles, which highlights that you made an equal contribution?  I certainly wouldn't think that it would be held against you because this one fell into the alternate rotation.  But then, I wouldn't even think it would be held against you if you were the Nth author and your student was the primary author.  Disclaimer: I'm an industry researcher, not a tenured or tenure-track professor, so I haven't seen this first-hand.  Thinking of how this would apply for, say, a fellow application.

This all depends on your area. In some areas, author lists are almost exclusively alphabetical. What area do you work in?

Thanks for the comments! My work is in the health sciences. We typically do not list authors alphabetically, but by amount of contribution. I am able to send a short (3pg) summary of my work, so I may just put a footnote in there about equal contribution. Thanks for the feedback!

I think it would depend.  In some experimental fields, if you are at a top school, it would be unusual to have much first author at all (grad students do the work).

It sounds reasonable to me, especially if explained as you did above.

My view is that, since you actually worked on the paper, it would be a poor choice to omit it. Perhaps your field puts too much emphasis on such things (mine does not), but it is part of your record.
I doubt that anyone would think you were "padding" your cv by including it. And fewer publications rather than more, does you little good.
But if you are limited to five, choose the five that best show your potential. I assume you think that this is one of them or there wouldn't be a question here.
It would be a different story, of course, if you were included as an "author" by gift rather than by contribution. But such overemphasis on order, in my view, works against collaboration and creates a lot of conflict. But that is a problem to solve after you obtain tenure.
But this might also depend on other aspects of the tenure review. If it is done purely on a written dossier, without any interviews, then you really need that dossier as strong as possible. But if candidates are interviewed as well, then you can give an explanation of why you included one paper rather than another and also some background on the work that was done.
Likewise if you have letters as part of the dossier, then perhaps your co-author can have something to say to back up your participation.

I don't think she is asking about having it on the CV. She is asking about including it in the external review file/mailing, which is limited to 5 articles.

@Dawn, thanks. I missed reading one word. edited.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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


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Is it bad if I am not a teaching assistant during my PhD?
I've applied to be a teaching assistant (helps with running undergrad labs and marking reports/tests/exams) every year so far during my PhD, but have never been successful. I'm getting to the end of my PhD, and despite my best efforts, have no teaching experience, thus that section of my CV is blank.
Would this be a bad sign for post-PhD employment?

This depends quite a bit on where you are looking for the post-PhD employment.

Thanks Arno - I'm keeping things open but leaning towards staying in research and doing some teaching/lab work.

"but have never been successful" A lot of people would love to be as unsuccessful as you in this regard. Don't worry. The standard TA experience (grading, office hours etc.) isn't considered a major achievement in one's CV anyway; if you need to prove that you're able to teach, look out for other options (e.g., give a couple expository talks at student seminars).

Did you got any seminars and practical assignment to tell about? My experience (Germany), if you get a third-party funded position, you might never be a TA during that time. (Milage varies, but might happen.) So what? Cannot say, a similar situation prevented me from getting a postdoc position.

Your question is too general: the answer depends wildly on your academic field and geographic location.

Not to mention your career goals.

Keep in mind that not all TAs are given assignments that help develop their teaching abilities. // If you would like to get your feet wet with teaching, there are many ways to do that.  Perhaps one way for you to consider at this stage of your development would be to give talks about your research, in a variety of venues.  Each talk you give to a live, human audience, helps you hone your presenting and explaining and teaching skills.

Location?  'There is not a Phd worldwide".....

Outside of academia, the lack of teaching experience will have little or no negative effect on your employment prospects.
If you are going into academic positions, the significance of not having been a TA will depend greatly on your field and the type of institution you will be working at. For instance, if you are at a research-intensive university, teaching experience isn't as essential as at a small liberal-arts college. In a similar vein, an engineering graduate is less likely to be expected to have teaching experience than a PhD recipient in, say, mathematics or the humanities.

If you want to stay in academia, then teaching is going to be part of the job, and you will need some experience in that field. Not having that at the end of your PhD is not a disaster, but you will need to rectify that blank spot during your postdoc phase. How big of a deal this is will depend on your discipline and your country.

The short answer is yes. aeismail and Maarten Buis have already answered why if you're going into academic jobs, so I'll focus on non-academic jobs.
The price you pay for getting teaching experience is less time spent on research. This might matter if one is going into a research job, but if not, then whether one has 5 publications or 3 isn't really that different (unless you've written things like Nature papers, in which case the employer might recognize the Nature brand name). What matters is whether or not you have the degree + which university awarded it. Since you're going to have these regardless of whether or not you have teaching experience, teaching experience is a "free" extra. In other words, having it never hurts and not having it is never good.
With teaching experience, you can claim more transferable skills. Even if you never go into a teaching job like giving private tuition, you can:

Say you are able to explain difficult concepts to students. This is transferable to, e.g., explaining your company's products to prospective clients, or to the company's marketing department.
Say you are able to mentor junior employees.

So: if you're able to get teaching experience, get it. If you can't, it's not critical, but it'll be a disadvantage.

Learning by teaching.
One of the most underrated experience in higher education is how much we learn when we teach.  When I would see a topic for the first time, I would usually be left with the impression that I understood the topic pretty well.  Looking back, this looks a bit like a delusion.
The process of having to explain the subject matter to a student helps us gain a depth of knowledge that we ordinarily don't fully realize was there.
Teaching while we learn also helps us get out of the curse of knowledge issue that plagues scholars.  Some scholars will get so steep in there subject of study that they slowly lose the ability to speak intelligently about that subject matter to anyone on the outside.  When we teach effectively, we have to get out of our own heads and see the world from other perspectives.


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Is it appropriate to send PDF e-mails instead of a textual one during a mail-based scientific discussion?
When I'm in the middle of an e-mail based scientific discussion, I often find that I'm severely limited by the medium. E-mails don't manage formulas at all, the symbol palette and formatting is severely limited, and included pictures in the body may or may not go through. Such loss of formatting is especially true if the recipent uses some legacy university e-mail system, as it is often the case in academy.
Due to these reasons, I'm tempted to use LaTeX to write my thoughts/results I wish to share, and attach the PDF. However, I've never encountered anyone doing the same during my 5 years of scientific carreer. All my professional contacts seem to stick to basic txt format, even if formulas are involved. I get vague terms instead of symbols ("charge density of xy"), broken formattings, "rho_xy^2"-s and "intg(exp(i (phi+1/2) pi)) dphi"-s, and not a single PDF.
Would it be awkward, unprofessional, or unproductive, if I put my whole letter in a nicely formatted LaTeX PDF file - even if the content is just 1-2 concise paragraph - and in the body of the email, I merely write the following:

Dear Mr. Schroedinger,
Thanks for your letter, which was useful to advance my thoughts on the topic [or a similar appropriate short sentence]. Please find my reply in the attached PDF.
Best regards,
Whiskers

Are both parties LaTeX users? In that case a LaTeX file might be easier, particularly since your collaborator can add/edit the equations easily without recreating them based on the pdf.

Related: What is the de facto standard while writing equation in a short email to professors?

@JonCuster I think a complied PDF is much better as you can read it immediately. e.g. you can't compile Latex on your phone.

Everyone gets too damn many emails these days. The only way to deal with this flood is to be quick in reading and answering them, and things you do in writing your emails that make that difficult or impossible will quickly get you on the "ah, great, this guy again" list of your recipients.
If you really need to work out a mathematical argument in detail, then yes, PDF is probably the way to go. If all you want to do is illustrate an idea, do it in inline math like everyone else -- it's so much faster to deal with these emails than having to open and read an attachment.

The second paragraph agrees exactly with my thoughts.

I would add that as a compromise you can write proper correct latex code for your formulas in the email. Of course the email program can't compile it but if the reader can't 'compile in their head'  they can just quickly copy and paste it to some suitable software and look at the nice formulas.

I would be pleased to receive a fully detailed pdf from my correspondents rather than a bunch of short messages with weird pseudo-coded equations. Unfortunately, writing proper LaTeX takes time and academics are always way too busy to do things properly. Sometimes (but not always) in collaborative work it is better to receive some response early than a perfect reply later. That's why people usually fall back on simplest decisions,  then those decisions form a habit, and it becomes harder to get out of it.
If you manage to keep your correspondence in proper LaTeX typesetting, with fully elaborated thoughts, supported by properly looking equations and graphics, this is great. If you manage to do the above and keep your responses timely, it's simply perfect and your colleagues should be happy and proud to collaborate with you. Yes, it would be slightly unusual, but in a good sense, because what's usual is not always very good.

There's nothing wrong with including an attachment that cannot be otherwise expressed in the text of the email. I regularly attach images of plots or PowerPoint slides with graphical representations of data that simply can't be adequately described using text.
The question comes down to whether the thing you want to attach can be adequately described in the email text or not. I might not attach a PDF for the sake of a single formula that's only slightly cumbersome in email text, but if you're using lots of formulas that become unintelligible in text form, you are justified in including the attachment. In most cases, I'd probably prefer easy-to-parse information that's slightly more difficult to access as an attachment, rather than difficult-to-parse but easy-to-access information in the email itself.


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Almost everything we know is taken from someone else, so what do I cite in a paper?
My professor commented that I should have cited more on my paper. I received 132 out of 140 points on the paper for the error. I'm studying history, so being a learned subject, isn't everything we know about it taken from someone else? How would I cite everything I have ever learned over the years dealing with history through conversations/ TV/ internet/ from childhood? I didn't know when I was a child that I needed to remember who told me that Rome was a global power back in the 1st century :) How far do we go with this?

The practical answer (if you're writing papers for coursework, not publication) is "Whatever your professor wants." And if you don't know what your professor wants, you need to ask him/her.

isn't everything we know about it taken from someone else? No, there's also observation and thought.

"I didn't know when I was a child that I needed to remember who told me" The point of such a citation, if it was required, would not be to tell where you learned the fact, but to tell where to check the fact so the reader does not need to believe you.

"The point of such a citation, if it was required, would not be to tell where you learned the fact, but to tell where to check the fact so the reader does not need to believe you." I read this and for a second I thought- why would I need to my professor to believe me, being that he knows the subject better than I do? Maybe I need to write my papers as if they were for a different audience. Like a lawyer trying to prove a case. Then I would look for more ways to validate my points. Thanks

@Theodore You've hit on a more general point: as a university student, you should be learning to be a member of your discipline, not just giving answers to your teacher. This often shows up as work that essentially (even if not literally) begins 'Yes, because...'

I didn't know when I was a child that I needed to remember who told me that Rome was a global power back in the 1st century :)

You are broadly correct with this. If something can be deemed common knowledge in your field there should be no need to cite it.
MIT define common knowledge as(taken from my answer here);

Broadly speaking, common knowledge refers to information that the average, educated reader would accept as reliable without having to look it up.

Other examples(not exhaustive) of where you should cite include;

When using a primary source to support an original thought or idea of your own then you should cite that primary source material
When using an idea to support your ideas that is contained in an secondary source/literature.
If you are taking something verbatim from a source you should cite it.
A caveat on common knowledge - When in doubt, cite your source.

Depending on what level you're writing at there may be university/department guides in relation to citations.
Finally I think in your case that you could ask your professor(as suggested by ff524 in their comment) to show you some of the area's in your paper where they thought lacked enough citations so you can use this knowledge going forward.


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What to do about an early, highly eccentric, reference?
So say you are writing a review which includes paper A, which claims to introduce a new idea to your field. In the course of reading surrounding literature, you find earlier paper B, which puts forward a very similar idea. Paper B is not cited by paper A. Normally the thing to do would be to add a note saying the paper B offered a similar idea some years earlier, then synthesise the discussion in both.
The catch here is that paper B is pretty idiosyncratic. It makes various claims that contradict the established wisdom, and does not (in my opinion) sufficiently back them up. It is a long paper, but contains no numerical analysis, which on this topic is a bit unusual. It contains sentences such as;

What may appear as fancy mathematical formulations is primarily intended as an invitation to mathematical physicists to fill in the remaining gaps.

(Which, if you are minded to, is probably sufficient to find the paper I'm referring to.) It has been cited (by reputable papers) as a a publication, multiple times.
Is it reasonable to just mention this papers existence in passing, without really commenting on its odd nature?
Edit; the advice of a commentator helped me find the publication in question. It's not in Russian, it's in English, I just failed to find it before. It's not a lot changed from the preprint, and I still don't feel comfortable making a strong statement about the accuracy of its claims. The discussion of errors in particular seems to miss key aspects, but clearly at least one referee did not agree with that assessment. So it's quite possible that I'm missing the point.
So far I'm inclined to go with @Captain Emacs' suggestion, and possibly also email the author (politely) to see if they are willing to clear up my confusion.

"An early attempt/exploration of XYZ [reference] ..." Makes clear it is not a completed work and it is not really mature. YMMV.

Was the paper actually published or was it only ever a "preprint"?

Are the "idiosyncratic claims" of the original actually confirmed/proven in the later paper?

@Buffy No. The two papers do have some similarity in their central premise, which is a reconstruction algorithm. Paper A does demonstrate that this premise leads to good results, by offering numeric analysis. But paper B makes a lot of assertions, many more than paper A.

@Kimball it was published, in "International Journal of Modern Physics A". I can't seem to find the published copy, but I trust the citations would be accurate.

@DanielHatton many thanks! I will go check out the published version. Yes, I'm being coy with it.

@Clumsycat Okay, I was confused because at one point you said publication but then you say it's was cited as a preprint.

@Kimball yes your right. The citation contained a link to a preprint, but that isn't the same as citing a preprint.

@CaptainEmacs likely going to go with your suggestion. If you'd like to make it an answer I would accept it.

@Clumsycat Glad you like it. I slightly expanded it to an answer.

Problems like that can often be solved by suitable formulations.
In your case, something along the line of
"An early attempt/exploration of XYZ has been undertaken in [reference] ..."
This makes clear it is not a completed work and it is not really mature. It assumes that this is at least somehow scientific and not crank work, of course.


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Applying to Graduate School with misdemeanor charge?
I am currently a 3rd year undergraduate student at a large public university. I am a music performance major. I'm very interested in applying to graduate school for either performance or music technology, which I am receiving a minor in. My biggest concern is that at the end of my freshman year I received a misdemeanor possession of marijuana  charge. I paid the fine and have been done with it for a while. Unfortunately, I can feel it haunting me still and the closer and closer I get to graduation and applying to graduate school the more I feel it creeping up on me. In my state nothing is offered to "remove" it from your record such as some states have diversion class.
So my questions are:
Is this something I should be extremely concerned about?
Will a university or conservatory completely disregard my application because of this reason? Or will affect their decision on my acceptance?
I didn't lose my scholarship because of it (and actually I have received more money from the school of music after applying for other scholarships) but will I be ineligible in the future?
Anything helps.
Thanks.

While the marked duplicate is slightly different (with respect to how the legal system treats the offense), the answers (especially the last two) seem to apply generally, including your situation.

I probably would not worry about this at all.  Conviction of a misdemeanor (as opposed to a felony) would not disqualify you from any of the U.S. graduate programs that I have been familiar with.  Schools will not necessarily even ask about misdemeanor convictions on their applications, nor will they be running criminal record checks on their applicants.  It is, of course, possible that some faculty reading applications at some schools may be vociferously opposed to admitting anyone with any kind of criminal history.  However, most places simply will not care.

I concur.  As I recall, our application just asks "Have you ever been convicted of a felony?" So we don't even find out about misdemeanors.  We don't care if you ever got a speeding ticket.

I think by this point in my life it is safe for me to say that if someone asserted/commented to me that someone "had smoked dope", I'd say "ok, sure, and what?" Or, depending on mood, quote our former prez, Bill Clinton's hilariously silly attempt at evasion, "yes, but I/they didn't inhale". Next, jaywalking? In contrast, e.g., hit-and-run stuff is pretty inarguably sociopathic. Assault-and-battery... ?


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Would it be a poor choice to focus on disability in both my personal history statement and diversity fellowship response?
I am working on my application to UC Davis. It requires a Personal History Statement separate from the Statement of Purpose. I've been through this process with UC Berkeley, and the prompts are almost exactly the same. Davis, however, also has a diversity fellowship that I'd like to apply to that requires a short statement, and if I leave my Personal History Statement essentially the same as what I submitted for Berkeley, I'm afraid I may repeat a lot. I'm trying to figure out if and/or how to make them distinct.
This is the Personal History Statement prompt:

The purpose of this essay is to get know you as an individual and potential graduate student. Please describe how your personal background informs your decision to pursue a graduate degree. You may include any educational, familial, cultural, economic, or social experiences, challenges, community service, outreach activities, residency and citizenship, first-generation college status, or opportunities relevant to your academic journey; how your life experiences contribute to the social, intellectual, or cultural diversity within a campus community and your chosen field; or how you might serve educationally underrepresented and underserved segments of society with your graduate education.

In my personal history statement, I talk about the interaction between my having a significant physical disability and the progression of interest and confidence in my ability to succeed in higher ed, discussing in one para. some of the challenges I faced. I also talk about helping interpret for my sister, who had speech production limitations after getting a tracheostomy -- how it really made me cognizant of language and grew a desire to affect some kind of difference for those who have language challenges.
The diversity fellowship prompt says to briefly explain how you fulfill their criteria. The ones that could apply to me are these:

To be eligible for a fellowship that promotes diversity, applicants must have an interest in an academic career in teaching and research, be a United States Citizen or Permanent Resident, and meet one or more of the following criteria:

Demonstrate potential to bring to their academic research the perspective that comes from their understanding of the experiences of groups historically underrepresented in higher education or underserved by academic research generally.
Provide evidence of academic achievement while overcoming barriers such as economic, social, or educational disadvantage.
Demonstrate potential to contribute to higher education through the understanding of the barriers facing women, domestic minorities, students with disabilities, and members of other groups underrepresented in higher education careers, as evidenced by life experiences and educational background. Examples include, but are not limited to:
b.    ability to articulate the barriers facing women, racial minorities and other groups in fields where they are underrepresented;

I have fairly substantial experience volunteer tutoring ESL to refugees, too. I'm trying to figure out where and how exactly I could talk about that. So, my question for you all is, would it be a poor choice to focus on  my disability in both statements?

The personal statement is personal; you decide what goes in it.  You should include evidence that you will be a good graduate student.

I just don't want to overemphasize it.. or come across as shallow for focusing on that one aspect of me. I'm just trying to figure out how it would come across...

The two sections are read by two different (if sometimes overlapping) committees. The personal history will be read by the general admissions committee. They might note issues of diversity and disability which can lead to a fellowship, but if there is a separate question for that -- they may assume that that information will be duplicated there. Still, if your disability played a significant role in shaping who you are as an academic -- the kinds of questions and approaches, or the empathy you bring to particular subjects or students -- I would include it in your personal history statement as that will speak to your motivation for study.
The diversity / disability fellowship question is also important. There are many small fellowships in the UC system and faculty try very hard to ensure that students get every penny they can -- but this is only possible if students self-declare. I would not feel shy about repeating any information in the diversity fellowship response -- again, you want to ensure that you have the funds to study what you want to study.

I don't have any experience in evaluating graduate admissions, so you should probably wait for someone who does to reply to your question, but reading the statement descriptions makes me think that they're looking in your personal statement to figure out your motivations (i.e. what is going to keep you going through the hardest parts of graduate school), while they're looking in your diversity statement to figure out how educating you will benefit the world. I think it'd be a good idea to not focus on diversity prompt #2, which sounds pretty similar to what you talk about in the your personal history statement, but the other two could apply -- so I'd focus on those.

The short answer to the question is: You should not focus on the disability in both essays, unless the two essays are going to be read by different committees, and they will not have access to the other essays. (The department secretary will know the answer to that.)
Some general advice, to take to heart in all of your application:

You have a limited number of words to impress upon the committee who you are; don't waste those words repeating yourself.
Impressing 'upon the committee who you are' is not the same as 'impressing the committee with who you are.' You don't need to have climbed Everest, ran for Congress at 26 and come up with a unique proof of Bayes theorem. Part of the desire to focus on the disability comes from this impetus that many students have to seem larger than life, but we all live in our lives, so make sure that you show who you are, even in instances that are more mundane.
Don't be overly humble either. Make sure that the great things you do are stated clearly.
Graduate programs are looking for potential scholars, not leaders, characters or great stories. Above all else, you need to come across as a valuable contributor to the field in which you are applying, with potential to contribute long into the future. Your disability shouldn't hinder that, but you still need to meet that standard, and your disability won't help there either.

A few notes on the disability:

Don't ever focus on the disability focus on overcoming the disability. You are not your disability, but your disability made you who you are, in part. Show them that.
Don't focus on special needs you will have (e.g. wheelchair access) since they will be providing that anyway, but but forthcoming about anything non-typical that you will need to do your research. The objective here is to demonstrate that you have already done enough work or thought enough about the field to know what special needs you have to do it right, not to get them to pay for those things (which they may).
Don't whine or try to create a 'special class' for you disability. Any disability is sort of self-defining, and has disadvantages--which is why it is called a disability. If you overstep that, however, and try to create 'additional disadvantages' you begin to sound like you are trying to exploit your disability for unfair advantages. (e.g. "Most people can imagine that it is hard to be blind, but what people don't realize is how bad anti-blind bigotry is!") Let the story speak for itself.
Do mention funding opportunities for people in your situation you that have or will apply for.
Do be grateful. On most local news stations there will be a story about once monthly about someone who has had something terrible happen to them, and they will be described as 'brave', 'strong', or 'an example to us all.' Generally, they meet their challenge, and remain grateful for the things they do have. Try to capture that spirit. The fact that you are applying to top programs indicates that you have had opportunities, in spite of your disability, so show that.
Don't use your disability as an excuse, but Do explain instances when it affected performance legitimately. If you are paralyzed because of a car accident that happened your sophomore year, it probably also affected your grades. Explain this clearly, because although the readers may understand the timing of the accident and the grades, they may not connect the two.
If possible, show a positive trajectory. If you weren't diagnosed as dyslexic until you were a senior in high-school, you probably had bad grades up until then, but after the diagnosis, you should point out you improving grades as your ability to cope improved.


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Posting Teaching Videos on Personal Website
Background: I am a fourth year math graduate student in the US.
I recently gave a talk in an undergraduate mathematics seminar at my university, and one of my friends in attendance offered to record a video of it for me.  I accepted his offer, since it will give me a chance to review my presentation and polish it, should I give it again at some point in the future.  However, he also suggested another use for it: post it to my personal website as an example of my teaching.
I felt the seminar went quite well and the recording quality is reasonable, so I am comfortable with such a thing representing me online.  The main questions I have are as follows:

Is such a thing appropriate on a personal website?  Could it be considered a bit overbearing?
Will this make any difference when applying for teaching positions?  Would anyone on a committee ever even bother to look at such a thing, let alone my personal website?
In a similar vein, should I try to make more of these?  Is it worth the trouble to have more examples of my teaching available?
Are there any other points I have overlooked?  Unforeseen benefits or possible pitfalls/risks, perhaps?

Any commentary whatsoever is certainly appreciated.

My first thought, maybe incorrect, was that this isn't exactly an example of you teaching, so suggesting that it is might be harmful if you are applying to certain types of teaching position. What sort of institution are you thinking about applying to?

While I won't be applying for jobs until next fall, I anticipate that I will be looking for positions at small liberal arts institutions.

Assuming that your lecturing skills are actually good, I don't see any downside at all to making videos of your lectures available online, other than the trouble involved in creating and posting them. I don't see how anyone would think there is anything remotely inappropriate about this (unless you start attaching 100 MB copies of these videos to emails you send to places where you are applying for jobs; needless to say, that would be a bad idea).
As for appearing "overbearing", depending on how you present these videos on your personal website, it may conceivably be seen as overbearing or in poor taste if they are displayed too prominently (e.g., as a silly example, a large video player window occupying almost the entire page with a flashy caption saying something like "Meet The World's Best Lecturer!!!", but probably that's not quite what you had in mind). But a couple of links to YouTube videos with informative captions such as "A calculus lecture I gave on 11/11/15"), or even a standard-sized embedded YouTube view, should not provoke anyone's ire in my opinion.
As for the potential upside, I think you are very correct in guessing that most committee members would not have the time or energy to view an hour-long lecture by a job candidate. The chances that even a small part of your videos will be watched by more than a few people are not very high. With that said, it is not inconceivable that some people will watch parts of your videos to get a sense of your abilities (I have done this myself on a few occasions, and even googled candidates and found videos of them that they did not think to provide). Even some committee members who don't watch your videos may still be impressed by the fact that you are willing to provide such documentary evidence of your lecturing abilities, and view this as a sign of honesty, trustworthiness and self-confidence.
As for creating more videos, I don't think anything beyond one or maybe two videos will have any added value, so I wouldn't bother with that.
Finally, let me repeat that my advice is given under the premise that you are a good lecturer whose videos will be impressive. You may think your talk went well, but it may be good to get objective confirmation of that from a friend or colleague before you proceed.


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ASME “text-only” submission in LaTeX
We are submitting a journal paper to ASME Journals of Mechanisms and Robotics for the first time. The manuscript is prepared in LaTeX. In the final submission, it is required that we submit "text-only" file along with the final PDF.

II. TEXT-ONLY FILE(S)

The text-only file, Word or LaTex, should include the following items in order:

1.1. paper title
1.2. author(s) info (affiliation, address, email)
1.3. abstract
1.4. text: single column and double spaced
1.5. reference section (ASME requires a numerical format, e.g., [1], 2, etc.)
1.6. table caption list
1.7. figure caption list
1.8. tables, each on separate page
1.9. footers  containing page number

ASME guidelines
If someone who has submitted to ASME before can answer what exactly are they expecting from LaTeX users, it shall be of great help.

Are we just supposed to upload the LaTeX document as is and the requirement is more directed towards Word users?
Am I supposed to remove all the figures? That would mess up the references. In order to correct that I shall have to manually add the reference numbers to figure! I tried options such as How can I remove the figures from draft and gobbling the \includegraphics command, but in vain.
Do I have to manually type the figure caption list? As deleting the figures would remove all the references and \listoffigures wouldn't work.
What exactly does this requirement mean?

1.9. footers containing page number

Regards.

You should contact the journal directly. Only they can give a definite answer.

Well I have mailed them. Hope to receive a reply soon.

I contacted the ASME staff and they said

"You can submit the LaTeX files with the figures embedded and we will accommodate."

I guess that makes life easier and solves the problem.

Although I have not made any ASME submissions, the following information might be of some use to you.

Am I supposed to remove all the figures? That would mess up the references.

Yes. But only from the tex file. You must include the figures (only as EPS or TIFF as per ASME guidelines) as separate files. You can do this without adversely affecting references by adding the [demo] option when including the graphicx package.
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx}
It is the label you add inside the figure environment that counts in the list of figures. There would be no error even if you don't include any image (like using \includegraphics) inside the environment. Although the page numbers may vary, the actual list would remain intact.

1.9. footers containing page number

This is not for LaTeX users to worry about. If the class file provided by the journal is coded properly, it should take care of this by itself.

The full contents of the paper must be submitted in the PDF file.

The above line is also included in the ASME guidelines. I suppose it is the the PDF of how you intend it to be. This may submit the necessary figures as per your liking. However, I think you may submit both PDFs, one with figures YourTitle_(with_figs).pdf, and one without YourTitle_(without_figs).pdf and intimate this to the editor for clarification.

The option \usepackage[demo]{graphicx} did work to remove the figure, but I had to retain the caption. As we are supposed to prepare a separate list for the captions, I am not sure if it is to be retained in the main text. I shall get back once I hear from the publishers.


text:
Conference fee, travel costs and accommodation fees for Keynote Speaker and Technical Program Committees
I was invited to attend a conference as a keynote speaker and TPC panel. The sent message began:

On behalf of the organizing committee, we are honored to invite you as a keynote speaker and the TPC Committee for [...]

This is the first time I have been invited as a keynote speaker or technical program committee. I would like to make sure that I will not be charged accommodation, travel or conference fees. Should I ask them via email? I also want to know if there is a reward or pocket money during the period of this conference in a professional manner. How?

Are you in a position where it would be appropriate to invite you to be a keynote speaker? Is the conference one you know that you and your colleagues would submit to and attend? If no to both, this is almost certainly a scam.

What's wrong with just asking them?

Assuming this is a reputable conference, just ask whoever invited you straight up about the financial arrangements and how do you deal with them. There may be a stipend or not, but that is less likely than paying (all) expenses.
You will probably need to make your own arrangements and get reimbursed. There may be limitations, so don't expect first class travel or accommodations to be covered.
If it isn't reputable, then, well,...

How can I ask them about all fees in a professional manner?


text:
Whom should I ask for letters of recommendation?
I am an undergraduate in an engineering field in the United States planning to apply to graduate schools, but am struggling to figure out who I should ask for letters of recommendation.
Currently I have the following options who I think would be good.

Professor who I have done related research with for a while and published a research paper with.
Industry research internship advisor (has a PhD) in a tangentially related field who I worked with for one summer

However, generally graduate schools require 3 letters of recommendation, and I'm thinking this would have to be from a professor I took a class with. This is where I have a problem— despite having good grades, due to being generally a quiet person, I'm not sure I got to know any of my professors well enough for them to write an outstanding letter of recommendation. I also can't really think of anyone else to ask a letter from.
Would having one "generic" letter from one of my classes kill my application?
Also, would a letter of recommendation from industry be seen in a good light if it was relating to my lab research skills?

There are many questions on this site about whom to ask for such letters. Search for them. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/152204/recommendation-letter-from-cs-faculty-for-math-grad-school-and-vice-versa/152206#152206

A "generic" letter won't kill your application. It'll be a little less strong, that's all.

This is likely a duplicate as @EthanBolker suggests. I won't vote it now since my vote would be definitive. But, you can ask the "other" professor whether they know you well enough to write you a strong letter. Some will say no, but others might surprise you. Academics are better than industry people, but you use what you have. Your question is a likely duplicate of: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/95713/75368

@Buffy wasn't me. I just replaced "who" by "whom" in the title. I agree the edit you're pointing out could be rolled back.

Have you TA'd a class in any capacity?  What professors would you be thinking of for that third recommendation?  In a similar boat here (one letter from an REU professor at another school, another from my undergrad "advisor" who I TA'd for, not sure for the third)

Many, many people find themselves in this situation, due to being introverted and/or just "keeping their heads down and working". But, then, we discover that a wee bit of networking is already very helpful to get into grad school. Tell your friends.

Ideally, you do want letters of recommendation from academia.  That being said, graduate schools (especially for PhD programs) are all about research and not so much about coursework, so you would want a letter to describe how you have the potential to succeed in a research setting.  The industry connection may help you do that, but you haven't provided too much detail on how you worked under that person.
I mentioned this in a comment above, but have you done anything outside of research where you interacted with professors (including TA'ing a course)?  That is also a valid source of getting a recommendation letter.  In addition to this, who would you be thinking about for that third recommendation letter from what courses and why?  It's never too late to try and send a quick e-mail and/or have a conversation in their OH to try and see if you/them remember each other.  Maybe talk about how interesting their class was, what your plans are in the future, or maybe how interested you are in their field/research.  (As a recent graduate, I occasionally try to send a quick e-mail to get advice from professors, especially since with COVID things are largely virtual, and maybe see if I want to ask them for a recommendation down the road, since I am also in the same boat)
When would you be applying for graduate programs?  Maybe you could try to TA a class or get an additional research experience in before you do so, and by extension, that third recommendation letter that you need.


text:
How to find publications from a particular institution in a journal?
Suppose now I am interested in University A and a Journal B. I want to know how many people from University A published a paper in Journal B, and what are these papers. How to do this?

The information you need is public. Faculty lists are easily found. Journal indices are easily found. It's just a bit of a search and correlation. You will get some false positives, though.

Why do you want to know this?

@DavidRicherby Some journals are top journals in some specific fields. I want to know who in University A has published many papers in the top journals so I can roughly find out the most productive researcher with high-quality papers in some fields. This can be seen as a criterion to find a good supervisor somehow.

Unfortunately, affiliations are a mess. People in bibliometrics usually say that you have to know the institution and its various names, acronyms, institutes, and laboratories very well, to capture all publications from the institution. If you have this knowledge, set up a corresponding search query (advanced search) for Web of Science (you need to have access to this database via your institution) and add the journal as additional condition.
Another approach is to check whether the institution you look at has a publications database and you can search for specific journals in there.

Sometimes the journal's (or their publisher's) websites have search tools advanced enough to allow searching/filtering by affiliation too.

@Anyon That's true! Just make sure to capture all names, acronyms etc.

In mathematics, you should be able to do this in MathSciNet (subscription required).
Here is an example I did.
Ohio State University Math department, published in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society.
  JOURNAL Proc Amer Math Soc
  INSTITUTION 1-OHS
I get 102 results.
You have to look up the codes for the items you want.  If I just put "Ohio State" for the institution I seem to get lots of things that are not matches.

In Scopus search, you can do an "affiliations" search, and this often helps to know about the research achievements and research potential of an University..

I would suggest to use lens.org which is free, and where you can use many simultaneous conditions in order to perform the search you are talking about. It is really easy to use, so I would recommend you to give it a try.

"I want to know how many people from University A published a paper in Journal B

I agree with the answer by FuzzyLeapfrog which is that "affiliations are a mess". The one thing I can add is that some publishing companies have specific tools to allow you to see and track affiliation data, for example the Nature Publishing Group has "nature index" which among other things, gives the list of "how many people from University A published with publishing company B":

Got a downvote after my interactions with BryanKrausse and ZeroTheHero here https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/194195/93303. Had a positive score before though, and I don't see anything wrong with this answer.


text:
Using slashes in academic research papers
Is it ok to use a slash to separate alternatives, as in "If 1st_method/2nd_method is used and 3rd_method exists....", in academic paper writing?

That is a forward slash. But I would reword the sentence to be clear what you mean.

Strictly speaking yes it's "ok" but it does not mean it's the best.
Most style books (I'm looking at AMA Handbook at the moment) would list that using forward slash (also called virgule or solidus) to represent "or" is acceptable. But the same symbol can also represent "and" as well as "per." So, there is some chance that misunderstanding can arise.
If it's not under strict word limitation, you may consider using the word "or" in between the two named methods.

What is wrong with something like :
If either the first method or the second method is used...


text:
Proper way to declare; "examples are ficticious for data protection"
I am currently engaged in some volunteer data work with a charity, I would like to create a write up of the work that can be shared with a few partners who do not have full access to the data.
The write up will be mostly statistical overview, which is not sensitive. The statistics are drawn from data-sets which are GDPR protected. In order to illustrate the data pipeline a few examples would be useful, so I will create a small fictional data-set with the same form as the real data.
To avoid any confusion, I need to declare that the examples are fiction (illustrative only) but the statistics are real. Is there a standard way to go about this?
It will look like;

The result of the data pipeline will be to tranform mixed type data
  into a float vector the input is .... Output fields are .... For
  example;
"Joe
  Bloggs|Carmarthen|06:00|Negative|1995|May|Finance|271946"
will become
"267.3|82.|168.|-35.|.0777|1648".

Note the example is not an anonymized record drawn from my data, it is pure fiction.

Is this project under the supervision of your IRB?  If not, why not?

@NateEldredge it is not done as university work, I would like to make it a proper publication, but would need clearance from the charity first. For now all communication is at the discretion of the charity.

If you want to have a chance of publishing the work academically in the future, then the project likely needs to be approved by your IRB from the outset.  (And if you do not intend to publish it or use it for some other academic purpose, then your question would be outside the scope of this site.)

@NateEldredge I believe I know what your referring to but I'm not in the US. I don't have permission from the charity to involve a university at the moment. Possibly for later projects if this one proves valuable. I would still like to treat the write up in a way that would be correct in academia. I think this site can advise on the correct wording even if this particular piece will not be published.

@Clumsycat Ethics committees are not a US-only thing.

@AzorAhai yes, but I suspect that Nate refers to "United States mandate for IRBs". Your both right that there is a real question of any of this ever being publishable, but at this point it's not what I'm working on.

@Clumsycat: I'm really referring to the general principle that academic research involving human subjects needs some sort of ethics oversight.  I do realize that the specific mechanisms and terminology vary in different countries, and I agree I should have used more general language.

Many journals have an ethics-oversight requirement as well.  So even if your university/country doesn't require it, you may not be able to publish without IRB-equivalent approval.

It is common to use words like "fictitious", "fake data", and even a footnote explicitly saying "these are not actual values" or "values for illustrative purposes only". It is even more common to just pick values intentionally that are obviously fake, so that no reasonable person will think they might be real, such as "John Smith|Gotham|01:11|1999|Jan|Accounting|12345" - etc.
I will however note that there is a way to handle this specific case that is even more high-level, which is just not to do this at all, because most stakeholders couldn't care less, much less even know what a float vector is or how they are suppose to interpret it. Telling people details they don't need makes many people think it must be important so they try to latch on to any random interpretation they can think of - because why are you even telling them if it doesn't matter? So if they are not a very specific type of user, just leave this out entirely.
If they are in the tiny, tiny minority of stakeholders that care about this incredibly low-level amount of detail, then it is reasonable to assume they will recognize obviously fictitious data even if you don't say it, and if you really are worried you can just give an asterisk and say its fictitious - but that's already excessive. If you need to demonstrate for some sort of officious bureaucratic sect, declare in the footnote that the data is fictitious for illustrative purposes, persuant GDPR section blah subsection blah blah blah. Give the lawyers something to smile about, if that's your audience, but you shouldn't let it take over the rest of the presentation of the work.

Thank you. In this case the reason for giving examples is that this note should serve as documentation for less-technical users.

How about " real data, but the names / labels have been changed"

No part of the published record will come from a real record. It's probably overkill, but don't want to risk it exposing something it shouldn't. the example could be like;
"Joe Bloggs|Carmarthen|06:00|Negative|1995|May|Finance|271946" and the only relation that would have to real data is the fields contain the same type of data.


text:
Do Universities have a right to stop students from talking about questions on tests?
This case in Canada was between students who were complaining about a professor and the school who claimed doing so was misconduct. The school lost because the punishment infringed on students' freedom of speech.
By this logic, does freedom of speech protect students from punishment if they were to release details of a test question while complaining about it in a similar manner? What legal right do universities have to mandate confidentiality of such things? (I hope this doesn't sound facetious)

Which country's legal system are you asking about?  And what sort of "confidentiality mandate" are you considering?

I'm interested in both Canadian and American legal systems as I've trained in both countries. Especially interested if there are differences. The "confidentiality mandate" in this question deals specifically with test questions, however it reflects my broader ignorance as to what circumstances confidentiality can restrict freedom of speech.

I think we might need to know what this hypothetical school policy says before we can say whether it is legal.  (Sharing a test question for the purposes of criticism would be legal, I believe, under the fair use exception in copyright law.  However, it seems like you are asking what is legal for the school to do, which is a different question that what is legal for the students to do.)

Disciplining students in the absence of a written policy is probably a bad idea, legally speaking.  So I think to answer the question we would need to know exactly what the school's policy says.

Ah, so if there is no policy the student could theoretically do whatever they reasonably want such as posting the exam questions online (baring intellectual property violations, etc). The issue would be the school policy and whether that is compliant with student's right of freedom of speech. Is that correct?

So, if you will, did the school get in trouble because they didn't have a policy about talking poorly about professors online and tried to punish the students anyways, or did they get in trouble because a policy that would prevent students from doing that would be a violation of Freedom of Speech?

Whether a school's policy is legal might depend on how it is worded overall, not just what it does in whatever specific cases have come up so far.  And if there is no written policy whatsoever, that would be similar to having a bad policy in that it would leave a lot of room for the students to argue that their right to due process was violated.  (But even if the policy is okay with regard to due process, it could still violate the right to free speech.)

As for your question about the case that you cited, I don't know.  But for a school in the US, any policy restricting student speech should: (1) be clear, (2) not discriminate against women or constitutionally protected minority groups, (3) not restrict constitutionally protected speech (e.g. political speech,) and (4) have a rational basis consistent with valid goals of the institution.  (This is in order to respect due process rights, equal protection, and free speech.)

FYI: Has the stance on questions pertaining to legal issues changed?

From your link:

Where a government-funded or affiliated entity such as a University attempts to limit the freedom of expression of its students it must carefully consider the students’ Charter right to freedom of expression, and ensure that any limitation is reasonable, justified and compliant with the Charter.

It seems like the difference between punishing people for sharing test questions and punishing them for criticizing professors is that one of these is "reasonable and justified," while the other isn't.

Perhaps you can elucidate my misunderstanding. My train of thought goes: Freedom of speech can only be restricted when compliant with the charter but restrictions on freedom of speech are noncompliant with the charter

@earthling The question in part comes up as I try to understand Freedom of Speech vs Institutional policy like in the current situation at Dalhousie University. As far as I know bigotry isn't a crime. My interpretation of the spirit of the law would seem to say sanctions are in order in that case, but I just don't know if the letter of the law explicitly protects such individuals.

In a nutshell, in what circumstances is an institution allowed to say "you're not allowed to say that"? So far: test questions "yes", negative comments about teachers "no", and bigoted comments "maybe".

Do you know what area of stack exchange I might post this to find people inclined in that direction? I didn't see a legal section. I initially considered philosophy but their questions seemed...different.

@Jim I don't think there is a Law.SE but you could always propose one.

@Jim Law.SE has been proposed and is currently in the commitment phase.

In all reality, there is no way to keep people from talking to each other in pretty much any way they want and the boundaries between what is officially "legal" and "illegal" here are so uncertain, that whatever one hundred volume treatise an army of crooks may write on the subject, it will just confuse everything and clarify nothing.
As to the formal question, AFAIK, the freedom of speech act won't help you much if you are doing something utterly ridiculous (like posting the questions you were explicitly asked not to spread on billboards, online or otherwise), and any legal dispute will be resolved based on the circumstances more than on the action itself, if you decide to bring it to that stage. In general, universities can and do enforce written academic policies against obvious violations and within reasonable limits, but, like it is with copyright, speed limits, and other things, it is understood that an attempt to stick to the letter of the law no matter what will make more harm than good, so you can get away with "minor infringements" more often than not.
As a side note, a professor officially complaining about students complaining about her makes me just laugh: if we had all followed the pattern, the courts would have to work day and night for the next few decades. The article carefully avoids telling what exactly the posts were (and, knowing what our students write in the evaluations, I am ready to believe that some of them might be offensive enough to merit a good slap on the face) but going the official way about such stuff just doesn't seem to lead anywhere. If you are dealing with legitimate and civilized criticism, you'll just have to swallow it, though you may prefer to stay at your own opinion, and if you are dealing with morons, you will just waste your time on them and gain next to nothing even if you win. You'd better leave the judgement about the validity of student complaints about you to your colleagues and other students: most of them aren't blind or stupid and know who is worth what.


text:
How to phrase potential contributions in thesis proposal?
I am pursuing PhD in Computer Science. I am working on writing my PhD dissertation proposal.
My main contribution in my work is going to be about data classification and prediction model.
How should I phrase my potential contributions / tasks in which technical contribution is about clustering/classification and prediction?
I am also planning to propose potential performance improvement in clustering / classification techniques that currently exist in my domain. What all should I plan to achieve? How can I go about phrasing it in the proposal?
I know most answers cannot be specific to my question but any pointer towards direction that I should take...where to look for answer etc. regarding this is much appreciated...

Hi and welcome to Academia.SE! I've removed the questions about doing data analysis from your post, because these are off topic at Academia.SE. You may be able to ask them on [stats.se] instead. (Also, on StackExchange sites we ask that you write only one question per post.)

any pointer towards direction that I should take — Picture me pointing at your advisor.

"If the proposed research is successful, there will be three main
  contributions.  First,....  Second, ... Third,..."

What you need to fill in is the specific nature of your contributions.  It's not enough to say that your algorithms will be "better" or "interesting" or even "useful".  You might use these questions to form a list of specific contributions:

Will you be discovering something new about the problem of data
classification and prediction that no one knew before, or only
understood poorly?
Will you be combining two or more methods that had never been combined before?
Will you be simplifying the problem in some non-trivial way?  Or expanding it? Generalizing it?  Making it more specific or concrete?
Will you be formalizing the analysis in ways that have not before?  What will your formal analysis be proving?
Are you applying an algorithm or formalism from another domain, that has never been done before in this one?
Are you demonstrating through experiments or other empirical research the viability of theoretical methods that have little empirical support?

Finally, imagine that you have completed your dissertation, and maybe you have published articles based on it.  Now imagine what other researchers might need to use your work and build on it, and therefore to cite it.  Why would future researchers need to use your work or build on it?