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What to do about questions that are designed to embarrass the speaker?
I've attended a lot of seminars and lectures by now, and it's typical for the chair of the seminar to offer audience members a chance to ask questions of the speaker about their work after the presentation.
Most of the time, the questions seek clarification of some aspect of the presentation or focus on a more comprehensive understanding of the research involved.
However, occasionally, I've noticed that questions are purposefully designed to embarrass the speaker.  Things along the lines of "That method won't work at all for what you're trying to do.  Your results are completely invalid" or "So-and-so's group already did that work years ago.  Did you not read their paper?"
Perhaps more disturbingly (I just got back from a really large conference if you can't tell), is that women seem to be more harshly criticized than men, and over trivial issues.  For instance, in a few sessions I went to, female graduate students were given really hard times over their presentations while the male grad students were not.  All presentations were about the same quality.  I guess I'm a little shocked; I'd heard of sexism in academia but hadn't actually seen it (or noticed it) until this conference.
Oddly enough, I've observed that it's typically prestigious professors or researchers that are asking these ostentatious questions.  I suppose they figure they have enough "fame" or whatever that their job isn't in jeopardy, and there's no easy way to really prove they're being rude or sexist.
I don't know what's going on here, but it seems to me that these questions, even if they do have technical merit, should be held until after the seminar, where they can be discussed privately with the researcher.
My question here, specifically, is what can be done to minimize these (uncomfortable for everyone) instances?  My thoughts are that a session chair should remind the audience to refrain from questions that are accusatory in nature.  As a presenter, I'm not sure what can be done in advance to preempt and avoid these questions.  Any ideas?

"What can be done to minimize these instances?" Don't open the floor to questions. Beyond that, you are at the mercy of the individual consciences in the crowd.

In what field of study is this?  In mathematics I think it is customary to be brutally frank.  In what country is this?  In some countries (I think the U.S. is one example), it is acceptable to be brutally frank.

Related: Useful strategies for answering "dumb" questions in a talk? and How to respond to the trivialisation of one’s work and unjustified demands for a considerable extension of the research?

Would you give us better examples? It seems to me your second one "So-and-so's group already did that work years ago. Did you not read their paper?" is point frank and you're somewhat obligated to answer it.

In my experience, a question that is obviously meant to harass the speaker usually winds up embarrassing the questioner, by making them look petty and immature.

Professor Cheng-Ning Yang, a 1953 Nobel Laureate in Physics, is good at dealing with this. I noted that he would use "I do not know how to answer this question" to decline the "unconstructive" questions. For example, you can read his popular books on his own research and teaching experiences and will see how he delt with Pauli's relentless questions.

https://twitter.com/AcademicsSay/status/446019219529158656/photo/1

@Joel: Where "brutally frank" = "obnoxiously rude and intimidating". Yes, I noticed this in the US, too. It's a great shame.

This will sound like a joke, but it's not: binge-watch all of The West Wing and study how C.J. handles heckling in her press briefings.

I guess I should have said it differently.  Instead of "customary" or "acceptable," I should have said "it is not unusual for audience members to be brutally frank."

It is simply rude for senior people to "mess with" junior people in a public forum. It does seem to be popular with some people, but it is not "accepted style" in the U.S., at least not within a reasonable distance of me. Yes, to my perception, junior women are often perceived (by bullies) as more vulnerable to bullying.

I don't agree at all that in mathematics it is customary to be "brutally frank"; it does happen sometimes, but not very often.

I'm also interested in the field and country. In my experience comments at conferences are lenient and politically correct to the point where it becomes absurd. If someone told me I did someone else's work again, it would hurt my ego but would teach me a good lesson. I would see it as beneficiary to the field.

I agree with @ff524: the examples you cite are completely fair (if factually accurate) in that they are rightful criticism of the presented contribution. (Well, what they really say is, "our review process does not work at all", but I guess that's a truth nobody wants to face.)

I also agree with @BrenBarn in the scenario that the asker does not have their facts straight. "How do I phrase my brutal criticism in a way that I have plausible deniability in case I'm wrong?" is an interesting question, too. I've often heard variants of "It's been a while since I read that article; can you please explain the differences between your work and that of X?".

Personally I think being direct and to the point is of far more value than wasting everyone's time with extraneous verbiage just to salve someone's feelings.  If the presenter can't answer the questions as listed then perhaps they shouldn't have been presenting.

I suspect that a lot of it isn't sexist in the "being derogatary to women" sense - just that often the older, experienced men tend to pay far more attention to young women than young men.....

Note that versions of this questions occur in any kind of presentation from lecture to technical pitch to sales pitch. You might want to consider taking a course in presentation skills, which should (but doesn't always) include a section on how to handle the most common kinds of disruptive audience members -- from those who are speaking up just so the boss notices them, to those who want to present their own idea which may have nothing to do with yours, to those playing ego games. The best solution may vary depending on which kind of nuisance you're dealing with.

advice to people who observe this behavior: Approach the question asker during the break and nicely point out the difference in how the audience (not the person specifically) are treating the male and female presenters. Be civil and socratic; engage them in a discussion. The goal is to get them thinking about their behavior and their biases, don't accuse them of anything but do try and correct the problem. This piece of advice is for confronting only people below or horizontal to you in status (i.e. grad student approaches grad student, faculty approaches faculty)

Firstly, I should note that the examples you give are certainly somewhat agressively formulated (more so than would be common in my field), but not in themselves invalid questions. It is certainly "allowed" to be critical of the presented work, and there is nothing the session chair can or should do about this.
As a speaker, it always helps to think in advance what kind of "negative" question there could be, and prepare for them. You know that your work is very close to Foo et al, 2001? Good, have a backup slide that highlights your contribution over them. You think people would argue that a much simpler standard approach would have also worked instead of your super-complicated new custom method? Have a backup slide which compares the results of the two methods (you did test the standard method first, right?). If your answer does not convince the person asking the question, then much of what I wrote in this related answer also applies here. Specifically:

(...) try to explain calmly why you did what you did. Yes, maybe that person asking the question will disagree, but so what? The fact that your actual peer reviews are good shows that there are a non-trivial amount of researchers that actually agree with you. The person asking the question is not your supervisor, you don't need to agree with him/her specifically on your research agenda or approaches.

As a session chair, you need to step in as soon as a question starts to become an ad hominem attack. That is, "I think this has been done years ago." is still fine, while "How the heck did you even get a PhD?" isn't. Further, a session chair should interrupt a series of questions as soon as he feels that the discussion isn't of interest to the larger audience anymore. I do not think that there is much that can be done in advance. As a session chair, you typically want to foster discussions, not preemptively set out the ground rules.
About the parts regarding sexisms and whether senior professors tend to be mean: I don't really have much to say about this. Not being a woman, I have not yet noticed any particular pattern about how females get asked questions versus males. The same is true for whether senior professors ask more critical questions - personally, I rather have the impression that fellow grad students and young postdocs or assistant professors are more likely to be extremely critical of other person's work than more senior researchers.

+1; if you have a good answer on that, I think the paragraph "You know that your work is very close to Foo et al, 2001?" should be extended with a suggestion for the opposite case - "You don't know ...". In my (very limited to a few years, so far) experience, there is almost always some previous very closely related work that you missed, because everyone makes up their own, new terminology (in CS at least, where "cool-sounding product names" for concepts are common), and because many concepts can be presented on various levels of abstraction and in very different communities.

@O.R.Mapper The only answer I can think of for this case is "I will need to look into this". If I don't know the work, how would I ad hoc be able to answer anything else?

Probably, that is the only way to go; I just wondered whether there was any way to respond in a confident way when the questions are "aggressively formulated". If, as the OP suggests, the asker indeed tries to embarrass the speaker, "I will need to look into this" can be quickly followed up by something obvious (and thus unnecessary to state) like: "You should have done so before giving this talk." (Of course, that may be the point where the session chair might step in.)

@O.R.Mapper With that kind of comment the person asking the question would really only embarrass himself.

I agree.  Most of the time people asking these questions are embarrassing themselves.  As a presenter you have to walk the line of entertainment vs cringe-worthy debate.  The audience for the most part think these questions are entertaining because of their connotation but it is up to the presenter to both refute the question and do so without engaging in a fight.

@O.R.Mapper In the "you don't know" situation, it might be good to say a bit more than what xLeitix suggested, perhaps something like "I was not aware of that work. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.  I'll look into it." My reasoning is that (1) even if the questioner intended to be nasty, (s)he has given you information that is likely to be useful, and (2) by being as polite as possible, you make any further nastiness from this questioner look particularly bad to the rest of the audience.

@AndreasBlass: +1, that's pretty much what I was going to suggest. In fact, I'd go a bit further and suggest phrasing like "No, I was not aware of that work, but it sounds interesting. I would be happy to discuss it with you after the session." This lets the questioner feel that you're receptive to their feedback, but avoids subjecting the audience to the protracted discussion. (In fact, one could probably adapt this approach as a session chair, too, e.g. "That sounds interesting, but we're getting a bit short on time. Perhaps you could discuss it further after the session.")

... Of course, the potential down side to this approach, if the questioner is truly obnoxious, is that you'll probably have to spend at least 5-15 minutes talking with them later. (IME, they're often really not, but YMMV.) Coffee breaks can be good for that, since it's a semi-public setting, and comes with a built-in time limit. Be sure to bring your laptop / tablet, so that you can immediately look up any references suggested -- the best way to deal with someone repeatedly insisting that you really need to check out this-and-that is to do it right there and then.

I don't understand this comment: "Not being a woman, I have not yet noticed any particular pattern about how females get asked questions versus males." After all, being a man, haven't you had precisely the same opportunity to notice patters in how males get asked questions versus females?

@TomChurch Arguably, it is much easier to notice different treatment when you are one of those that are not treated the same.

But we're talking about two groups of people! It's not meaningful to say "one group is treated the same and the other group is treated different"; the two groups are treated differently from each other.

@TomChurch It is, if there is one group that is very large (males) and one group that is at most 20% (females), as in my field.

+1 From a PhD student perspective I don't think you emphasise enough how aggressive some younger postdocs can be in their questions at smaller seminars/conferences/meetings. However I have found at larger conferences it is almost always senior lecturers that do the probing.

@GoodGravy These things vary from group to group. I don't think that there is a general rule that postdocs do the grilling in internal seminars.

@xLeitix Oh of course not, particularly in smaller groups it has been the complete opposite even from my experience! I am speaking very generally and with a narrow perspective. I just like that the answer points out that aggressive questioning isn't a senior lecturer only 'problem' like OP assumes.

As others have noted in the comments, there's a difference between questions that have legitimate content but an unnecessarily aggressive tone (e.g., "Isn't it obvious that won't work for reason X, you fool?"), and questions that are purely verbal attacks with no real substance ("How did you even get accepted to this conference?").
As a speaker, the best way to respond to the first kind of question is just as if it lacked the harassing component.  If you calmly address the substance of the question without getting your dander up, the questioner is the one who will look like a jerk for adopting such a confrontational stance.  Of course, it's especially nice if you can cleanly dispatch their question with a concise and accurate rejoinder (e.g., "Actually, Smith and Jones showed in a paper last year that this method works quite well"), but if your research is sound, even a fairly garden-variety response is probably adequate (e.g., "The jury is still out on that question, but our results show it's worth investigating further").
As for the second kind of question, at least in my experience it seems to often take the form of a sort of rambling rant by the questioner, directed less at the current speaker than at some whole research area or methodology.  (For instance someone saying, "But don't these kinds of studies always run up against the problem of. . .")  I have seen people come of well in responding to these kinds of questions by waiting patiently and then responding good-humoredly but pointedly with something like "I'm not sure I caught what your actual question was."
If the question really is a direct attack or a "gotcha" attempt (e.g., quizzing the person on one particular paper), you'll rarely be faulted for just saying something like "Maybe we can discuss those details individually later" (i.e., in the coffee break or whatever).  I think this is the ace-in-the-hole response to many questions that try to derail the question session and turn it into a one-upmanship contest.  Of course, it's best only to use it when the question really is out of bounds (or too large in scope to be answered in the question session), because if you try to deflect legitimate questions this way you'll look like you haven't done your homework.
As an audience member, I've noticed that usually when someone asks a confrontational question, it seems to make the audience uncomfortable as well.  Often other people have questions and would like to ask them before the question time is consumed by verbal posturing.  So it helps to remember that, if the question is really uncalled-for, the audience is probably "on your side" and will not think less of you for simply deflecting it and moving on.

+1 for the "discuss those details individually later" approach.

-1 for the "discuss those details individually later". If someone says that your results are completely invalid, this is a very weak answer. Your response might be short, but you shouldn't be oblivious to such statement.

As a presenter I believe that the best advice I can give is be honest, be yourself, and be prepared.
This goes for your presentation and any research/material surrounding your lecture.
I have given many presentations/lectures/seminars in the field of computer science. Many of these at one point in time revolved around trade automation within direct exchange fields.
When I first started doing this, I was in my mid 20s.  The audience was 90% men, almost all of them 40+.  I have to say at first I cringed when we opened things up to questions.  Things were anywhere between uneasy to hostile - mainly due to my age and lack of time in the field.
Some general tips:

Understand that some things you say people will take that as a threat to whatever their "job" is.  Change, new technology or new data can make people fear their abilities.  I once discussed a way to cut two milliseconds off an exchange execution.  This technique threw out a standard industry mechanism.  My boss promptly got several calls from executives at two firms wanting me fired.  A year later that industry mechanism was a thing of the past.
Your topic might be interesting but there is a 99.99% chance that it will have little effect on the history of mankind.  You can't put off an aura of godliness and not expect a few smartass questions.
Give credit where it is due.  In my case I combined several theories and current technology to produce something that worked efficiently together.  I did not at any point in time act like I created everything.  I also (depending on audience) liked to give some shout-outs to those who helped or those whose work influenced what I did.
Know your audience.  I like to know who might attend my sessions.  I know that people from certain groups might have certain types of questions.  Also at the same time try to acknowledge this audience during your time.  Often you can neutralize a harsh person by giving a strategic compliment before they have a chance to ask a question.

Quick bits on your specific questions:

That method won't work at all for what you're trying to do. Your
  results are completely invalid
Answer: Your session should have been clear enough to answer or refute this.  If it can be asked without everyone rolling their eyes then you have not done your job as a presenter getting the facts across.  If someone asked me this I would calmly tell them why I disagreed (in less than a minute).
So-and-so's group already did that work years ago. Did you not read
  their paper?
Answer: If your work is just an extension of theirs then this should be part of the presentation.  And then during the presentation you would tell how yours differed (you don't have to "compare" the entire time) and give your additions.  Again if you did not do this you have failed as a presenter and it is a valid question.
that women seem to be more harshly criticized than men, and over trivial issues
Answer: People always judge others by how they look.  This is a fact of life.  I was an ex-football player.  I get lots of dumb-jock looks and remarks.  You can't get hung up on this.  Just answer the questions and keep your opinions of their motives to yourself.  (You can despise the person and still answer their question nicely)
it's typically prestigious professors or researchers that are asking these ostentatious questions.
Answer: Be self-deprecating, make sure that others know that you don't think you are the smartest person in the world.  This seems counter-intuitive but they will soon see that they just spent two hours listening to someone who doesn't think that he/she is smart, so where does that leave them?

As for the chair... People should be allowed to ask questions even if tough.  I don't believe in asking certain questions behind closed doors unless the question is truly personal (which I didn't think your examples were).  However, the chair should step in if the people asking the questions are keeping others from asking something or if they are just taking too long.

@xLeitix - Sorry I left without saving!

Regarding "So-and-so already did that work," one cannot always anticipate it. It's quite possible that they really did do all that, and you just weren't aware of it because they published it in an obscure journal, or one aimed at a different field, with different journals and jargon, that just happens to occasionally overlap yours. (For instance, there are plenty of results in applied math that could apply equally well to physics, economics or mathematical biology, or might just be published in a math journal.) ...

... Or it could be that the questioner is wrong, and so-and-so actually did something superficially similar but unrelated. In any case, you cannot always anticipate these questions, so you'll need to have ways to deal with them when they come "out of the blue". ("That's interesting, let's discuss it during the break" is often a good one.) Ditto for "that's all wrong!" -- maybe it is, or maybe the questioner just doesn't get it, or maybe they dozed off and missed a crucial point. In any case, the public Q&A session at the end of the presentation is not right time to settle such disputes.

@IlmariKaronen - Those are good points.  If I didn't know.  I would simply ask for information around their points and tell them I would get back to them.  At the same time I would feel a little embarrassed for not knowing - I am sure this can happen easier in some fields compared to others.  I feel like if someone is coming to listen to me for 2-4 hours I should really know my stuff.

It would be however, completely appropriate for the chair of the session (or audience members) to point out sexism if they believe it is a problem in their session. However, that is their decision and there is little the speaker can do to remedy this.

I don’t think self deprecating is a good solution, and it can be especially fraught for women. I would rather suggest demonstrating thoughtfulness and lack of arrogance (acknowledge the positives of previous work and ways of thinking about an issue, etc.).

My method seems to be a bit more... devious... than the methods proposed by other answers. This is something that was handed down in a roundabout fashion from other researchers I know. No one talks about it directly but I've had one on one conversations when it comes up.
As a presenter I try to make sure to lead the audience to what might seem like a couple of 'gotchas'. Just as I control the method and content of the presentation, I think it's important to control, to a limited extent, the questions and post-talk discussion.
What does this mean? I never give a talk without a pretty good idea of the worst questions I could get about it. This requires having a group, preferably in your lab, who is willing to give you harsh, constructive feedback. This requires an advisor or supervisor who is willing to listen to your presentation and put their 'asshole' hat on and help you identify those questions. This requires being willing to be told that your baby is ugly. A lot of research groups are very positive and that's good for the most part but when it comes time to present you need honesty and a little bit of appropriate 'meanness'.
Additionally, I typically try to lead the audience to questions during my talk. The 'jerk' questions tend to pop up when others don't have questions. By making a talk that is engaging and encourages questions in a specific vein the presenter is less likely to receive an unhelpful, insincere question. This is a bit more subtle and there's a delicate balance. A presenter should never leave pertinent information out but... there's a line right? With experience a presenter can both know what questions to expect and encourage some questions over others.
It's a bit weird, isn't it? One would think that a 'perfect' presentation would involve precisely describing the topic in such a way that questions are unnecessary but the real world of presentations having questions, having people be engaged is beneficial.
Of course nothing will remove the 'jerk' questions entirely. I once gave a presentation on a visual classification system. A faculty member, a well known faculty member albeit in a different subfield, raked me across the coals. Why? Because "Training data is stupid, you just need to tell the robot what a chair is. Why are you spending so much time on something stupid!" Which, for anyone who understands classification systems is... not accurate or very helpful. Sometimes you just gotta let that crotchety jerk get their poison out, say a couple of 'mhmms' and nod while finishing with a "That's very interesting. I'd love to talk more about this with you. Why don't you email me at..."

Some of the best academic presentations I've seen use this method of inviting questions that propel your presentation along. Even if nobody asks the question, you can always say, "right now some of you may be wondering how we got X.  Well, in my next slide..."  Prepping a significant collection of "discussion" slides that may or may not be relevant also helps shut down gotcha-seekers marvelously well. As soon as the first one is rebuffed with "I'm so glad you asked that, let me show you this graph in my appendix slide," others tend to stay quiet.

Reminds me about leaving a minor typo in a report prior to boss review, or a simple problem in a home prior to inspection. Some people have a need to pick at something, for whatever reason, and by giving them a simple problem to solve, they've scratched the itch and won't feel like digging too deeply.  For an academic presentation, though, you'd want, and should welcome, any and all comments, opinions, and questions in order to improve.  While controlling the presentation is important, I suspect people who follow this tactic are depriving themselves of some valuable feedback.

I think this is also a good scientific habit, and preventing ugly questions is only a positive side effect: There is always some aspect to inquire further, something to keep the science business running. This is what conference talks are for. They are not for silent admiration. I think especially elder professors might feel offended if they think a speaker is just looking for admiration. So they ask the "jerk questions".

@AdamDavis - Perhaps I should have been more clear. The goal is to encourage constructive, helpful questions that engage the audience and, in doing so, minimize the unhelpful 'jerk' questions. From my experience it's not the 'jerk' questions that end up providing valuable feedback, typically those are being asked to tear down the presenter and make the asker feel/appear more important/impressive.

A neutral way to effectively bypass the question could be to ask "may we have a chat about that in the break?".
Those sorts of questions are often not productive to answer in front of an audience, particularly if you don't think it's a valid concern. If you have an answer on hand, then you should answer the question - but you don't want to get into an argument on stage with a well-known professor if you cannot give a concise answer.
By doing this, you're also encouraging the audience to ask questions that are concise and clearly answerable.

I agree. If a question completely derails you - e.g. "Foo et al did this years ago," when you've never heard of Foo et al, say something like "Thank you, I'm not familiar with that work. Perhaps you have time to talk about it later?"

Unfortunately an all too common result of this approach is that the presenter avoids the person asking the question for the rest of the conference and problem with the work is never discussed.  A direct answer (if you have one) is much better than bypassing it.  If you don't have an immediate answer then you should say so (before suggesting an off-line discussion).

First, a general method for softening rudely-posed questions is that the session chair can rephrase the question into a more productive form. That is, the useful and constructive content can be separated from possibly hostile tone or affect of the questioner... especially if, as the session chair can probably judge by the affect of the speaker, the speaker is flustered.
This mediation is potentially relevant both in the cases where (apparently) the question is sheer bullying, or (apparently) the speaker is actually mistaken or ill-informed or ... and cases in-between.

"That method won't work at all for what you're trying to do. Your
  results are completely invalid."

Stay calm and kindly answer:

"Thank you, I am very grateful for your input. Could you please be more
  specific about why you think it wouldn't work?"

This way you will embarrass them - you will show that you react like a kind person and scientist, while they weren't able to be specific enough. If they don't specify their critique, you are fine. If they do, you turned the emotional argument into rational one, and you can respond factually.

"So-and-so's group already did that work years ago. Did you not read
  their paper?"

Stay calm and kindly answer:

"We did a lot of research of the published studies, but all of them
  were inappropriate for our case because of A, B or C. But we could
  miss something, so I would be very grateful if you give me the
  reference afterwards."

This way you present several things: that you actually did the research, that you can accept the critics and that you are working like a scientist.

I had a question once like the second and I exactly answered something like this and it was well received by the audience.

@Lego you have to turn the emotional and vague critique into particular reasons! First, because you are scientist and you are actually interested in those reasons, and second, if you don't do it you are silently accepting the critique. Your approach "Please don't tell me why, I don't wanna know, and I am afraid of being embarrassed  in front of these people" is not scientific and will only embarrass you.

My question here, specifically, is what can be done to minimize these (uncomfortable for everyone) instances?`

I disagree with your premise, that one should do anything to minimize these instances. These questions (excluding sexist behavior) are not only legitimate, but are a useful mechanism of quality control that forces researchers to perform their research more rigorously. A bad researcher can simply ignore most other kinds of criticism of their work without negative personal impact. But they cannot do that in a public forum.
If your research is solid, you should have no problem to defend it against any legitimate accusations, even in a public forum such as a conference. If, however, the person asking that question has a point, it is their duty as a researcher - and the real point of a conference - to point out your mistakes, so that you and others in the room can learn from it.

To the person asking a malicious question regardless of his/her status depicts lack of etiquette. I think the Chair or Moderator should quickly intervene by asking to discuss the issue after the end of event so that the speaker can adequately respond in more details.

Why should etiquette (or the lack thereof) be a reason to interfere with a scientific debate?

Personal attacks and rudeness waste time and needlessly mucks up the atmosphere of discussion and debate. Moderation is about making sure that you have a good debate, and keep your audience interested. I love a good argument or debate, but I have increasingly little time for people who are rude because they can be, and I'm hardly alone. If the gathering's goal is to further scientific or other learning, this kind of grandstanding is illogical and wasteful, and turns off the audience.


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How to get in touch with professors in Japan for research projects/masters education
I have received a Japanese government scholarship for research and masters degree. While I originally thought it would be easy to get in touch with a professor after having received the scholarship, it's proven to be more difficult than I expected.
Do you have any suggestions?

It might help to describe what you have tried so far

No, you have not received the scholarship (yet), since this requires approval from your desired university and supervisor. Probably what you have received is a commitment from your local Japanese embassy to recommend you to MEXT for the scholarship, but if you can't find a supervisor, you don't get the scholarship, notwithstanding the embassy's recommendation.

I received such a MEXT research student scholarship from October 2012 to March 2014. (In my case, I'd already made contact with a Japanese professor who I wanted to study with).
There's several things to consider in terms of how to contact people.

You need to search Japanese university websites in your field. This is going to be nearly impossible if you don't have any Japanese fluency.
Then you're going to want to find researchers who you could imagine working with presumably you'd narrow it in terms of both research interest and their ability to use languages you can use (e.g., English).
Write them a letter explaining you are receiving a scholarship from the Monkasho (文部科学省) and would like to study in their university, starting from being a kenkyuusei (研究生).
See who responds.

As a basic rule, you are more likely to get a response from professors at universities that are used to hosting international students with MEXT scholarships. This will mean national universities like: Tokyo University, Kyoto University, Tohoku University, Kyuusyuu University, Hokkaido University, Nagoya University, Hitotsubashi, etc. and well-known private universities like Waseda, ICU, Keio, Aoyama.
More minor schools (prefectural or city ones) will probably not be super familiar with the procedures and would require strong support and interest from the advisor -- who doesn't get much time or money to help work on this (and it's quite the administrative hassle).

Separately, Japan is a place where knowing people is more than half the battle so it's hard to build connections from scratch. Instead, you're hoping that at least one person will respond and either be open to hosting your or know someone who is that they are willing to forward your e-mail to.

Usually, your contact person at the Japanese government scholarship office should be able to help connect you with faculty at relevant (and eligible) institutions.
Alternately, your university may have a sister-school relationship with a Japanese university. Your study-abroad office should know their counterparts in Japan and they can help arrange introductions.
Finally, you might want to find scholars who are active abroad. I would see if your national association in your discipline has a searchable directory of foreign scholars. You could then search for members in Japan and use that to contact potential candidates.

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A student posted my lab materials as a "project" on Instructables, and hid its origin as a lab assignment. How should I address this?
TLDR: A student posted my lab assignment as a “project” on Hackster.io and Instructables. His posts hide its origin as a lab assignment, in which a lot of the materials (texts, circuit diagram and similar) were given to the students. If you were a potential employer reading his posts,

you would not know it was a lab assignment,
you would think (falsely) that the author of the posts designed and implemented a major project that involved a significant amount of original work,
you would think (falsely) that the author of the posts has a very good understanding of the subject matter and a very good ability to communicate his work in writing.

Should I say something to the student (who is not my student anymore)? If so, what? Should I take any further actions?
As an educator, I feel like it is my responsibility to help my students understand when they are misrepresenting their work, and/or failing to meet professional/academic standards and legal requirements with respect to attribution and copyright. I am not sure  how to communicate this lesson without placing the student on the defensive.

A student posted my lab assignment as a “project” on Hackster.io and Instructables
Last semester, I taught a graduate-level embedded systems course, for which I developed some new lab materials.
One lab assignment in particular was meant to make sure that all students gained some experience with putting together a project composed of multiple parts. For this lab exercise, I gave students a pre-constructed circuit on a breadboard, and a code base including functions for using each of the parts on this circuit. The students only had to implement the control flow of the program, using the functions I gave them.
I just noticed that one of my students has posted this lab assignment as a "project" on Hackster.io and Instructables. His post is a near-verbatim copy of the written material I gave to students, including:

A description of the hypothetical scenario I presented to motivate the lab:

You have just been hired at a company that does X. You have been tasked with...

He just changed it to read:

We have just been hired...

A lot of background reading material which I and my TAs wrote, including original graphics, explaining how each of the parts used in the lab work.
Fritzing diagram of the circuit (which I constructed).
Tutorial-style instructions for the tasks involved.

In total, the student posted ≈2250 words of written material, and some images, all taken from my lab instructions.
The student made minor changes to hide its origin as a class assignment
The changes he made were:

Some changes to the text that appear to be mainly for the purpose of hiding the origin of the project. For example, where I wrote:

This lab

He changed it to:

This project

He omitted the parts where I instructed students to write a unit test for each subsystem, instructions on what was provided already and what new code students were expected to write and submit, and how they were going to be graded.
He added his own “main” source file, i.e. the thing he had to submit to me.

I hold the copyright to the materials he posted
All of my lab materials for the course, including those written materials, are in a public repository on Bitbucket.
Students were supposed to “fork” the repository in order to complete the lab, and were required to keep their fork private for the duration of the course. I didn't give any additional instructions regarding posting lab materials online.
The code in the repository is under an open source license that allows students to redistribute the code. (He didn’t actually post any of my code, though.)
The text material and graphics, which he did post, are not; I have not licensed those under any copyright licenses (like Creative Commons) that enable redistribution.
My university/school/department has no formal policy on posting coursework online. I didn’t say anything specific in the syllabus or give any other explicit instructions (besides for what I just noted above) about students posting course materials online.
The source (my repository of lab materials) is not indexed by Google, so the student’s posts appear to be original material
Although my lab repository containing the material is public, Google doesn’t index its contents. So if you Google some of the text in these posts, it appears to be original.
The only attribution is that the student mentioned me as having “inspired” the project
On Hackster.io, there is an “Additional Contributors” field, in which he wrote:

Designing the lab that inspired this project by ff524

Question: How should I address this?
Should I say something to the student (who is not my student anymore)? If so, what? Should I take any further actions?

Are they still a student at your establishment?

@EnergyNumbers He hasn't graduated, so I assume he will return in the fall.

IANAL, but I imagine this is what DMCA takedown requests are for.

@Federico Yes, my concern is how to educate this student (in my role as an educator). I'm not nearly as concerned about protecting my copyright as I am about my student misrepresenting his work in my course.

Is there an honor code that this violates? Seems like it violates any honor code I've heard of.

Can you know for sure who was the student? Can he get some form of payment from these sites?

If your university/school/department really has no policy on this - and it isn't just that you aren't aware of it - then it is about time they got one. Everywhere I've taught has had policies on this - policies which would make this clearly unacceptable. Indeed, many places prohibit students from redistributing notes they take in lectures, as well, and not just materials actually prepared by instructors. I've had one student post coursework online but that was an essay and the question was a single, unoriginal sentence, so not even subject to copyright.

@cfr That might be a cultural thing. Redistributing notes was definitely not frowned upon during my study. This sounds more like copying a book than notes. But, since the text was not copyrighted, many things here aren't clear cut.

@ff524 Could you provide an update?

It seems to me that there are two orthogonal aspects to this:

Copyright
Attribution

Either of these would in my eyes justify talking to the student and/or to the websites he posted at.
Re 1, you will need to decide by yourself whether you want to stick with a narrow interpretation of your copyright. If you don't explicitly allow dissemination, then the student has no business disseminating your work, period. Slight changes to wording don't make this more ethical or more legal. Of course, you can just let it slide, but I'd argue it would be good if you explained this to the student as a "teaching moment" and required him to take the material down. If he does not comply within a reasonable time frame, I would recommend that you talk to the websites.
Re 2: I find it much more serious that the student does not even properly attribute the work to you. What could be his motivation for doing so? After all, he could just as well put your name prominently on the materials (which would still violate your copyright, which is why I consider these two issues orthogonal to each other). The only motivation that comes to my mind is that he explicitly wanted to pass the work off as his own. Will he put this on his CV as an "example" of his portfolio? He shouldn't do that, and he shouldn't get away with this. Again, I'd recommend that you talk to him and to the website, if he doesn't take the material offline.
In addition, I'd say that this second issue would certainly warrant at least discussing possible disciplinary consequences with him, depending on what possibilities your university offers. This is certainly comparable to straightforward plagiarism - he didn't do it to get a better grade, but quite probably to show off somebody else's work as his in a non-academic context. I'd say that the sanctions your student code spells out for plagiarism would be a good starting point for holding a discussion with this student.

There is a 3rd important aspect -- Plagiarism: The student looks better than he is. This fact itself is actually a criminal offence in some countries, AFAIK.

@yo' Plagiarism and lack of attribution are two different words for the same thing: taking someone else's work and making it look like your own.

I like this but with a caveat: the posting of the material on an independent website may be outside the university's jurisdiction to impose disciplinary consequences. Depending on the relevant policies, one might argue that the university can only punish plagiarism that is submitted as coursework. So this emphasizes the point that it is important to research the policy on plagiarism. (Of course the copyright issue remains, either way.)

@DavidZ On the other hand, they may have fairly generic misconduct policies that this would fall under.  Here's one example of a university with a rather extensive non-academic misconduct policy.  It includes " Conduct that constitutes a criminal offense as defined by state or federal law" as well as "Serious and repeated off-campus violations of municipal law", the first of which seems likely to cover plagiarism and copyright violations.  Though you'd probably have to prove something about the offender's goals to get him expelled.

@g.rocket: This doesn't seem to be "lack of attribution" but "false attribution" - much worse obviously. "Lack of attribution" would be "Look everyone, I found this incredibly good paper on the internet". But this seems to be "Everyone look at the excellent paper that I wrote".

@gnasher729: "False attribution" usually actually means the reverse -- attributing a claim to a source that does not actually justify the claim. I understand the distinction you're trying to make, but "lack of attribution" seems appropriate here; this is just a particularly egregious case of it. The student is indeed posting their own project, including their own work; but they're obscuring the nature of the project and concealing that most of it is not their own work.

I found a paper that this student published in a predatory journal when he was an undergrad. It's full of plagiarized content (chunks of text copied verbatim without quotation marks, list of references at the end includes some of the sources but they aren't cited in text)  :(

In the current discussion there seems to be a somewhat of an agreement that the student maliciously misattributed your work to oversell his own contributions. Based on the information given that seems far from obvious to me (you know, "never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence"). Yes, it is certainly weird that he uploads your code and design without saying that he only did (small) parts of the entire solution. However, it is entirely possible that the student really did not think about this at the time, especially given that your code is actually open source and redistributable. Your figures are not, and even for your code the student clearly needed to attribute you, but those points are actually quite subtle and it seems entirely possible to me that the students simply is not aware of that.

Question: How should I address this?
Should I say something to the student (who is not my student anymore)? If so, what? Should I take any further actions?

Yes, definitely, but unless there are strong indications to the contrary, I would keep all discussion under the assumption that the student just made a silly mistake and will be willing to fix it.
In the first instance, I would just send the student a mail and tell him that you stumbled over his upload and are dissatisfied with his attribution of your work. Tell him that you expect him to make obvious which parts are your copyright, and which parts are his own work (e.g., via headers in the source files, as customary). If you don't want your images to be part of the upload at all, tell him to remove them entirely.
Should he decide to ignore this request, what you can do next really depends on how important this is to you. Roughly in order of level of escalation, you can either let it go, keep pestering him per mail, talk sternly to him in person, send a mail to the platform and make them take it down, or contact the dean of studies (or whoever is in charge with student ethics in your institution). I would definitely not do the last, but all previous reactions are perfectly suitable.

I agree that there is not necessarily malicious intent, especially since this student is from parts of the world with different views regarding plagiarism. My goal here is to educate, not to punish. Can you suggest in more detail how to impress upon him the seriousness of this issue, without putting him on the defensive?

@ff524 While it would be nice to have an answer to the question in your comment here, perhaps it would be good to post this as a separate general question?  Imparting the seriousness of plagiarism to students is of general interest and AFAIK on this site it has only been addressed in the context of academic punishments, which to me seems not so ethically enlightening.

@Kimball I agree, it is interesting as a general question. I think you should ask it :)

@Kimball: I also agree that this would be an interesting question. This question is related to your point.

@ff524: You're quite generous with not assuming malicious intent. I cannot find any other explanation for his actions, like the changing of the word "lab" to "project" when almost everything is otherwise copied. It shows pretty well that he was explicitly trying to misrepresent the origin of the work.

I sent the student an email, complimenting him on his initiative in publicizing his coursework online, explained why his current posts aren't acceptable, and gave him some very specific, detailed guidelines on how to do so properly. His response: "I'll take it down, but [insert lame excuses here for why he believes he didn't actually do anything wrong]. Sorry for accidentally infringing." C'est la vie

@ff524 I would edit that into your original post, so that more people can see the conclusion of the situation.

@Jashaszun I'd rather not, in case student ever comes across this post. I'll probably delete the comment soon.

@ff524, you might want to get some evidence (a screenshot, or a copy of the webpage) of the student's post before he takes it down.

New update: I found a paper that this student published in a predatory journal when he was an undergrad. It's full of plagiarized content (chunks of text copied verbatim without quotation marks, list of references at the end includes some of the sources but they aren't cited in text).

@ff524 I am quite tolerant, but I must say the situation you described would have made me livid and I would probably have let this shine through in my interaction with the student. In particular, I think I probably would have left off the "complimenting" component of the interaction, I do not think irony works with such people. From your description, it seems he knows that he is wrong and just wants to defuse attention.

My answer assumes that you did not attach any kind of license or copyright notice to your repository.

I have a feeling that this student has misunderstood your repo being public for being open source. It would be best to take a deep breath and explain the difference to this student. Not many people realize that a repository without a license defaults to standard copyright law. (i.e. You, the author, reserves all rights.)
So first, add a proper copyright notice to the repository to prevent this from happening again. Then go calmly explain to your student what it means when there is no license in a repository. I guarantee you this was an honest (and actually very common) mistake.
Step back and consider that it's very likely this student thought this was open source material and (I'm assuming) no license displayed detailing how the material could or couldn't be used. It's an open source world for these kids. Without a notice saying the author must be attributed, they likely didn't know any better. You're a teacher, so use the opportunity to teach.

Frankly, I am much more concerned about the lack of attribution and misrepresentation of student's contribution vs mine. I don't care that much about the copyright issue, which I understand is more subtle.

Step back and consider that it's very likely this student thought this was open source material and (I'm assuming) no license displayed detailing how the material could or couldn't be used. It's an open source world for these kids. Without a notice saying the author must be attributed, they likely didn't know any better. You're a teacher, so use the opportunity to teach.

But, also, this wouldn't be OK even if it was open source. Depending on the licence, it might be legal. Not necessarily, though. And even if it is legal - even if the material was public domain - it will not be legal if the student later uses it as part of a portfolio of work, say, without explaining exactly which parts of it constitute original work. And that doesn't even get to the ethical dimensions.

Well, it could certainly be ok if it was open source, depending on the license @cfr. I also have no idea where everyone has gotten the idea that this is some sort of portfolio piece. Who has ever used an instructable as a portfolio piece. In any case, it's a teaching moment, not something to freak out about.

I just meant that it is a mistake to think that open source = do whatever you like. It doesn't. An open source licence grants you specific rights, just like any other licence.

Yes, I did read it. I've just read it again. Your answer says: the student probably thought it was OK because it must be open source, as it didn't say otherwise. What the student doesn't realise, that is, is that public does not default to open source. But that conflates open source with do-what-you-like. That is, even if the student did assume that and it was true, it would not follow that the student did nothing illegal. 'It's an open source world...' suggests they'd be fine if everything really was open source. But that just doesn't follow. (However much you sigh about it.)

@cfr that's exactly what I stated in my answer. And that's why I sigh at you sir.

That is not at all what your answer says but I withdraw from this discussion on the grounds that it is clearly without purpose. I would, however, recommend that you refrain from making assumptions about posters' identities: what possible evidence can you have for thinking me male? In any case, I will not respond again.

Even if the repository and materials were actually open source, the student would still not be in the clear.  Your answer does not make that clear and may be (mis)construed as saying that "open source" == "do whatever".

@jcm feel free to edit, but I don't understand how that can be "misconstrued" when that was exactly my point.

"Open Source" and even "public domain" is only about copyright. It doesn't allow me misrepresenting someone else's work as my own. And any document that has no license attached isn't "Open Source" at all. No license attached is actually the strictest license possible; it means "you can't do anything except as allowed by copyright law", and that's not very much.

OMG people! That's exactly the point of my answer!!!

It's quite possible that the student enjoyed your project and wants to share it with the world. Perhaps talk to them in person and use phrases such as

I'm glad you enjoyed last semester's project, I noticed you put it online. It's great to see you're sharing knowledge but just note that this is actually plagiarism if you don't cite the work you copied. Could you please cite the work and any future work. I'm happy to let this go today but in future it might make things difficult for you.

Perhaps also point out that he really should have sought your permission.

There is so much more than plagiarism going on here. You can't copy >2000 words of written material without permission even if you cite it, for example.

@ff524 - that completely depends on the licence.

@Davor That's what a license is: a document that explains what permissions are granted to others, and under what circumstances. If a license permits copying, that is permission.

@Davor: presumably, there is no license, and that means all rights reserved to the author or copyright owner. However, almost everybody is ignorant of copyright law.

The scandal is not the copying; copyright law is complicated. The scandal is the utter lack of attribution and the clear attempt to hide the origins. This is clearly unsavoury, no matter what. Even many free software licenses make clear that attribution of the original author is to be maintained.

I recommend you take decisive action. Clarify in your mind who the intellectual property belongs to. Does it belong to you, your employer, your other contributors?
Once this is reasonably clear then take action accordingly. If the material belongs to you and you alone, I don't have much advice. But I do empathize with you.
If the work belongs at least in part to your employer or to other contributors, you might be required by law or by the rules of your institution to do something more specific.
If you do nothing else, start by going to Hackers.IO and Instructables and read their terms of use policies. If you believe your student has violated the terms of use of these sites, then I strongly encourage you to report your concern to them. This is your basic due diligence.
Check with your attorney or another member of faculty that you trust to help figure out what to do next. Not handling this sort of issue carefully could create a bad situation down the line. "How did our labs get into this guy's book? Now he's suing us!? And you knew about this??!! Why didn't you do anything about this back in 2015?" I hope this is not the middle of the night as you are reading this, but, these things can get bad. Just do your due diligence.
As for the student? Not sure. At the very least, he should have asked your permission to share it or adapt your work. His/hers was a bad, bad choice. Unfortunately, not a lot of win/win options that I can think of for dealing with this.
I would say get the sites to take the content down, figure out your due diligence regarding your institution, then deal with the student on whatever terms and using whatever options are left to you.

There are two possibilities here, if you are concerned about maintaining control over your Intellectual Property.  1) Ask the student to attribute it, or 2) Ask the student to take it down. Personally, I would ask the student to take it down, and if it doesn't happen, I'd ask the university powers-that-be to start sending out take-down notices to the relevant sites.
Without worrying about how to be nice about doing this (which you should certainly try to do, as there's no reason not to), this is educational material that you probably worked hard to develop.  You attained an experience level and knowledge base that allowed you to do it.  The choice to make it available to the rest of the world at no cost belongs to you, and not to your student, and it carries the risk of devaluing your expertise.
As an aside, our new Academic Honesty policy specifically defined such behavior as academic dishonesty, whether properly attributed or not.

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


text:
How to ask for feedback from research students on my supervision abilities?
As the lone experimentalist in my group, I end up supervising most of the students (M.S., B.S. and high school) who do experimentation-focused research in my lab.
I am always trying to improve my mentoring and supervision skills. So I would like to ask my current students for some feedback at the end of the summer.
However, I want to make sure they don't feel pressured in any way by this request, that they are assured there will be no negative or positive consequences to them, and that they understand that I really want honest answers. (I'm not fishing for compliments.)
And, I am looking for specific feedback that I can use to improve or build on, not just general complaints or reassurances that everything was fine.
Given the goals stated above, what's the best way to ask for this kind of feedback? Should we speak face to face in an "exit interview" kind of thing, or should I ask them to write something in an anonymous form online, or something else entirely?
What specific questions can I ask to get focused, helpful feedback on my supervision and mentoring abilities?
Does anybody here have experience (as either supervisor or supervisee) with this kind of assessment, and have useful techniques to share?

I can only up-vote once, but this is a great question about a very honorable initiative.

Related question about feedback (about teaching, not supervising): http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/18816/2692

Unless you have many students (5+ at least) that you're getting feedback from at the same time, any anonymity (via online forms or otherwise) is illusory, and it will likely just detract from the quality and detail of the feedback.

Have you tried the Start-Stop-Continue?

@adipro Nice resource! Maybe you (or someone else) can write an answer specifying how to apply it to this use case (asking supervisees/mentees for feedback), which I'm sure will involve some modifications to the classroom use case scenario.

I have not used the method myself, unfortunately, although I have given feedback using it. It was in a classroom setting, but I am sure you can adapt it into other kind of settings.

You've got some good answers already, so I'll add a brief comment to them rather than writing this in full.  After (hopefully) running things in a way that encourages ongoing feedback and discussion, and an informal opportunity to give feedback openly, it never hurts to give people a chance to say something off-line.  The shy ones could email you or drop a note through your door when the project is over, but should be encouraged to do so.

What about RateMyProf or similar sites? I think they generally exist as a way for the students to let their steam off, as the ratings are just uncorrelated with the teachers' effectiveness and professionalism. But it may serve the purpose in your case.

Set the Stage
At the start of each relationship, let each student know that you value feedback, that you are adaptable/flexible in your approach to supervision, and that you will be asking for their feedback both during and at the end of the end of the supervision period.
Reinforce the Message and Values
During the supervision period, look for opportunities to demonstrate your adaptability, your interest in feedback, and it is OK for them to offer feedback even if they might feel a bit uncomfortable.  (Some people resist giving feedback to supervisors, including for gender/age/cultural reasons. They need to experience the process working successfully to overcome that resistance.)
Asking for Feedback
Aim for a face-to-face meeting, though it's fine if some people prefer to give feedback in writing.  Before you ask for feedback, first ask what is important to them in supervision relationship. You need to understand their frame of reference and values. Then ask: "What worked well for you? And what didn't?"  Then you can ask the feedback question: "For those things that didn't work so well for you, what would have worked better for you?"  You are asking how things could be different for them, within their frame of reference.  You aren't asking them to step into your shoes and advise you on how to be a better supervisor.

+1 for Set the Stage - if you have done this properly, they will be more likely to feel comfortable that you will not punish them and that their feedback will actually be valued. I would add that if they submit in writing, you provide a way to make that anonymous.

From the answers proposed so far, this seems to be by far the most useful and relevant to me. +1

I (am) was in a similar situation as you are. I ended up supervising a team of BS and M.Eng/MPS students for a project. Most of the work for them involved programming and data visualization.
After the end of the semester/year, I took them out for coffee in a casual setting and asked them how I needed to improve my supervision skills. Since I worked with them closely throughout the semester/year, we were on friendly terms and I got some very constructive feedback. This helped shape my supervision in the next semester.
I did not ask anyone for help but this was what I had observed my previous adviser(s) doing with me so I followed their example.

Any specific questions you asked that you found helpful?

Something to the order of - "Hey guys! I am a n00b trying to find my feet in organizing and managing projects. I did my best over the last year but was hoping if you had anything to add. I would really appreciate it and it would help me sharpen my supervisory skillz"

Did you award ice cream for every constructive item of feedback you agreed with?

@Raphael : no need for sarcasm here. I agree with the OP, an informal meeting is a good way of having some good discussion and honest remarks, if you are somehow close with your students. It would be more awkward than anything if that's the first time you speak to them in an informal way though.

@strnk I agree. I did not employ sarcasm. You might call it a hybrid of "honest question" and "attempt at humorous suggestion", rooted in the experience that honest, constructive feedback can be slow in coming even in an informal climate/setting. Ice cream is a well-known motivator.

imho, beer is an even bigger motivator (for those of legal age)

Just FYI, I've tried exactly this ("I'm a new boss, any feedback you guys have is most welcome"), and it's very difficult to get good feedback. The "he's the boss, gotta put forth the good face" mentality is is pretty deep rooted.

I tend to have a group lessons learned session, either periodically or at the end of a project/phase. Phrasing questions in terms of the project, what worked and what didn't, sets up a stage for a frank and constructive discussion. Since it is not about you, you can participate as well.

Any specific questions you can suggest?

@ff524 Open ended questions, Start for example with the project successes because it is the easiest to talk about (what were the biggest successes, and why)? Then move to what didn't work, what were the biggest problems? Offer something to start the discussion, i.e. meeting times were not communicated, so we never knew when to meet. What is a solution to that? Use a Google Calendar. Lastly ask, what the areas of improvement are. You might hear things like, a new building. But that's OK, your job as a successful mentor is to remove the roadblocks, here you learn what the roadblocks are.

@ff524 Ideally, you keep probing for these questions throughout the mentorship/project management and if you did your job right there won't be surprises at the end. You can read more at: http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/lessons-learned.php

The bigger question behind your question is:  How can I be a more better/professional manager?  Right?
And to answer that, it's probably not as simple as posing a question on SE.
I would ask you:  Why do you think you need extra feedback?  Do you think your students are hiding their thoughts or fearful of voicing their feelings to you?  Because otherwise you should be fairly "in sync" with them while you're interacting, presuming your not managing from afar.  That is the key indicator for supervisor performance, and there's no boilerplate that you'll be able to make for every situation and every type of person.  If you try, you become the another PHB.
As a former manager, I know that if your employees aren't voicing their true thoughts or concerns to you, there's already a problem.  And it's not necessarily them.
So the other key item, if I've guessed your intentions properly, is how do you develop this skill(s)?  And for that you need to listen and dialog fluidly in each situation you encounter so that you never miss a step and always stay on top of things.  That takes courage (because you will fail) and time (because it takes a diversity of experience), not technique.

"Why do you think you need extra feedback?" - for people who do a lot of research, this seems quite normal, even expected.

I don't have any reason to think anything is wrong now. I always operate on the assumption that I can improve, and that explicitly solicited feedback can be a useful tool for self-improvement.

I am not sure that being a good supervisor is very similar to being a good manager. I have certainly met people that were good managers but terrible supervisors, and vice versa.

You can do an anonymous survey. Ask them to rate you on certain criteria(that you mention in the survey, and want to get a feedback on!) Have them add additional comments too after the survey so they can add things that they feel, you should know about. This would be completely anonymous so they won't be too afraid to be honest. But on the other side they might still hesitate to open up completely as no one wants their boss to be mad at them just because they spoke the truth.

This basically reiterates some of the concerns I brought up in my question, without giving any specifics or new information, so it's not very helpful to me.

If one is asking for feedback from a single student a semester, then any anonymity is illusory.


text:
I have a lot of extra room for classes. What should I take?
I'm currently in my second semester of college at university in the United States, and am currently majoring in Computer Engineering. I passed a lot of AP tests in high school, all of which gave me college credit. Because of this, if I take only the bare-minimum of required classes for my major, I'll end up averaging ~10 hours per semester for the next 6 semesters. Due to the way pre-requisite classes are set up, it's impossible for me to graduate early. And besides, I have a full scholarship, so I don't want to graduate early.
My question is this: I can take as many credits outside of my major as I need inside my major. How can I make the most of this freedom? I plan to pursue a career in robotics (Ideally at NASA, but that's a long shot), so I want to use my next three years to help that dream. The way I see it, there's a few obvious options:

Dual Major. I could probably get a dual major with any other engineering major if I was determined enough, but Computer Science or Electrical Engineering have enough overlapping classes that they would make the most sense.
Triple major. This sounds pretty ridiculous, but it is an option. I could potentially major in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering and still graduate in the normal 4 years while taking a maximum of 18 hours per semester. Of course, this would be pushing it a little. If I had one conflict of two different classes being taught at the same time, I wouldn't have room to fix it. And then there's the problem of stress: I'm taking 18 hours now, and have loads of free time, but half of those hours are freshman-level courses. I think I'd be able to handle 18 hours of junior- and senior-level classes, but I can't know until I try it.
Take interesting classes. There's a lot of classes that I'd like to take that aren't required by my major (artificial intelligence, digital image processing, intro to relativity). However, there's not really enough to fill the amount of space I have.
Take fewer hours and get a job or internship. This is not much of an option, because my scholarships require that I take at least 15 hours per semester, which still leaves a lot of empty space in my schedule.
Start a Master's degree. My university allows undergraduate seniors to begin working toward a graduate degree if they are taking few enough undergraduate credit hours. My goal is to attend a different school for a Master's degree, but that plan will probably change several times between now and when I graduate. (I'm a teenager. We make stupid decisions.)
Research. I go to a fairly large university, so there's plenty of research opportunities.
Study abroad. This is fairly low on my list of priorities, but who knows? That may change. It's always an option.

The idea of taking a lot of classes solely because I'm interested is very appealing, but I have a feeling that it wouldn't add as much to a resume as, say, a dual degree. And I am very interested in the material in my major, so it's not as if I'm going to have to suffer through my required classes.
So, in summary: I have room to take an entire second major's worth of classes in my next 6 semesters of college. What should I do to best further my dream of working as a NASA robotics engineer?

Does your college/department have a course number for "independent studies" or similar? If so, look into the rules for it. You may be able to get credit for a project in your target area.

Not really a full answer here but you might want to think about taking a humanities course if you can: philosophy, film, anything really that drills down on your capacities as a writer of prose essays. Apart from the benefits of being about to pause and consider wider social questions etc, you get significant career benefits. As you rise through a career you take on more and more management roles where good writing skills are crucial (and rare). And you would be dealing with people from non tech backgrounds so it would be good to have had experience of their worldview already.

I am surprised not to see getting involved in research projects on your list. At many schools, you can get academic credit for research. It is often no good for satisfying requirements, but that sounds like that's not a problem for you.
Getting involved in research is an excellent way to further your dreams, especially in getting on the track for graduate school. It can also introduce you to lots of interesting material that you would never encounter in a class.

Ah, yes, I forgot to put that on the list. I'll edit it now.

The ideal would be to work on a research project with a group that does robotics or something related.

Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering should have a ton of overlap, and depending on course structure, EE might even be better suited for robotics at your university. Your instincts are right: Computer Science would be the next logical thing to major in, and in addition to being useful for robotics, it's very useful in general, should robotics not pan out immediately.
I'm not sure I'd recommend triple-majoring in your case, largely because you know what you want to do, and the above dual should get you there. Concerning the 18 credit hour question, I can but give you my experience when I foolishly took 21 during senior year: the stars aligned to make every project from all classes due on successive weeks (rather than being bunched up at once). Were it not for that happenstance, things would have been a lot harder to organize. You'd likely be able to handle 18 of upper level classes, but it may well come down to factors out of your control.
If you can do an internship in a related field, that'd likely open more doors for you without the commitment of a Master's degree. If that doesn't pan out, research would be a great next thing to do.

A double major in CE and EE would be pretty cool (sounds like 5V isn't enough for you, anyways!). Instead of triple majoring with CS, maybe fill the rest of the free space with some useful math (or physics) courses.
As far as math goes, I assume you will take at least one differential equations course and one linear algebra course. Try to take another of each, if you uni offers it. Other courses to consider:

vector analysis
numerical analysis
discrete math

A pure math course or two like combinatorics couldn't hurt, either, especially for artificial intelligence.
Computer science courses that could be useful would be courses that you may have already taken for CE, such as

microprocessors
computer systems and assembly language

Basically anything relating to control engineering would be helpful in your case.


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How common is reference/citation padding?
I recently discovered a paper of mine (pure mathematics) has been cited by a paper in a very different field (an area of applied mathematics) that I have nothing to do with.  The reference to my paper is used (along with another reference) to justify some statement in the introduction, but I have never studied anything like this (I don't even understand the statement).  It's clear that this citation is wrong, and while it's possible it was an honest mistake and the author was just careless, because the topics of the papers are so different (the titles are completely unrelated) and the journal and publisher are ones I've never heard of, it occurred to me this could be a case of dishonest "citation padding" (randomly adding superfluous citations).
Here are some possible reasons for citation padding:

Trying to legitimize one's work by adding references to reputable papers.
Either directly as part of a citation cartel to say increase impact factors, or as some indirect padding to help prevent a citation cartel from getting caught.  (I don't know if the latter happens, but this is part of my question.)
"Collecting dead souls" (i.e. some other nefarious scheme I haven't thought of)

Question: While I know citation cartels a real issue, is there any evidence that citation padding, outside of superfluous self-citations/citations within a citation cartel/ring, happens in more than just a few isolated cases?  For instance, are there stories of shady journals encouraging this or authors doing this systematically, like there are about citation cartels?
Note: I am not asking for a diagnosis of my specific case, or what I should do, which is discussed in these related questions:

How to react to your work being cited incorrectly or in a misleading way?
Should I do anything if I am cited for something that wasn't in my paper?

Not an answer to your question, but with citation manager software, it's easier for a typo or misclick to result in citing a completely different paper.  So I wouldn't be quick to rule out "honest mistake", especially if the rest of the paper looks generally reasonable.  Hanlon's Razor and all that.

@NateEldredge Sure, but in this case I don't think that author would ever have reason to refer to any of my papers.  I don't know how citation managers other than BibTeX work---is it easy to accidentally cite a paper you would never have reason to look at?

I think it's often an error by people with sloppy behavior and cavalier attitudes.  I have frequently seen these carried forward.  Worked with a lab group htat had 20 or so papers where the main cite for an important part of their technique was just wrong.  they had cited the right person.  But a paper that had nothing to do with the technique.  And grad students had just carried the error forward.  When I did a single paper/experiment with them I discovered it because I insist to see every reference (and have a paper copy) of a paper that I publish.

And I check the page, issue, etc. numbers rigorously versus the actual journal.  I hate it when I am looking up a cite and can't find it from an error (or have to do detective work to get around a typo).

@NateEldredge So right. Today, I opened older work to take few paragraphs for new article skeleton, and found two completely unrelated/wrong/bogus references. Title of one is so unrelated to anything I do, that it kept me puzzled like 15 minutes (how I even got that entry in my Mendeley?). I guess it wasn't just  "wrong click" but careless use of "Search for details" option. I discovered several important references in the local database are messed up (probably) like that, waiting in ambush for a "Refresh" of any existing work.

One way this could happen by accident is if you "inherit" a large BiBTeX file from someone else (who may have expanded on someone elses and so on). Then if you are not careful about authors with the same last name, you can easily cite the wrong thing if you just use \cite{authorYear} and don't check if there are multiples of those.

Combining comments by Nate Eldredge and Tobias Kildetoft might explain away the OP's comment

I’ll add that in addition to mistaken citations, the concept of citation padding is extremely hard to define, let alone demonstrate. This I doubt you’ll find answers to your question.

DOI does not use a check digit, so it could easily have been a case where a DOI was jotted down incorrectly or misentered into a citation-generation tool.

Maybe to add another option. Not so long ago, I posted here about a completely bogus paper I had to review for MathSciNet. One of its characteristics was to have many completely unrelated citations. Maybe, if you have some time, you could try to understand this paper and see if it makes any sense at all... It wasnt hard in my case, albeit, the suposed topic was suposed to be close to what I work at (in applied mathematics).

Not in my experience, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This might require a genuine literature search using various keywords to give a quantified estimate for particular fields. I read citations quite closely in my field and I have only rarely seen this practice (<1%). Much more common is slightly misrepresenting what the other authors said, or referencing something a reviewer might suspect the author hasn't read, like a tangentially related book used for a brief aside. And, of course, quasi-related self-citations.

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text:
Which is better, a paper with pedantic vocabularies or a paper easy to read?
Many say that

A good paper is a paper which is easily understandable by a reader.

Actually when I am reading lots of papers in good journals, however, they are written with a sort of pedantic vocabularies, even though I can find simple and easy words which can replace the former.
Should I use a pedantic vocabulary but clear sentences in order for other people (reviewers, readers) not to underestimate me? I think the previous statement (clear sentences with pedantic vocabulary) sounds like contradiction, or irony.
What do you think about it?
FYI, I am EE/CS graduate student and good journals can be IEEE TMC, TWC and so on.

My first thought is what do you meant by "pedantic vocabularies"?

My second thought is that the advice is to aim to minimize the use of jargon because academic authors' tendencies are to overuse it. I.e., the products you're reading are to some extent the jargon-reduced versions.

In Physics, "speed", "velocity" and "rapidity" have three different meanings. An outsider reader it may find the overuse of the second two pedantic, but it is actually accurate and clear, once you know it.

Often what sounds "pedantic" is really just unambiguous.

As a native English speaker I am often amazed how often I encounter rarely used words in papers where a much simpler and commonly used term would be sufficient. It must be frustrating for non-native speakers trying to understand the work. For example, I have seen 'concomitant' used instead of 'associated' or 'related'. I have never heard someone use 'concomitant' in a conversation. If they did I would think it very odd indeed!

There is a third way:
Be pedantic about your vocabulary in the right way to make your paper more readable.
Using established, clear, and consistent vocabulary and defining it when necessary is the best way to ensure that you are not misunderstood. The main advantage of “simple and easy words” is that they do not need to be explained to the reader, but this also entails that you rely on the reader interpreting these words the same way as you do, which may be not given surprisingly often. Defined vocabulary does not have this disadvantage.
Moreover, you need to at least need to mention the established, “pedantic” vocabulary for context and to avoid the impression of reinventing the wheel. By consistently sticking to it, you avoid switching between different terms for the same thing, which usually impedes intelligibility.
However, you should also bear in mind that readers unfamiliar with this vocabulary may want to read your paper. For these readers, define the more uncommon words and cite papers explaining the basic underlying concepts. Papers are not difficult to read because they contain new words, but because these words are not properly explained or because the reader does not understand the concepts represented by them. For example if you write a paper on theoretical particle physics, readers will have to understand some elementary aspects of quantum theory to follow your thoughts. Using vocabulary that can only appeal to readers without this basic understanding of quantum theory is pointless and only raises false expectations.
Finally, if you get to introduce new concepts, you can try to choose words for them appeal to intuition, but this does not mean that you are relieved from the burden of explaining these words.

There is a paper about that.  It draws some surprising conclusions.  According to Fig. 1 R3A, using unusual words (jargon) is correlated with getting more citations.
http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004205
However, I would recommend you ignore these correlations and write to be clearly readable.  Most likely after you have put a lot of effort into explaining things simply, reviewers will still say it is confusing, because things that were just figured out tend to be difficult things to understand.

Most journals these days focus on readability.You should definitely not use pedantic vocabulary just to sound more knowledgeable. However, that said, you should use technical terms wherever applicable, and explain them, rather than use an oversimplified vocabulary that caters to a lay audience. At the end of the day, you are writing a paper for the scientific community who have a basic understanding of the subject matter. One heuristic would be to think that you are writing for an audience who are not from your specific field but belong to a related field. This will help you understand which technical terms you would need to explain. However, I do think that sentences should be kept simple as far as possible and unnecessary use of jargon should be avoided.

There are lost of "simple, everyday" words which have a precise technical meaning in some areas (velocity, force in physics) which often has little relationship to the common term's meaning, and there are many otherwise obscure and not at all used words that describe specific, common concepts in an area. A paper, say, in theoretical physics will be next to unintelligible to someone who isn't familiar with the subject, while being crystal clear to a colleague of the writer. Or a paper might be full of common words, but with meanings far removed from the everyday use. And the second one might be clear to one familiar with the area, or completely opaque.
What does matter is if the author uses the right words to express the intended meaning to the intended audience, and strings together the concepts and explanations in logical, natural way without either over- or underexplaining. In my experience, writers who command a more rich (and thus complex) vocabulary tend to do a better job. But there are outliers either way...


text:
When writing multiple papers from the same dataset, how do you handle the methods section?
I am planning on publishing two distinct papers based on the same dataset – one is looking at policy implications and the other is a more traditional academic article. The methods sections for both papers are largely the same (minus the statistical analyses, which are different) but the survey design, implementation, etc. are, of course, the same.
Can I use the exact same language for the methods section in both papers or does that fall under self-plagiarism and/or copyright issues? It seems crazy to figure out a completely different way of wording something when obviously it’s the same study, but I’m not actually sure what to do.

Directly copying and pasting the two sections is almost certainly self-plagiarism.  If you publish one paper before the other - you might be able to cite the first paper in the second and then just rephrase the same information.

@NajibIdrissi I'm under the impression that straight copy-and-paste is frowned upon; you're supposed to at least make an attempt to rewrite the section.  But I'm also very inexperienced in writing papers, so I'll defer to anyone with more experience :)

I intensely dislike the notion that reusing your own text across methods sections could be considered plagiarism. This is one of the stupidest bits of self-policing we've subjected ourselves to in years. There are many reasons for my objection, including:

The first time I write something, I write it as well as I can. Writing it differently just to avoid writing it the same will make it worse. Why should I do that?
In describing methods, precision is of utmost importance. If the methods used in two studies are the same, the descriptions should be the same to highlight this point.
It's a waste of my time. If I write code that calls a subroutine to do a specific job, I don't code up multiple different versions of the subroutine for each call. Why should writing papers be any different?

All of that said, overreaching self-plagiarism norms are fact of contemporary academic science. If it were me, I'd duplicate the text, citing the other paper and including a note specifying that the text was duplicated. Even that may be riskier than is optimal, though.

Amen. Academic publications are NOT school work and should not be evaluated as such. You advocate openness. Amen to that as well.

There is a divide in how to approach this question based on the type of methods section, as there are two almost entirely distinct forms of methods sections in scientific publications.

"Prose" methods: This type of methods description is part of the main flow of text, and presents the methods in an explanatory fashion.  Such a methods description is expected to be either unique or else credited as being reproduced/adapted from another publication.  An example of such a paper (in particular Section VI A, B).
"Cookbook" methods: This type of methods section comes at the end of a paper, after its discussion and conclusions, and is effectively a compressed "appendix" with no narrative exposition, just an extremely terse summation of particulars.  Such a methods section is not generally subject to concerns regarding self-plagiarism (and arguable not even copyrightable!) because they are essentially just recipes: there are only so many ways to say "Cells were cultured in LB medium at 37C." An example paper with such a methods section.

For your particular case, then, if you expect both papers to be under review at the same time, then you should already be making sure that the reviewers know this is the case. The papers should likely be referencing one another as "under review", the cover letter should make the existence of the other paper clear, and you should likely submit it as review-only supplementary information.  If you are creating "cookbook" methods, that's enough to deal with self-plagiarism.  If you are creating "prose" methods, then you should explicitly note at the beginning of the section that it is shared between the two papers, thereby making an explicit declaration of shared/adapted text and defusing concerns of self-plagiarism.
Finally, if one paper ends up significantly preceding the other, such that they are not effectively co-published, then you can simply remove its references to the other publication and change the references in the second to refer to prior rather than simultaneous publication.

You might want to consider having the full detailed description of the methods in the more traditional academic paper and a streamlined version (referencing the other paper) in the policy paper.
The papers have different audiences who are interested in different things. You need the detailed methods to support your results (academic paper). Having established that the results are credible, the other paper investigates different aspects.
It's a little tricky to handle during simultaneous review - but you can supply the (anonymised version) academic paper to the policy journal as supplementary information for reviewer information. Discuss this with the editor of the policy paper journal in advance.

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