text:
Should I quit my PhD?
I have finished 5 years of my PhD, and I have 5 publications in top tier (A* computer science) conferences based on work done during PhD. However, most of the publications are in unrelated areas. I am finding it almost impossible to compile a thesis from all my publications.
All my publications have me as first author and my advisor as second author. My advisor hasn't read any of the publications, and he is incapable of judging them even if he reads them. I know that the work I've done can't be compiled into a thesis. Due to the completion of PhD duration, I have stopped receiving scholarship from my Institute.
Even without my PhD degree, I can easily get a high paying job. My other option is to compile my work in the form of a thesis and hope that the thesis reviewers accept it.
What should I choose?
Update
I have got several brilliant answers and I wanted to accept many of them. I have decided to complete my PhD without antagonizing my advisor. He has agreed to grant me permission for submitting my PhD thesis, if my two papers, that I submitted recently, get published. If they indeed get published, I will have 4 related papers, and hence, I will be able to compile a thesis. I won't be able to add my other papers, which doesn't really matter. I told him that I care about my PhD and not the best thesis award, but he is hell bent upon it. He has agreed to provide me a project assistantship salary as long as I am pursuing PhD.
Despite what @einpoklum said, it doesn't seem fair to leave without a PhD after working for so many years. Thanks everyone for the help.

You've come this far, don't give up now!

What exactly is the problem? Why do you think that 5 publications in top-tier conferences are not enough for a thesis? It is quite common that the subject of a thesis is not exactly the same as the initial plan.

The problem is that the publications are quite unrelated with each other. I can't come up with a suitable title that can bind all (or even a majority) the work that I have done in a single draft.

What are the requirements for a thesis in your university? Do you have to have 5 papers?

@n1000: There is no such requirement from the university. My advisor, however, wants best thesis awards from each student, and hence insists on lots of publications from each student. The surprising fact is that he has absolutely no idea about the work that his students do. His philosophy is: 'Maximal output via minimal input'.

He has had 9 PhD students so far. Only 2 of them left with PhD degrees. The rest left without any degree.

I've seen recently a few thesis with title "Essays in macroeconomics" and I suspect they are just a compendium of unrelated papers. However, feasibility of this kind of thesis may depend on university, department, field or country.

...my advisor as second author. My advisor hasn't read any of the publications... — I'm sorry, WHAT?  How can anyone who hasn't even read a paper be a co-author?  Even if you work in a field where advisors are coauthors by default, this is extremely unprofessional, if not unethical.

What do you want to do, career-wise? Are you mainly interested in making money in some endeavor related to computer science, or does your dream job require a PhD (whether in or out of academia)?

I second JeffE's comment. I could arguably understand not contributing writing to a paper, but at the very least an advisor should read your paper and contribute editing advice (even if the paper is great and no substantive editing advice is needed, minor editing advice can always be provided).

@user2808118 Your advisor has no idea what his students are doing, and almost 80% of them left without successfully completing their degree? WOW.

What country are you in, and what university?  At least at most universities in the US, holding down a decent-paying job in industry and completing a degree are not mutually exclusive.  And if you  aren't getting a scholarship and/or research assistant salary, exactly how do you plan on eating?  Not to mention paying rent &c.

Does your university have the PhD by compilation option?  To get a PhD degree, you simply need to show that you can do research.  Given your publications, I doubt any examiners will fail you.  There is no requirement at least in my university that the topics have to be coherent, though traditionally they need to be.

Sorry, I just saw all the comments. I can't specify details about my university, but my advisor is an exception. The other professors that I worked with during my Master's were incredibly helpful and gave really insightful comments about my work.
Unfortunately, I ended up with my prof because he was hiring PhDs in an interesting area. I had no idea, that he himself was totally unaware not only about the area but the entire field in general. He chose the field because of the hype surrounding it, and the ease of availability of grants.

@Prof.SantaClaus: My advisor insists to compile a thesis from coherent topics only.

@user2808118 I suggest that you explore other ways to graduate.  For example, my university has a policy that protects students against supervisors like yours.  In particular, students are free to initiate a process whereby an independent supervisor is appointed.  He/she then judge whether a student has done enough to warrant a PhD degree.  The student's thesis then goes out to examiners as per the usual process.

@user2808118 To add, students always have the power to change supervisor.  The university is always on the student's side -- at least that is the case at my university -- I'm in Australia.

That's so cool. I guess that I can use that as a last resort. However, the mistake lies with me for not focussing on a single topic. He told me point blank the same thing. I told him that he deserves as much blame as me, but he got aggressive. That's understandable, I guess.

While I'm not recommending either action, I'd recommend contemplating the sunk cost fallacy. Which is to say, focus on what you have and what you could have, not what you might 'lose', because time spent is already a sunk cost.

If it is impossible to compile a thesis from all your publications, I suggest focusing on lesser publications in the thesis and if it is possible to expand your work, focusing only in one direction. Since your work is already published, there is no reason why it wouldn't be accepted by the reviewers. The content of the thesis counts less in applying to post-doctoral jobs, what is important is your papers. Of course, the thesis must be well written, rigorously, etc. There are many people who receive PhD diploma with few publications, or even no publications at all.

While this is a reasonable suggestion in itself, I believe it's making too much of an implicit assumption about OP's situation. Now, s/he did accept, but in my experience (incl. in public office representing graduate students) for many people this course of action will fail.

I agree with @einpoklum. Having 5 papers isn't necessarily helpful for advancing in academia if the research areas are so disconnected that the 5 papers collectively show a lack of focus and commitment to a research topic.

I was able to connect 2 (out of 5) of my publications. Two more are down the lane, though still unpublished. I guess I can compile the 4 of them into a thesis.
Anyway, I am looking for an industry job which is easily available in my area.

I wonder how the OP decided that they are A* conferences? because CS A* are very very competitive and one publication that solves an original problem can in many cases be enough for a Phd.

I really have to disagree with everyone here telling you "don't quit" as though it would somehow be a failure, and a Ph.D. is the thing to have, etc. I would say:
1. It depends on why you've gotten to this state of affairs
Having invested time and effort in 5 different and barely-related directions over 5 years means something is seriously wrong. Probably not wrong with your capabilities though - since you have been able to obtain useful novel results. There's some kind of issue with one or more of the following:

Your motivation: How come you haven't chosen to pursue any of these subjects further and more deeply.
The relation with your advisor: How come your advisor was essentially completely uninvolved in those papers? Do you even have any sort of interaction with him?
Your advisor's motivation: How come your advisor did not want you, or you and him together, to focus any any of the 5 subjects? Or on another one? Hasn't he solicited you, advised you or told you to do certain work that he would be familiar with?
The research proposal / plan which you presented your candidacy with: Did you originally decide to just jot something down you don't really care about or your advisor doesn't know about? If so, why was it accepted? If not, why didn't you sticking to the plan? Or - after 2 or 3 years, why didn't you sit down and devise a new plan?
Potential collaborators: Why are you working alone? It seems the community, or several ones, are interested in your work enough to have it in conferences. So, have you found nobody else to work with? Have you looked?

I can really not give you a serious answer without some or most of this information. But I will say that for some of the possible answers to this question, you should definitely consider:

Taking an official leave from your Ph.D., to figure out what you want or would be passionate about.
Adding a co-advisor, or even switching advisors, to someone who would be able to help you finish by focusing on a subject you've already started work in.
Quitting amicably, if there isn't clear direction or subject you want to focus on and get more results, and if what you'd really like to do is go work in industry somewhere.

2. That's not the right question
Getting a Ph.D. is a side-effect of performing a body of significant research on a focused subject. Do you want to do that, still, and (do you believe you) are capable of doing it? ... Answer this question, in light of what I've said above, and your own question resolves itself. Again, I can't venture an answer, since you've not provided  enough information.

That last paragraph should be engraved in stone and prominently asserted in many, many universities.

@bishop except that it's so often completely disconnected from reality that I'd hesitate to fool students into thinking that all PhD's work that way.

@DanielSank: Not sure I understand what you mean. Could you elaborate?

Motivation:  The problem is, I can't think of how to extend ideas. I get ideas while reading lots of papers in many different fields. Most of the ideas don't work. Some of them work, and I publish papers out of them. However, I can never figure out how to extend them. I have told my advisor that I am not PhD material several times, but all he sees is a bunch of papers. I am good at coming up with publishable ideas, but not at focussing on a particular topic.

My initial research proposal failed. I was too short-sighted to come up with a  meaningful research proposal after that. Hence, I ended up working at unrelated problems and getting publications.
I wanted to collaborate with a good researcher, who mailed my prof about the same. My advisor didn't allow it however.

Advisor: My advisor's PhD is in an area that is unrelated to the areas in which his students work. He doesn't like reading papers in general, and it has nothing to do with me. We have interactions, but the only comments he ever gives is to submit two more papers for the next conference. This might sound weird, but he hasn't given any other comment ever.

@user2808118: My friend, you've been sorely mis-advised. But this is also your fault for spending 5 years without realizing it. I still don't quite know how this happened, and how your research plan / subject got written and effectively put aside, but - please talk to some faculty members whose work has more to do with yours about your situation, discreetly; as well as with whoever's in charge of graduate studies.

No don’t quit, five A* papers is more than most theses ever achieve already, good work!
Sounds like you just need to come up with a vaguely convincing story to knit them all together; then find some friendly examiners. There must be some bizarre application area that would combine most topics somehow... say you have published on category theory, the social science of Hadoop uptake, and tractor design; then you just need to invent some niche application about farmers needing a more robust language and system to handle their agricultural data, write 20 pages of waffle about it as an intro chapter, staple that on the front of the papers, and you should be good to go.

If you post your specific topics on here then maybe people will have fun making such application area suggestions ... – People may have fun, but this is not something this site is suited for.

@Wrzlprmft As a farmer needing a more robust language and system to handle my agricultural data, I disagree.

You're disagreeing with a fundamental aspect of Stack Exchange. Q&A, not Q&D, not Q&Q&A&D.

What's confusing about your question is that having 5 papers in top-tier CS conferences is a bigger achievement than a PhD (in fact much bigger, in my opinion). So the idea that you should quit your PhD because you did something much more impressive sounds rather strange, and suggests some kind of potentially serious problem with your advisor and/or your thesis committee or department.
In particular, you say your adviser only wants students to graduate with best student thesis awards, but that as a result only 2 out of 9 graduated?! That sounds like an extremely counterproductive and self-sabotaging (and sadly, also sabotaging to other people's careers) philosophy to have.
I will keep it relatively short since I think analyzing in detail what has gone wrong and how to fix it is beyond the scope of this question (but feel free to ask a new one adding some details, there is certainly room for more discussion about this). The short answer to your question is: definitely don't quit your PhD because your papers are on unrelated topics, let alone because you "can't come up with a suitable title". You have achieved something much greater that is worth more than a PhD, and, assuming the issues with your adviser are resolved successfully, should be well on track to finishing what sounds like it will be a pretty stellar thesis with only a short amount of additional work. Good luck!

Thanks. As of now, I am compiling a thesis out of 2 of my latest publications. 2 more works are down the lane, that are somewhat related. The thesis won't be stellar, since most of the publications won't feature in the thesis.

2 out of 9 graduated not because of his insistence on best thesis award, but due to his lack of understanding about the problems they were working on. They ended up doing nothing for 3 years (or 5 years) and left thereafter.

Talk to the dean of graduate studies or other appropriate department administrator.  The main problem here is an advisor with rigid expectations who won't read your work.  This is not a good match for a student who's been doing interdisciplinary work that doesn't fit the mold.
One possible desirable outcome of this conversation: you get paired up with a different advisor who reads the work you've done so far, and brainstorms WITH YOU to find a common thread running throughout the bulk of your work.  Together, hopefully you can come up with ways of packaging your work and an outline for what remains to be done to tie the parts together in a finished whole.
If you can't find someone capable of functioning as your official advisor, at least try to find someone to mentor you informally to accomplish what I described.

Note inspired by the helpful answer written by Dan Romik, who I believe is an administrator in a CS department.
You may be asked by department administration to try to stick it out with your advisor and work through your difficulties.  It might be tempting to say, "It's impossible,  I've already tried all the things you've suggested," but I suggest that you do your best to cooperate, no matter how pessimistic you might feel, and agree to try again, but with a specific time frame defined.  For example, you and the administrator might agree to meet again in three weeks.  During that period, try your best to move forward with your advisor, with a positive attitude, letting bygones be bygones.
If there are still insurmountable problems, go back to the administrator after the specified interval and report back, calmly and accurately.

I want to talk to the chairman, but I don't want to antagonize my advisor. I wish there was an anonymous way of discussing my problem with my chairman.
My advisor has agreed to accept my PhD, if I can get two more papers. He still insists on getting a best thesis award. It is incredibly weird.

I suggest you collect the various paragraphs you've written here and put them together in one document, then share them with the administrator when you meet. If it's hard to start talking, just hand your sheet(s) over). // I don't see what you have to lose.  In the worst case (which I can't imagine realistically happening), and the conversation with the administrator makes things worse, how much worse would things actually be compared to how things are now? And I would think that your back-up plan would give you peace of mind.  If the PhD doesn't work out, you do have an exit strategy.

Is it your career goal to enter into academia? If so, finish the Ph.D by hook or by crook. You will not be able to roll the dice into an academic position without one. Others in this thread have better advice on how to do this.
Is your career goal to enter into the private sector? Take into account that every year you spend trying to finish your thesis is $XXX,XXX dollars. If I told you I'd give you [insert what your starting salary could be] to quit and get a job, get some benefits and being piping some of that sweet, sweet software lucre into your bank account, would you take the deal?
Will the job you are shooting for absolutely require a Ph.D? The industry is notorious for hiring drop outs of all levels, but there are still some jobs that will require the letters.
Lastly, if you could put yourself in your own shoes ten years later, would you regret not finishing it. Is that regret is worth $XXX,XXX?

I don't think that I will regret leaving PhD.

By hook, perhaps. But not by crook, no... =)

Show your ability to be a "PhD" by writing the dissertation based on the work you have done over the past 5 years. Be creative. Tie it all together: you alone know how this fabric can be stitched up. Defend it to the faculty at a public invited forum. Finish.
Based on your post, I am certain you can do it!

This is concise and a great motivation.

Thanks. This is exactly what I am doing. Although, I am compiling a subset of the papers.


text:
What should I do when a student complains about the marking in this situation?
When I was a marker, a student came to meet me to complain that I did wrong in the assignment marking but he didn't bring his assignment. I assumed that what he claimed was true and apologized. Then he just kept complained about something and then asked if I accepted that my marking was bad, and I accepted. He claimed he would tell the university and they would do something to me, and then asked my name and contact information and left. Later I found that what he even talked to the wrong TA. Was this student misbehaving and should I have kicked him out of my office in the very first place? I was only told by the instructor to meet with students to talk about marking issues and have no other idea.

I certainly wouldn't have admitted fault without seeing the work. That was your first mistake. Complaining about marking isn't misbehaving and doesn't warrant being kicked out unless the student was being offensive or abusive.

@Eppicurt What I replied to the student was "if that is true then it is a wrong marking."

I'm confused. I thought you said he complained to the wrong person? Did you discuss the individual problem and its answer or did they just complain about it being wrong? You need to update your post to include more details than this and be clearer.

@Eppicurt He did complain to the wrong person, but I had no idea about it when meeting with him.

I was only told to meet with students to talk about marking issues Please clarify who told you to meet with the students.

What exactly is the "situation" you're referring to? Do you mean to ask "What should I do if a student complains about his grade but doesn't bring the assignment to show me?" Something else?

@ff524♦ Yes, I mean how to deal with such a student who was very aggressive.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Isn't the PhD supervisor required to teach the student the research subject and prerequisites, in order to save time?
My friend is completing her PhD comprehensive test and is going to start research.
Her supervisor is emphasising the importance of self-learning. He is saying that "I will provide the necessary resources, books, etc., I am not going to teach you anything, it is your responsibility to complete prerequisites. There are several resources over the internet to accomplish all your required tasks".
My doubt is that why can't the supervisor teach at least the prerequisites and the subject of research to some extent?
Anyway, the literature survey and the publishing will be done by the student only. In this context, my doubt is to know whether the supervisor is bound to teach or not?

You can have doubts, as you are probably not party to the full discourse between supervisor and student...

Whose time would this save?

@Azor Ahai student time... Because supervisor can give narrowed down subject required for the student..

@hanugm Student time isn't a priority, supervisor time is.

Supervisors train; they don't teach. (Albeit the distinction between terms is rather subtle.)

why can't the supervisor teach at least the prerequisites and the subject of research to some extent?

A PhD is like an apprenticeship, rather than a taught degree (such as an undergraduate degree). Hence, supervisors are expected to train, not teach.

the literature survey and the publishing will be done by the student only.

Actually, the supervisor will guide the student in both activities and will (likely) be a co-author of any publications.

is...the supervisor [likely] to teach or not?

No: The supervisor has said they won't teach nor is it their job to do so.

The supervisor is quoted as saying, "I am not going to teach...it is your responsibility to complete prerequisites," which might reference (especially in the US) taught courses that PhD students are required to take. Given such context, the supervisor may merely be explaining that it isn't their responsibility to provide any help for taught courses.

I mean likely, as per recommemded norms...

@hanugm I edited to address

Even "training" seems going an extra mile. At the most basic level, supervisors are expected only to supervise (duh).

@BartoszKP Bad supervisors maybe, good supervisors I disagree. (Similarly, bad managers manage, good managers advance.)

@user2768 I can imagine a well done supervision without any additional effort. Although the meaning of "to supervise" includes directing the work, which is hard to strictly distinguish from "training". I'm not sure whether discussing such subtle semantics is worth the effort :)

@hanugm Yes, the "recommended norm" pretty much everywhere in the world is that in a PhD you figure stuff out on your own. You get some amount of "on the job" training, especially related to reading and writing papers, operating special software and infrastructure, etc., and maybe a more senior PhD student or postdoc gives you some hands-on training on the necessary scientific methods, but if you hope that your supervisor delivers you dedicated classes and lectures in your subject matter, then your PhD will be an extremely disappointing experience.

@BartoszKP: It depends on which scientific field we're talking about. In some cases, training by a laboratory's lead researcher is significant (and may not even have alternatives) - and also necessary for him/her to make you productive sooner.

Actually, the supervisor is teaching you, or trying to, at least. No, she is not required to teach you as you want to be taught, telling you explicitly what is needed. She has another method in mind that she expects to be very effective if you are willing to go along with it.
When you finish your degree you won't have any "teacher" available to you anymore except yourself. She is teaching you that now and teaching you to be effective in those circumstances. A lot of recent graduates learn that lesson too late.
Too many professors depend too much on lecturing, confusing that with teaching. Teaching is providing the circumstances for learning and for that the student needs to work, not just watch and listen.
She is doing you a favor, not being lazy. Accept that and you can have a glorious future.

Even in a class, simply lecturing is (for me, anyway) an inefficient use of time.  Far better to learn the material from the text, and use class time to address problems.  This is even more true in a one-on-one situation.  The supervisor should direct you to what you need to learn, and be there to help with problems.

... well, this is sort of true, but sometimes this is an excuse for careless supervisors with too many students to just not supervise their PhD/MS candidates seriously.

A PhD supervisor's job is to prepare and train the student for research.
In order to carry out research, a person very often needs to learn new material, and to learn it very quickly and very efficiently, much more efficiently than the average undergraduate learns material.
The trouble is, once a researcher has left the womb of PhD training, there won't be anyone around to coddle them and guide them through learning new material. They've got to do it themselves.
So, part of the PhD supervisor's job is to require their supervisee to learn to learn quickly and efficiently, without coddling.
So no, it is not the PhD supervisor's job to teach their students the prerequisites. A good supervisor can decide for themselves when it might be useful to accelerate the process by presenting, let's say, a well-timed example or case study. A good supervisor might also lay out a course of study. But to walk the student through that course, step-by-step, as in an undergraduate course, would be counterproductive.

(Under the implicit assumption that the supervisor is a (full) professor or some other similarly high-level person)
PhD supervisors typically already have a lot of duties: teaching classes, marking exams, conducting oral exams, supervise the projects of the other PhD and grad/undergrad students, proofread papers, theses and reports, grade theses and reporst, manage administrative duties, prepare presentations for conferences/visits to other institutes, be a host to guests from other institutes, attend department meetings, and many, many more.
At the same time, the group has experienced PhD students and postdocs that are right on the cutting edge of the research but who have much more time for side activities because they only have a small fraction of the rat’s tail of duties the (full) professor has.
Having the full professor, i.e. the official supervisor, be the person teaching the new PhD student would be very inefficient. It is, by definition, a one on one situation meaning a high time cost with a necessarily low gain. Something that really doesn’t fit well with tight schedules. On the other hand, experienced PhD students and postdocs also have the knowledge and much more time on their hands. Therefore, if there is any actual teaching of methods or skills to be done, it will be the PhD students’ or postdocs’ job.
Naturally, the supervisor will still be there for the core part of their job: answer questions, provide guidance and point to helpful references if they are hard to find. I believe the quote states your friend’s supervisor is planning on doing exactly that.

It usually recommended PhD students take courses or at least one course in the area they are doing their comprehensive exam in. This allows the student time to read and evaluate critical readings - but the supervisor is under no obligation to hand hold students through this process.
Our comps were entirely self directed. We got a reading list and took about 4 months independently to study and make notes for the exam. Taking a course allows you to unpack some of the critical trends in the literature - so they could ask their advisor if they would do a reading course with them, otherwise, nope.

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


text:
Is writing a grant proposal at the end of Ph.D. a good idea?
I will be getting my Ph.D. in computer science in several months, from a US university.
Over the course of my research I have stumbled on a number of interesting directions that I didn't have time to pursue.
Now that my Ph.D. is coming to an end, and I will be leaving (hopefully for a postdoc), I was wondering if it's a good idea to put some of these research directions into a grant proposal with my advisors?
My questions are:

Is this a good idea, especially given the fact that I will not be affiliated with my current institution anymore?
Is this a good career move, at this point, or should I postpone this to another time?

field? country?

Computer Science. USA

You haven't had to participate in grant proposals for funding future colleagues during your PhD so far? That is typically how you gradually get some experience in writing such proposals.

@O.R.Mapper no I haven't had a chance to participate in writing proposals yet.

Writing grant proposals with your supervisors is great experience and good for your career.  Writing in partnership with more experienced researchers is a great to to get "apprenticeship" experience and to become introduced to key funding agencies, program managers, and the expectations and practices in interacting with them.  Moreover, even if you move on before the grant is funded, you may find yourself able to work on the project via a subcontract to your new institution or else to help supervise students on the project from afar (I certainly had this experience).
Thus, if there is a good opportunity for doing collaborating with your supervisors on grant-writing, I highly advise doing so.

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


text:
Short term grant for travel/relocation costs when starting a PhD
I've been accepted into a PhD program in Bielefeld, and I'm also waiting on a response from ETH Zurich. The thing is, moving to either place from the Netherlands is expensive, and then I need to find a place and pay for deposit and administration costs, and furnishing if so. Does anyone know short term grants for starting students that I can use to fund my first month of PhD while I get my first pay check?

Are you indeed looking for a grant (somebody should give you money for this) or a short-term loan (somebody lends you money)? Because the second seems much more realistic and common than the former.

Have you asked the university? Maybe they can give your first salary in advance or help you with the housing.

When I was in that exact same spot, my advisor managed to get me a temporary/emergency one month grant. Therefore, I'll repeat one of the mantras talk to your advisor...


text:
In IEEE conferences is it necessary run the simulation in front of the members?
My paper was accepted to an IEEE conference, but I am not getting the simulation results I obtained before.
In IEEE conferences will they tell you to run the simulation in front of them?

"IEEE conference" tells us almost nothing. The IEEE sponsors more than 1000 conferences each year, on everything from computer science to the engineering problems in electric power transformers. Can you be more specific?

For the future, make sure you use the same pseudo-random number generator for all random choices and give it a specific seed. This way, you can always rerun the exact same simulation (assuming your implementation is single-threaded).

@Peter: Or just record a video of the one simulation run being reported on? Frankly, if a simulation only works for a specific set of random numbers (not a specific set of carefully chosen numbers based upon external factors!), something is wrong about the hypothesis.

Do the new simulation result still support the conclusion in the paper? I agree with @Peter, but would add a recommendation to run tests with different seeds to check that the seed does not affect the conclusions.

@O.R.Mapper Absolutely. The fixed seed lets you go back to the good results to figure out what's wrong. But you still do need to figure out why the seed affects the results.

ALWAYS write out your random number seed to your log file!   Then you can repeat any run at will.

@tumpa: instead of seeing this as a problem, see it as an opportunity.  Due to time constraints researchers do not often build a "second system", but you have, so make the most of it! You have gained a deeper understanding of your problem and how sensitive it is to small changes in your software. Perhaps this indicates that your method is not very robust. Also, just relax and carefully work through your code. I find stressful situations (e.g. hard drive crash) can often make it hard to spot the bugs in a simulation.

Since the other answers should properly address your question, I'll raise an issue that bothered me from the go: What do you mean you can't replicate your results?
One of the cornerstones of science is the replication of results (something that is almost never done in computer science...). If you can't replicate your results, how do you expect someone else to? If nobody can replicate/verify your results, sorry, you are not doing science :(
I'm not saying that you are doing it wrong, one would need more information than that, I'm saying that the phrase

but I am not getting the simulation results I obtained before.

is very troubling and can indicate that you are, indeed, doing something wrong.

Actually, my hard disk crashed, so the original results can't be recovered. I ran a second simulation but the results deviated from my original results in the paper.

Nevertheless, the article itself should be a roadmap with complete instructions on how/why you arrived at those results and how to replicate them.  That's what research articles are for. If you, the original author, can't duplicate the results based on what is written on the paper, the same argument applies.

@tumpa "hard disk crash" is equivalent to "the dog ate my homework"; that is, no one will find that an acceptable excuse. Backing up to a thumb drive is so easy these days that there's just no reason to not do so for your critical work. And everything that everyone else said about replication of results.

@msw, I can't not agree especially as someone who lost the entire HDD (with both of my partitions...) a month ago, but since I backed everything crucial (code) up, it wasn't a big deal. I mean, it was annoying to reinstall everything. As far as the original question is concerned though, I would follow the "if you cannot replicate, don't publish it" mantra. Far too often have I found great results in publications that absolutely do not work as well when implemented.

@tumpa For hard disk crashes and other acts of God, proactively create an online repo on say Github. Check in your code and result files periodically. Even if your current demo doesn't work, you'll have a much better idea of what went wrong, as you step through your comment log.

I have not seen any conference in which normal track papers where required to show simulations.  However, you may very well have questions about your simulation and results.  For that reason, I would be careful of presenting something in which you yourself can not replicate.  At the very least, depending on how different your results are now than they were before, you may need to make it clear in your presentation that you are aware there may be some issues with the accuracy.

So far, in none of the IEEE conferences I have attended have I seen a compulsion of a demo from the presentation critics. Though some delegates do present a demo, but it would be of their own wish.
Thus, you wouldn't have to worry about giving a simulation at the conference. The average time given to you would only be from 15-25 minutes for your presentation. You should be spending enough time explaining your work.
(Nevertheless, you ought to know what is wrong with your simulation for the good of your research concerned)

Apart from what others have already mentioned here, about your inability to obtain the same results again being a bigger concern than just presenting a demo, I would also remind you that if someone from the audience asks some difficult questions, you could be caught in an awkward spot.
So, here is my advice - forget about whether you need to show a live demo or not, first figure out what is wrong with your methodology or your hypothesis. If you can justify that, then don't worry about the live demo, and if you cannot justify that, then you still have to do a lot of work.

+1 for "forget about whether you need to show a live demo or not".

As the other answers have noted, showing a live demo is the least of your concerns.  If your results are correct, and you understand the methods you've used to obtain them, then everything is fine.  If not, you have bigger problems anyway.
You don't say exactly what you mean by "not getting the simulation results I obtained before", but whatever it is, it's worrying:

Your earlier results might have been a statistical fluke, or they might have been representative of only a small fraction of the parameter space.
Alternatively, if your old code consistently gave different results than you new simulation code does for identical parameter values, then either your old code or the new code (or both!) must have a bug.

Until you figure out what the cause of the discrepancy is, and verify (e.g. by comparison with earlier work and/or an independent reimplementation) that you simulations are actually producing correct results, there's a good chance that at least some of your results are bogus, and any conclusions you may have drawn based on them may be simply wrong.
The good news is that, by a lucky accident, you caught this problem now, before the conference.  Even if you can't verify or correct your results in time, and end up having to withdraw your paper from the conference, that's still a lot less embarrassing than having someone else refute your results after (or, perhaps worse yet, during) the public presentation.
At this point, the two questions you should ask yourself are:

Can you honestly and confidently stand in front of your peers and superiors, and answer questions about how you got your results and why they are the way they are, with full confidence that your claims, to the extent you've made them, really hold up to scrutiny?
If not, what's the least embarrassing way to retract your claims, at least temporarily until you can reconfirm them, and how soon do you need to do that?
(Tip: It's almost certainly not waiting until just before you need to present your paper.  It's most likely also not trying to bullshit your way through the presentation with dodgy data, and having someone in the audience call you on it.)

In any case, if you haven't discussed the problem with your supervisor(s), do that now.  This is one of the things it's their job to be aware of and to help you deal with, and they'll (hopefully) have the experience to suggest a reasonable course of action in your specific situation.


text:
Do I need a PhD in mathematics if my goal is to teach at the undergraduate level?
My ultimate goal is to teach undergraduate level mathematics, that is, classes such as calculus and differential equations, as well as introductory proof-based courses like linear algebra, abstract algebra, and real and complex analysis. Why? I just love to teach people who are interested in learning math, and I have the strong belief (it's more of a certainty) that all interested mathematics students can appreciate and find the joy to learn any of these core classes if they receive the right approach. I am willing to teach like this patiently because I like it and I'm willing to devote to it. I feel very comfortable teaching math.
I am receiving a bachelor's degree in mathematics from UC Berkeley in May 2016. Needless to say, I like math a lot and I am excited to learn math at a higher level in grad school.
My question is, given that my goal is to become a math educator and obtain a secured job, do I need to pursue a PhD in mathematics?
I know that the whole idea in getting a PhD is to do original research, but to be honest, this is not the exciting part for me to go to grad school. This is merely secondary for me. I would even say it is tertiary since I am more enthusiastic about studying more math and being a graduate instructor. I know community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and even some universities hire lecturers (whose only job is to teach). Should I get into a master's program to achieve my dream job instead?

Related: Is it possible to earn a PhD in mathematics with emphasis in teaching?

I have removed the parts of this question asking where to apply (because we don't answer questions like that here; see the [help/on-topic]) and asking if age matters (because it's been done to death here; see [tag:age].)

Related: Can you teach at a community college with a master's degree?

I don't know about other accreditation agencies, but SACS generally requires only 18 graduate hours in a field to teach (and sometimes with less, given life experiences — normally IMLE, for fine arts instructors).  Accreditation agencies will set the bar minimum for teaching accredited coursework; individual institutions, of course, are free to raise the bar.

The OP mentioned liberal arts colleges, so let me comment that at the liberal arts college where I work, tenure track faculty definitely need to have a PhD and even most visiting faculty. I know of two cases where a tenure track faculty member's spouse, who only had a master's degree, was able to teach, but usually not upper level electives. It's best to get the PhD. You need to understand these things deeply to be able to teach them well.

At least in the US, if you want to teach calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra, and are also willing to teach lower-level stuff (e.g., algebra stuff like quadratic equations and trigonometry) you can likely do that at a community college, which means you might not need a PhD. If you really want to teach abstract algebra and real analysis you probably could not do that at a community college, which means you'd probably need a PhD.

I think your question is really "which universities will hire instructors without a doctorate?" This depends strongly on the country in which you want to work, and the type of university you want to work at.  In some countries and at some universities, there are regular faculty who have only a master's degree.  But in many cases (e.g., at typical four-year institutions in the US), you will be automatically disqualified, or may qualify only for a part-time or adjunct position.

Don't forget community colleges. See Can you teach at a community college with a master's degree?

@ff524: Right, but don't forget the OP said "My ultimate goal is to teach undergraduate level mathematics, that is, classes such as calculus and differential equations, as well as introductory proof-based courses like linear algebra, abstract algebra, and real and complex analysis." At most community colleges I'm familiar with, the highest level math course taught would be either calculus or differential equations, the majority of the teaching would be at the precalculus level, and being able to teach the highest level courses is positively correlated with having a PhD.

@PeteL.Clark I think that you should write another answer including this information, since the OP specifically mentioned community colleges as a possibility.

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


text:
When should private tutors communicate with course professors?
Students often seek help from a variety of sources, including private tutors, who can be found either locally or remotely on websites such as Wyzant, Chegg, Tutor.com, Varsity Tutors, etc.
As a relative newcomer to the world of online tutoring I am gradually coming to realize that protection of academic integrity, while somewhat fundamental to the entire enterprise, is somewhat of a challenge; this is especially true when tutoring remotely.  Academic integrity is a potentially sensitive subject, in the sense that it is easy to impose an unintended policy (or one with unintended side effects) on others by accident, either actively or passively.
I am wondering if it is appropriate for tutors to be in communication with their students' teachers in order to ensure that their lessons are not somehow incompatible with school or class academic honesty policies or integrity frameworks.  On the one hand, teachers and Professors could benefit from knowing if a large number of their students are seeking outside help to understand lessons, and from having transcripts of one-on-one tutoring sessions as well.  On the other, there is a small possibility that, for any number of what would amount to legitimate reasons, they (individual teachers and/or Professors) might regret this knowledge, and that the set of appropriate stewards of tutoring sessions (or the "relevant data" thereof) does not include them, but rather consists of a comparably* sparse network of educators and administrators that is nonetheless robust.  Would it be generally acceptable to leave this decision in the hands of the student?  Or is there a more appropriate (more graceful or less awkward) way to maintain academic integrity for tutoring sessions?
*That is, with respect to a "radically open" network that includes everyone who might have any interest whatsoever, including the course professor.

Your location is important, as the student-professor relationship (or teaching philosophy) depends heavily on the country (and also heavily on other factors).

If you screw your clients you will quickly not have them anymore. If I was leading a tutoring service and an employee attempted to give away client information I would fire them instantly.

@FourierFlux, thanks for sharing your perspective.  If it helps, my question is geared more to independent tutors than to CEOs of relatively large tutoring companies where liability would be somewhat non-insignificant, and where fancier third-party approaches to observing academic integrity can probably be afforded.

Academic integrity is the responsibility of the student.  Everyone has a responsibility to decline to knowingly assist cheating.  Only the instructor and university have a responsibility to actively discourage cheating.
So no, you do not need to contact professors unless your employer requires it.

Some universities have honor codes that differ from this, but honor codes only apply to affiliated individuals.

I appreciate your sharing your point of view.  I would also add that anyone who acknowledges such a responsibility probably 'has' that responsibility as well, and I'm not sure that I would trust someone who did not understand the basis of academic integrity to effectively discourage its corruption, independently of where they happen to work.

Also, even if someone's employer required their being in contact with their students' professors, would it be "correct" for them to do so unconditionally (as opposed to, say, quitting?)

I recommend that you have a clear policy, accepted by the student, that you will contact their instructor at the start of your work with them, announcing yourself and asking for any guidance or ground rules that you should follow.
This policy makes it unnecessary to ask the student for permission and then wonder what to do if it isn't given. It also makes it clear to the student that you are a supplement to their instructor and not a replacement. Finally, it should make it clear that you won't listen to requests to do unethical things.
Moreover, as a newcomer, you might get some valuable pointers that will help you be more effective. For example, the idea that it is best to give students only minimal hints when they encounter problems.

Agreed. As a teacher, I would also love to be notified of any student being tutored for my course – and be happy that they've got that support, but aware of the fact.

The equal mix (at the moment) of up- and downvotes on this answer surprises me. Would downvoters comment please.

@EthanBolker, I'm surprised on this one also. I sometimes push people to do things they really really don't want to do even when it is probably the right thing, but this doesn't seem to be that. Maybe someone would like to explain.

@EthanBolker I'm one of the downvoters, and I suspect that the vote mix reflects, as many other cases here, the different mentality between US (and maybe Britain) and old Europe. For me, what a student does to study outside a class should be none of the professor's business: for me a student can get tutored, helped by friends to solve homework, go to ask for help online, consult any book they want etc. And, for me, neither a university nor a professor should have a say on any of these.

@MassimoOrtolano Fair point. "Get tutored", yes. "Hire someone to do one's homework", no, Even in Europe I hope. A tutor anywhere should refuse  the latter. I suppose that honorable person could just tell the client "no" without informing the teacher of the relationship.

@MassimoOrtolano, perhaps, but it was a US based, new to tutoring, OP here. They were asking for advice to help them do a better job. Is your advice to "do whatever you like, without guidance"?

@EthanBolker I explained my policy about homework here, so for me it doesn't really change anything if a student hires someone to do their homework, it's just wasted money for them. And when I was a student virtually every professor gave solutions to homework problems. All my colleagues give solutions. It's up to the students to use homework to learn something or not.

Buffy, it's a private tutor not a university one, I wouldn't give any guidance to a private tutor: they're the ones who want to do business.

I agree with @MassimoOrtolano here. Where in the question is the country stated?

But Buffy, even in the US, if you had a class of 200 students and 50 of them got a tutor, would you really want to have 50 tutors contacting you for guidance?

@user111388, See the profile of the writer.

@MassimoOrtolano, With 200 students you aren't dealing with them individually. If you can deal with that you can figure out a way to deal with the 50. And doing so might even save me some time and effort in other ways. Don't make this a zero-sum game, please.

@Buffy usually courses with upwards of 200 students involve some amount of delegation.

Yes, of course, but I've also been thinking about what I'd actually do if I suddenly had about 50 additional TAs in such a course. It might be worth giving them some guidance. I might even want to post a general advice page for potential private tutors.


text:
Is there a common understanding or philosophical foundation of academic integrity?
In another contemporaneous post, I asked about whether private tutors ought to establish communication with the course heads of their students, and received several thoughtful responses.  Based on what I have learned so far, from those responses and from my own admittedly limited research on this subject, it seems that in one direction, involving subjective experience and private decision-making, questions of academic integrity are, at face value, somewhat cut-and-dry.  Cheating is bad, one's work should be one's own, and all is well and good as long as one knows that one has followed the rules.
However, for potentially good reasons there do appear to exist people who care deeply not only about whether they follow the rules, but also about whether other people do as well.  That is, these individuals, that I would count myself among, would seek to construct an objective experience of academic integrity so that others might benefit.  In light of somewhat painful discussions of colonialism, racism, and of other 'other' problems that have cropped up recently, it seems necessary to give serious thought to how the objective side of academic integrity is understood.
Based on recent news about police conduct, there is a possibility that 'authorities' in some settings may, consciously or subconsciously, deem it acceptable for certain kinds of students to work honestly by themselves, but not for equally qualified others to do so, without some additional kind of clumsily imposed surveillance. This is obviously bad for many reasons, but in particular because it would mean committing to the idea that academia is really just a sort of quaint shell game with no real knowledge-generating value, and whose true motives are merely political.  So authoritarianism, whether actively or passively imposed, is out.
In light of this, my question is: Are there shared modern understandings or theories of academic integrity that can openly help interested students protect themselves and others from the risks, physical and moral, present and future, associated with academic dishonesty?

How is "one's work should be one's own" a subjective experience?

It's easy to overthink this: you know personally what work is your own, and you might be able to convince your friends, but without serious evidence you might have trouble with a stubborn lawyer (in certain jurisdictions.)

Hmmm. Why the racial note in this? I don't understand your intent here. Or your underlying assumptions.

@Buffy: to furnish an example of where irrational bias has threatened to compromise academic integrity.

Sorry, I don't see the connection. Whose academic integrity, exactly? Such a thing would be just racist bias, having no other link to "academic integrity". I suggest you remove it or make it clear.

The inclusivity tag also clouds the issue, I think.

@Buffy would it help if I explained the connection as I see it?

It should be an edit to the question, not a comment, but I think there are two issues/questions here and you might consider separating them.

@Buffy It has occurred to me that academic integrity may be compromised if anyone's academic integrity is compromised.  People with racist biases are especially susceptible to causing immense harm through shoddy scholarship.

I can only give my personal philosophy and hope that it is shared widely enough, though I have no doubt that it fails any universality test. I developed this over many years. As a young faculty member, I was too strict in my interpretations, not yet understanding many important issues.
First, I believe that our first responsibility is to our students. Among those responsibilities is the imperative to teach every student. I'm not a lecturer/grader. I am a teacher. What that means is that I need to "set the conditions" under which every student can learn if they are willing to do the work. They don't need brilliance. They need grit. Some need more grit than others, so my interactions vary with different students, depending on their needs. Some required huge effort to help them over humps. Some needed extra help to overcome poor prior teaching and even misconceptions they had picked up earlier. Some just never learned how to learn and I had to teach them even that. And some needed extra work to provide sufficient challenge to them to really grow.
Second, we have a responsibility to society as a whole to provide graduates who are both technically and ethically solidly grounded. We can't ignore either. My clear preference is to only fail people who haven't done the work. I try not to trick them. I try to find ways to pass them, even if it means more work for them and for myself. Mostly, in my later years, I succeeded at this. People who failed didn't have the heart to succeed.
But the basis of this is that one needs to understand how people learn and it is only through understanding this that you can really evaluate the effect of cheating and other academic dishonesty.
People learn through repetition/reinforcement along with feedback. There is a book by James E. Zull that explains this well. Hearing/seeing something once isn't enough for real learning. Lectures are only valuable in pointing students to things that they need to study. I used to tell my students that "It isn't important what I do here. It is only important what you do". (Please don't interpret that as implying I was lazy.)
So, I sought ways to teach in which that was pretty much guaranteed to happen, provided that the student put in the effort. Reinforcement followed up by my feedback, to help them not pick up misconceptions. I also sought to find evaluation mechanisms that were biased in the direction of deep learning and skills, not short term memory for which "cramming" would be effective. I sought ways for students to fall and then get up again (redoing old work for better marks, for example). Part of that philosophy is "You are here to learn. You are not here to prove to me that you don't need to be here."
Thus cheating is bad because for the student because it doesn't lead to learning. There is no repetition and feedback on their trials. So, they are wasting their own time (and lives) by cheating.
For society as a whole, it leads to dishonest people who can do great damage to society. At this very moment there are a couple of people in the US Senate (no, I won't name them) who went to the very finest schools and are technically gifted, but have no ethics whatever. They have become a danger to the republic. But they aren't the first, of course.

Academic integrity for the student means doing the hard work that it takes to learn and avoiding short cuts that prevent deep learning.
Academic integrity for the faculty (qua faculty) means setting fair conditions under which every student can succeed if they are willing to do the work.
Academic integrity outside the classroom is a bit beyond the question, I think, and isn't addressed here.
And, I guess I need to note that "set the conditions" was once used by a US Vice President as a euphemism for torture.

Thank you for your answer. If it helps, my question pertains to academic integrity in general.  Could 'doing the hard work' involve inviting others to discuss this topic in non-self destructive ways?

Also, I might argue that cheating isn't bad because it doesn't lead to learning (sometimes it very much does), but that it involves learning to be disrespectful of a small matter (a school or university), which does not bode well when encountering potentially 'large' matters (or other small matters.)

In college and high school, I believe that I could have benefited to some extent from having been tipped off at some point to constantly and seriously question my own larger purpose in attending college, and whether the foundations I was setting then, beyond increasing my own basic knowledge and experience, were sufficiently solid to support that purpose without significant and possibly costly external intervention. At some level it should be perfectly fine to pursue one's work in private and to allow the larger questions of how one's own integrity coheres within a larger sort of 'integrity matrix' to resolve themselves subconsciously.  But at another level, the less one is able to accomplish oneself, the more one must perhaps subconsciously rely on labor done by others who may not ultimately benefit from one's gratitude. Hence, I can imagine there being considerable value in inviting students to take these kinds of meta-matters into their own hands, and deliberately build and test their own academic infrastructure to whatever extent they are able.
The modern Academic Integrity movement in the U.S. can be attributed to Donald McCabe, although it has existed in various forms for much longer.
By now there is a wealth of additional perspectives on this topic, with more or less complexity or explanatory power.
As is often the case, academic integrity has been enforced for longer than conscious attempts have been made to understand it, and has been upheld through a variety of accounting mechanisms, and this context shapes or limits how the field itself can be studied and understood going forward.
The movement appears to be rooted in the subjective experience of what is regarded as fair or just at an individual level, as well as the objective experience of what may be universally regarded as true in a society.  There can be more or less tension between these constitutive elements, especially where several different societies begin to overlap or rub against each other.
Within many societies (including most U.S. academic settings to my knowledge) authorship is regarded as an extremely personal quality, and is tied to the status (or grant funding, or influence) of an individual within that group.
In others, the role of an individual in achieving a certain desired result is viewed as secondary to the success of a group as a whole: a person's contributions are noted only to the extent that doing so increases the chances of the group succeeding in its future tasks, and are otherwise thought of as being in vain, or purely egocentric.
It might be interesting to examine what might happen at the junction of these very different philosophies toward scholarship, if doing so is not perilous.  One might hope that the collective goals of academia are to bring a sensitive lens to bear on poorly understood subjects, and not an opposite thereof.
Note that a strict individualistic approach to academic integrity is not necessarily individualistic in its impact or intrinsically egocentric: it could serve the needs of the society in which it is maintained as well as an explicitly collectivist approach would, for example by deliberately attracting talented researchers from elsewhere.  There would also be strong incentives to monitor individual behavior, and for individuals to express their values as faithfully as possible.
If the individualistic approach is clumsily or selfishly implemented, however, it could easily turn into a counterproductive and/or corrupt sort of self-ingratiation.
Objective stances toward academic integrity are most prominent in exam rooms and, to some extent, the evaluation of long-form essays. Short assignments tend to be given slightly less official scrutiny, for better or for worse, though often owing to technological or time constraints rather than limits to the inherent meaning of the work.
In the literature (c.f. [2] and [3]) there appears to be a tendency for academic integrity to be defined in terms of one of its opposites: cheating.  This is a potentially untenable habit, as the notion of cheating is itself somewhat treacherous; its meaning is unambiguous in certain cases, but less so in others, and sometimes in counterintuitive ways. Can two students be accused of cheating if their answers on a test are conspicuously similar, if the teaching staff failed to notice it during the exam?  Some might say yes, but would it not be cheating to allow cheating to occur, or to presume guilt, or punish without a hard justification?  Moreover, there are other behaviors that can be corrosive to (certain interpretations of) academic integrity when taken to extremes, behaviors that are not obviously cheating: student isolationism or self-imposed hermitude (which can seem, subjectively speaking, like the complete opposite of cheating), enrolling in subjects that one has already studied elsewhere, or accidentally leaving one's bag unattended in a restaurant for 15 minutes.  A philosophy of academic integrity expressed only in terms of cheating might be somewhat akin to a philosophy of virtue that is grounded entirely in (technical) prowess.
Be that as it may, how one might approach the subject of academic integrity in a constructive or positive way is a very sensitive matter, in part because of the ethical quandaries that surround the murky business of telling other people how to hold themselves accountable, or what kinds of pledges or promises or vows to make, or perhaps even suggesting that it is even possible to make pledges or vows in ways that are both meaningful and safe, as though doing so did not also involve accepting certain risks as well.  It is somewhat nontrivial to come up with an explicit personal accountability framework that is both sound and allows one to make what amount to real, considerate, and unassailable, promises to others, but that (and, in an a posteriori sense, accommodating or forgiving impudence, possibly the 'grit' alluded to in Buffy's answer above) is essentially what academic integrity requires.
Sources:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_integrity
[2] Pedagogy not Policing: Positive Approaches to Academic Integrity at the University, https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/2413/pedagogy-not-policing/
[3] Cheating in College: Why Students Do It and What Educators Can Do about It, https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/cheating-college

Can you provide links or other citations for the last two refs?

I appreciate the feedback. It wasn't my intent to write a sort of essay, but I'll do what I can


text:
Is scientific misconduct relatively normalised in some countries or academic cultures?
My question was provoked by this comment, and the fairly popular responses to it. I've seen similar sentiment expressed before, though always as asides rather than any direct 'accusation'.
In my country (UK) and perhaps the West overall, academic dishonesty is a cardinal sin - whether committed by students or especially by researchers. As a completing PhD student who returned from industry I can see why: the whole system depends on trust to a degree that frankly surprised me a little initially*. The threat to one's name and career that dishonesty would pose looms far larger than any potential benefits.
Are academic cultures from other countries more lax on this point? Are researchers from these countries more likely to prioritise "getting ahead at all costs" over the validity of their work? Do the comments I've seen reflect informal prejudice (perhaps widely held but nonetheless anecdotal), or an objectively evidenced phenomena?
Surely the scientific output from such a culture would be completely bankrupt? At minimum I cannot see how such a system (which serves to keep scientists in jobs more than producing new knowledge) would interface with the West's: on an individual level at least, once someone is outed as a charlatan many potential employers and collaborators will not touch them with a barge pole.
To reiterate, I am asking whether there is evidence that some countries or academic cultures take a more relaxed view on dishonesty. I'm also interested in what the consequences are for the international standing of those cultures and their scientists.
*Industry benefits from the natural selection of frequently reused ideas by high, proximal cost of failure. The scientific equivalent should in theory be replication...

What exactly is the academic culture of a country? Third-world countries can exhibit a tremendous discrepancy between the best researchers (who are often working together with the West closely -- you might not count 100% emigrants, but there is a wide spectrum of being part-here-part-there) and the average academics. The former usually don't differ much from those in the West as far as ethical standards are concerned. A first step to making the question more concrete would be to specify whether you mean only researchers working full-time in said countries.

Note that despite the perceived cardinality of the sin, there have been egregeous cases of scientific misconduct also in the West, and not so rarely.

Somehow related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/42050/20058

Is this appropriate for Skeptics.SE?

To answer directly, yes, but this needs to be detailed for a complete understanding. In my opinion, there are two aspects that must be considered

Lax view on dishonesty
what counts as dishonesty

There are some countries that have a more lazed view on dishonesty, one is my home country.
Cheating in an exam is always punished (not harshly though), but rarely looked upon by colleagues. Moreover, you usually have options to retake the exam if you were caught cheating and if you pass, you're at par with everyone else. But to really understand the phenomena, you need a little bit more context.
Where I come from, I had university classes where we had to memorize full lectures and all you had to do at the exam was to write the full lecture on paper. The whole exam was pointless, you didn't learn anything anyway, so if you could bypass the exam, it would mean that you managed to save some time that nobody gives you back. I even had a senile (literally, it's sad) professor who was giving sort of random grades, barely correlated with the number of pages you wrote and the graphs you made, without even reading what you wrote. Moreover, the study material was about techniques not in use for the past 20 years at least. If you take what I just said for granted, I think everyone would reach the conclusion that studying for this class in order to pass the exam is not only pointless, but the wrong approach, since the goal is to write as much as possible and draw some pretty, barely related graphs.
By now you probably think that the university I'm talking about must be some fake/scam university in an underdeveloped country. Again, you have to trust me, and I see how I am very hard to trust, but this university is considered a respectable university in a EU country.
To conclude this point, some countries have a more relaxed view on academic dishonesty, but things still go on, because the academic is pulled by other aspects of the society that work better. For example, I went through all this classes of this university and graduated, and this granted me a diploma that allowed me to join a masters programme at a world TOP 50 university, in another EU country. So basically, the good politics were good enough to join the Bologna system and EU, which allowed this backwards university to exist in order to provide diplomas for people for which diplomas are vital for their future. Even though I had such a horrific background, I performed well on my masters, at least at par and sometimes even better than students with good backgrounds.
Now going to the second point. Not everything that would be considered academic dishonesty in western countries is considered dishonesty in other countries. For example, a failure to cite half a page of verbatim copy in a PhD thesis in a western countries would be academically fatal. Where I come from, these things get relativized to other issues that there are in the countries, and I would add, for a good reason. It's easy to see plagiarism as the worst sin ever if in your bubble it is indeed  the worst sin ever. But when one public person is accused of embezzling millions or even tens of millions of dollars, and then the accused accuses the accuser that he copied some paragraphs in his PhD thesis, it is easy to see how the public opinion doesn't care about, literally, some copied words on a piece of paper. Then these things work as examples for the public, and the conclusion is: it is fine to plagiarize, but it is not fine to steal millions of dollars from public money. Both are bad, but at scale, the first is negligible and can be approximated with "not bad".
I don't want my examples to be used as some sort of reasoning to discriminate people that come from countries with different ethical standards, because everything that someone from these countries does, because he developed different cultural ethical standards, a person from a western country can do as well, just because he doesn't hold to his cultural ethical standards.
Considering the original question, and my cultural background, I think it might be valuable for the answer of this question, my answer to the original question.
I personally consider that it is not unethical if, the person that was asked to write a recommendation letter (the professor), does not mention the incident, if he truly recommends the student for the PhD position. Moreover, I consider it unethical to include negative comments in a recommendation letter. My reasoning for this is that a recommendation letter is just that, a recommendation letter. It should only include why you recommend someone, the fact that you recommend that person is already clear from the existence of the letter. A recommendation letter is not a summary report on previous activity. The moment you include negative comments in a recommendation letter, you start being deceiving towards the person that you are recommending, by giving false hopes, and also towards the committee to which the letter is addressed, by recommending someone you do not truly believe it should be recommended.
In my opinion, if someone writes a negative recommendation letter (logically broken expression), the letter says more about the writer, than its subject.

"By now you probably think that the university I'm talking about must be some fake/scam university in an underdeveloped country." Well, truth be told, yes, but I was also considering the scenario of studying a major at a university that isn't really known for being "strong" in that major, so to speak. Pretty sure at most if not all universities you'll be able to find classes where "you don't learn anything anyway" or with a professor that gives "random" grades. I'm just not sure I can swallow the idea that this is common at a great university in the same field that it's known for. Is it?

Where I'm from, universities are more like holding companies for faculties. So the faculty is the proper educational institution, and the university is just a group of loosely related faculties. I don't want to talk about the whole university, but the faculty I'm talking about, is the most respected faculty in its own field at national level, and it won twice the best faculty in all the fields at national level. About the last part, in my opinion, it was politics, not all faculties are as bad as the one I had the luck to join, but the other faculties in this field, are somehow even worse.


text:
Co-author blocking publication
This question is somewhat inspired by the question in When is a supervisor unable to request paper retraction if a paper gets published without her consent?, although I've no reason to suppose that the following situation describes the one prompting that question.
Suppose Alice and Bob do some research together, with Alice providing ~75% of the intellectual contribution (perhaps Alice is Bob's PhD student). Alice writes a draft of the paper, and lists both of them as authors.
Bob does not agree with part of what Alice has written, and says he does not agree to the paper being published in this form. Alice, however, is not willing to remove the offending section. (For the sake of argument, let's assume that neither Alice nor Bob can be said to be objectively 'in the right'.)
Is there any route out of this impasse? Can Alice treat Bob as refusing authorship of the paper, and publish the manuscript without his name?

My thoughts are not well-formed enough to be an answer, but by some (all?) definitions an author has final draft approval and a paper can only be published by consensus of authors. This would be an absurdity if Alice can just remove anyone who doesn't agree with her draft from the list of authors. Both "final draft approval" and "consensus" surely must mean "right to veto publication", which Bob has chosen to exercise. Sucks for Alice ofc, especially if Bob chose to feign objections for personal reasons unconnected to the content of the paper.

@SteveJessop True. But are there exceptions? Suppose Bob decides to attempt to abuse his power, and demands a bribe before agreeing. He can clearly be disciplined by his employers. Can they also dispense with the need for his consent to publication? Or does he get to destroy Alice's career as revenge for "outing" him?

Right, I'm sure one can make a case for "if you abuse it you lose it", but a simple definition of "author" won't include special cases. One might perhaps argue that by offering to publish in exchange for a bribe he has in fact approved the final draft, since his only stated caveat can be set aside as illegitimate? I wonder if, for another example, an "unreasonable" but not outright abusive refusal to publish can lead to an institution or funding organization invoking some right to "publish" the results in the non-academic sense regardless of who gets or deserves the academic credit.

There are several options for Alice:

Ask Bob if he is willing to give up his authorship. Then, if he says
it is OK, publish without his name (but make clear in which part he was involved).
Remove Bob's contribution from the paper and then publish. (Which might not be possible.)
Find some common ground (maybe with the help of someone else) with Bob and then publish. (The best way, but
may not be possible.)
Do not publish the paper at all.

Can Alice treat Bob as refusing authorship of the paper, and publish
  the manuscript without his name?

No.

Are you sure your answer to the final question isn't influenced by your being Bob? ;-)

@espertus every paper should be only published with my name! Or at least with paragraph praising me.

Alice used to correspond with me in examples of encryption, but lately she's forsaken me for Bill.

I am not sure there is such a thing as "giving up authorship". Ghost writting doest not exist in academia; unless Alice can remove all intellectual contributions Bob made from the paper, I'm not sure Bob "consenting" to publication without his name is enough.

Is there any route out of this impasse?
Yes: the part which Bob is not happy about is clearly marked as opinion of Alice only, which Bob accepts.
I have seen papers published where the authors admit that they couldn't between them agree on some point and present both options to the readers.

The nice thing about academia is that intellectuals will generally allow, and even appreciate, this kind of impasse. I have seen this happen in the literature a few times, and it usually takes the form of dual conclusion sections, each titled by the author making the case.
Having an impassable dispute about the interpretation of data should be encouraged, even with (or especially with) advisors and students, colleagues and PIs. What should not be under dispute is the importance of the question, the data, and the scientific approach.


text:
Dissertation acknowledgements: thanking a professional for medical treatment?
I'm currently working on the acknowledgements section of my doctoral thesis. I suffered from severe depression during my time as a PhD student and received tremendous support from a particular nurse at the university's health center. She's literally the only person outside the academic sphere who helped me overcome my health issue (I'm an international student living far away from my family), so I'm thinking of thanking her in the acknowledgements, but I'm aware that that would be unconventional. Would it still be fine to include her, or would that ever be considered unprofessional or inappropriate?

Chances are nobody will have a problem with it. I have never come across a situation in which the decision of somebody to include anybody in the acknowledgments has got them into trouble. What's in the acknowledgements doesn't normally interest anybody unless somebody who did some work and believes they should be there is not.

I reminded a daughter that she had said, "I will when you do" regarding the Ph.D.  (I earned mine late in life.)

From a European perspective: this is totally fine to me.
This is your text. In addition, the acknowledgements section is likely to be the only part of your thesis where you can freely use the pronoun "I" instead of the academic "we": a few words thanking people that actually really helped you to achieve your thesis is a good idea, so go for it.

Yes, dissertation acknowledgements are typically much more personal than paper acknowledgements, and are often used for people who provided any form of support.

I suggest that you do this, but without mentioning details or bringing up the issue of depression. Thank her for her support as you could also do for, say, academics or family members.
If you leave depression behind you there is no reason to leave a marker in your dissertation. But, yes, acknowledge her help.

One reason to leave a marker of depression in your dissertation despite having left it behind: so that others currently suffering from depression during dissertation writing may come across it and be reminded they are not the first to walk that path.

I don't think the world is at a point where this might not be used against the author. People spend a lot of time to be good at something at the expense of learning other areas in life (like mental health). It thus seems unlikely that someone, who is really good at their field and works where the author might try to get a job, could have had time to learn about depression and think beyond that it is just being lazy, for example.

@heretoinfinity: I think that’s sadly true in many contexts — e.g. job applications — where mentions of such personal circumstances are not usual, and an unsympathetic reader might read them as an intended excuse for professional shortcomings.  But in thesis acknowledgements it’s much more normal to get rather personal, so this wouldn’t stand out as at all marked, and there’s much less scope for that uncharitable reading.

The following is from an American perspective.  I have no idea how it works elsewhere.

The acknowledgements section is yours.  You can do with it whatever you like.  There are a few formalities which you should generally adhere to, e.g. you should probably thank your advisor; and if you thank one committee member, you should probably thank the rest.  Basically, don't jilt anyone.
But it really is yours.  You can acknowledge anyone you like, and say anything about them that you want.  The acknowledgements are a place for you to make personal statements about the last 4-8 years of your life, in gratitude for whatever support has been provided during a genuine ordeal.
For reference, my father's dissertation gives thanks to a large number of people, and then turns an irritated eye towards the university itself:

The same cannot be said of the institutional setting. Its lack
of coherence and frequent pettiness serve few.

Personally, I very nearly acknowledged my lawyer in my acknowledgements (my wife and partner of 15 years left me a year before I was supposed to finish my PhD, taking our daughter in the process—that attorney was a vital component in my ultimate ability to finish, albeit a year later than I'd planned).  One draft contained the lines

Special thanks to W___ B___, esq.  The last two years have been filled with pettiness, disruption, and sabotage.  Without Mr B___, I likely would not have been able to overcome it.

I ultimately didn't include any such text (it seemed petty, as the real goal was to take a jab at the ex), but I considered it.
You get to say whatever, and thank whomever, you like.  It is your document.

Practically no one is ever going to read your acknowledgements.  If you are lucky, your advisor will read them.  There is a good chance that anyone who you specifically ask to read your dissertation will read the acknowledgements.  But that's about it.
If you feel that some service provider has helped you to finish, you absolutely should thank them.  And you can make that thanks as effusive or circumspect as you like.  You shouldn't really worry about who is going to read, or make decisions based on, the acknowledgements section of your dissertation.  Because almost no one is ever going to read it.
I would maybe suggest that you keep things basically professional (there is no need to go into any detail about whatever mental health problems you were having, just as there would not be any reason to get into whatever gastro-intestinal distress you encountered after eating that bad pad thai at a cheap restaurant with your advisor—don't ask), but it's still really up to you.

NB:  While writing this answer, I found a typo in the first sentence of the acknowledgements section of my thesis.  A very obvious one.  No one has ever pointed it out.  Clearly, no one (not even I) have ever read that section.

But: remember that the thesis is a permanent record, and nowadays it is likely to be published online and findable with all good search engines. Therefore, whilst you can write whatever you like, it is worth taking a moment to reflect on whether you will still be happy with what you wrote in your acknowledgements in 20 years' time.

@avid Indeed.  I had originally written more in the last paragraph about "are you going to be happy with this in 10 years?", but it is so hard to know what you are going to think in 10 years...  I stand by the basic idea of "keep it basically professional".

When I meet a new colleague with a PhD, I usually spent 5 min to google their thesis to know what they did. I read the summary, I look at some random graphs, and I always read the acknowledgments. It reminds me of writing the acknowledgments myself.

@usr1234567 You are likely one of only two or three people who has ever read the acknowledgements of the theses you have read the acknowledgements of.  I tend to read abstracts, the table of contents, and skim over the introductory material.

"If you feel that some service provider has helped you to finish, you absolutely should thank them." Service provider? The internet service provider and the electricity company did help me, but...

so I'm thinking of thanking her in the acknowledgements, but I'm aware that that would be unconventional.

I am a big fan of all kinds of acknowledgments and always encouraged students to go wild there (as I did).
With this said I would think twice before mentioning any health problems. This may not only hit you back (if someone reads your PhD thesis) or your doctor may not be thrilled by this as it is covered by confidentiality rules, practices or laws.

I'm not aware of any areas where it would it would be against rules/norms for the patient to disclose who their doctor is. I agree it might be prudent to say something like "I would like to thank (my doctor / Dr. S.) for their thoughtful care." rather than "I would like to thank Dr. Emily Smith at North Health Partners for her treatment of my (depression / broken leg)."

@AzorAhai-him- I don't know - it sounds a bit weird to me (as a French). It's not that it is illegal or something, just that the medical areas are really private, including the relationship with the doctor. But this is just a feeling, nothing hard core.

This is not unusual at all. You can provide thanks to Ann Adams, Bob Blake, Chet Carson, Dave Dunlop, etc., for all the help and support they provided you during the difficult time of writing your dissertation.
Do not mention your own health problems.