text:
reuse of text between publications (CS)
This probably depends on field, but in Computer Science  it is common for people to publish similar material in workshops, then conferences, then journals.  Each time it is acceptable to reuse some material from one level to the next as long as there is some new material (journals sometimes will publish verbatim but that's anohter matter).
So, is it acceptable to borrow significant text from one conference paper to use in a second conference paper?   In my experience the answer is no, but I'm curious if there are any guidelines, and if so, whether they vary across disciplines.
BTW, after posting I came across this: Attitudes towards self-plagiarism ... certainly related to this.  I commented there, and should have mentioned here, that a complicating factor with regard to reuse of text arises from the use of blind submission: if you can't say who you are, you can't admit to copying your own text.

Whether or not it's acceptable, it does appear to be rather common, especially when the fragments are motivational, or describe common notation.

effectively a duplicate of Attitudes towards self-plagiarism, and the answers there adequately cover this variant of it

EnergyNumbers, I had edited this to point a that other page.  I think they are related but I disagree those answers cover this.  In that case, someone wanted to submit several overlapping things in parallel, I thought.  Here it is a paper from the same event in an earlier year.

I would say it depends:

Some papers go from Abstract to Extended Abstract to Full Paper. In this case I see nothing makes it unacceptable. The same goes if you are extending your own results.
I often see the same material copied in the Background (and
sometimes in the literature review) section with the same authors for
different papers. That is in addition to Definitions and common
notations as @Suresh said.
I believe in this case it is ethical and valid since Background (or Definitions) is not the paper contribution.  This ,in turn, has a disadvantage (and I really suffered from this): if you were not able to understand some parts of the background in the first paper, you will stuck there. In other words, you will not find another wording of it.

Returning to the question:

is it acceptable to borrow significant text from one conference paper
  to use in a second conference paper?

If the significant text is not significant part of the contribution then IMHO Yes. The word significant here is the key and it is ambiguous but let's say its 40% of the paper.
The bottom line is:
Removing the borrowing text, does your paper have a contribution by its own?

I have seen the opposite where some papers are very similar to others and I think this is a bad habit. At the end, you are trying to discover new things not to copy them.


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Authorship determination for a paper in IEEE journal
I finished my bachelor project and my supervisor suggested to work with me on publishing a paper about my work which is an encryption algorithm, Now my supervisor helped me with some remarks along my bachelor project and helped me with the paper (like grammar mistakes and such) but I am the one who made encryption algorithm and I am the one who wrote the paper:
Now should I include my supervisor as a 2nd author as he wants? (I can refuse, and then publish the paper on my own) He is a senior IEEE member and has published papers (where he was also 2nd author taking credit for others' work). Should I mention him just for the sake to get my paper accepted or protect it from getting stolen?
From my point of view, what he deserves is to be mentioned in acknowledgments but not as a second author.
And will the ownership of the paper will be 50% to me, while 50% to him ?

So, you did your project on your own, without any inputs from your supervisor?

In engineering, I think it is commonly accepted that the adviser of a student project is always a co-author of any papers resulting from the project, whether or not the adviser contributed to the paper or to the project.

But wont people think he contributed in making the cipher ? , i mean i did the cipher , while he concentrated on how should bachelor thesis looks and how should paper looks(which i am grateful) ,  but he didn't contribute to the encryption algorithm.

And will the ownership of the paper will be 50% to me ,while 50% to him ?

No.  Ownership of the paper would be 100% to you and 100% to him. Or perhaps more accurately, 0% to you, 0% to him, and 100% to the publisher.

Given how your comments are rife with punctuation, grammar, capitalization, and spacing errors, I find it hard to believe that you got a paper acceptance-ready all on your own. Perhaps you did the bulk of the technical work, as you claim, but your overall spirit seems remarkably ungrateful for any assistance you may have received. Seeing that he is an IEEE senior member, he probably has a good idea of what qualifies for co-authorship, and what is more appropriate for recognition in the acknowledgements. I strongly recommend that you defer to his expertise in that area.

Oh lord... he seserves one... Perhaps you didn't see how other co-authors contributed in other papers. That is enough effort from an advisor

As I read through your question and some of your comments, I get the impression that this faculty member has already done some work on your paper, presumably believing that he would be a co-author.
If so, I think it would be wrong to submit a solo paper with his improvements incorporated into the work. If you want to be sole author, then you should do ALL the work, including the proofreading, etc. – or at least have let the professor know up front that he would only be listed under the acknowledgements, so he could make an informed decision about whether or not it would be worth his time and effort to make those improvements. Proofreading and correcting is not a trivial feat.
More importantly, though, your question reminds me of a similar situation I experienced during graduate school. During a computer graphics course, my lab partner and I did a lot of work on an algorithm, and we ended up getting a paper published. Our instructor was also listed as a third author.
My partner and I developed and tested the algorithm, and our instructor did little but give us the problem. Did I feel slighted? No, and in hindsight, I now better understand his vital role in our work. These problems don't just pop up like dandelions, or infiltrate our email like spam – they are usually the result of extensive study, along with collaborative research with industry. In other words, without us students, he wouldn't have had an answer, but, without our instructor, we would not have had a problem of any meaningful significance.
If I see an IEEE paper with two authors, instead of presuming that the work was split evenly between those two, I'd probably assume that one author's principle role was to identify the problem, while the other worked the solution. That's so common that it's almost a given – such symbiotic relationships are ubiquitous in academia.
In other words, I think you misunderstand the nature of coauthorship in research. Your instructor thought the work you did was good enough for the two of you to get something published together. You ought to be appreciative of his guidance, happily put his name alongside yours, and get off to a good start in the realm of academic research.

But remember that standards of co-authorship vary significantly between different subfields of computer science.  In theoretical computer science (my subfield), acquiring the grant, suggesting the problem, and offering feedback on the manuscript are not usually worth coauthorship.  Even in an IEEE journal.

@JeffE: That's a good point. However, I'm assuming that, if the faculty member assumes co-authorship is a given in this case, then it's probably the right way to play it. (I suppose that could be an erroneous assumption, but I wanted to point out that the O.P.'s situation is hardly considered unusual in many branches of research.)

Mentioning the problem , alothough i changed the title of my bachelor later to be to make a new encryption alogrithm rather than IMPROVING an existing one , he did point me to the direction of cryptology . Ok well but i will point out to him (since he want to submit paper to the journals himself) that he will guide me in the submitting part but everything will go through me.
Thanks your previous problem is similar to mine . Thanks and thanks for all others who helped me in my decision.

@Trice: Except I never considered it a "problem" – I always regarded it as an "opportunity."

You have many questions as about authorship, and I am afraid some of your questions/comments indicate a certain level of confusion about authorship. You could browse the authorship questions on this site, and it may Enlighten you to some extent.
Regarding your specific questions:

Should I include my supervisor as a 2nd author as he wants?
First, you should check the policy on authorship directly from the publisher. IEEE Publication Policies states that:

Authorship and co-authorship should be based on a substantial intellectual contribution. It is assumed that all authors have had a significant role in the creation of a manuscript that bears their names.
Therefore, the list of authors on an article serves multiple purposes; it indicates who is responsible for the work and to whom questions regarding the work should be addressed. Moreover, the credit implied by authorship is often used as a measure of the contributors’ productivity when they are evaluated for employment, promotions, grants, and prizes.

The IEEE affirms that authorship credit must be reserved for individuals who have met each of the following conditions:
  a. Made a significant intellectual contribution to the theoretical development, system or experimental design, prototype development, and/or the analysis and interpretation of data associated with the work contained in the article;
  b. Contributed to drafting the article or reviewing and/or revising it for intellectual content; and
  c. Approved the final version of the article as accepted for publication, including references.

Unless you performed research entirely without any input from your advisor, it seems unlikely that he did not make a “significant intellectual contribution”. Possible types of contribution include proposal of research subject/project, any guidance in the choice of method to pursue the project or on intermediate results, guidance on how best to interpret results and present them, etc.
Will the ownership of the paper will be 50% to me, while 50% to him?
No, co-authorship does not necessarily mean equal contribution (and is not understood as such by the readers). To go even further, some journals offer the option of writing an explicit statement quantifying (to some extent) the respective contributions of the coauthors.
Won't people think he contributed in making the cipher?
Not necessarily, as above. They will think he contributed to some extent to the research project, but will understand that he may not have been the one who came up with the idea.

I'll end by adding that you should be really wary not to dismiss your advisor's role too much. Even if you had the breakthrough idea and implemented it yourself, surely the guidance offered by your teachers and supervisors are to be credited, maybe more than you realize right now. Also, that he gave you the opportunity to pursue a worthwhile research project, and then helped you transform that into a publishable (quality) paper, are important contributions.

There was no guidance , i had to discover the mistakes in the algorithm and fix them! , because he is that into cryptology i had to study and make algorithm , i updated him with what i am doing but he didn't show me my mistakes , he was agreeing with anything presented.
His guidance was in the appearance of the paper and how it should be written and presented .THAT'S IT , so would that fall in category (b) IN Your marked passage or that doesn't fall ?
Thanks for help and marked passage(yellow box)

Yes, that would definitely fall into the (b) category.

And would (b) be enough or does he have to meet all 3 requirements ?

Since he's your advisor and you consulted him through out the project, then you definitely need to put his name as a co-author (unless he refused to be a co-author).
Taking into account that this is your first paper and he's a senior IEEE member (I don't know what this really mean but IEEE love its members), I believe it is a plus for your paper to be co-authored by him.

His consultation was never ever used to change anything in the encryption algorithm , I mean when some one writes a book and sends it to someone to check its spelling mistakes and how it should look , they are mentioned in acknowledgments abut not as 2nd author , or am i wrong ?

@TheTrice So if I understand right, you got this idea of the encryption algorithm by yourself, encrypted everything alone in a dark room and  never discussed anything with your advisor...

@Nicks,  not only that - his advisor must also have told him that he won't do anything but proofread for typos, and particularly not check the content of paper and thesis. Off course there may be a slight problem with the paper as no second person ever thought through the idea of the student before the publication was submitted...

IMHO the "magnitude" of the contribution "supervision and checking [not the spelling but the experiments, content and reasoning]" by the prof does not depend on whether the student does a very good job or needs lot of corrections. (If I get crappy papers for review that also isn't honored differently from reviewing very good papers.) Also, the student not noticing the guidance of the prof can be result of a very good guidance by the prof: instead of telling "do this and that" the prof leads the student to thoroughly understand the problem and thus derive a solution "himself".

So all of you think "I am not that smart to see the guidance the doctor provided me? "
To end discussion :
Thanks for your help , although some were not(but that's to be expected), Yes i went in my dark room spent days making my algorithm , with every step taken or idea coming  by i was updating my algorithm based on my thinking and i updated doctor just for the sake of notification( no ides came from the doctor at all , as he has many work to do) As the answer i have chosen as a solution i will just mention him as a 2nd author to help me publish the paper.

, although this is because the IEEE and the world we live don't care about the work than about appearances , because if all what mattered to publish in a journal is the work presented , then i would never put his name as an author and just mention him in my acknowledgment as reading the paper and telling me his remarks.

@TheTrice No. Is just that often people overestimate their work on a project and underestimate other people contribution. If it was indeed all your work without any input whatsoever from your advisor, then you should not put him on your paper. BUT, knowing how the system works, it wouldn't surprise me if it was the SUPERVISOR not you who chose this particular topic to investigate, and you probably had some talks before starting work, and he probably made some suggestions.  And most probably he gave you some materials to read about it...

If you don't think your supervisor deserves to be a coauthor, just tell him so and submit without him.  You don't need our approval.  But be prepared for a backlash; in particular, don't expect him to want to continue working with you or write you a glowing recommendation letter later. Single-authorship may look like the best short-term solution, but generosity usually pays off better in the long run.

The rules for what co-authorship mean vary by field: in math it would be unusual for an advisor to be listed as a co-author under the circumstances, while in engineering, as others have notes, an advisor is normally included.
One of the reasons is that fields like engineering list authors in an order conveying information about the contributions: you'd be listed as first author, and your advisor as last author. Readers understand that this means you had the main intellectual contribution and your advisor acted as a supervisor.

It appears to me that you are looking for validation for not including your supervisor. A supervisor is not supposed a person whose brain emanates marvelous and groundbreaking ideas which are later developed by a horde of pawns.  Research does not work like that. It is about collaboration at different levels.
If you cannot admit he has contributed to some extent, that's fine. My point of view regarding this sort of ego-fights is: is it worth creating a whole circus and fighting for being first/solo author of a paper that is not going to change the world? Time will pass and you will understand ... Hopefully.
Good luck.

I have same feeling about this discussion "It appears to me that you are looking for validation for not including your supervisor."

If he wants to be an author, add him, and use that as leverage to improve your paper.
Being first author is plenty of credit for you; in fact, in your situation being sole author could be an indication that you are unable to work with others, which is a negative in most cases.  People are highly accustomed to crediting the student with all of the value of the work (because they did the work), and the professor with all of the value of the work (because they enabled the work in various ways), and the credit can count twice because the student and professor almost never are competing for the same things.  I'm assuming that the professor actually did do something enabling.
In any case, before you publish the paper you should get someone to read it carefully, and if they say things like "this passage is unclear" or "this needs more background" then your professor ought to be able to give advice and/or help fix it.  There's nothing like having a highly experienced co-author to make short work of a request to place this work in the context of the field!  If your professor cannot help improve the paper in this kind of situation (and help write a good cover letter, etc.), and they didn't actually enable any of the work, then even if it would help you, it is probably not ethical to include him as an author.  Otherwise, there are only positives for all involved.

Thanks for your answer , He does the reading , as i said that's the only thing that he does ,reading the paper and telling me remarks about some passages or grammar mistakes , but work to do algorithm was done solely by me.
I updated him with every step in making the algorithm ,but he never mentioned any remarks since he doesn't understand encryption that well , so i had to discover my mistakes in the algorithm and work on my own on them.
So his name will only be used to help me publish the paper,Since IEEE care more about appearances more than the work presented.

IEEE doesn't really care one way or the other about your paper.  The decision  whether to publish will be made by an individual editor, based on the recommendation of independent referees, who may not even be IEEE members, much less representatives.

In engineering, it is common (accepted) for students to put their advisor's names as authors. This does not detract from the student's efforts; in some respects it can enhance the reception of the paper because the wider community will probably know the supervisor more than the student.
Be aware that if you try to publish it without your advisor's name, then the reviewers or editors may contact them and ask what is wrong (and also decline to publish the paper).
My advisor told me that the work I was doing was worthless, and not worth publication.  I moved universities (and advisors), completed the work and submitted it without my original advisor's name as author.  The IEEE editor rejected the paper until my original advisor was added as author.

Yeah its all about appearances and connections rather than work presented .
One day a more scientific community will be presented rather than IEEE.

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Is it bad practice to submit the entire manuscript for an initial book proposal to a publisher?
In a previous book I wrote, I submitted the entire manuscript along with a couple page proposal to a few different publishers. Both editors never responded to me.
In my current book, I sent the entire manuscript with a short description to an editor at Springer, and it has been two weeks, and I have heard nothing, not even an acknowledgement of receipt.
Am I doing something against proper procedure?
Update: I emailed the editor again asking her if she received the manuscript, and she said she did. She was just on vacation. (I guess Europeans take longer ones than those in the U.S. are used to…)

Did you follow the book proposal guidelines for Springer? It does not include sending the entire manuscript but does include items like:

Author
Author CV
Any other contributors (include CVs)?
Who's the audience including undergraduate or graduate
What book do you see as the main competitor?
3-4 paragraphs describing the contents of the book
Unique Selling Points (why should someone buy this book)
etc.

Note: I'm not sure that I've linked to the book proposal guidelines for your area, but they surely exist.
Second Note: Geremia provided a link to the book series webpage. Poking around on the page and tracing links, I did find a general manuscript preparation page, but nothing on what the proposal should look like. I maintain that unless they tell you explicitly to send the entire manuscript, you should send a brief proposal or even a query ("are there guidelines I should follow?") to the editor first.
Based on blogs and articles that I've read by fiction editors and agents, not following published guidelines for a submission is one of the top pet peeves and a quick way for your submission to get deleted or tossed in the recycle bin.

I'm submitting to Springer-Velag, and the series I'm submitting to doesn't have much explanation, just one editor's contact info with no more explanation than "Please send your proposal to…".

In my experience (and I have coauthored two editions of a textbook published by Academic Press), the part of the book proposal that you'll be asked questions about (which is presumably what they care about) is the marketing stuff- who is the intended audience, and how will this book be better for that audience than competing books.  If you haven't gotten over that bar, no editor is likely to send the manuscript out for review.

I am pretty sure the author meant different Springer:) if there is no reply, try calling the editor you find via contacts listed for each discipline at springer.com
In any case, do always mention that the proposal was also sent to xxx, so as to avoid more editors arranging reviews for the same proposal

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How was higher education done before the university system?
I know the university system as it is understood today dates at least as far back as the 13th century or perhaps even to the time of Charlemagne, Alcuin of York, et al., but how was higher education handled before universities? Was it by private tutoring?

There was the Great Library at Alexandria. It was immediately adjacent to "The School of Hard Knocks".

As with many things the history of higher education is not well known since accounts may be scarce or missing altogether. Early evidence indicate that schools existed in Egypt where, primarily, boys would learn to read and write etc. One has to remember that such skills were not for the masses. Religiously connected schools also emerged where religious texts were handled and copied. Theological and medical teaching was also done but very little else. evidence of mathematics have been found so there were also schools, perhaps aiming at architecture, astronomy , etc. relevant for the culture. None of these has a degree at the end but was likely based on apprenticeship and mastery evaluated by the teachers. Similar evidence for teaching exists in all older cultures and seem to focus on maintaining order in the social and cultural basis for society.
There seems to be a big step when considering Greek education which was far more comprehensive than the pragmatic education earlier. In the city states of ancient Greece specialized schools emerged where teaching circled around very specific topics such as the Hippocratic school of medicine on Cos. This specialization seems to have continued with the well known Greek philosophers/scientists such as Aristotle, Plato etc. and teaching progressed in directions envisioned by these founders. In other words, there was no single systematic way for schools to teach and operate.
In the Roman world subjects were ordered in groups that we can recognize today: I grammar rhetoric, dialectic; II geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music; III medicine, architecture. This was how the liberal arts (defined as theoretical and intellectual activities by the Greeks) were seen. The subjects have of course survived to modern times although organisation has changed. So education became more organised but the education was not open and still served a purpose for maintaining government rule. Out of the post-Roman world came the first universities as stated in the question where education became even more organized and eventually including fixed degrees.
This answer is loosely based on the excellent book: The first universities by Olaf Pedersen, Cambridge UP, 1997. I strongly recommend it!

The only educational history book I'm familiar with is Patrick J. McCormick's History of Education, but I want to check out The First Universities! Thank you for the reference

Yes, there are probably several books so thanks for the one you mention. I am interested in the subject so I will also check that one out.

It depends on what you mean by higher education.
Degrees are highly inflated nowadays, now practically everyone and his dog has a PhD, or at least a BSc.
100 years ago passing final exams in high-school practically was the terminal degree for most administrative positions. Much fewer people went on universities, mostly engineering, doctors and such.
If you go back a couple of hundred years you realize that very few profession actually needed university degree, and universities were mostly scholarly centers for philosophy and religious studies. Most engineering didn't even exist 500 years ago, and what existed was taught by professional communities through apprenticeship, not by universities. So what you call higher education is defined very much by the post-industrial area.


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Prolonging a PhD to improve research CV, is this good ?
I am in my 4th year of PhD. Few months ago I presented my thesis proposal which already included some of the results (that are actually published). I proposed to add another chapter (call it Chapter x).
One of the committee members told me that the results presented are sufficient for a thesis. He said that chapter x is not necessary, or it can be replaced by a literature survey (instead of presenting original work - as I proposed during the thesis proposal). He said that original work can be done during a post-doc instead.  My thesis supervisor agreed.
Right now, I am in the middle of of the Chapter x [and some other stuff] (and I think I have original results that are not complete - they would be complete, if everything goes fine [which is never the case in research]).
My question is: should I write my thesis without novel results in Chapter x and then do a postdoc based on Chapter x ? Or: should I continue working on Chapter x even if this will result in a longer PhD ?
The source of my confusion:
Wouldn't adding novel results in Chapter x improve my research CV ? but at the same time, will the long period of PhD negatively affect the research CV ? Plus, will I find the chance to work on this topic as a postdoc !

What field are you in?  In my field (computer science), it's rare for anyone but the committee to read the thesis itself.

He said that original work can be done during a post-doc instead. My thesis supervisor agreed. — If I ever heard a professor say this to a PhD student, I'd be seriously tempted to slap them.  (The professor, not the student.)

@JeffE: I am in Computer Science as well. When I said that I will include a new chapter in my thesis that contains original work, I meant that this original work solves a problem related to my thesis and this work will be published at least in a conference. My thesis already contains results [I have 3 long chapters other than Chapter X, each of which have original results published in at least one conference or journal, this is why they thought it is sufficient - I believe this is the source of your confusion, though I'd have loved someone slapping some supervisors in my school :)].

@JeffE maybe that's the case for Chapter X, I consider that is likely if it's the 10th chapter, which is about time to write a bit about related work and future lines. I'm not sure about the meaning of "X" here.

@JeffE A member of my committee told me to tie things up and sort out the lingering strands left during my postdoc, and it was some of the best advice I've ever been given.

As Irwin suggests, prolonging the PhD to improve your research track record is a standard strategy, especially for students who are interested in pursuing an academic career.
The minimal requirements to get a PhD are fundamentally weaker than the minimal requirements to get an academic job.  Despite all high-falutin' talk to the contrary, the only real requirement for completing a PhD is convincing your thesis committee to sign the requisite paperwork.  Most faculty have an image in their heads of the necessary work; for example, in computer science, a minimal PhD thesis is roughly equivalent to two solid conference papers.
On the other hand, the academic job market is a true competition.  Only people with truly outstanding research records (and strong recommendation letters) get invited to interview for faculty positions, or accepted for research postdoc positions.  It doesn't matter whether you're "good enough"; lots of people are "good enough". What matters is how you compare against other people on the market.  So it's actually quite rational to delay completing the PhD past the point where you have a viable thesis, in order to improve your research record.
That said, phrasing the delay in terms of "making your thesis stronger" is totally missing the point.  Your PhD thesis is an administrative hurdle.  At least in computer science, if you're lucky, three people will ever read your thesis, including you and your advisor.  (The standard joke ends "...and your mom.")  Your colleagues will see and judge your track record through your peer-reviewed publications in conferences and journals.
So, the short answer is: Do more original publishable research, and then publish it.  And then I guess you could show off to your committee by including those results in your thesis, but whatever.
Also, please slap your advisor for me.

Thanks for the answer. I will slap my previous advisor for u (the current one is cool), but only if you accept me in your lab after they fire me from the university ! :)

Even your mom won't read your thesis. Even your mom...

@JeffE "showing off to your committee" is terrible advice. Odds are that if OP is not at Harvard or MIT and even if OP is in a top-5 school, that OP is not a star of the department. The truth is that OP's thesis is never gonna be anything to write home about. OP needs to run his own race and not try to prove a point to his/her advisers or to anyone else.

"if you're lucky, three people will ever read your thesis, including you and your advisor"  …And if you're unlucky, your faculty hiring committee/potential postdoc advisors will look at it during the application process.  So at very least, take some time to write a nice introduction.

@Amatya I really don't understand your objection.  Of course PhD candidates should show off their research accomplishments to their committee.  Of course PhD students should try to prove a point with their advisors,  and that point is "I deserve a PhD".  I do not mean that they should exaggerate the importance of their contributions, but that they should cast them in the best possible light.  A PhD defense is no place for unnecessary  modesty.

@Amatya Also, I think your elitist defense of mediocrity is completely inappropriate.  I have seen truly excellent research produced by PhD students at rank-100 schools.   I've also seen truly mediocre research produced by PhD students at MIT and Harvard.

@JeffE Perhaps we're talking at cross-purposes. My point is that you should only do research because you enjoy it greatly and not to prove your worth. 99% of graduate students will never produce any work that is of the caliber of what it takes to get tenure in a top-20 school and most tenured faculty will never be considered to have made a significant contribution to their field and most top 20 faculty will never be in the running for a fields medal or a Nobel. It is better for a student to try to be the best version of themselves and have fun and be productive.

@Amatya "Many people fail, so you should never try." - Questionable advice, unless you have a way of knowing whether a given person in particular will fail or succeed.

@Superbest perhaps you would prefer: "most people don't win the lottery but you might so go ahead" . It is not my intent to discourage any one. People should have fun with their work and try to be the best versions of themselves. They should just understand what they're getting into. It is statistically unlikely that there is one Feynman between those of us pointlessly arguing here and it is damn near impossible that all of us are of Feynman caliber.

@Amatya Good point, but by saying that, you are arguing that much like lottery players, aspiring scientists are unable to control their scientific potential. I don't think that's true. Practically every famous scientist, including Feynman, says that they do possess no innate "knack" for science (beyond above average intelligence), but have become good at it through perseverance, hard work and making good use of the occasional stroke of good luck.

@Superbest You can think that the information uncertainty  is about your (and the world's) knowledge of your own potential. You can invest your time and life in trying to find out if you can hack it at the highest level or not. Once you've made this investment of time and effort, you will slowly (or quickly) discover how productive you are. Most of us ex-ante believe that we have innate ability, but ex-post some of us are proven right and most of us are proven wrong. If you only look at at what Fenymans went through in grad school then that biased sample would be unrepresentative of reality.

As a grad student myself, I can't be entirely sure, but I would look at it like this: based on the information you've given, it sounds like the only significant difference between the two options is whether this new research is part of your PhD thesis or not. In the long term, I don't think it will matter. The project will show up on your research CV either way, whether you do it as a PhD student or as a postdoc.
But if you choose to do it as a postdoc, then you will be partway through a postdoc in, say, two years, whereas if you choose to do your research as part of the PhD, you will not yet be a postdoc in two years. All other things being equal - and I think they are in this case - I would think it is better to advance through the stages of your career (PhD, postdoc, professorship) more quickly. By this logic, you should go with your committee's recommendation and omit this project from your thesis.
I have also read things which suggest that completing a PhD more quickly is correlated with greater academic success later in life, although I can't remember a link to give you. I'm not even sure it matters, though, since there isn't necessarily a causal relationship.

interesting ! +1 for the last paragraph .. I will make my own research about this point.

"I would think it is better to advance through the stages of your career" What's the rush? Unless money, lifestyle, etc., are a major concern, I can think of no compelling reason to finish in four years instead of five.  Five years is not a long PhD in any discipline that I know of.  Likewise, finishing in four years might help convince someone that you are a promising, hardworking academic—but not nearly as much as another publication or two.  I say correlation, not causation.

There are a lot of details left unmentioned in your psot:

How many papers have you already published? Is it only the three chapters of the thesis?
How long would you extend your PhD program to add the additional work?
How many publications or conference papers would you get out of this work?

If you already have four or five major publications after four years, then prolonging your stay for, as an example, two years for one paper might not be worth the time. However, if you only had to extend a year to get two or more publications, and you know that they will be accepted into top conferences or journals, then it would well behoove you to take the extra time.
However, there might be other reasons behind the sudden change in attitude. Do you know how the remaining time would be financed? Is it clear that your advisor would be able or willing to support you for the remaining time you'd want to spend?

your answer consider all details. I think prolonging would be the best decision. It's only few months though (one term maximum).

One semester doesn't really make much of a difference. The only obstacle to check with then is financial—if you have support for the extra semester, then you should go for it.

@aeismail One semester doesn't really make a difference…unless the postdocs in your field run on a specific calendar cycle.

I'm a bit late adding this, but another reasonable option is: let the market decide for you.
Apply for postdocs this year, based on the research you have already finished.  If you get offered something good, then write up your current results and defend.  If you don't, then spend another year in grad school improving your research, and hopefully you'll be in a better position to reapply then.
Of course, you'll want to have your advisor on board with this plan, and make sure you have funding available for the extra year.

I've known of a few cases of people prolonging their Ph.Ds to improve their CVs.
I have spoken with professors and students who "felt their students had not published enough" and held them longer to ensure that their CVs would be strong enough so that someone would hire them for a postdoc or a faculty position - the reasoning being that if someone zips through their Ph.D in a few years but doesn't have enough work on their CV, then that student is going to be damned as far as an academic career goes.
Thus, one thing to ask yourself is if that work you're doing for your dissertation will eventually become a paper that might have some impact. In other words, if you write about this in your dissertation, will you eventually publish it?
Also, as part of your academic "development" so to speak, you should have a good idea of how much is "enough" as well, and that is to know what is "important" and what is not. In your stated case, maybe X isn't that important of a research gap if both of them think that you can investigate it with related work instead of doing research work to that end.
Another possible reason that it's mentioned as not being necessary is because they both feel that it will take much, much longer (in other words, the investment isn't worth the reward). Or, if the results merely incremental, they may not be enough of an improvement to warrant a new publication.
I realize that this isn't an answer and it's more of "things to consider" but I hope it helps you eventually come to a decision.

Let the market decide. If your results are ready when the job market comes along then your adviser can feature them prominently in his/her letter, whether or not it's a part of your thesis. You can complete the high quality work as a post-doc as well. If your adviser can see that your chapter-x has potential then so can the professors in schools trying to hire you.
Staying in school a year longer only makes sense if it will significantly impact how you are valued by the market and if it enables you to significantly improve your portfolio of working papers. Your committee member's comment that "original work can be done in post-doc.." makes me think that he/she was being euphemistic and was perhaps worried that you maybe be trying to delay facing some harsh job market truths in the guise of doing "original" "chapter-x" stuff .. if everything goes fine "which is never the case in research".
The point of a thesis is to get a job to enable you to contribute in research. If your current thesis gets you a job then move on and don't look back.

Just do what your advisors told you. They are going to grade you anyway and give you letters of recommendation. Why would you want to do something different after already asking for what you are proposing? Would you want to annoy them just to get more material in your dissertation. Do you think it actually advances your career opportunities?


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When is a good time (during graduate studies) to start thinking about writing the thesis?
A significant number of colleagues had their thesis defense in the past year and talking to them got me thinking about my own dissertation to come in about 2 years (I am approximately half-way through my graduate studies).
Based on my experience, the norm appears to be so that the focus of a PhD student shifts from initial getting-used-to-things, to getting-papers-out, do your coursework/teaching (if applicable), getting-papers-out (repeat)... until you are a couple of months away from the dissertation date, and you panic your way into writing your thesis. The panic then leads to stress and errors, which I witness with many colleagues.
Seeing as my projects are particularly detached from one-another, it would perhaps be good to start thinking about some structure, and perhaps even start jotting down some text; not long paragraphs but at least some bullet points on the points I want to mention, statements I want to make in my thesis.
Seeing that I am only half-way in, is this a reasonable approach? ... or am I stressing way too early? Does one need to leave the thesis writing to the end when the stress is maxed-out, or are there smarter ways to handle the writing? I imagine one drawback of starting now, is that I do not yet have the "bigger picture" but yet again, since the projects are not built up on one another, I don't know if it's a real issue in my case.
Any perspective on the matter is welcome, of course.

Short answer: Today.  (And where were your colleagues' advisors?)

@dd3 My field is kind of hard to define; I would say biomedical research with quite a bit of bioinformatics. (I agree that an edit would make the question more clear, fixed it just now)

The revision doesn't change my short answer.

@JeffE i figured... It would have been nice to have a longer answer that touches the subject of balancing the workload between carrying out projects, getting published and patching/weaving the thesis.

But you're presenting a false choice; writing and publishing are integral to "carrying out projects".  Always be writing.  Always be publishing.  Always be working toward a bigger picture.  Then when it's time publish, most of the writing is already done, and when it's time to make a thesis, you only really need a stapler.

@JeffE hmm it appears as there is a slight but crucial difference in the approach towards the thesis (could be field-oriented), our theses are composed partly of the papers, and about as much (if not more) of semi-theoretical discussion of work that you've done during your PhD. In other words, the publications are no more than half of the thesis.

Then you should be writing the "semi-theoretical discussion" as you make progress, and then (since your field apparently requires it for some reason) removing it before submitting anything for publication.  My main point stands: Always. Be. Writing.

@JeffE message received :)

I think it is a good idea to start writing down parts of your thesis early on. You need to consider possible structures for the thesis as well so that you know what you might need to write.
Starting early will, however, not remove the need for significant efforts at the end because the thesis evolves and it is only when you have your last papers/experiments/equivalent done when you really know how the text will have to look. This means you should write down text early on with the clear understanding that this text will likely undergo lots of revisions. While this may seem like a waste of time, I have found it useful to have the thoughts down on paper, it also provides a sense of fulfillment, "that you are on your way". In some cases I have had to scrap the texts altogether and start over but I see this as part of the iterative process of scientific work.
By going through the iterations your text will improve and the last efforts will be ever closer to a final product than were you to start from scratch at the end. I went through this myself and I have seen countless students do the same. Being prepared and realising that much awaits ahead is just a realisation that must be clear. Going blindly into the final stages without having a grasp of what is needed is what causes extra and unnecessary stress.

What many folk find difficult is recalling what they did at the start of their thesis work - the literature review. They come to start writing their literature review with all the experience of the in-depth, detailed analysis conducted during their research phase and have perhaps forgotten all those papers that they read, reviewed and used to fill in the background and inform their research.
I suggest that, right from the start of your literature review reading, make short notes about each paper, perhaps at the top of the first page. e.g. "Great introduction to the field, a bit basic though"; "Good for a thorough review of method X"; "Not relevant" etc.
This makes the job of sorting through your massive (!) pile of literature easier when it comes to setting out the path you took through it to come to your research idea.

It is not clear from your post whether your dissertation will just mostly be a collection of your papers, perhaps with some filler material added, or whether it will require a substantial amount of writing from scratch. I've heard that publishing papers as a grad student and assembling them into a thesis is done depending on one's academic discipline, and perhaps depending on the university.
If you are just putting papers together there will be less work involved. Regardless, 2 months sounds like a very short amount of time to be writing a thesis in. Are you sure you got that right? I suggest you talk to other students who left it till late, and ask them if they regret doing so.
I would certainly recommend getting started on a draft immediately, if you haven't already. Things to keep in mind, depending on your area, is that heavily mathematical writing is very time-consuming. Computer calculations, writing software and so on, are also very time-consuming. I would also include graphs and figures in writing software. Figures, in my opinion, are best handled by writing code, making it easy to alter after the event, and giving the best results. Actually, graphs are a good thing to try to get set up early, because they can be a pain. Even if you don't have actual data to work with, you can use dummy data, as long as you know roughly what your final structures will look like.
If your work has significant components of either, you need to allow extra time.
You definitely don't want to be in the position of frantically debugging your code a month before your defense to get some important result out, for example. You should also not rely on your adviser(s) to tell you what schedule to keep. It is not their thesis on the line.
Two months before submission is the time for reviewing the thesis for errors, hopefully with the assistance of your advisor, and getting ready to hand it over ot the thesis committee. My impression is that the norm is to allow the committee some time to read it, like a month. They may not read it, but that is considered polite.


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As faculty, can I bring about changes in our outsourced campus bookstore?
I am tenured faculty at a state university in the US. Our campus bookstore is not run by the university; instead, it is owned and operated by a large, well-known corporation, and has a contractual agreement with the university to "be the official bookstore" and to operate in the center of campus.
Over the years, I have grown increasingly frustrated by the poor service offered by the bookstore. To name only the problems I've encountered this fall:

A full week into classes, many of my students have not yet been able to obtain their books. Neither they nor I have been told when their books will be ready; bookstore staff are not answering their email, and their phone goes straight to a recording.

A complaint on their Facebook page reads: "Please get more people working the registers, kids are waiting in line shoulder to shoulder with others for hours because there’s only one person working the register!" This, in the middle of a deadly pandemic!

My question is this: As a faculty member, do I have any ability to coerce them to improve their service? For example, if I were to join the relevant Faculty Senate committee, and pester a bunch of people in my university's administration, would I be able to bring about change? (And, if so, what would be the best way to proceed?). Or, would I merely be driving myself crazy?

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. Please read this FAQ before posting another comment. Finally: this question asks for specific information that only those familiar with high-level university administration can provide; this is not a question for common sense solutions.

While there may be some excuses this fall (2020) in the middle of a pandemic that supply chains for books are messed up (as they are for many other things), here are a few things that you could do.

Choose textbooks and materials that are readily available through other outlets, even suggesting places they can be found. (Neither of my kids generally buy their textbooks from the campus bookstore anymore - just easier to order from the comfort of their dorm/apartment and have them show up in a day or two.)

Prepare and teach your course such that any of several recent editions of the textbook could be used. This way it will be easier for students to find a used copy that would still apply. (One of the organic chemistry profs at the local university does this - organic chemistry texts new are ~$400, used are ~$50 since new editions come out nearly yearly in an attempt by the textbook publishers to destroy the used market.)

Provide much of the material yourself in the form of lecture notes, with pointers to material on reserve at the library (wait, is that a thing anymore?).

Work with your department to apply these suggestions across more classes. Talk to colleagues in other departments as well. They likely have similar frustrations.

In summary, I think local, then grassroots, efforts are likely to be more impactful than trying to fight city hall.

Strongly agree on picking materials that are available through other outlets.

Thanks for this, I appreciate it. For sections where I'm the only instructor, and get to choose the book, I definitely do this -- for example, the book for my other class can be bought for less than $10 online (and that's why I chose it). Also, last week I volunteered to serve on our calculus textbook selection committee, and I intend to fully investigate OER options. For the moment, I'm stuck with a crappy situation: we are using one of those "custom editions", together with some bundled software, and if students buy elsewhere they have to pay twice as much.

Good answer. One other suggestion: Use or write open source/open access text books.

Denying the bookshop business and profit is probably the best way to affect change. They'll be pressured to improve their service if students stop buying their books.

@academic Why can they only use one piece of software? (If it's Autograph – I know it's great, but Geogebra Classic 5 can do everything it can apart from that fancy arrows mode.) If it's possible, consider finding a free alternative; then they won't need to buy the custom edition.

As a faculty member, do I have any ability to coerce them to improve their service?

I wouldn’t use the word “coerce”, since in the literal sense of what you are asking, no, you can’t coerce anyone to do anything. But if things are as bad as you describe, you certainly ought to have the ability to effect change, provided you are willing to make a substantial commitment of time and effort, and spearhead and champion a multi-year (probably) effort to raise awareness of the problem, recruit allies, and build up support for your cause.
After all, determined individuals have done much greater things than improve service at a local bookstore, starting popular movements that led to much bigger changes at the city, national, or international levels. If Malala Yusafzai can win a Nobel Peace Prize at 17 for her activism for human rights and education of women and children, and Greta Thunberg can become an international icon for her climate and environmental advocacy, it does not seem a stretch to imagine that you too can be an agent of change.
But just joining a senate committee by itself won’t achieve anything. You have to be willing to work much harder than that and at a much broader level. You probably will encounter resistance due to administrators’ incompetence, indifference, and maybe even outright corruption. So to succeed, I think the key will be to raise a massive level of support from faculty and students that will leave decision makers with no choice about the need for reform. Some obvious steps are to gather data, document the extent of the problem, and then work on communicating what you know in the most persuasive way you can to as many people as possible, through blogs, social media, emails, personal conversations, or any other way you can think of.
Good luck! Note that this answer, and your question, are opinion-based, and thus in my opinion the question is not answerable to the standards usually expected on academia.se. But I hope these thoughts are still helpful in a modest way.

Yes, the good old "preferred supplier" problem. That's usually a turnaround time of several years to get changed if one is persistent (yes, been there, done that, multiple times). Going through the students is probably your best bet. I do not think that the comparison with Climate Change or Female Education is warranted. These are already global issues with visibility and activist structure. Trying to get an apathetic administration to change a (for them) "minor" nuisance is quite a different ballpark of difficulty (and I am only half-joking). Still +1 for the overall advice.

@CaptainEmacs if you’ve been there and done that multiple times, I bet OP would appreciate an answer telling about your experiences in more detail. I personally would also be quite interested in this, so you have a promise of at least one guaranteed upvote.

It's very convoluted and not easily generalizable and not suitable for an answer. To be successful, one needs to very precisely understand the structure of your institution and its dynamics; respecting how it is as opposed to how one wants it to be. Even with everything being above water, good faith mechanisms/people can drastically obstruct productive work. You need to seek to align these mechanisms with your productive goals. I cannot go into more detail. Even so, it requires a reptilian level of patience. To change things like that take a long time, there are no quick fixes.

Thanks for this. I'm not sure that I dare to believe that, if Malala Yusafzai or Greta Thunberg can do it, so can I. But I appreciate your answer!

Having repeatedly attempted in less chaotic times to replace the needlessly expensive "popular" texts with at-cost in-house notes for calculus... I have the impression that many faculty don't care about cost-to-students. Second, from the top down, as far as I can tell, the university makes decisions about bookstores without any info about what faculty or students want. They will occasionally appear to try to accommodate, but appearance is not substance.
Yes, I'd predict that you'd mostly just be driving yourself crazy with frustration by being on faculty committees or whatever, to try to influence the central administration, unless in your univ (unlike mine, sadly) the faculty senate actually has power. Here, about bookstores, health plans, and most other things, we definitely do not, and neither do students.

Assign Open Educational Resources instead of proprietary textbooks.  This will bring about the end of your campus bookstore.  Open educational resources are free, redistributable, and modifiable.  They eliminate all the problems with campus bookstores.
Examples: https://openstax.org/subjects/view-all

+1 Came here to say the same thing. I think this answer could be expanded/improved a bit by: (1) highlighting strategically that it will be easier to affect change locally on the department level than with university admin/outside contractors, and (2) linking directly to the fine OpenStax calculus text: https://openstax.org/details/books/calculus-volume-1

It seems that the students are already complaining about the situation on facebook, but maybe moving those complaints to twitter and adding mentions to state representatives (since it is a state school) might be enough to shame the bookstore into doing better.
Faculty and students can also can complain to their department chair, dean or provost. There is no need to be a member of a senate committee.
Having said that, vendors have been given a lot of leeway during the pandemic, so there is a chance the university and bookstore will simply say "Sorry, we are doing the best we can." (See for example the story about food in NYU dorms: https://abc7ny.com/nyu-food-new-york-university-dorm-coronavirus/6382186/)

A full week into classes, many of my students have not yet been able to obtain their books.

This happens at my campus too. It's not likely to change, because it's an inventory management/cash flow strategy for the bookstore. Come October, they don't want to be left holding any unsold books. Those books represent a huge cash outlay, and shipping them back to the publisher costs money and uses labor. Many faculty don't assign any work from the book for the first week, so the bookstore finds it convenient to act as if all classes are that way. Some students are shopping for classes, so the store wants to take their returns and sell them to other students in the second week.

My question is this: As a faculty member, do I have any ability to coerce them to improve their service? For example, if I were to join the relevant Faculty Senate committee, and pester a bunch of people in my university's administration, would I be able to bring about change?

Not likely. Your campus outsourced this function for budgetary and administrative reasons. In particular, if your campus workforce is unionized, then outsourcing the bookstore lets them avoid paying union workers, whose wages and benefits are expensive. Because it's outsourced, they can't directly control the store's operations, and they outsourced precisely because they didn't want to control them.
Although this issue has both educational and management aspects, it's primarily a management issue that happens to impact education. Your faculty senate only deals with professional and educational issues. Its job isn't to get involved in the operation of the campus. Sometimes a faculty senate does succeed with an expansive interpretation of its mandate, but in my experience that gains sufficient momentum only when it's an issue involving wages, benefits, or working conditions, and they can act in concert with a faculty union.
You do have some control over this at the individual level. You can use open educational resources. Although I'm an OER enthusiast and use them exclusively in all my classes, you should not be under the illusion, as suggested by some other answers, that this will cause a prairie fire of resistance that will fix the whole problem. Most faculty want the convenience of the publisher's ancillaries, including the test bank, etc., that they already have set up and are used to. Few faculty care at all about either the price or the didactic quality of texts. Most will express attitudes that these are irrelevant: -- that the students wont buy the book anyway, or won't read it, or will use it only as a supplement to the prof's own (superlative) lectures.
Keep in mind also that that there are likely to be campus financial interests involved. E.g., on my campus, the bookstore has a 37% markup (which they prefer to describe as 27% of the retail price), and any profit goes to sports teams. And although I haven't seen any reliable evidence of direct cash kickbacks to faculty, it is indeed common with the big-bucks freshman survey texts that there will be "soft" kickbacks. E.g., on my campus, the publisher of the freshman calculus text invites faculty on trips to Florida to meet the author.

What happened to good old fashioned campus activism to promote change? I guess it’s not the 60s any more, but take a lesson from ‘60s activists’ playbook when conditions were unacceptable and change was slow in coming:

Organize with like-minded individuals
Prepare a list of demands of the book store and publicize the demands
Find a charismatic, telegenic spokesperson among the dissatisfied
students
Boycott the store
Picket, sit-in, protest loudly but non-violently
Reach out to the shareholders of the parent company if publicly
traded
Petition the school administration to cancel the bookstore’s contract
for cause
Propose a co-op, non-profit bookstore run by student employees with
faculty advisors
Editorialize in campus publications, websites, social media
Involve outside media (radio, TV, newspapers)

The time for timid suggestions is long passed. Activism gets results.

You don't have the ability to impact how the bookstore does business, but you certainly have the ability to impact the students' reliance on the book store.
On your syllabus, and on your course website, you should plainly show the course materials that the students need for your course.   If there is good open-access material that would serve your purpose, you should consider using it, but even if there isn't, or for some reason you don't like the open access model (and I have no urge to enter that debate), this gives the students an opportunity to purchase their materials somewhere other than the bookstore.  Be VERY careful about actually linking or recommending alternative and cheaper commercial sites, though, as that likely violates the school's contract with the vendor.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out, though, that textbooks can be found at much lower cost than the campus bookstore, whether a student is purchasing new, used, or wants to rent.
Keep in mind that there may be some actual benefits to bookstore services.  For example, they may take purchase orders from the school, or somehow interact with the bursar's offices for students who might need to purchase their books through financial aid.  They remove the excuse for students claiming "I couldn't buy the book" (assuming the staff is doing their job, unlike your case).  There's probably another reason or three that I'm sure you'll figure out if the bookstore decides it can no longer profitably operate on your campus and leaves.

I can think of three ways of tackling this:

The official route: finding out what the contract says, finding out who in the University is responsible for managing it, examining the contract to see whether they are in breach of it, establishing when it comes up for renewal, and ultimately getting it terminated.

The activism route: basically making their life sufficiently miserable that they change their ways, by boycotting them, giving them bad publicity, etc.

The persuasion route: find out who the bookstore manager's boss is; get on their side; explain that its in both your interests to improve things; get them to replace the current manager with someone competent.

My suspicion would be that the cause of the problem is an incompetent local manager, and that the bookstore's head office is probably as keen to sort the situation out as you are. You need to find out whether that's the case, because it will affect the strategy for solving the problem.

The other answers here focus on how to make the bookstore change.
I'd like to add a thought on how to change the situation at the bookstore now.
From what you write, one particularly annoying issue right now is that many students have to spend a lot of time in the line at the bookstore.  It may be worth while if you as teacher of the course suggest to the bookstore to make one "bulk" purchase: have your students sign a list if they want to buy there, if needed collect copies of their student IDs, place the order with the book store and schedule an appointment when to collect the books or when they deliver the books to you (without the need to line up). All this can be done by your students, although I think that when calling the bookstore to agree on such a procedure you as the lecturer may have more weight than a student calling them.

That being said, I still find the culture of having one mandatory textbook strange for a university course.
Typically,

We have several textbooks to choose from (so each student can work with the textbook(s) that they get along with best)
Old editions are typically fine as well (I've sucessfully worked with several textbooks that were 30 - 40 years old in my first years at university)
We'd have been quite upset if the textbooks that were recommended as directly relevant hadn't been available in the library in sufficient numbers (we weren't that many, though). Many if not most of us started by using textbooks from the library at least until we knew which textbook suited us personally. That was also the recommended procedure for buying textbooks.
(Buying in student editions of software was either done at the university IT department, or directly from the software company.)

The first two points are something you can work towards in future when doing the next iteration on your lecture.
The third point is also something to bring up at your department and/or library, but may require quite hard negotiations. It is probably difficult to negotiate, but I noticed that substantial sets of textbooks had stickers saying that they were funded by certain foundations. But maybe you can find such money, and get the donor to tie the purpose to buying textbooks for the library. With the decision for faculty and/or library being textbooks vs. nothing, I'd think the textbooks have a good chance.

Thanks for this. Some thoughts. First of all, your suggested "bulk purchase model" is indeed what our bookstore pushes on our students. Indeed, I since learned that my students' books had been on the shelves all along. Apparently their software fouled up, my students were told that their books were not available, and there was no way to contact them. I had to escalate all the way to the provost before someone would tell me what is going on.

As far as your culture comments, I think that "using one book" is tied to the culture of American academia. Typically we try quite hard to keep everyone on the same page; homework (often just "Problems 2,3,5,9,11,14,15,19,22 of Chapter 4") is required and counts for a significant proportion of the grade; and students expect to be told explicitly what material the exam will cover. What you describe sounds very interesting, but also like it's adapted to a system very much different from ours.

I don't know the US system first hand, but from what I've heard, yes ours is quite different (and I think it used to be even more different). We typically have a curriculum stating which topics are relevant, possibly naming a few textbooks to give an idea of the required depth. Homework excercises are usually/often not graded but are seen as opportunities for self study offered to the students. Seminar excercises are more often graded. Both are distributed as sets of actual questions rather than references. In school, both ways are used.

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


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How to make thesis-writing feel less tedious?
I'm about to finish my master's thesis on a TCS topic (algorithms). I'm quite happy with my results; the most engaging part of the thesis was grappling with getting up to speed on the state of the art, then taking that and developing new and/or more efficient algorithms for the specific model I'm working on. Proving that the algorithms actually work has been very satisfying as well.
However, I'm having a hard time sitting down and TeXing it all; it feels very tedious. I did write out the most important bits very soon after I had them figured out so I could give them to my advisor. Yet for the better part of the past two weeks, every day I considered getting down to it and putting it all together into a presentable thesis, eventually deciding to put it off for another day. As I'm hoping to do a PhD afterwards, I thought I should nip this in the bud so I won't be wasting time like this for too long.
What are effective methods to motivate myself to do what is necessary in research as efficiently as possible so I can focus more on the actually interesting, creative parts?
(I could not figure out how to tag this; feel free to edit tags)

There is a number of great answers speaking to organization and extrinsic motivation by now; I was wondering if anyone has had any success in finding/improving their intrinsic motivation with regard to writing? Possibly a change in attitude, maybe a point of view that may not have occurred to me that makes writing appear more useful?

If you burn out easily from writing, take breaks every hour to do what you want to do and after you're done, get back to writing. Sometimes, it's just tedious, but it can be mitigated.

What do you mean by "tedious"?  Is it just boring?  Or do you have writers block and find that even after sitting in front of the computer for hours nothing gets done?  I'm assuming the latter, as the former really doesn't sound like a serious problem ...

It is more a motivation issue than one of not being able to produce new results. I would prefer to only work on ideas and not having to give them a presentable form (which is of course not how this works). Obviously, proofs and algorithms need to be thought through and noted down formally to a sufficient degree to be sure they are correct - but that's a long shot from putting everything together publication-ready, so to speak. I have strong intrinsic motivation to do something new. When I try to do the necessary labor of documenting it tidily, I get little done (except in infrequent bursts).

Most of the time, this is because I have a number of ideas for solving new problems that my results brought up, and I would much rather be working on them. But since there are deadlines on many things that's not a way to work, and I was hoping others have had similar issues and might have found useful techniques to efficiently get the labor done so there is more time to be working on new things instead of wasting time (trying to, but not actually) documenting results.

There is a lot of hard and frequently tedious work in getting from notes written on napkins to a finished product accessible to others. Learning this is a very important part of your education as a scientist.  Also practice helps.  A lot.

Is your motivation problem related to writing (as your title suggests), or related to TeXing (as your second paragraph suggests)? If it's the latter, you might be able to write in some other way, and pay someone to TeX for you.

It's the writing itself; I actually find latex itself to be quite fun.

I actually find latex itself to be quite fun.  So get off SE, get some text in and only come back when there's a real problem - or at least that's what I had to tell myself frequently.  And if the writing is going badly get on with figures (in my case always sit down in the morning with the goal of writing something).

Am wondering if the question is more suitable for personal productivity S.E. than here...

tl;dr: Divide and conquer. –  aeismail♦

The Balloon Analogy
I used to hate writing with a passion. Trying to squeeze a 5 page paper out of me was like trying to juice a rock.
Eventually, though, I figured out the root cause for my procrastination.
The biggest sense of daunting I found when writing a paper is that you start with nothing, and have to end up with a significant something.
So, let's look at what you have set up. You create a new Word/TeX document, and it's there. Page 1 of 1. A blank page with that blinking cursor.
Pretty intimidating and most likely the reason why we push it off till tomorrow until it's due next week and then we've wasted forever. This is basically like us trying to inflate a big weather balloon. You do a little work, and it doesn't seem inflated at all.
I eventually got over this intimidation by reducing the size of the problem to its individual parts. Imagine trying to fill up a dozen individual party balloons with the same amount of air as the weather balloon. Each bit of inflating goes a long way, and a fully inflated mylar balloon is much easier to achieve.
Transforming one Big Balloon into a Bunch of Smaller Balloons
A strategy that we all learned in K-12 is outlining, which actually helps more now than it did then. Now, it doesn't have to be a formal outline. However, the idea behind the outline is that it can transform into a full-sized paper much more easily than a blank slate, for little actual effort in.
Stub out each individual section of your paper. If you have a glossary, add that. If you have a bunch of subsections, create them, and add the titles. Don't be afraid to dedicate an entire page to a chapter with no content, if you feel that eventually you will need it.
For basically 12 or so lines of typing, you've turned a single blank sheet into perhaps 8 or so pages with a rudimentary summary of what you're going to talk about. Filling out a single page or two is much less daunting than that previous 20-page paper we were fretting about before. This dividing and conquering of pages has turned 1 very large paper into 8 relatively easy to populate short papers.
Inflating the Balloons
After that, pick a section, any section, that you want to write. It doesn't have to be the introduction if you're drawing a blank. That's perfectly normal. I rewrote my introduction all the way to the end of my paper because the rest of the paper was evolving to include additional topics. Some sections needed more meat or could be expanded, others could be shortened or removed.
Now, type away at the keyboard on the section you've assigned to yourself until you fill it up or have run out of ideas. Wanted to write Chapter 5: Potatoes in Artwork? Go for it! Chapters 1 to 4 can wait until you're sufficiently inspired to do them, or have enough information from Chapter 5 to help give substance to the other chapters.
When you're done with the small subsection you're working on, you should evaluate whether you feel you can do more. Sometimes, after doing a relatively easy section, I enjoy tackling a somewhat harder piece and getting that out of the way. Other times, I'll need a break, and take one.
Basically, my strategy is that one shouldn't plan to, or even reasonably expect to, write the paper front to back.
Breaking the paper into parts, giving them sufficient weight so that you can see the progress as you go, and slowly but steadily inflate and become a full paper.

Author's Note: Yeah, for some reason now I write really long posts even when I don't mean to.

tl;dr: Divide and conquer.

On the first day of a new writing project I only plan to set up compilable Latex document with all the sections. The next day it is a lot easier to start. Then the next day, if I have figures I'll add them too.

@aeismail That's boring q.q

Of note: this works for pretty much anything where lots of words need to end up on a screen. I program by writing what I want to do in comments first and add in the actual methods and logic later.

"The biggest sense of daunting I found when writing a paper is that you start with nothing, and have to end up with a significant something." That seems like a reasonable description of what I'm having trouble with as well; it seems like a lot of work , and I can muster little motivation to do that work since it feels like I'm just writing stuff down I already figured out. The d&c approach should be a good technique for the logistics of writing. Do you maybe have any pointers on how to increase motivation for it? It sounds like you went from "bah humbug" to "meh, could be worse" yourself.

It's more of a change in a way of thinking. For my 50 page paper in grad school, our professor set a bunch of checkpoints along the semester to gauge our progress. Set up some with your adviser so that you are motivated to have some actual progress by a certain point, rather than just a 100% progess point a few months away.

@G.Bach it's also helpful to try and not visualize all writing as a chore. This post, for example, I didn't feel obligated to write that much and genuinely enjoyed putting my thoughts on it.

For people doing anything with geometry: if you have figures on napkins or scratch paper, go ahead and take a snapshot with your cell phone and put that in. You then have something to write about right there in your document which makes writing that section much easier. You can replace the snapshots with the real figures later - this will save you from sinking too much time into improving your figures before you write anything.

@G.Bach I find outlining the thesis to be quite fun. What is the main point I want to tell? What background do I need? How do I sort the theory and implementation? I end up with the full skeleton of sections and subsections after one day.

@Sumyrda I genuinely had not thought of putting in dummy figures up until now; it did always slightly irritate me to have to do figures very soon since for some reason I can argue about them much better if I see them in the pdf instead of on my notepad.

This is quite a nice post. It is not revolutionary. But it provides a mindset. And it helps to "feel" that the approach has allowed success to someone else. Also the specific tip about leaving the intro to later is personally a good one - i often write a good intro to a paper/doc that never gets off the ground.

While it doesn't speak to me in terms of motivation, I expect this to be the most useful answer in terms of making writing feel less laborious; thanks for the advice!

If you often get stuck with writing, you can try two things:

Try free writing.  Forget about your thesis for a moment, and just start writing.  It doesn't matter what you write, just keep writing.  It doesn't need to produce usable material.  It doesn't even have to be on the topic of your thesis, if you feel you just can't do that at the moment.  But do keep writing.  This helps overcome writer's block for many people.
When I first heard about this, I considered it very silly, but it turned out to work for me.  Very often I end up with a text that turns out to be usable after all, or relatively easy to polish to the required quality.  Not having the pressure of having to write good quality material helps me be more efficient.

Sit down with your colleague and explain to him or her what you are going to write before you write it down.  This will help you organize your thoughts and write in an easier to understand manner.  It also helps eliminate the tedium and get you more excited about your work.

I'd recommend talking to someone first (2.), then sitting down right away and writing down your thoughts, without the intention to use the text as-is in your thesis (1.).

I don't like writing either. It feels very clumsy. And it is hard, especially if you haven't done much writing. Sometimes it felt that I learned a lot more about writing during my PhD, than actual subject.
I did find that some sections are easier to write than others. I find that describing results easier than describing the method. And describing the method is easier than writing introduction. So, I work backwards sometimes.
Now, this is a funny thing, I cannot start an introduction of a new paper by just typing in. I found that using good-old paper and pencil, away from the desk, are much more productive in creating the first paragraph or two. Then it starts flowing from there.

The introduction is typically written last.

@ThorbjørnRavnAndersen wouldn't the last thing to write be the abstract?

The divide and conquer approach applies to time management and writing location as well as content, in my experience. For instance, when writing up my PhD thesis I found myself rotating between my home office, work office, and the "coffice" (starbucks!), usually any two in any given day. I also gave up trying to write in the late afternoon, because I noticed that it always felt like even more of a drag, and rested instead, often having a productive evening session as a result. I probably got about 5-6 productive hours a day with this approach, but I found that to be plenty to make encouraging process day by day. I think that being encouraged by one's progress is an excellent motivator!
So, in addition to all the other good advice here, try changing scenery during the day and think carefully about how you work at various times of day.

I have run into similar cases where I had to deliver written evaluations of my team members. I typically knew what each person had accomplished, their strengths and weaknesses, and areas for improvement. I could sit down with them and talk to them 1:1 and give the feedback. However, it needed to be captured in written form.
I tried several approaches to getting the write-ups done, but found unless I physically put myself in an environment that offered no opportunities to do something else I just couldn't get it done.
Using my laptop to draft the write-ups never worked as the laptop itself offers too many ways to get distracted (an email in instant message comes in, playing with formatting in a Word document, browsing the web for correct spelling of a word and then ending up searching for other things).
Two things helped my get the task done:

Isolate myself from everyone and everything that may interrupt or distract me. A local library in the middle of the day is typically fairly deserted and quiet, and was ideal for me.
Hand writing the initial draft with pen and paper. This allowed me to avoid the distractions a computer offers, and I didn't worry about perfect grammar/spelling/sentence structure/formatting/etc getting in the way of being "creative."

Once I had the hand-written draft, I was able to work much more mechanically to type up the evaluations.

Have you tried the "pomodoro technique"? It's just a form of what's called time boxing: you set aside a limited amount of time to work on something (in this case, 25 minutes) followed by a short break (5 minutes). You use a timer to tell you when the work and break times are up, and periodically take a break. There are tons of online timers, phone apps, and so on for the actual timing part.
I found all the extra rules and writing down goals and stuff to be too much, but the basic method of telling myself that I only had to work on this for 25 minutes and then I could go do something else was really useful.

A small percent of the overall effort is the creation, say 5%.
The bulk of the effort, perhaps 95%, is what it takes to adequately describe the work so others can understand.
The 95% is our payment for the joy of creation and for the privilege of doing it again and again.

What is the form you're most comfortable with ? mind maps can be turned into text with less effort than writing text right from the start. Reading out loud powerpoints can be recorded and then written back.

Welcome to Academia SE! I assume you are somewhat familiar with the SE format, but what makes a good answer here can be a little different. Please read through this meta question for some tips about writing good answers for Academia SE.

A couple of points, which I thought might be helpful (despite being rather obvious as well as you having some great, albeit non-brief, advice in already posted answers and comments):

What people in some previous comments and answers called a "divide and conquer" strategy or "the balloon analogy" strategy, I call an "extended plan" or, better, "extended outline" approach. IMHO, it's self-explanatory.
For motivation, you have to feel excitement about the topic. If you don't have such or lost it, try to revive the enthusiasm for, at least, some aspect of the topic.
I would recommend you to write plain text first for everything (maybe with simple formatting, such as Markdown or similar syntax) and only then convert the content into the LaTeX format.

Perhaps you need a different mental image/metaphor... If you were on train-tracks, and you could hear a train coming in the distance, you'd move... You'd not linger, as a pedestrian, crossing a busy highway. Now, yes, these comparisons seem to miss the long-term grind aspect of "writing a thesis", but they do aptly convey the failure-mode. The "problem" is that, happily, many people in grad school have a relatively easy-enough life that day-to-day there's no connection between sweat and food, or sweat and rent-payment, etc. I'd not advocate that people be so stressed that they see every day as a battle to merely survive. However, the (happy!) opposite extreme does seem to subliminally confuse many people, unsurprisingly.
The difficulty of understanding viscerally "passage-of-time" might be well suggested by thinking of "something slipping away". Sure, at any moment, the change is small... but every moment wasted contributes to a negative situation, etc.
If you're at all competitive, imagine that every moment you're not doing the write-up, your competitors are... or, at least, the best-self-disciplined of them are, and they will be the ones that get the post-docs... (??!!??)
Another tack: "it's fine to be demotivated, and it merely shows that you're failing a diagnostic test..." That is, depending on your motivation and worldview, you could castigate yourself by observing that the very failure to write is not merely inconvenient, but is a literal failure of a certain academic-survival(-ist) test. "The bear ate you."
Of course, among other issues, thesis-writing comes at an awkward time of many peoples' lives, among other awkwardnesses that of finding that "being smart and quick" is completely insufficient for thesis-writing, for example. A sort of smart-person's trap/disappointment.
And, in the latter context, if "find motivation in previous terms" is the goal, I think there is none. Maybe some fakes, but, srsly, at some point things are not so completely "kid games" as earlier school might have been for smart, quick people. That is, there is some heavy lifting to be done, and it can't be bluffed-through so easily.

Intrinsic motivation to write up your results can very well be a hard thing, especially if you're distracted with further consequences of your work. Here are a couple of ideas:

Further consequences of your work will likely be addressed once you start your doctoral studies, possibly leading to good papers, so it might be a good idea to postpone working on them until then.
Try to imagine teaching others what you've done using techniques you find the easiest (conversations, slides, blackboard banter, whatever). Did you like the feeling of them learning about your work? Use that feeling as a spark. (If you didn't like them learning about it, we might have pinpointed the problem.)
Try to imagine you following your own work years later. You'll know the high points, sure, put perhaps some details will get fuzzy or the reasoning for certain choices you made may be unclear. Save your future self frustration and get it all down while it's still fresh in your mind. (Like commenting code you know you'll need to revisit later.)
Sometimes the act of documenting helps you discover problems with your approach (okay, not the most desirable outcome, but better to find them now rather than later), as well as give you ideas for other directions you haven't yet considered.

Good luck!


text:
Eliminating ambiguity in a grading policy
In a particular course, there will be one final exam and an online activity.
Say the final exam is worth 50 points and the online activity is worth 5 points.
Based on the following statement, how should the course be graded?
"Online activity points added to the course cumulative score."
For a sample case, we will assume a 49/50 on the exam, and 5/5 on the online activity.
While I know what the above statement means, is it ambiguous to others? If so, how can I remove the ambiguity?
EDIT1: The course grade is only made up of the final exam and online activity. There are no other sources of points.
EDIT2: I bring this up for two reasons: A student has interpreted the grading policy to mean he should get 54/50 (using the example numbers) in the course. He feels that if the points are added to the course cumulative score, they should not increase the total number of points possible (54/55). In order to prevent this misunderstanding in the future, I'm trying to reword the policy.

My understanding of the example you provided is the student gets 54/55. If this is not your calculation, then there is some difference between our understandings.

At least get a verb in there so the statement isn't a sentence fragment?

Good point. The existing wording of the policy was inherited, and I'm trying to clear things up.

Maybe the best way to eliminate the ambiguity is to add a concrete example to your syllabus:

The final exam is worth 50 points and the online activity is worth 5 points. Therefore, if a student scores 48 on the final exam, and earns 4 points in the online activity, then that student will have scored 52 out of 55 points possible.

That seems much less confusing and ambiguous than:

Online activity points [are] added to the course cumulative score

I recommend that you work with weighted averages, as being less confusing.  For example: the final exam will be worth 50% of the grade; online participation will be worth 5% of the grade.  (I just made those numbers up -- you get to figure out what your scheme is.)

I got "final exam 91%, online activity 9%" (rounded to the nearest percent).

And, of course, you will want the percentages to add up to 100%...

Yes, total must = 100%.  I was leaving out the midterm, the homeworks, the project and presentation, etc.

Thanks for the comments. I just edited the description above to reflect that the only graded work in the course is the final exam and online activity.
aparente001: How does working with the percentages make it less confusing? Is there something that could be misinterpreted about the original grading statement?

Is there something that could be misinterpreted about the original grading statement?  Yes.  //  By Nate's calculation, it sounds like you'll want something like a 90/10 split.  But I think you'll find that putting that much weight on a final exam is very hard on students, especially students who have any sort of special needs.  It sort of looks like laziness on the instructor's part (whether it is or not -- that is the appearance it gives me).

@aparente001 The points for the exam and online activity can change (i.e.: They can both have 50 points each), but I'm more interested in ensuring the grading statement is unambiguous. Does it seem though it could be misinterpreted?

Does it seem though it could be misinterpreted?  Yes.  The points for the exam and online activity could vary -- the weighting takes care of that.  Whatever percentage the student earns in his exam must by multiplied by the weight factor.


text:
Planning to do PHD, Masters Thesis important? (USA)
I am a master's student in computer science. I have completed my coursework and will be graduating soon, with a project. I am planning to do a PhD in the future: is a master's thesis an important prerequisite for a PhD? Most people say yes, hence I am of two minds: (1) get an extension and improve my project into thesis, and then graduate or (2) graduate now, hoping that everything will work out fine. I already expressed my interest to work more on my project; my advisor said OK. Do I need to do anything other than this (improving my project, of course with research exploration) to get a thesis? My advisor seems to be a little uninterested, because he has to guide other students, too, rather than that I did a bad job on the project. But I am wondering which way to go: industry or master's thesis?

Short answer: No.  Longer answer: All else being equal, more research is better for PhD admission.  (Note: More research, not more degrees.  Admissions standards for applicants with masters degrees are higher.)

US/UK or Continental Europe? Please indicate in title and question, as the answers are very different.

Sorry, the country was USA...

Your last question is a bit of a non sequitur, frankly: I don't really see the connection between going into industry versus doing a master's thesis with the rest of the question.
That said, JeffE's comment above is essentially correct: if you are interested in doing a PhD in the near future, an industrial job is probably not going to get you the research experience you need to be a competitive PhD applicant.
With respect to what you need to do to convert your project into a master's thesis, that's really something you ought to discuss with your project supervisor. Without knowing the specific policies of your department, as well as the specifics of what you did in the project, it's difficult (if not impossible) for us to know what needs to be done.

Hi, Thanks for your advice. I just saw your profile and I work in a molecule simulation project too, but thats been done and the professor from another department, who also collaborated is happy. So my work is in an final stage and will be completed within May end and I am good to graduate. But If I want to make it as thesis, I have to work on parallalizing the simulation for performance and this will algorithm for parallalizing can be used by anyone who uses this method, not just for my project.  I would really love to work somewhere as research Assistant to gain experience, but I am in F1

F1 Visa, is for international students(I am from India), I need to work on a H1B Visa to stay, which I dont think any research organization offers(I have to check out though). So I am planning to extend my graduation for December and see, what can be done. I am planning to decline a job offer that I already have and planning to do an internship in my field,systems(tats industry though, I have an offer).Please advise.

@howtechstuffworks: This is a very different question from the first one, and I think could be asked as a separate question. (I'm also not really qualified to answer this question, as I am not based in the US, and I was a US citizen, so I didn't have to worry about US immigration law!)

Actually, that might be an another different question. But for now, my concern, is how important involving in research during your masters is important? Because, I am planning to take a shot, will it worth and my adviser is not so interested in my research as he is used to be for my project till now. Just wondering. Thanks. Sorry for the confusion.

It depends upon the norm in your field and in the country you're applying to. If you're looking at programs in the US, if you're in a non-engineering field (in which most master's degrees tend to be coursework and project-work—and not research-based), then having some research experience is quite important. In engineering fields, it's not nearly so, but it's always beneficial to have it rather than not to have it.

@Aeismail, while we're at this, what college?

"how important involving in research during your masters" — If you're aiming for a PhD in computer science, involvement in research is the single most important aspect of any masters program.