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Contacting Academic about Industry Problem
I am on an R&D team in industry with no formal connection to anyone in academia. However, a professor wrote a paper on implementing idea A. I have an idea B that extends idea A, but I am unsure about some practical implementation details. I strongly suspect that the aforementioned professor would have some intuition about implementing idea B as they did a very good job of implementing idea A. Moreover, the paper containing idea A did not get very much attention (i.e. has a low citation count and no follow up that I can see). It seems to me that if I am right about idea B, then they might enjoy having found this new application area.
I have written up an explainer on this idea which has the rough form of an academic paper -- though in its current form it would not be publishable. I would like to email this professor, give a brief explanation, attach the explainer, and ask -- if they have the time to spare -- that they look it over and comment if it catches their interest. Is this an acceptable thing to do? If not, are there alternatives and, if so, are there faux pas that I should specifically avoid?

If this falls in your company's revenue stream, offering the academic a small consulting arrangement would enable making sure all the IP gets addressed, and will float your needs higher in the priority list.

What exactly is your goal?

Acceptable practices likely depend on the country.  Furthermore, some countries have public-private partnership programs which could be of interest.

Sure! I (an academic) had someone in industry contact me in a somewhat similar circumstance. I always had the right to politely decline to engage; as it turns out, we had a pleasant email exchange followed by me visiting their workplace for an afternoon (which was quite interesting to me even aside from the mathematics), giving a talk, getting two free meals, and having some interesting and interested discussions with people I never would have otherwise met.

@user2705196 My main goal is to get advise on implementation. But other valuable outcomes could be anything from a collaboration to the academic in question pointing out some substantive flaw in my work. I think the extension is straightforward, but it's hard to know how good the idea really is without a more robust implementation.

This is quite acceptable. I suggest a preliminary email saying that their paper touches on (is close to) some work you are doing in your company and you have an idea that might interest them. Perhaps a brief sketch of the idea, sufficient to show them you're not a crank. Don't include the (draft) paper. You could offer to send it if they are  interested.
If this should progress to joint work you will need to be careful about the IP. The professor will want to publish results, the company may want to get something for nothing.
On the whole this kind of collaboration is good for both parties.

The OP could also provide a link to the draft, which would allow the professor to read it or not at their convenience.

Agree 100% with Ethan's answer, but let me phrase it slightly differently.

ask -- if they have the time to spare -- that they look it over and comment

Professors never have time to spare and have little interest in unsolicited manuscripts. I won't go so far as to say that you definitely won't get a response, but it's probably 50-50, and it'll almost certainly be a brief reply rather than an in-depth review of your paper.

Is this an acceptable thing to do?

Yes, it is, just approach it slightly differently. I would send a brief e-mail in which you ask the technical question you want to ask (i.e., "I am wondering how you implemented A; in my work implementing B, it seems there are several options....").
This has the advantage that it's a light lift for the professor, so they are likely to respond and give you something helpful. And if they express interest in B, then your manuscript will no longer be unsolicited when you send it (though I would still consider sending a one-page summary with your most exciting results, rather than a full manuscript). The usual cautions about protecting your IP apply.

I understand why you both want to avoid sending the manuscript. I would just like to mention that not sending the manuscript, i.e. adding at least one round, can be an obstacle. A not unlikely scenario: I read the question, need more details, don't find any attached manuscript where those details would likely be, don't want to engage at this point, forget about the email, the end.

The problem with "unsolicited manuscripts" isn't that they are unsolicited, but often written by cranks or clueless amateurs and have no value to this professor. Someone doing serious work on a problem who has read the previous paper and tried to expand on it, that's a totally different matter.

Both valid points, but I think an initial e-mail with a manuscript is more likely to be overlooked. Either because it will be misclassified as crankery or spam, or because the recipient will say "oh! this is interesting! I'll come back to it when I have some time"....which never happens.

are there faux pas that I should specifically avoid

There is a potential one. Have you discussed this with your company's legal department? You have just generated Intellectual Property which the company may want to use in some way (either to generate revenue, or as patent ammunition). Your legal people may not want you to share that with an external party, or at least not without an NDA and/or an arrangement in place between your company and the university which spells out in detail how any further IP resulting from this contact would be split up.
Note that while contacting legal may protect your employer in the long term, in the short term it can only put a damper on your plans, so you should think carefully whether you want to wake up these particular sleeping dogs. However, simply sending this out without covering your behind first may get you into hot waters internally, depending on your company's culture.
Of course, if you have to write in your email to that professor with "before I can share that paper, you will have to sign this NDA", that will drastically reduce the professor's willingness to collaborate with you.

Thank you for this observation, but I'm covered on the legal side.

As others have said, this sort of thing goes much easier if you can provide a consulting arrangement, which will both reimburse the professor for their time as well as set out the legal boundaries regarding IP and publication.
There are also dedicated programs that are there to explicitly fund this kind of academic-industry collaboration. One such is the Small Business Innovation Research program .  For this particular program, you write up a proposal to the Department of Energy, who then releases funds to your company for the R&D, some of which ought to be a subcontract to the professor.  It's certainly more work than just cutting a check, but it may also be easier to get your company behind you if someone else is paying for it.  In my experience the award rate is fairly high for this particular program.

Both are valid approaches, but very  different.  One way, you're hiring the academic as a free agent, in a fairly lightweight agreement.  The SBIR would be a sponsored project, and the contract (or one of them, anyway) is with the University, and involves writing a solid grant.  Each has it's place.

@ScottSeidman that's a good point. I suspect most universities will want to have some input in consulting gigs, but much less than a full grant

Some lay out a maximum amount of time faculty spend consulting.  Mine does that, and is very liberal about it, but does suggest we run our contracts through their counsel, without giving them any right of refusal at all.

Things get more complex with International Contracts, though.  Some new laws absolutely need to get followed.


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Is it fair to use techniques I found on the web to solve my assignment?
I'd want to get perspective on what I feel is an unjustified case of academic misconduct.
I am taking a mathematics subject and part of my assignment was to submit answers to questions given.
One of the questions I was unsure of what method I should apply, I searched on youtube and found tutorials on how to solve this problem. I should make it explicit the direct answer was not part of the video, however, using the same method I could substitute my values and get the correct answer.
I may be accused of plagiarism and apparently, my use of the video was unfair and plagiarism. I suspect it's because I used the same symbols which in retrospect I could have, should have changed however I still feel this is unjustified and comparable to applying the chain rule or any other mathematical principle taught through the increasingly powerful use of the internet.
Do you think there are ground to challenge this? I thought I was doing my due diligence sourcing methods, not direct answers.
Do you think this fair?

Welcome to Academia.SE.  Whether we think this is fair seems less important.  What policies for the course were in place?  At my undergraduate institution, what you did would have been find as long as we cited the YouTube video and how it helped us.  Could you clarify whether or not there were course policies at play here?  Was this a take-home test or homework?

Is there such a thing as justified academic misconduct? ;-)

Have you actually been accused of academic misconduct, or are you talking about hypotheticals here?

As the title changes it sounds more and more like you have been accused of breaking rules. If that is the case, then what is the rule you were accused of breaking and was it explicit?

@Flyto Maybe, suppose you are taking a medical course and during the exam which includes a question on how to respond to a certain medical emergency that emergency actually happens to the person next to you and your mind blanking you quickly use forbidden materials in your backpack (Google, a textbook etc.) to look up what to do and save a life.

Doing research, whether on-line or from books, is one thing.  Trusting a YouTube video is something else entirely.

@jamesqf Why? There are thousands of high quality videos that provide instruction on all sorts of topics. I wouldn't blindly trust a YouTube video any more than I'd blindly trust a website, but there are a lot of useful videos that demonstrate math techniques (say, finding eigenvalues) that come from anybody from major universities to organizations like Khan Academy to individual professors making their own videos to random people.

Sometimes this is even a good solution to a assignment. I once had a assignment to find any good approximation to compute a formula in a faster way. Students found many different approximations, but any approximation which worked good enough was a valid solution. Another time I was surprised when the professor later announced that finding some parameter by a brute-force search (for a smaller problem) is a good solution. Now I know, that you later often will use "anything that works". In the end, knowing where and how to look for a solution is one of the things you should learn at university.

@jamesqf Lawrence Lessig is a professor and copyright scholar. He makes YouTube videos on copyright that I thoroughly trust. There are many books discussing copyright by journalists and other non-specialists that contain glaring errors. Remember that the platform or media is not the same as the source.

A possible assignment could be "Find $\lim_{x\to0}\frac{\sin x}x$". Some Youtube video will show how to solve this with l'Hôpital as $\frac{\cos 0}1=1$. However, in your actual course, this exercise was perhaps intended to find out that $\sin'=\cos$ in the first place ... in that case you have introduced circularity.

@Flyto Presumably, the OP meant something along the lines of "unjustified accusation of academic misconduct".

Presumably you referenced the video in your answer. In which case, it's not plagiarism.

A great piece of advice of one of my profesors: Feel free to search online or in books for methods to solve the problem, but after you read something, close the book, and wait an hour or two before solving it.

@TimothyAWiseman: Why in the world would he, or anyone serious, waste time making videos when the information could be conveyed better, faster, and cheaper in writing?

Whatever it was, it wasn't plagiarism. Whether it was within the rules set by your professor is another question. But, assuming that the rules permitted online research to answer the question, then that is all you did. You will have to judge conformance to the rules of your course.
If someone has accused you of plagiarism they are probably using the word incorrectly. That doesn't mean, of course, that you aren't without fault. That is for you and others to judge.
Using the same symbols in mathematics can hardly be faulted in any case, as many of them are standardized and used in the same way throughout mathematics. They might, however, have been a tip-off that you went outside the allowed bounds.
But, for your own educational progress, I hope you don't go to the web too soon to get such questions answered. Struggling with a problem expands your mind in a way very different from finding a solution or a solution framework. If you want to be a mathematician, you need to develop that skill.
Note that exercises given in almost every course, aren't given for the purpose of finding an answer. The professor already has the answer. The purpose is to help you grow your mental abilities. Work on the hard problems. If you want to learn more, work on harder problems.

It is unclear whether the OP went "to the web too soon." It seems like they studied a method to solve the problem on the web.

@user2768, I didn't make a claim that they did. I recommend that students don't.

I did not jump on the web immediately to attempt to solve the problem. I did reflect on my lecture content, looked at my tutorial discussions and did try to formulate steps to the final answer. In the end I used the internet as an outlet to try and understand how a problem like this can be solved but I do admit I didn't linger on this question for hours wondering, thinking. Perhaps I moved on too quickly, I still don't think this justifies this punishment.

@Buffy Your phrasing includes "your [educational progress]" and "[I hope] you" which is somewhat suggestive of fault on the OP's part, a minor edit should clarify

This started out as an answer and ended with a tangential lecture

Regarding the struggle on your own part: We are in 2018. After confirming that you don't know the right method, the first step SHOULD be to check the web. Of course, one should be critical of web sources, but that is beside the point - society today is moving towards "cloud knowledge". While I also encourage self study, using "the cloud" (wisely) is the most efficient way to solve problems...

@StianYttervik In the short term perhaps but Buffy's right to point out that this trend is also producing reams of would-be scientists and mathematicians with no critical thinking skills of their own. Cloud knowledge doesn't mean "everyone's knowledge except my own", and a mathematics course is almost certainly expecting the student to apply some of their own thinking rather than just look up the answer someplace else. Admittedly this is a very difficult and blurry line in general - after all, research ability is also important (OP did this part well) and arguably more useful day-to-day.

...I was unsure of what method I should apply, I searched on youtube and found tutorials on how to solve this problem...using the same method I could substitute my values and get the correct answer.

That is not plagiarism, that is learning: You were given a problem, you found a method that could be used to solve your problem, and you applied the method to your problem. That's exactly how we learn.
By analogy, suppose I'm asked to find the area of a circle, but I don't know how. So, I search the internet and discover that the area of a circle is π·r2. Now I'm able to apply what I've learnt to solve the problem (assuming I know the radius r or diameter 2·r). That's how we learn, that's not plagiarism.

Also, basic techniques like these don't normally need to be cited. If you use some obscure, advanced theorem that came out last year, then you should cite that, even in homework. For some techniques, it helps to name the rule (e.g. step 5: use L'Hopital's rule [work]), but you wouldn't need a formal bibliographic citation.

I agree with all of this, but it is worth noting that many courses, especially in mathematics and related fields, discourage use of materials from outside the course because they want the students to learn the methods as presented. This especially makes sense in an area like PDE. Many homework problems have trivial solutions if any technique is allowed but the professor wants to force you to use techniques that are more difficult to learn that technique.

Rote learning an equation without understanding it (or how to derive it) is arguably the most basic form of learning, if at all. That said, it’s probably the norm so it’s hardly unethical and definitely not misconduct.

@TimothyAWiseman "many courses...discourage use of materials from outside the course," wow! That surprises me. A significant amount of what I've learnt was outside of my courses

@user2768 Agreed, I remember specifically being told "if you learn only what's displayed here, you will get a C - higher grades require learning outside of the course materials"

@user2768 It often makes sense in context. Professors often want to use relatively simple problems to teach advanced techniques rather than constructing complex problems that can only be solved with the advanced technique. The simple problems often have trivial solutions if the techniques available aren't limited. This comes up a lot with partial differential equations for example.

@TimothyAWiseman Understood, that makes sense.

Seems to me the professor was expecting the students to come up with their own method, not use someone else's. Whether that's sensible or not is by the by, although whether the professor should have made this clearer is more pertinent, particularly if sanctions are now threatened as a result.

@LightnessRacesinOrbit I didn't get that from the OP's question, but your point is valid

@user2768 I deduced it from (a) the plagiarism accusation, and (b) the purpose of schools

I concur with @user2768 's answer. What you did was fine, unless the assignment specified "don't look anything up".
I think what you should have done was include in your submission exactly what you told us here:

I was unsure of what method I should apply, I searched on youtube and
  found tutorials on how to solve this problem.

with a reference to the link that helped you.
Had you done so the worst case would be an accusation that you misinterpreted the rules (which may not have been clearly stated), not that you cheated in any way.
This is what I provide my students for guidance: https://www.cs.umb.edu/~eb/honesty/

@St.Inkbug University policies were OK as far as they went, but they focused on the "don'ts". I wanted to use the opportunity to encourage exploring. I usually asked students to summarize this piece in the first assignment, so I could later remind them that they'd read it. Sadly, many paraphrased the don'ts and skipped the dos.

@St.Inkbug Thank you. If you want to continue the conversation offline you can find my email address in my profile and on my web page.

I suspect it's because I used the same symbols which in retrospect I could have, should have changed

This may well be the case. And I can understand the attitude behind it.
It is one thing to find an alternative source to teach you what you need, learn from it and apply what you've learned to a given task. This is perfectly fine (most of the time).
However, looking up the solution to your task, copying it, only putting in different numbers, and handing that in as your own work will look much more inacceptable.
No, you should not have just changed the symbols! That can be seen as an attempt to cover your 'plagiarism'.
What you should do in the future is:
If you find (part of) a solution to your task in some literature, pick it up and understand it. (That's not to memorize it!)
Then put aside that literature and with your acquired understanding solve the task manually. This will help you avoid the accusations of plagiarism (no guarantee, depending on how much the source's solution differs from what you're expected to provide) and at the same time help you learn the required/requested skills and prove that you've done so.

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How do some institutions attract so many female computer scientists?
It's no secret that computer science is a heavily male-dominated discipline. It's so male-dominated that some people have given up trying to attract more women. Yet Carnegie Mellon not only has close to 50% women in their undergraduate CS classes, they have lots of female faculty. Why?
I'm also interested in what any other institution that's been successful at achieving something resembling gender parity has done as well.

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It's a UK organisation, but the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) promotes the Athena SWAN charter for equality in higher education and their website includes some example of good practice: https://www.ecu.ac.uk/equality-charters/athena-swan/athena-swan-good-practice-in-heis/

It wasn't always the case that CS was a field dominated by men.  Through the 1970's and into the 1980's,  computer science was a field that attracted more women than many other STEM fields. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding

Carnegie Mellon gives an answer on their website:

The steady climb of women enrolling in these fields at Carnegie Mellon highlights a combination of factors: a strong commitment by leaders at the university, college and department levels; influential pipeline programs for middle- and high-school students; targeted recruitment; closer scrutiny of applications; support and mentorship programs; and attention to diversifying the faculty.

A second, speculative answer:  Carnegie Mellon is wealthy.  Computer science is where they invest the most.  If they want to attract more women to their computer science department, they can use their money to do it.  Many of the factors they list cost money. They may be decreasing the diversity of other universities.

If they are influencing middle school or earlier, they could equally be increasing the diversity at other universities with the same feed schools. (by supporting the 30% threshold past the age where biases tend to skew the balance)

@SeanHoulihane Their impacts could be wider, sure, but I doubt "equal": although I'm not familiar with Carnegie Mellon in particular, "pipeline" programs tend to be pretty strongly branded. Though they may do some general good for society, they are probably also reinforcing explicitly or implicitly "...and your next step is to come to Carnegie Mellon." I don't think it's a bad thing, I'm just skeptical you can estimate the broader impact by looking just at Carnegie.

@BryanKrause, I'm thinking if they improve the pipeline in a single school from an early enough age, that will tend to bootstrap the diversity within the school. Maybe not self-sustaining, but I think there is likely some amplification and it is not at all clear that 2nd choice universities would loose out.

Agreed, partly why I said I don't think it's a bad thing. I doubt anyone is really losing out, in any case, I don't think diversity is a zero sum game.

We are a smaller German University of Applied Science and most of our courses have a certain application field in addition to computer science (usually about 70% computer science, 30% application related). The application fields "media" and "medicine" seem to motivate many female students to start studying, even if they later decide to work in the automotive industry or somewhere else.
Furthermore, our university strongly invests in diversity actions, we are trying not to discriminate anyone, and we are trying to promote female students e.g. as student assistants / tutors (which is not hard, since we are usually looking for the best, and most times we are having more female top students than male ones). But for the younger female students it is good to see that others succeeded or are very successful.
Once you crossed the 30% mark, the feeling is that it's not "special" or "strange" if you are female.
One point where we have to improve is the number of female faculty members, but this takes time.
But still, motivating more students to study computer science is a high priority!

+1 for “Once you crossed the 30% mark, the feeling is that it's not "special" or "strange" if you are female.” —I suspect this is a huge factor. Theoretically, this is supported by work like Thomas Shelling’s “Micromotives and Macrobehavior”

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At the risk of sounding like a broken record:

I'm especially interested in answers from female computer scientists at CMU.

Well, go ask (some of) them, politely; you can't expect them to stumble onto this page...
The staff directory is available; you'll need to figure out which ones are women by the photos and the names though, and pick out a few people to contact. But, better yet, you should start by contacting the Dean or whatever CMU call the head of the School of Computer Science.
The School of Computer Science at CMU also has a dedicated Women @ SCS website, which you should check out, both for immediately-relevant material and for names of women faculty and management personnel which you could contact directly (i.e. put those at the top of your list of people to contact). Thanks to @user3067860 for noticing that site!
PS - As commenters suggest, you can't just start asking specific questions with long answers right away, you need to make sure whoever it is you contacted is willing to converse regarding these issues.

Maybe the OP should start here: http://www.women.cs.cmu.edu/

i'm sure all the women in the department would LOVE to have some random interrogating them out of the blue about their experiences.

@dn3s I suspect the intention was to reach out to the heads of the department and ask about approaches they have used, not to contact to women who did join and ask them why.

@dn3s: 1. OP would obviously need to sample a few faculty members. 2. With a properly worded introduction, and a question regarding willingness to discuss this issue, recipients would either politely decline or agree, without feeling interrogated by random people.

I removed some debate about whether this should be an answer, a comment, a vote-to-close, a chat discussion, or something else. At this point (four years and 40 upvotes later) it is staying as an answer. However, this is a singular decision and does not create a precedent that answers like this are acceptable generally -- if another case arises in future, we can discuss on meta at that time.

The phenomenon you have observed, where some programs have great difficulty attracting female CS majors (and faculty) and others are approximately 50%, is a classic example of a "tipping point" phenomenon. Tipping point phenomena were modeled in economics by Nobel prizewinning theorist Thomas Schelling. They were popularized by Malcolm Gladwell.
The intuition is this: Everyone faces certain benefits and costs from pursuing a CS degree. The benefits include income, intellectual challenge etc. The costs include hard work, eye strain, etc. In addition, minority individuals face the cost of being an "outsider" in the environment. This "outsider cost" is typically modeled as increasing in the segregation of the field. So a field with 90% men would have a higher outsider cost to a woman than a field with 60% men.
The tipping point comes into play when looking at equilibria. One equilibrium is that there are very few CS women. This is because the outsider cost is so high that only women who highly value the benefits (income, challenge, etc.) have a net positive utility from the CS major. But, if you can nudge the system off this equilibrium and get even a few more women, then you can decrease the outside cost enough that a few additional women find CS net positive. And then these women's presence decreases the costs further, and so on. You progressively tip the scales of cost/benefit such that you reach the second equilibrium of 50/50.

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If you want to attract some contingent of students to your institution, then provide an attractive work environment for them. It is really as simple (complex) as that. It doesn't have to be just the male/female breakdown here, but it applies there of course.
First, consider the answer here of user Dawn who suggests a tipping point. But how do you get to the tipping point. Others have suggested money, but I'm pretty sure that is insufficient, though it may be necessary.
First, how many women do you have on the faculty? Is it enough? Why not. Is it harder for them to get tenure? Why is it harder to get tenure? Women (in the US, at least) often have societal demands put on them that they can't avoid and that makes a rapid advance to tenure impossible. In a related case, I had a brilliant female colleague who had to delay her career to take care of an ailing mother. Men almost never have that problem as someone else (a woman) will do that instead. Women also need to have accommodation made for childbirth as no one else will take over that burden. Men don't have to delay family or choose between career and family. Single parents are usually (not always) women. Do you pay young women enough that, especially if they are single parents, they can afford proper childcare without sacrificing their research? Rigid rules around tenure and salary work against you here. Tailor the system so that it is consistent with your overall goals and flexible enough to accommodate special situations.
So, work to build up (and tenure) your female (or other "minority") faculty.
Next is the question of how welcoming the environment is for students. Look not only to universities with a better balance, but look also to small women's colleges (and Historically Black colleges). Why do students want to go there? The faculty has a lot of women, of course, but not all. However, the environment has a lot of people who "look like me." (Tipping point again). But, beyond that, those places also seem to me to be better at mentoring young students. In many of them the faculty and students are on first name basis with one another. The professor becomes a role model, not just a teacher.
So, make sure mentoring happens. This can work for everyone, not just women.
Next, is the actual work schedule sane or insane? Do you require long hours in the lab that may be possible for men (who have external support for the daily tasks of living) and not so much for women (who often are left with those tasks. Does your environment lead to burn out for some? That is unhealthy for everyone and leads to extreme stress. Some questions on this site suggest that it is more common than it should be. Some of the techniques for reducing stress, by the way, require additional time and effort. That may be harder for those with outside responsibilities. On a related note, is your work schedule so intense and competitive that backstabbing among students (or even with professors) happens? Do you have a way to make that stop? A number of questions on this site indicate that it happens more than it should. Even people "stealing" the research product of others.
So, assure that the work schedule is sane and not overly stress inducing.
Next, how are women treated day to day by both faculty and other students. Is there some low level of sexual harassment that is tolerated? Are you sure? There are faculty who prey on students, of course. Are you sure that you have a way to both recognize that and to force it to stop? Do you have formal standards of conduct that apply to both faculty and students. Note that mentoring (of both males and females) can help here. A quiet word from a mentor can change behavior when needed.
So, make sure that no one needs to deal with the "ick factor".
Next, who's questions and opinions are valued? Is it only extroverts who get a chance to say anything or to represent a working group? Does your faculty have sufficient training to assure that every student's ideas are valued? Fairly simple, but required, teaching seminars can improve the classroom/lab environment. They will probably be resented by some, but you have to ask, what is important? If you only value high pressure ego driven research progress, you will attract only people who are comfortable in that environment.
So, consider your values and find ways to operationalize them, not just talk about them.
And note that you don't have to sacrifice research quality or output to do these things. Take CMU, for example.
For what it is worth, I never had a situation in which I thought a female colleague was less able than her peers, including myself. I have a pretty big ego, of course.

And yes, I realize that I answered a slightly different question.

To your question of other institutions getting gender parity: Until visa and exchange rates started making things harder, Australian universities had a lot of Iranian postgraduate students. I noticed that the proportion of women in this cohort was very high, and when I asked some of those (female) students about this they told me that computer science is a popular subject of study for women in Iran, and that they felt very accepted in the field. Articles such as this one from Forbes seem to bear this out. I hesitate to draw any conclusions from this, but it's an interesting example of a place where computer science in not assumed to be a male-oriented field.

At my low-diversity STEM Ph.D. program (arguably top 10), the biggest change we made during recruitment week (a week where accepted student applicants visit the school) was that we hosted a women-only social event. Current female Ph.D. students in the program chatted with female recruits socially. No men were present. Shockingly that year we went from maybe 20% of female recruits accepting offers (in the past) to 100%. I think the event showed that we as a program acknowledge that being female in our field comes with additional challenges, and having a safe space to talk about those challenges is important. I think it also created a sense of social cohesion with the female recruits. They liked each other, they liked the possibility that they could all go to school together. They also got to ask really important questions about the program that they may have felt uncomfortable asking if there were men present. Literally, nothing else changed, this one small change to recruitment week had such a massive effect.

How many offers to female students did your department make?

Maybe 5 to women and 6 to men. It was over 5 years ago so not sure.

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How can I work with PhD supervisor/colleagues who insist on using their own timeline?
I'm a PhD-student in (hopefully) my final year of my thesis, but there are still some open tasks before handing in. Since funding has already run out some time ago, I am trying to wrap up everything as soon as possible. Thus, I try to be more pro-active, i.e., do not wait until colleagues or my supervisor are answering mails/setting up meetings, but rather set them up and plan them by myself. This also involves writing meeting notes from meetings covering the next steps and send those to the persons involved.
Especially for planning future steps I usually prefer to get responses within a reasonable time frame (i.e., usually within two workdays) such that I can continue with the discussed tasks as soon as possible. If I do not get responses within that time frame I earlier could assume that everyone agreed with the results and next steps.
Now, during the recent months my supervisor and colleagues started working together and increasingly ignored the summaries. On multiple occasions the decisions of earlier meetings were completely neglected and the direction of the project was changed, meaning that I had to discard my work done until that point to start from scratch again. When bringing that up my supervisor stated that I should be more aware of the schedule of the people involved, and therefore understand that getting answers/change suggestions can take up to several weeks. He stated that I should be more relaxed, something which is getting more difficult for me in light of the situation stated above.
I currently do not know how to handle the situation, and how to improve it (if possible). Thus:

Are my expectations to get responses in a timely manner (i.e., two workdays) too high? I know that my colleagues and my supervisor are busy, but I'd still appreciate it if I would not have to deal with changes introduced several days or weeks later.
What would be the best strategy to improve the current work situation, to finish the project within a reasonable time frame? To a similar question it was suggested to set own deadlines for answers, comments, etc., but that failed in my case.

Hmmm. Are you trying to take over the supervisor's job? Their authority?

Or, are you that student who, when put on a team, decides to do the work all by themself? I hate to seem harsh, but it reads like you lack something about the concept of teamwork.

Your supervisor is your boss. Bosses tend to prefer to work on their, and not their employees timeline. It’s a good idea to set up meetings and write notes, but don’t expect to be able to will your boss into changing how they operate. The attempt alone can easily be off-putting. For better or for worse, you likely have to accept that.

@Buffy: It might have been written like that, but I definitely do not try to take up all the work in a team. I would rather expect clear expectations, such that I can work on those tasks (thus I took up writing the notes), and it can be frustrating if I've been told several weeks later that I misunderstood something in the meeting, and therefore all my work during those weeks is in vain. To avoid spending time on tasks which are not necessary I therefore try to clarify as much as possible before starting. I hope that that clarifies the situation a bit?

@gnometorule: I understand that, even if it might be frustrating sometimes. But yes, you might be right in that case.

It's debatable whether, when funding has run out, the supervisor is still the student's boss. If this means what it would where I live, that means the OP is working in an unpaid capacity as part of the supervisor's lab. In that context I don't think it's unreasonable to be annoyed that one is having to regularly discard work because people are not responding (even to note they will follow up with more detail later) in a timely manner.

"Thus, I tried to be more pro-active, i.e. do not wait until colleagues or my supervisor are answering mails/setting up meetings ..." - let me just tell you, I think you sound like a perfect fit for an industry job :-)

@user_0815 Occasional misunderstandings happen. However, if there is a regular misunderstanding of tasks that need a lot of time to be completed and later have to be scrapped, then you need to find out whether your boss is simply communicating badly and you need more elicit clarifying information or whether you tend to misinterpret them (again clarifying questions can help here) or go off prematurely on something you think you understand (but don't). Is that the case? If so, there is a quite fundamental issue in your communication that has slowed you down. Not exactly your question.

@CaptainEmacs: I am not sure if there are misunderstandings, or simply changes of direction, but to be sure of that I tried to sum up those meetings, such that I can refer to them afterwards. Also, in case of questions arising after meetings those notes can be quite helpful, but they are entirely useless if the notes are either not confirmed by colleagues or discarded as "you have misunderstood something" after several weeks. This is the main reason of why I would like to receive feedback within a reasonable time frame.

@Buffy is it wrong to be "that student" even when your colleagues finish up their part just a day before the meeting/deadlines and your work depends on their results in some capacity?

@helperFunction, yes indeed, it is wrong and a failure of "teamwork" from the start. Teamwork doesn't mean divide up the work. That is a plan guaranteed to fail. It also adds additional work - integration of the parts.

@Buffy in that situation, what according to you would be the right way of handling things?

@helperFunction, make it a team. Have meetings, work together. For a software project, learn about Agile Software Development and its practices, some of which can be applied to other domains.

If OP is independent, that's great. I am a big fan of PhD students that set their own schedule and are proactive, as long as they are reasonably capable of taking a sensible route.
If a student would start foisting a time table and response times upon me, however, and insist on them being followed, we would have a discrete "tete-a-tete" about who is in charge of setting the schedule.
Now, of course, you are under time pressure; we do not know what was the cause of that or who was responsible for that - but from your question it seems that you regularly went off into directions which were later canceled. We do not know whether this is because your supervisor would be a pedant, or because you might have been more enthusiastic than discerning. This may have cost you a lot of time in the past.
Also, you talk about "tried to be more proactive." That indicates that there was another problem in the past; we do not know what it was, but perhaps you were too reactive in the past and you now try to compensate for that - but you cannot dump recovery from past mistakes onto your supervisor to fix.
All this is reading between the lines of your question, and the matter may have been entirely different.
Your funding problem is the real issue here, it appears. Ask your supervisor what can be done to alleviate your problem. If additional funding cannot be found, ask them what they advise for you to be able to finish as quickly as possible. Be respectful, they may be able to help you in your situation - but, by no means impose your pacing onto them.

My main reason for becoming more "pro-active" was the feedback from my supervisor. Initially I did not write notes and asked for confirmation, but after he changed expectations and parameters several times weeks after starting the experiment while stating that he always intended the experiment to be run in his way, and I misunderstood in our meeting I decided to write notes, such that I at least have a guideline to follow and to refer to.

@user_0815 Yes, that's precisely what I suspected. It is now clear that you were originally not pro-active enough, but now you seem to be overshooting in the other direction. There is a clear mismatch between what your supervisor expects and how you work, and it appears to lie at the bottom of your issues.  Since you are towards the end of your thesis, probably your best bet is to discuss with your supervisor how to optimally accelerate your thesis.

I tried to, but he insists on finishing all experiments/simulations/papers/etc. first, which is difficult if those requirements get changed or extended constantly.

@user_0815 I see. That's a problem, indeed. You may need to be concrete on the timeline with your supervisor and check how this can be cast in stonenow.

Are my expectations to get responses in a timely manner (i.e. two workdays) too high?

Yeah, I think that's a high expectation. In some groups it may be possible, but especially to expect this from a group of multiple people each who have their own responsibilities both to themselves and others I think is too high. I'd set about a week as a low end for expectations, partly on the basis that most people have a somewhat weekly schedule (that is, if they have more free time on Thursdays, it's like that free time recurs every Thursday). However, some times people have other "one-time" events that may make them unreachable for longer (their own deadline, particular busy parts of a course year such as before/after exams, etc).

What would be the best strategy to improve the current work situation, to finish the project within a reasonable time frame?

It sounds like you're soliciting a lot of feedback for this stage in your project.  By now you should somewhat know what you're doing and who you're working with. You should be able to anticipate some of the feedback you get and pursue alternative directions without getting instruction.
For things you need immediate feedback on, especially from more than one stakeholder, schedule meetings. Prepare all the information necessary to make the decision, present it concisely, and get your answer. I do think it's generally reasonable to have a weekly meeting scheduled with the people you work closely with, but that's not reasonable for everyone. However, if you're someone that needs a weekly meeting to be productive and your supervisor isn't, well...you're pretty much out of luck by this stage on that one, you'll just have to manage. This is sort of "week/month one" negotiation stuff, or things to work out before you even start.
If you have more than one thing going at once (you mention multiple "tasks" that need completing), structure your work so that you can be waiting for feedback on some things while preparing others.
Lastly, work with your advisor on a reasonable timeline. Instead of asking for more rapid feedback (your solution), present them with your problem (needing to graduate by some date) and ask for guidance. At some point one simply has to stop iterating on things. There is no natural defined end beyond which there is no more work to do for most academic projects.

We worked out a timeline for the project several times, but each time requirements changed (or were added by him), resulting in delays. Therefore, at least for me it is difficult to believe that new timelines will help much here.

@user_0815 You don't need to make a "new" timeline, you need to work together to stick to the old one. So, if something new is added that takes more of the finite time remaining, then something else has to be dropped. What would your advisor suggest dropping to incorporate the new requirement? In addition, your timeline needs to budget for things to change because things always do. It's not realistic to budget only for everything to work perfectly the first time.

You are trying to boss your advisor around, and that is not going to work. Other answers have had much good advice on alternatives.
I would like to focus on one detail in your question:

the direction of the project was changed, meaning that I could discard my work done until that point to start from scratch again.

This is not acceptable.  It is way to late for changing directions. Push back on this.
We are talking about your thesis.  Your advisor can offer advice, but you decide whether that advice is good or not.  And if they are too busy to talk to you, make your own decisions and stick to them.
Once you get out of the "three steps forward and two steps back" routine, you should be able to reach the goal in a reasonable time.

I am not sure how to push back on it if my supervisor finally is responsible for saying "Yes, you can submit this thesis." Unless I could finish all the tasks he gave me this will not happen...

I think you cannot steer your supervisor and the research project. Everybody besides you have multiple other duties like different research projects, other PhD students to supervise, writing proposals, reading theses, writing papers, teaching, and so on. They have to balance the amount of their time they spent to these topics.
Further, your personal goals (finishing your PhD in a timely manner) does not necessarily align with the research group (research breakthrough, some long-term goal, creating PhD thesis topics, being interesting for industrial collaborators, preparing research questions for the next grant).
So you cannot change how fast you get answers and you cannot change the research group. I think you should try to decouple your PhD thesis from the research in the group.
Sit down with your advisor and define what you still need to do for your thesis. Both of you have to agree, that once you covered the defined scope, you are allowed to write up your thesis, hand it in, and defend. Beside that, you can or cannot invest in the common research direction - that depends on what you can negotiate with your advisor. Their slow pace will help you allocating your time to your personal research, to aim finishing your work.
Good luck.

The issue here is that my supervisor still tries to change the scope of the work by extending it after meetings, even if the opposite was discussed during the meeting. This is the reason I try to keep notes, to verify if it was my memory which failed (and the topic came up during the meeting) or he changed his mind afterwards.

@user_0815 That is a problem. You have to make an appointment and nail him down on a scope and make it clear to him, that you want to write your thesis with this scope. If the project changes, that's fine and you will support them. But you make it clear to him, that it is time for you to wrap your PhD thesis up.

Are my expectations to get responses in a timely manner (i.e. two workdays) too high? I know that my colleagues and my supervisor are busy, but I'd still appreciate it if I would not have to deal with changes introduced several days or weeks later.

From my experience, a one-word answer is yes, your expectation here is unrealistic. I state later why I say so.

What would be the best strategy to improve the current work situation, to finish the project within a reasonable time frame? To a similar question it was suggested to set own deadlines for answers/comments/etc., but that failed in my case.

I would think that a hard deadline is the best way - where you leave your current position and/or move to your next employment. In most cases, the first vision of a PhD project is not achieved - which is fine. One of the outcomes of a PhD project is also your career training and that is non-negotiable. Apart from that, if your university requires you to have certain requirements fulfilled before defending your thesis, that should be done as well. On the research outcomes, by the time you finish your PhD, the experiments/data/code should have been documented properly and have reached a stage to be made publicly available if that is what your group has agreed to do.
The thing is your research project(s) is only a part of your colleagues' (including your supervisor) ongoing projects. They should prioritise your projects since a PhD is a hard deadline, unlike their employment which might not be for a limited period, but placing unrealistic conditions on them would harm your collaborations with them. There are other factors (family, life and so on) that determine how much and when they can focus on working on common projects with you.
My suggestion is that having end goals for your PhD to achieve some research outcomes is a great way to approach and tackle your PhD - since it gives meaning to what we do. But it is a problem if it gets in the way of you collaborating with others and makes you non-flexible and non-adaptable - both to the research goals and to the schedule. One of the other outcomes of PhD is also to work with people on big projects (longer timeline and goals which typical PhD projects are).
I would suggest having open communication with your group - tell them why a certain deadline is important to you in the long term and give them the room to think and react when they want instead of requiring them to respond within 2 days. Giving them the benefit of doubt when they are late in responding is also good for your health and nerves (you can think and work on your personal projects in the meanwhile). These are positive collaborating practices and is conducive to your career growth and good health in the long term. In the end, if you feel like the grand goal of your PhD is unattainable due to the pace of the work, it is still fine since you do grow out of your PhD and have learned something in the process.
Hope this helps.

Getting timely responses/decisions by email in academia is in my experience a lost cause.  However, if you're scheduling regular meetings (which are the right way to make time-sensitive decisions, imo), you shouldn't have to deal with things by email.  I would suggest that you try to be clearer about meeting agendas and conclusions.
It sounds like during meetings, you and your PI/collaborators aren't on the same page about when you're making a firm decision about the next steps in the project, and when you're having a general discussion about possible options.  So you need to be very explicit about what you need, what you're planning, etc - and you need to do that during the meeting, not by email, because emails clearly aren't a good communication medium for these kinds of issues in your group.

Before the meeting, send everyone an email summarizing what you want to talk about and what decisions you need to be made.
At the end of the meeting, state what you understand the decision to be and what you plan to do as a result, and ask if everyone agrees with that and if they have other concerns. If people have concerns or the decision is unclear, you want to make sure that this is figured out during the meeting, instead of by email afterward. If it looks like things are unclear, schedule another meeting (or extend the current meeting if possible).
Your goal is to make sure that by the end of the meeting, everyone understands what decisions have been made and what you will be spending your time doing, so that if they decide to change direction later, they know this will cause wasted work on your part.

That said, projects pretty much inevitably involve changing directions and wasted effort going into different things that end up not working out - if everyone already knew what they were doing, it wouldn't be academia!  So it's possible that everyone does already understand how much time you're spending on backtracking and wasted work, and they think that's how science normally works. (They may be right! There's not enough detail to tell.) In that case you have a larger-scale problem, and you should talk about that with your PI and ask if there's anything that can be done about it, possibly by making your work more independent.

Since funding has already run out some time ago, I am trying to wrap up everything as soon as possible

I think this is the key issue.  The project suddenly became much more urgent to you, but it did not get any more urgent to anyone else.  Your advisor and other stakeholders are still getting their normal salary and so are still on the same pace they used to be, you are trying to accelerate the pace.
The only way to solve this is make your advisor or other stakeholders truly understand why this is so urgent to you, and get them to feel the same urgency.
Read the book "Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It" by Chris Voss.  One key takeaway from this book: phrase questions your advisor in the form of "how am I supposed to?"  For example "As you know, the funding has run out a long time ago. I can't get a job until I finish my dissertation, but I can't finish my dissertation due to XYZ issues. I have $X left in my bank account. How am I supposed to pay my rent and buy food once that runs out?"
He might answer this by solving the problem in a different way.  For example, maybe he knows of some other source of funding get you through until the end.  Or maybe he agrees to speed up his timetable.

My supervisor mostly cares about the main project to be finished, but keeps changing directions of the experiments (which is the reason I am trying to keep notes and to verify them after meetings). He does not care about my funding issues, and keeps telling me to just find a job. How, that is up to me.


text:
Peer reviewing with dyslexia
Background
I am a postdoc in theoretical physics and have severe dyslexia. A consequence of my dyslexia is that I have a very low reading ability and comprehension level - in the lowest 1st percentile.
It is very hard for me to read a single paper - to learn new topics I often find it easier to jump around different sources of information extracting key bits from each (something I believe is common in dyslexics).
(Note: I want to make it slightly clear that the struggles of someone with dyslexia are different from those who are not native speakers)
Situation
I have recently been asked to do my first peer-review - something I knew would eventually happen and something I have been dreading. I know the importance of peer review for academia and therefore it is not something I want to try and get out off.
The question
Are there any (well-tested) techniques to aid in good, efficient and fun peer reviewing for someone who has difficulty with comprehension?

Is it only with the written word that your comprehension suffers? You must have used some effective techniques to get you to where you are? How did that go?

@Buffy Yes, mainly written word. I can follow talks more easily. I guess the main technique I currently use is to actually just work things out for myself, with information gathered through different places (e.g. talks, lecture notes, or papers). But I never read full papers - I usually read a sentence or two about the bit I'm currently trying to understand.

You have my sympathy. I have dyslexia,(and dyspraxia) and i find reviewing difficult, but not unenjoyable. I just have accept that a review my colleagues will dash off in 2-3 hours will take me two days, and plan accordingly. On a practical note, you might try read aloud software to have to computer read the paper to tou.

@IanSudbery Thanks for this comment. I do use text-to-speech software. That said, it is slightly lacking when it comes to reading documents with lots of maths in - making it sometimes more of a pain to use than its worth. As a side project I am actually trying to write a LaTex to Speech Synthesis Markup Language `converter' which would solve this issue but it's not ready to handle full latex documents yet.

If you have difficulty writing, that might be addressed by creating an audio recording  that peer reviews the document.  In my experience, journals will let you upload any file with your peer review.  This probably does not answer your question, but it could help other individuals with dyslexia.

@AnonymousPhysicist I do like this suggestion and use audio recordings in a lot of my personal life - there is, however, a loss of confidentiality in this case. Especially if the authors know the reviewer.

@JosephTooby-Smith Any reasonable journal editor will consider accessibility more important than anonymity.  The audio recording conflicts with anonymity, not confidentiality.  In physics, the reviewer is anonymous.  The review is confidential.  You should not review the work of people you know too well.

@AnonymousPhysicist Agreed - to all points.

How many reviewers does the journal use? If you're one of 2 or 3 reviewers you may be able to review while acknowledging (to the editor) that some aspects are harder than others to review thoroughly, but if you're the only reviewer (some APS journals for example) that's not an option.

Do dyslexic fonts such as Opendyslexic help? https://opendyslexic.org/ If so, you could ask the editor if the paper could be generated with the best font for you. This should be virtually no effort with Latex or Word

I believe I've seen Emacs support for text-to-speech synthesis, and as Emacs supports LaTeX sources as well, that might be a low hanging fruit or two there.

Difficulty writing… avoiding recordings… I’m not dyslexic, but s dyslexic friend used speech recognition SW, as do I ~75% of the time. Basic dictation IMHO ok). Programmers (including TeX users) often need extension packages written in Basic or Python or … I haven’t tried math/TeX/LaTeX myself yet, but web users report success. BTW Windows Nuance Dragon is the best around, only buy the professional version so that you can write your own extensions. I hope one day open source peech recognition will be competitive. Remote to *ic widely used.

@KrazyGlew Dragon is good - I've used it in the past. Annoyingly they discontinued there mac version though.

Yes, many regret tDragon\Mac’s demise. But many report success controlling Mac/Unix apps via  remote access, eg ssh, from a Windows PC using Dragon. you lose the parsing of menus, but you can still use app/window context sensitive commands. Especially using an X Windows server on PC, eg from Cygwin. Similarly, running Dragon\Windows in a Parallels virtual machine to control the Mac it is running on. I have not tried, though.

Let me suggest a strategy. It depends on the paper to be reviewed not requiring extreme confidentiality. A variation on this technique is used fairly often by senior professors.
Find one or two students at the university. I'd suggest two, actually, and work together as a team to analyze and discuss the paper. Depend on them for the written stuff and use your own knowledge and background to fill in things they need to know to understand the work.
Having two students lets you encourage them to work together to explore the topic further without you needing to always be in the loop. Meet as necessary, say an hour per week.
The students will actually benefit from this if the paper is at all related to their studies. Even undergraduates can benefit from a deep, but guided, look at current work. They will benefit not just from reading the paper and trying to understand it, but more, I think, in trying to explain it to you and each other.
Some places will find a way for them to get a bit of academic credit for such things.

I can see this been a very useful technique, although feel it is more likely to work for professors then post-docs. In terms of getting access to willing students etc.

Talk to one of the profs that advises students in your field. I'd think Cornell would be a good place to make this work.

Maybe your place is full of exceptional people, but generally students to not have the skill (or lets say experience) to do meaningful peer review. Exception maybe end of PhD students. Generally you should have gone through the process yourself a few times and should also have a (quite) comprehensive knowledge of the whole subject.

@lalala it's not unknown for PhD students to be asked to review papers. I checked with with my supervisor that this was reasonable before agreeing; I did wonder if he'd actually arranged to punt the review to me.

I have reviewed a journal article as a PhD student which was eventually published, as an undergraduate would probably be unusual though.

@Tom, I wasn't suggesting that the review be passed on to an undergrad, which would defeat the OPs purpose. But studying a paper and discussing it is something valuable in multiple ways, both for the OP and for the students, not to mention the journal.

Are there any (well-tested) techniques to aid in ... fun peer-reviewing

Disregarding the rest of your question, if you are not comfortable peer reviewing something, just decline the invitation to peer review.  In my experience, peer reviewing is not fun.
If you want to be helpful, you can be very helpful by suggesting a few alternative peer reviewers.
Physics documents are not accessible to people with disabilities - it's good that you're working to fix this with your text-to-speech side project.

I actually declined to peer review a few days ago, due to disability.  Probably the disability is temporary.

Just don't peer review. It is not mandatory to peer review anything. It's not in your contract, nobody will complain to your boss, and you will not get fired because of it. You can even decline, saying that you do not review any papers due to your disability, reducing the number of invites you get.
The consequence will be that you (probably) won't be asked to become an editor, and your papers might be judged a bit more harshly by a spiteful editor, and in your CV, you won't be able to claim that you reviewed for XYZ. You might feel like you owe it to the community or publishers (you don't), in which case you can just do something else to ease your conscience, like organizing a conference.

I disagree. Reviewing is a valuable experience. There is no reason to avoid it if you can find a way to make it work.

But most of any status peer review. There must be a reason why they do it.

I'm surprised no one has suggested this but you could also request the editor for more time to do the review.
I don't mean to apply any label to you which you might not be comfortable with, but in many countries dyslexia is considered a disability and therefore would entitle you to reasonable accommodation.

I doubt any laws would apply since reviewing is normally just volunteer work. The journal has deadlines, of course, and authors need some timely feedback. But, I agree that asking for time is fine.

Also, publishing and reviewing is typically an international activity, so I wouldn't emphasize national laws/policies, unless the publisher has to follow certain rules about accommodations because of where they're headquartered or "do business."

If automated text readers are not up to snuff, but you still wish to review the paper, perhaps it's possible to find someone who can read the text to you? Probably someone with enough maths background to be able to read formulas, but it doesn't have to be someone familiar with the field. You could pay them for their time.

My thought was the OP might be able to read it out loud and record it. I think they could do this one sentence at a time. Puzzle out a sentence first, record reading it, pause, puzzle out the next sentence, record, pause... And then play it back as a single thing. But it might be very, very slow going, so not sure it's entirely worth it.

@user3067860 Yes, sounds very tedious. OP already mentioned that they use automated text readers and that it's a step up from reading it themselves, however it apparently fails miserably when it comes to math formulas. So I think the next step up is another human being reading the text. That should be significantly better.


text:
How should I write a letter to ask the author of a research paper some questions?
Can I write:

Hi Prof. xxx,
I am xxx, PhD student from xx University. Recently I am studying your paper titled “xxx” in xxx. Could you please help me understand why xxx? I assume that there may be two reasons: 1)xxx 2) xxx.
Thank you so much for your time.
Sincerely,
xxx
xx University

Standard salutation would be "Dear Prof. xxx, ..." instead of "Hi". I would only use "Hi" with someone I am on a first-name basis with.

Just as a side note, not all authors of papers (not even the first authors) will be professors, but much more often PhD students just like you.

What is the reason to write the letter? Do you want to make contact with them, or do you not understand xxx? If the latter, would steps did you do to understand xxx?

Your email template is already better than 50% of the ones I receive....

As an alternative to writing a formal email you could try finding the author, preferably first or last author, on a social platform like ResearchGate or LinkedIn and then reaching out there.

When I was a student I liked to also mention my advisor and my area of research, and maybe a few words about how the author's paper related to my research. Of course, this only makes sense if you already have an advisor and a project, but the more the author understands about who you are and how they are helping you, the better.
I also agree with the others that it's better to start with "Dear Prof. xxxx" (if the author is in fact a professor).

It sounds not very professional. I would suggest writing "Dear Prof. .." Here is an edited version of your letter:

Dear Prof. xxx,
I am a PhD student from xx University. Recently, I came across your paper titled “xxx” in xxx. Could you please help me to understand why xxx? I assume that there may be two reasons: 1)xxx 2) xxx. I would greatly appreciate your response.
Best regards, xxx, xx University

Yes, you could write that and you might get a reply. It is possible that you won't, but it seems polite enough that the chances are good.
It might take a while for a reply (weeks), however, since people are busy and it might take some time to reflect on the proper response. And the reply might just be a pointer to somewhere you can get additional background.
As user spin notes in a comment, a more formal salutation would be better, however. Some places can be quite formal.

I assume that in principle authors are happy that people read their work and are curious about it. Would it help in your opinion to make the author curious about the work of the OP that leads him to write the letter, for example by outlining one's work, providing a link to a paper, or giving some other detail? Also, I'd (naively) write something like "I am particularly intrigued by your innovative [insert field specific thing here, like strategy to compensate for measurement errors] which leads me to the following questions: ..." Would such a rationale be a good idea?

@Peter-ReinstateMonica, generally, for a first contact a short message is better than a long one. It can open a conversation. If the receiver is overwhelmed by the size/complexity of a first (blind) email it is easy to just delete it.

Yes, I suppose that's the dilemma.

"I am particularly intrigued by your innovative..." I would avoid that, reactions to flattery are not always positive (it may come across as insincere).  I suspect most authors would regard evidence that someone had actually read the paper and had questions to be more than sufficient as a complement ;o)  I'd definitely prefer a short to the point email.

Yes you can ask. But your current version has some issues.

Hi Prof. xxx,

Use a more formal way to address him in the first e-mail. There is a chance that he will answer less formal, but you don't know in advance, so be more formal for the first e-mail.

I am xxx, PhD student from xx University. Recently I am studying your paper titled “xxx” in xxx. Could you please help me understand why xxx?

This sounds like "I need a teacher that helps me understand my assignments". The professor will see it as not being his duty to help students to do their work.
First, really try to do your own research. What don't you understand, do some of the references in the paper explain it? Can you find other material or textbooks that help? Ask another student or staff from your faculty.
Then, of course, the paper can be hard to read and a question is still justified. Try to explain in a concise way what you don't understand and ask a question as concrete as possible.

I assume that there may be two reasons: 1)xxx 2) xxx.

That's a good way to approach the issue. Tell (without too much text) what you didn't understand and what you think what may be meant but doesn't quite sum up for you. Don't go into too much detail, as you obviously did not understand it and explaining your wrong version doesn't help the author. But write enough that he is able to see what you didn't understand.

Thank you so much for your time.

Personally I would not exaggerate here. A simple "Thank you for your time" is appropriate, but the "so much" may be a bit over the top.
They may be a professor and you're "just" a student, but in the end you're both just persons and you can ask questions like any other person. So I'd be polite, but don't exaggerate.

Yes, demonstrated effort is always good.

As an author, I appreciate it when someone shows interest in my work. I have no issue with responding to specific questions or engaging in a discussion.
That said, when you reach out to an author you should show competence in the area and ask relevant questions. The template you posted looks fine.


text:
How can I explain bad grades in a PhD application due to bad lecturers?
I am an undergraduate studying in Australia aiming for a US PhD program. I want to apply for a PhD in statistics. I have good grades in all of my math and stats courses in general.
Unfortunately, the statistics department has quite a few very bad lecturers. And the two lowest grades I got are from two probability and statistical courses. As the discipline I am applying for is statistics, I think I really need to explain them in my materials.
These two courses were organized badly. For one of them, the lecturer was basically incompetent. For the other one, the lecturer might be a good researcher, but horrible at teaching. I am not the only student saying this; numerous complaints were filed for these two courses and many students dropped out during the term. I worked hard on these courses, but the results are still significantly lower than what I would normally achieve.
How could I properly address my lower-than-expected performance in these two courses, and if I should address them at all?
I am afraid if I say something negative towards my lecturers, I might leave a bad impression to people in the admission committee since many of them are lecturers themselves.

Are these courses graded on a curve? Was the average grade in these courses significantly lower than in others?

I don't know. But for one course, I actually asked for a review, and the lecturer couldn't even tell me clearly where I lost many marks. I think she gave grades by her "feeling" of our paper in general. You wouldn't believe for the final containing 4 questions, 3 of them had errors...

Excellent approach : it’s not you fault but the lecturer’s fault.  Did you do enough to achieve a better grade? Did you rely solely on the lecturer’s course or did you also study additional material ( of the two courses you want to start a PhD in!)? Did you not realise the problem before the exam? From what you write in your question it seems you are the only person to blame.

A PhD is supposed to learn independently. You can't blame the lecturer when you failed to learn. Sorry to to be blunt but... The stink is on you.

It rarely comes over well if you blame others.

You were at university, not school. It was your job to teach yourself, not your lecturers. Lecturers lecture, they don't teach. If your lecturers weren't good at lecturing then you should have gone off and found other materials.
Nobody is going to hold your hand through your PhD either: to be honest, with this attitude, I don't think a PhD is for you.

Well, it's always easy to blame others, but this also applies to many comments I got. Maybe for people who talk here with superiority, I hope you could independently learn anything in any situation and excel in any exam thrown at you. Altough reading some of your unconstructive remarks ruined my morning, let's just stop here as maybe you just had a bad day.

@zlb I sympathise, and the added issues from COVID would have made this worse. But are you sure a PhD's for you if you can't learn independently?

@zlb And if the marks were outright unfair, what did the appeals process say?

Related/duplicate:  Should I mention in my personal statement that my poor performance in mathematics courses was due to the course delivery not being effective for me?

Some comments here imply that bad grades are entirely the fault of the student. Often this is true, but not always. By analogy, if you're going to a new place, you could drive yourself, learning from a map, or take a taxi/uber. If someone else drives, they might be worse than if you drove yourself for the first time. A truly bad teacher can certainly be worse than teaching yourself. Learning through a class takes both student and teacher effort, and in some cases a teacher may be significantly at fault for reduced learning.

When I was a Masters student 30 years or so ago, a group of second year mathematics students complained to the department head that one of the second year calculus lecturers was incompetent, and they weren't learning anything from his lectures.  The department head hired me to run some extra classes for these students, covering material from the second year calculus course.  The feedback from the students was entirely positive - they learnt much more from my classes than from the official lectures.  The point is, these students recognised the fact that they weren't learning, took some ...

... initiative, and asked for help.  The result was that their problem was dealt with BEFORE their final exam.  If you're in a less than ideal learning situation, and you don't take the initiative to solve the problem, then I'd have to agree with most of the commenters here.  Any blame lies mostly with you.

I recommend you don't mention this at all.  Here are some reasons:

Variation in the quality of lecturers is already built into the grades and GPAs of all other students, so this does not raise any special issue that differentiates your experience from the experience of other applicants.  While cases of lecturing leading to student complaints is unusual, it is not so rare that other students would not also have experienced it.  It is rare to meet a university graduate who cannot point to at least one bad lecturer they had, or even one who could reasonably be described as incompetent.  (Note: I am not endorsing this situation; just observing that it is the reality of academia at the moment.)

Following on from this, reporting bad quality lecturing as a reason for bad performance is likely to sound churlish.  Admissions committees want to know that incoming students are professionally generous people who can act in a collegial way in the Department.  Ideally they want people who are tolerant of shortcomings in others, don't draw attention to these shortcomings unless absolutely necessary, and are able to work around deficiencies in the work of others without complaint.  Over the course of your own career you will probably make some mistakes and do some work that turns out to be of insufficient quality --- learn to tolerate that in others.  As Kant said (although he said it in German), "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."

The explanation you propose to give identifies the problem for your bad performance as being located in someone else.  The admissions committee will want to know what deficiencies you can identify in yourself that come out of this experience, and what action you have taken to improve since then.  For example, if you can't follow along with certain lecturers (e.g., because they are bad teachers),  what alternative sources of learning do you seek out, and what have you done since then to ensure that you can learn material independently?

Finally, assuming your report of this is accurate, and even assuming we accept that these were indeed bad teachers, it will indicate that you find it difficult to succeed in statistical learning from independent written resources without lecturer assistance.  There is a lot of this type of learning in a PhD program, so anything you say that indicates a difficulty learning independently will count against your application.

If you feel the need to say something about these cases, or if you are asked about them, it would be best simply to say that you had difficulty following the lecturers in those cases.  Avoid any criticism of the lecturer and focus on your own inability to follow along, then explain what you have done since this time to put yourself in a better position for learning in cases where you have difficulty following the lecturer.  Any experienced academic will read the obvious variation in lecture quality into this without you needing to say it.  They will appreciate if you "take the bullet" for the outcome instead of blaming your lecturer.

Thank you for your suggestion, Ben. Not mentioning the issue altogether seems to be a better choice. If I do decide to address the results, I think I will blame myself on the lack of enough practice side.

@zlb Yes, but don't mention it.  There are other questions on this site of a similar nature, and the general consensus is that one or two "bad" grades won't kill your application, and you don't want to draw attention to these things.

I thought exactly about your last bullet point when I read it. The conversation would go something like: "I had bad lecturers for my course, so I did badly." "Did you read textbooks independently to improve your knowledge of things you didn't understand?" "No, I just went into the exam not understanding it." "Then how will you do in a PhD, where you don't get a lecturer at all?"

While I agree with your recommendation to not blame the lecturer, I feel that your arguments are unfair to the student. Yes, it's pointless to blame the lecturer in the application, since the committee won't take the student at her word, and even if it did, having excuses for bad performance just isn't as valuable as having evidence of good performance. But not all students have to deal with the same number of poor lecturers, some students have it better. And it is not fair that the student is expected to tolerate others' shortcomings when no one will tolerate her own shortcomings.

“Don’t mention it at all” is the right answer for the application materials.  But interviewers may well ask about the bad grades, so OP should have a good response prepared for that situation.

Whether you paid or not for your degree is a big factor here.  In many countries, it's cheap or free for undergrad, but in the US for example, it's life debilitatingly expensive.  Because you are paying so much, your professor really aught to be "good" because the grade they give you makes or breaks your entire career, and the excuse "Well YoU ShOuLD HaVe FoUnD a BeTtEr SoUrCe" is not valid at all for undergrad, for then what exactly are you paying for?  Normally though, even in the US, you don't pay for graduate (STEM) degrees.  That's when it's valid to switch mindsets.

I agree completely with Ben's answer: you should not attempt to blame your lecturers in your application materials, even if your complaints are justified. Most students have to deal with their fair share of poor lecturers; further, even poor lecturers typically give a reasonable proportion of good grades.
One point to add: if there really was an anomalous circumstance that put you in a truly unusual situation, then it would be far better if the person writing your letter of recommendation explained this situation in their letter. The report of an anomalous circumstance will carry much more weight if it comes from a professor, who is more impartial and has more insight into what is usual and unusual. Of course, it would be highly unusual for a letter writer to criticize their colleagues and state that grades were assigned unfairly, so this option will only be available in highly unusual circumstances (which does not appear to be the case here).

Upvoted for the statement here that others (letter writers) are much better at explaining anomalies than the candidate themself. A student can't really say "My professor is an idiot", but a professor can say "My colleague has issues that affect this student".

Your best option is to say nothing, and talk about your strengths rather than weaknesses. Most students have weaknesses, whether it's low grades in some courses or something else. Admission committees know that it's rare to get a student with no flaws, so what's important is whether the student's strengths are worth tolerating those flaws.
This is assuming you're not applying to the very top programs. There, bad grades in a fundamental course are unlikely to fly, unless you have some truly amazing accomplishments to balance it out.
Your plan of excusing the bad grades by citing lecturer incompetence is a bad idea. There are too many students who do poorly in a course and blame the instructor. There's no way to know whether you are one of those. Other students agreeing with you means little: Most students are not good enough for PhD programs, hence a minority of applicants get admitted. Besides, the committee is not going to canvas your classmates or look up your teachers on ratemyprofessors.com, they'll just throw your application in the bottom of the pile, and see if they can find a less complicated application. Moreover, some may very well feel that you should have found a way to teach yourself the topic regardless of poor instruction (such as reading the textbook) - in research, one often must learn things without any instruction at all.
If your grades in statistics are truly bad, I would recommend not applying to PhD programs in statistics right now. This by itself is a very strong reason not to admit you and no amount of skillful rhetoric in the application will save you. If it sounds unfair, it is - students from grade inflated schools absolutely have an advantage over others, but such is life. If you try to apply anyway, you will be fighting an uphill battle. I recommend delaying your application and taking some steps first to even the odds a little:

Do an internship, get a job, or find some other way to obtain experience that will make you seem impressive to the program you're applying for regardless of grades - typically you want something where you get research experience, ideally with publication authorship
Do a project or take a more advanced course in statistics and do really well, which would show that your understanding of statistics is strong in spite of bad grades in lower level courses - this would be the best way of "excusing" your earlier poor grades

You'd have to separately research what specific topics would impress PhD programs in your field. Usually some kind of short program can tick a lot of the boxes, such as a Master's Degree, or working in a research group. You'd lose 1-2 years but end up qualifying for a much better PhD program.

(+1) I totally agree with your 3rd paragraph, especially the well explained rationales for your advice to say nothing.

I'm not sure that the reason for the bad grades is really relevant. If the professors didn't teach the material well, you didn't learn the subject, and that's what the other programs presumably care about. So unless you believe you did learn the material (on your own, presumably), but for some reason the course grade doesn't reflect this, the grades should stand.
Yes, this puts you in a lousy situation if you're applying for positions in this field, but you really should have expertise in the field you plan to work in. If you've tried to remedy the problem by studying independently, you could mention that to mitigate the poor grades.

One possible idea to alleviate a bad grade is the (heh) statistics. If you have the data on the average grade in your "bad" course, and it is significantly lower than over averages, you might be able to argue that it's not your performance but an especially hard exam or something like that.
Otherwise, I would not "baselessly" blame the lecturers, nobody in the committee knows neither you nor the lecturers, so you are basically badmouthing them without an evidence.