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How can I politely request that an authority figure respected protocol?
I am in a postgraduate program, part of which is to do an internship at an organization or school recommended by the program, mostly by observing a class or by shadowing a professor at his job.
There is a requirement of a two-week internship. After that the school or organization is supposed to sign a form that the student has, in fact, fulfilled their internship obligation.
I have already started my internship in one of the locations but I have only gone twice. I am supposed to go at least eight more times.
I am in weekly contact with the person I'm "shadowing", about the day and time of my internship.
Problem:
This program is, as it turned out, a cash cow for the specific University and some of the faculty. There are way too many students and not enough places to intern so I assume this is why some professors/schools are willing to say that the student has completed their ten-day internship requirement even if they haven't. The director of the program knows about it and is aware or even encourages that it be done this way.
During the last communication I had with the professor I'm shadowing, she asked me to bring the form so that "you finish up slowly".
I have a feeling she'll say something like "There is a huge waiting list..." and that I can't do the ten days but she'll sign the form anyway.
If this happens, I would like to stand my ground and ask that I do the full ten days as required, even if it means doing it at random days and times or stretching it until I'm done with the program itself.
My main argument is that I am there to learn and I can't learn much by doing a three-day internship. I'm sure she knows but I still want to be able to kindly demand that she respected protocol so that I gain as much experience as I can in the field. I'm paying them anyway. They aren't paying me.
How can I best achieve my goal, if she insists on the waiting list and tries to rush me?

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

I think there is a really nice question about over enrolled activities and Professors signing off on things you didn't do and not having access to the things you want, but it is buried in there and needs some pruning/editing to help us understand the question.

@StrongBad How can I improve it?


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How do schools typically handle a request for short-term leave from a student?
A student at my college will graduate soon and go to the US to study full-time, on a visa. His family however, are planning an important event sometime in the middle of the semester, and they hope that he can return to his home country for two weeks, then return to the US to finish the semester.

During that semester, he will only be taking courses and will not be receiving any grants.

Do colleges typically have a policy prohibiting such arrangements? Are professors generally willing to accommodate such requests, e.g. adjusting deadlines for homework?

I am afraid this is off-topic here, as it seems to be about undergraduate studies.

@CharlesMorisset I may misunderstand, but it certainly does not seem like that to me.

Colleges do not prohibit such events because colleges can't prohibit such events.  On the contrary, colleges have policies explicitly permitting absences for certain specific reasons: travel on university business (including athletics), documented medical emergencies, deaths in the family.  There is typically a special grade of "Incomplete" awarded if the material missed is critical, such as a final exam; the student takes the final soon upon returning and the grade is adjusted accordingly.
As for what the professors will do, this is highly variable.  Some will be accommodating and will extend deadlines, others will mark missed work with zero, while a few might even kick the student out of the course.
Luckily, there is a simple solution for this student.  While enrolling for classes, at the very beginning of the term, he should speak to the professors involved and explain the situation.  If any professor is particularly hostile, then he should take a different course instead.  In extremely unlucky circumstances, a specific course will be essential to take that term (and no later), and the professor will be very hostile.  In this case it might end up that the student takes longer to graduate.

The answer will highly vary according to the institute, or even according to the professor because some institutes leave the professor to decide.
What the student should do is to e-mail or meet with the professors who will be teaching in his/her chosen courses, and inform them that he/she will be a away for two weeks, give the professors the actual dates of departure and return.
Usually, deadline can be moved and sometimes even exam can be rescheduled. But it's mostly about how flexible the professors are willing to be. If the professors wouldn't accommodate, then the student should not take that course.
Also, the student should make arrangement about getting the lecture slides or notes that he/she will be missing, and perhaps ask for the lecturers' permission to let a friend of the student's to record the lecture, if possible.
Just remember all of these communications should be done preferably before the semester starts. Never just disappear for two weeks and then come back to negotiate for accomodation.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Is it legal/ethical to use data grabbed from a Stack Exchange site in a paper?
For example, I download all the content of Academia@SE, later analysis it in a data mining paper, and submit the paper in the end. Is it OK to do so? Do I have to ask the permission from the administrator of the website? And does he or she have rights to forbid my academic use? Thank you.

Maybe you should site it; better safe than sorry

@sidht Yes I will surely cite it.

To clarify: your question was originally titled "Is it legal/ethical to use data grabbed from a certain website in a paper?", and @Piotr edited it to "a Stack Exchange site".  Are you interested in the situation for SE sites specifically?  Or do you want to know about general sites, with SE just being an example?

@ziyuang Excuse me for an overzealous edit. However, title of the question didn't match the content. So I second Nate with question (as SE may be not a typical example).

Your University may have an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that reviews how you conduct experiments. This board may be known by various names (Ethics Committee, Experiment Review Board, Human Subjects Research, etc.) but they are generally the ones that you would go to to consult about whether what you are doing is within the scope of ethical behavior and good treatment of human subjects data.
As StackOverflow and associated StackExchange repository data is available under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (as @piotr_migdal linked above) and is publicly available, your IRB will probably tell you, "It's fine" and not require review. However, it depends on the IRB and the institution and the nature of the data.
There are entire research disciplines built on scraping web sites, software repositories, and social media, so don't feel bad for doing it.

+1 for IRB approval. It's fairly easy to make the "seatbelt study" argument and say that something posted to a site like StackExchange is intended to be publicly viewable. But it never hurts to have IRB approval, and your university may indeed require it (mine does for all research - I have an IRB approval form for a purely simulation study around here somewhere).

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.  If you are seriously concerned about this issue, you should consult one; your institution probably has intellectual property lawyers on staff.
There is a general principle that "you can't copyright facts".  Wherever you get your data set, you probably can  legally publish any analysis of that data, without requiring anyone's permission.   However, you may not be able to legally reproduce the data itself.
Of course, by standard academic ethics, you must properly cite and attribute the source of the data.    And if you can't guarantee that the data will remain accessible, it could affect the reproducibility of your results and hence the quality of your paper.

SE license all user content under CC SA, so here there is no problem with copyright.

@PiotrMigdal: Before your edit to the question's title, I read it as asking about data from Internet sources in general, not just SE.

For me it was not clear as well, just I matched title to the content. But an answer by @Shion interprets it as SE-specific. And anyway, I wrote a comment, it is not a downvote.

I believe you can do it with StackOverflow data, as long as you cite/attribute it properly. This article affirms it. However, I do not know whether this can be extended to the rest of StackExchange. A question to the mods or to the support team might help you clarify.

Thank you. So for other internet sites, do you mean I need to ask beforehand anyway, because there are no such licenses usually?

This depends on the privacy policy of the particular website. There are ways to get around it. You can email the mods of the  websites in question and if you are a credible researcher, often they will give you permission to use their data, often in a de-identified dataset format.

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


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Outsourcing your research to Kaggle for co-authorship or other non monetary options
Some parts of our research fall out of our expertise. We thought about creating a Kaggle challenge just for this part. But we lack fund resources for the reward, so we could not offer any money. We are thinking now about offering co-authorship in a paper, do you think this would work? Otherwise, which other things would you offer as reward in Kaggle apart from money?

Have you thought about asking questions on related stack exchange sites to see if anybody has any clue about that problem?

I will do that if in three days I do not get any answer here, but I had to start somewhere and I chose this nice place!

You may well be able to offer other incentives (which is why I'm not submitting this as an answer), but coauthorship is tricky, since it is highly constrained: everyone who makes an important intellectual contribution must be a coauthor, and nobody else can be.  For example, several other teams may submit ideas like the winner's (maybe with just a little less impressive write-ups or results); then they would all have to be offered coauthorship.  In the other direction, if nobody's results are useful, then nobody can become a coauthor, even if they put a lot of time and effort into the contest.

@AnonymousMathematician I don't know how the authorship should work in this case but you are right that it's not something that can be simply traded. However, usually solutions very and when writing a paper I don't need to put in co-authors all people with similar approach - I need to acknowledge them, perhaps in form of citations. And IMHO it gives a natural framework when you choose your co-authors out of the solutions you want to use and only cite other solutions that make sense but you don't apply them directly.

I agree that if someone proposes a solution you don't use, then that doesn't necessarily require coauthorship, but the dividing line between use and non-use is tricky when the solutions are similar.  Basically, I'd separate coauthorship from winning the contest, and then invite as a coauthor whoever makes sense (probably the winner and possibly other contestants with the same critical idea).

@AnonymousMathematician AFAIK solutions on Kaggle are not mathematical proof-style. There is a lot of one's own idea, a lot of technical fine-tuning; not just 0-1 or a few main ideas for the proof. Moreover, before actually asking participants, you see only a numerical result. So there is no risk of an unintentional plagiarism. And also one can set a threshold below which no authorship is proposed (personally I wouldn't promise any co-authorship but if the result accuracy is satisfying - asked the winner(s) for co-authorship).

It's true that fitting the Kaggle competition framework is a bit of a constraint, but if you understand that framework and see how your problem fits into it, I'd suggest you e-mail quote@kaggle.com with a description of the data & problem (and ideally sample data), even if you don't have funding. We can see what comes of it!
(Disclaimer: I work for Kaggle.)

This sounds to me like the textbook definition of a potential collaboration opportunity. I would speak with researchers in the computer science, machine learning, mathematics, and/or statistics departments and try to establish a long-term collaborative relationship. I would also speak with other faculty in your department to see how they handle this problem, which they likely have as well. It may be as simple as paying a grad or reasonably bright undergrad a few bucks an hour to crunch numbers. (Actually, you shouldn't take for granted that the grad student is reasonably bright... but I digress.)
This will be beneficial in both the short- and long-term, in a number of ways. In the short term, you'll hopefully get to analyze your data and generate a publication. In the long term, it's very likely that you'll need such expertise again, and you'll have the resources available for the analysis. Additionally, you'll find that having someone with analytics expertise on hand when devising whatever study you plan on doing can be immeasurably useful, as they will help you determine what measurements need to be taken and what data needs to be collected to ensure that you can get the most out of your dataset.

Some competitions have "Kudos" (or "Jobs", or "Knowledge") as a prize, see Kaggle competitions sorted from the smallest prizes. I don't how it does work with proposing a competition (maybe it is not free).
I guess if the problem itself fits in the Kaggle framework (which is a pretty strong constraint), and you can try it for free (I don't know if it is the case), then why not. Especially as even two "Kudos" competitions attract 50 and 153 teams, respectively. Just it is on you to make it as attractive as possible.
Of course, intellectual contribution requires a co-authorship. But if I had the right expertise, I would run for it :).


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Why don't colleges and departments teach social skills?
After all, to do research with a professor, a student has to have good social skills. So why not have classes that teach social etiquette and social skills? It seems that many courses in college are "book courses." Yet, when students graduate, what really matters is how they present themselves and their social skills.

A very simple answer to this question is resources. Who exactly is going to teach this course, and what resources are you going to reallocate it in order to offer it?
Moreover, who is qualified to offer such a course? (Or is it just a series of soft-skill workshops?)

Additionally, how does one demonstrate mastery of these skills?  Although there are some commonalities across disciplines, good social skills involve being adaptable to a plethora of personalities and groups with their own diverse norms.  Perhaps it is a skill that is best mastered through experience rather than structured lecturing.

Perhaps because basic etiquette and social skills are something to be learned before one pursues an advanced degree?

@PeteL.Clark I disagree. For me, as for many other nerds, scientific and technical skills were easier to learn than social ones. Saying 'hey, wait before learning adv. maths and do sth with your social skills' is both disrespectful and wasteful.

A lot of the so-called social skills can be learned through lectures on sales and customer relationship. At least it worked well for me.

@PiotrMigdal: I agree with you.  It is an assumption that such social skills are naturally learned as a part of the students' education.  This is not necessarily so... It's not that social skills are necessarily harder to learn, but that we develop a notion that they are less important than scientific knowledge.  Thus, we regard it as secondary to academic knowledge until the point when we start to become professionals.  Then, it's not just what you know, but who you know that will land you the tenure-track position.

@SylvainPeyronnet:  That's a really great idea!  Where do you get such a training?  I presume through side jobs in the service industry? Or in a business school?

@Piotr: All human beings need social skills and have manifold opportunities to learn and practice them throughout their lives.  Speaking of social skills: when responding directly to someone else, please don't make something up and put it in quotation marks.  As it happens, I am a mathematician and have been studying mathematics for most of my conscious life.  And, as a human being, I have been interacting with other human beings for my entire life: these things happen at the same time.  My point is that teaching "social etiquette and social skills" in the university is way too late.

@PeteL.Clark: If it's too late to teach it in the university—and I agree that it probably is—then your question now becomes more perplexing. Again, who teaches this course, and when?

@aeismail: I think there are some things best learned outside of the context of classrooms and courses.  The social skills I have come from interacting with and learning from various people: parents, significant others, neighbors, friends, enemies, schoolyard bullies, colleagues, barbers, cab drivers, baristas....

Let me also say that, as an academic mathematician, I know that some students in STEM fields are not the most socially advanced or well-adjusted people around.  (But by the way most college students are callow and self-centered compared to their later, more fully adult selves.  It is a lifelong process!) The question is whether this is problematic.  I would say that in most cases I know of, it isn't: as a professor, I don't choose the coolest or even the least awkward students to work with.

There are some people who are so socially challenged as to make me not want to work with them: severe body odor, pathological dishonesty, psychopathy...these are all deal-breakers.  But come on: these problems are not going to be fixed by having students take the right courses, are they??

@Paul "through side jobs in the service industry": exactly, before I became part of the academy ;)

@PeteL.Clark I do agree that social skills are important (they certainly go well beyond social etiquette). Nonetheless, I don't agree with premise that the university is too late. I would have benefited, among many others (for me it is easier to learn maths "in the natural way", than to learn social skills). Excuse me for the quotation marks (however, your exact words are just above, so there is no place for confusion, what were your words on what was a hyperbole).

Not all things that you must learn can also be taught. Experience is often the best teacher.

@Piotr: I'm not saying that people's social development should be complete by the time they enter university.  (In fact, I said the opposite...) Definitely one learns a lot of social skills as a university student: it is, for most people, their first chance to build their own lives largely independent of parental supervision.  I'm saying that much social learning must, and does, take place well before the university level.  (And I am surprised to be saying this: it seems absolutely incontestable.)  I am also saying that social learning is not best accomplished through coursework.

@Piotr: Also, I am not a fan of the rhetorical device in which you take what someone says, modify it / make it significantly more extreme, and then condemn this modified position, e.g. by calling it "disrespectful and wasteful".  From a logical perspective you haven't added much -- you're condemning something that no one has said -- but there are some unpleasant insinuations which could get in the way of calm, friendly discourse.

I have to object to the premise of the question — Yet, when students graduate, what really matters is how they present themselves and their social skills.  I have seen students with horrible social skills land good jobs, based entirely on their academic and research records.  I have also seen weak students passed over for good jobs despite impeccable people skills.  Yes, social skills are incredibly important, but characterizing them as "what really matters" is a bit of a stretch.

@JeffE: indeed, if you have moderately below average social skills but are talented, competent and professional, then I think academia is a good career for you!  (Not you in particular, of course...)

@PeteL.Clark: Is it that obvious?  :-)  But I didn't mean only academic jobs.  The spectrum of social skills is just as varied in the Real World as it is in academia.

This question is perfect for this SE new site: undergraduates if you find it useful you can follow it and help us in spreading the word about it.

I heard that there where some (highly wanted) trials in Potsdam (maybe somewhere else):

Soft Skills Colloquium, Hasso Plattner Institut, Potsdam
Computer geeks learn to flirt (Reuters):

Even the most quirky of computer nerds can learn to flirt with finesse thanks to a new "flirting course" being offered to budding IT engineers at Potsdam University south of Berlin.
The 440 students enrolled in the master's degree course will learn how to write flirtatious text messages and emails, impress people at parties and cope with rejection.

To name the (alleged) reasons, why university courses in social skills are so rare:

many social skills can't be easily fitted into a course scheme,
there is a common belief (with which I strongly disagree) that there is no such need (as its to late (not necessary) or people will learn it automatically  (a wishful thinking)),
there may be a huge difference in initial social skill levels (from one where no course is needed to one, when a course won't change things),
teaching social skills may be difficult, as many things are very culturally- and context-dependent.

Personally, I regret that there were no social skills courses at my university (so I had to learn from books, mostly - undergraduate psychology). For me, as for many other STEM students, it was (relatively) easier to learn technical material "in the natural way", than social skills.
However, social skills (as any other skills), are the best to be honed in practice (at least after). There are many opportunities, e.g.:

teamwork on any project (scientific or "just for fun"),
running a students' chapter or club,
organizing trips, excursions, movie nights, parties, ...,
organizing a students' conference.

During one's university life as an undergraduate, there are many opportunities to improve one's social skills and confidence as an adult. These range from the various sporting and political clubs students can join, through volunteer activities students can participate in, through coaching activities (of more junior students or even high school), all the way to activities like having a few drinks in the uni bar (soda, for US students). During the summer, one can participate in spring break-style activities or get an internship at a law firm.
All of these activities, I dare say, help shape a student into a person. There's no assessment, no assignments, no grades, but such is the school of hard knocks.

At our university (the Netherlands) students are actively involved in group projects and as a part of the preparation to these projects they get some training on how to give talks, how to negotiate, how to organize/chair meetings, etc.

My only point was to show that not all colleges do not. The academic landscape is diverse enough also in this respect.

I would call these "professional skills" rather than "social skills", and I think it's a useful distinction to make.


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Is it a bad idea to take a leave of absence to finish a degree?
In general, is it better to complete a graduate degree first before deciding to work? Or is it also advisable to take a leave of absence and work while finish your graduate degree later?

It is difficult to finish a degree and work at the same time. This is especially the case if you have to write a (PhD) thesis. There are a number of obstacles. Firstly, you will have to work on the thesis during the evenings and weekends, which is both tiring and can induce RSI. Secondly, you will have no life and this is depressing. Thirdly, both your work and your PhD thesis will suffer. Fourthly, the time taken to complete the thesis could drag out 6 months or even 1 year, before you get close to finishing it. Under these circumstances, many people simply do not finish their thesis.
It's not impossible, though. I know of a few people who have completed their theses after taking on another job. It requires a lot of discipline.
If you have the luxury of taking a leave of absence from work to study, then I'd advise taking it. Get the degree out of the way in as short a time as possible.


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Being harassed by a department chair
How do you cope when a department chair is all out to cause you problems? Especially when he is doing it for personal reasons that I have no control over (e.g. gender, skin color, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, accent, etc). My chair hates me, so he harasses me with bad teaching loads, too many preps, assigning me one class at 8am on one campus and another class at 8pm on a separate campus three hours away, making me teach every day when others teach only twice a week, denying me funding to go to conferences, not permitting me to go on a sabbatical, etc etc etc. He is highly unethical. I suspect he discards good teaching ratings I get and pencils in bad teaching ratings but I have no way to prove it. He makes up untrue anonymous complaints from anonymous students and anonymous complaints from anonymous faculty / staff. When a particular person is not hired and everyone wanted to hire that person, he whispers to everyone that I am the one who voted against hiring. He tries to turn everyone against me. When anything even remotely goes wrong, he blames me.
He has the Dean in his pocket. He is also the chair of the faculty senate, childhood friends with the university president, brother-in-law of the provost. He is not the research type - he has one of those Ed.D. degrees and is a career administrator who has been the department chair for 17 years now. When I was hired, he was on medical leave, so he had no say in my hiring decision. He is also the only person in the department who does not teach or do research related to the department. He is a politician - former mayor of a small city - so much more astute and politically shrewd than I can ever be. He is dishonest, a blatant cheat and a frequent liar, so sitting down with him definitely never helped. He has superb contacts within the town and in state politics. Short of finding a new job, is there anything I can do? I cannot leave this university for personal reasons relating to the two-body problem, family whose help I need to take care of a severely handicapped child and other personal reasons.

Don't walk.  Run.

How about moving to a different department?

Why the vote to close?

I recommend the book Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia by Emily Toth, whether or not you are female.  It's great.  There's a second book that is presumably as good, but I haven't read it.

Gather evidence, enlist allies, get ready to connfront him!

There is an awful lot of identifying information in this post. A truncated version appeared here a few days ago, which identifies the field. Tread carefully.

What are you doing now?

I agree with JeffE that leaving is the best solution, but it may not be an option.  One key question is whether you have tenure: if not, you're presumably doomed (if the chair's behavior is as bad as you fear) and you will need to find another job anyway.
Assuming you have reasonable job security, I'd sit down with the chair and ask what he envisions.  Don't complain, argue, or try to present your side.  Instead, you could start by acknowledging that the two of you have unfortunately gotten off to a rough start in your working relationship, and that because of his stature and leadership role it's important for you to earn his respect, so you'd like his advice on how to improve the situation.  Your goal is to learn, not to debate.  Don't explicitly agree to any facts that aren't true, but you don't have to fact check everything he says, and you shouldn't dispute his perspective or opinions in this conversation.
One possibility is that he is an insecure jerk who wants you to submit to his power and authority.  If you do so, and let him boss you around a little without complaining, then he may treat you somewhat better.  [This is assuming he can't treat you any worse than he already is.  If you fear things could get worse, then be careful, but your question suggests you don't have a lot to lose.]
Another possibility is that he just doesn't want you around, and there's simply nothing you can do to get on his good side.  In that case, maybe he could help you transfer to another related department, for example.  Of course, you can't even bring this up unless you have some job security, since otherwise you have no leverage at all.  And it's important to do it in a face-saving way.  There's no way it will happen if it looks like he is getting rid of a problem employee (the administration and the other department will not accept that as a valid reason for such a transfer), and obviously he won't cooperate if the stated reason is getting you out from the control of an irresponsible chair.  Instead, you'd have to give it a positive spin: helping your career by giving you a chance to develop in a slightly different research direction, building ties between departments and fostering interdisciplinary connections, etc.  It may be galling, but you need to set this up in a way that makes it look like your chair is doing something valuable for the university by helping to arrange it.  If you can get your chair enthusiastic about this, and if there's another plausible department, then the chair's influence within the university might really help you.  And don't be too restrictive in ruling out possible departments: there might not be any appropriate match, but I know of a couple of cases in which people have successfully resolved personality conflicts by moving to departments that were a bit further afield than one might expect (engineering vs. science, for example).  If you've got tenure, then the university has a powerful incentive to fix this conflict, even if it means letting you sit in an odd department.
Leaving the university is radically different from switching departments, and you should not ask the chair for help in doing that.  Within the university, your chair's standing with the administration will play a major role in what opportunities are available.  Outside the university, your chair probably can't help you very much, but could certainly hurt you, so it's not worth the risk.
The worst case scenario is that your chair hates you and wants to hurt your career, regardless of which department you are in.  In that case, there's nothing you can do if your chair has the full support of the administration, and you'll have to either leave the university or wait for the chair to retire.  However, you shouldn't give up all hope until you've exhausted options like submitting or transferring.

Just to add to the other excellent comments: while I have no personal experience that might be of value in your situation, I think that there is one thing you MUST do on a continuing basis regardless of everything else.
Document every instance where you feel this person is abusing their authority in relation to you. Accumulate as much evidence you can on each case, and build up a case file. Even if you don't go on the offensive, you'll need this if the chair starts trying direct confrontation and provocation (instead of the passive aggressive bullying that's going on right now)

Agreed.  Also store your records off-campus.

If you are dealing with a bully who is insecure and threatened by you, direct negotiation will only result in your being manipulated further.  Read the available on-line literature on adult bullying.
Making friends with other powerful people (e.g. superordinates of your boss) is effective, eventually you might become someone that the bully wants "on side" and their overt behaviour will just flip like a light switch.  If you can document all your claims e.g. some members of a department having twice the teaching load for no clear, publicly-stated policy reason, you may have legal recourse & be able to get a more level playing field to try to prove your academic merit on (have you talked to HR?)  But if things are as "sewn up" as you say, and there is no help from HR or another campus organisation, then the best thing is to change job.

Do you have any suggestions for reading about adult bullying?  I don't know much about this but would like to learn more.  Thanks!

I'm afraid I just did Google & Google scholar searches on it when I had a younger colleague draw my attention to a situation that I realised, while extreme, was far too familiar.  The only papers I found worth putting in my citation index were on school-age bullying, but the gist of the Psychology Today etc. articles on adults were enough to help me help my colleague(s).  It seems to be an under-researched area, which is ironic since understanding it would probably benefit the childhood problem as well.

@AnonymousMathematician: an online blog here

I've found the book "It's all your fault! 12 tips for managing people who blame others for everything" by Bill Eddy incredibly helpful. It can be bought for next to nothing on Kindle and it brought me great insight and understanding. http://www.amazon.com/Its-All-Your-Fault-Everything/dp/0981509037

If the harassment really is for reasons of "e.g. gender, skin color, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, accent, etc," then the federal government could get involved. See the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission website (http://www.eeoc.gov/) for more information.

Not a full answer, but a suggestion: Consider meeting with the college's ombudsperson (if they have one), affirmative action officer, EEOC officer, etc.

This is a very interesting question, and I am surprised that there's no more about "bullying" in the SO academia community (I hope this will change fast).
As anonymous and new user, I can share some experience:
1) If someone (higher in grade) bullies or harasses you, it's sad to say, but that means that you are not seen as doing a valuable contribution to the department. Not a "maybe", not a "perhaps": that is just what it is. This assumption could be right or wrong, but any dean/chair/professor wants to have a supportive (adoring?) team. So either you adapt to the system, or you will make your life very miserable: make your contributions very clear, boast about your workload or find another place. Bullies like strong (and loud) voices.
2) Do not confront the bullying person: it's anyway an unfair battle, since they're managers and higher-ranked anyway.
3) Be blatantly open with what you do, aka "blow your own trumpet": when you start doing it, others reply as well, and you start realising that your "case" is no worse or better than somebody else's.
MISTAKES TO BE AVOIDED:
I think that the worst mistake to be done in these cases is moaning about the issue, or using "allies" to make the case, or asking the unions to do something about it. Moaning won't solve your case, but just make your stomach more acid; internal allies will not either: having allies and support is generally a good thing, but I realised that I was just "using" them to reinforce my assumptions and beliefs (ending up in a infinite loop of self-commiseration); unions will just use a pre-defined strategy that will be well known in advance by the bully.
REMEDIES:
Since you do not want to change your affiliation (but sadly this is the only real way to solve the issue, I am afraid), my take on the issue is to be honest with yourself, and ask whether your workload could be worse, or if you could make a request to avoid some teaching times by using some reasonable excuses, and in general stopping being negative about the person. The latter is tough but again, if you're being (overtly or secretly) negative, the bully will make your life even worse.
RESOURCES:
An excellent blog on the matter, and an "external" voice to talk to (yes! they talk and listen to you, also privately...) but in the UK: http://bulliedacademics.blogspot.co.uk/

me? i left the institution

I have to strongly disagree with this answer.  The initial point is correct—if you are being abused, you are not valued.  But the proper response to abuse is not to "get used to it"; this is a merely a recipe for continued abuse.  Allies are a must in this situation, just as they are in any other stressful, emotionally charged situation.  Trying to tough it out alone is dangerous and usually unnecessary.  But it is important to find allies who are well-informed and brutally honest—the last thing you need is an echo chamber.

The last sentence is especially disturbing.  Yes, it's healthy to be positive and forgiving, but not because negativity will make the bully think less of of their victim.

dear @JeffE, what to say? I have been through it, and before that, I shared your opinions. I fought. Hard. Found allies who were brutally honest, but who were also scared to take the next step forward with me (a formal complaint). Tried to overcome the system, met the oppressor many times in his "cave", filed formal complaints. In order not to sink others I fled

I think you did the right thing, by finding allies, by fighting hard, and by leaving.  None of that is easy.

I got through this type of situation through a combination of institutional and personal means.
I was subject to mobbing by a group of faculty members in a particular field of British lit (pre-1800). When one of them became chair, and I stepped down as graduate program director, they piled on. One filed a specious grievance against me. When that failed after a year of harassment (during which I lost my mother), the new chair scheduled me to teach 3-4 new preps every single term. After four years of this, and after 3 separate administrative complaints that went through my chair and were stopped by the dean, I filed a grievance after my chair finally got grounds to file a negative performance review because she had overloaded me for years. The grievance was part of a peer review process; my peers found for me five to one. Next, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and got 1 year off. During that period, my chair got promoted (!!!) and was gone. Problem solved, on top of which I had grounds to file EEOC complaints for gender, age, and disability discrimination. I'm back this term. So far so good, with a chair that doesn't seem to have the stomach for all of this.
We are so vulnerable--and until our good work is trashed, we don't realize how vulnerable we are.
Fight the good fight when you can, and back off and lay low when you can. There's nothing to be lost by it, either in terms of your job or in terms of your self respect.

Downvoted because this is simply one example situation. The answer cannot be applied to general situations.

You didn't mention if you had a union or not. If you do, go to the union's grievance officer. Bring all the evidence. Have a conference with the chair and the union rep.  It doesn't have to be hostile. The focus can be how you can be on par with other faculty members. Most grievance reps are good at building consensus. It will put the chair on notice that his decision making isn't to be arbitrary and capricious.


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Having students scribe lectures
When I'm teaching an advanced graduate class where the source material is drawn primarily from current research papers, there isn't a canonical text per se, and a typical lecture, while loosely structured, also involves discussion that might help clarify the papers.
In such a setting, asking students to scribe lectures serves a useful purpose. Students hopefully remember the material better after writing it down, and are forced to be more precise. And classroom discussion can be captured for posterity.
But I don't think I've found a way to implement this effectively. My current mechanics include:

students are assigned as scribes between a week in advance, and on the day of the lecture
I provide a latex style file, and also an example or two of prior scribe notes.
students are expected to produce a first draft within a few days of the lecture (lectures are once a week), and the hope is that a good version of the notes is on the website a week after the lecture.
these are "seminar" classes: they are 1-credit, and the only work the student needs to do to earn a grade is one or more scribes and (sometimes) one lecture.

What happens is that the initial draft is usually abysmal, and it either takes me a really long time to wrestle the document into shape with the student, or I give up and do it myself, which also takes a lot of time.
Are there useful practices that can improve this workflow ? Is my timeline unrealistic ?

p.s To avoid confusion, when I say scribe (which is common
  parlance in my area) I don't mean a literal recording of minutes but a
  synthesis of material that if well done becomes something resembling
  lecture notes.

I guess it might depend on what is "abysmal" about the drafts?  Formatting, general writing quality, typos, incomplete, poor understanding of topics, etc?  Each of these might require different steps to address (and in principle some of them may be tied back to the lectures themselves).

Formatting is a problem (but minor). The biggest problem is writing quality and basic structuring of the material as a "lecture" as opposed to 'minutes of a meeting'.

You must mean transcribe which, in my dictionary, means, "to write out from speech." The verb scribe means to cut (as in carpentry) to score (as in metalwork) or to engrave (as in, to inscribe upon). Or perhaps you just mean taken written notes?

Ah. I've used 'scribe' colloquially for a long time. But I stand corrected.

@BenjaminMakoHill "Scribe" as a verb also means to write; a scribe was somebody who copied documents back in the days before printing. As a verb, it's somewhat archaic in general but it quite common in academia for meaning that Suresh uses.

"Scribe" is the correct idiomatic verb/noun/adjective, at least within theoretical computer science. "Transcribe" suggests that the writer is merely copying the lecturer's words verbatim. Good scribe notes are not merely transcriptions.

I hadn't seen it before either, but it does seem like "scribe" is used as a transitive verb in this way in certain parts of academia.  So far as I know this is a recent and somewhat jargony usage.  (E.g. it seems to mean "to type" rather than literally "to write".)  I think it would be fine to use the term in the question but would be good to define it: we get in trouble when we assume we know each other's jargon.

(I do think this usage has caused some minor confusion here: I am confident that Suresh does not mean literal word-for-word transcription, as some answerers have understandably thought. He means the practice of designated students typing (probably texing) nice lecture notes, a practice which is now relatively common.)

@PeteL.Clark yes that's what I mean. Thanks !

I'm not sure that a transcription is overly useful. Is your goal to converge to something like lecture notes or a textbook, or just to have minutes of the lectures?

Do you have the option to use the topics in a seminar first and staple together the seminar papers to form some approximation of lecture notes?

@Raphael something between fleshed out lecture notes and minutes, but much closer to lecture notes. In regards to your second point, the papers themselves are research papers, and are not optimized for readability :).

@Suresh Exactly. Reading, digesting and re-explaining research papers is what we make students do in seminars; their products should have "close to lecture notes"-quality.

Then I don't think I understand your point.

A suggestion (depending on the size of the class) - each student proof reads/improves notes one week, takes them the next.  You start the ball rolling by providing draft-quality notes of the first lecture to all students so they know what they're aiming for.

You have the following goals:
(I) Every student will transcribe at least one lecture.
(II) The transcribed lecture notes will be of a sufficient quality to be useful to the other students, and ideally to be posted somewhere for others to access.
(III) You don't want to spend an unreasonable time writing or correcting the notes yourself.
In my opinion these are three worthy goals and any one of them is attainable, but as a set they are probably incompatible with each other.  So you may want to choose (not necessarily once and for all, but depending on the course) which of these worthy goals is the worthiest and prepare to sacrifice one or both of the others.  In more detail:
If you prioritize (I), then the emphasis is placed on creating a learning experience for the students.  If you do this you will find that the variation in the quality of the note-taking will be amazing.  I have seen this in students' written notes over the years.  Yesterday a student left his notebook in my office.  I flipped through it today to try to figure out who it was.  It is one step above chicken scratch: for instance, he is writing on lined paper but his mathematical expressions and equations only stay within the lines about half the time: he can have a "written slope" which is only slightly larger than -1.  (This helped me identify the student, who does not have his name written down anywhere.  I noticed his characteristic negative slope when he was writing on the board in my office yesterday.)  On the other hand, in my graduate course I have glanced at several students' handwritten notes at the end of the lecture and marvelled at how much better they look than my own handwritten pre-lecture notes and what is on the blackboard at the end of the leecture.  At one point years ago I gave in a borderline undergrad/graduate level class what I thought was one of my best lectures of all time and at the end realized that I hadn't prepared any lecture notes and sadly reflected on the fact that it would be lost forever.  Then I remembered that I had one student in the course who took great lecture notes, and I asked her for her lecture notes for this purpose.  I think that what she gave me was an improvement on my delivered lecture, and using her notes I got my favorite part of what amounts to a textbook on number theory: you can see the lecture notes here.  (Yes, I touched it up a bit afterwards, but not by that much.)  You can also see that I thanked this student at the end of my notes.
All of the students mentioned above are "A students".  I personally do feel that the gender difference between the students is playing a role here.  This is not a scientific observation and I certainly mean no offense to anyone, but in my experience the difference in note-taking care between male and female students is, on average, dramatic.
Anyway, if you prioritize (I) and (III) you're going to get such uneven samples as to make it a pretty jarring experience for anyone to try to follow the entire course by reading the notes.  Having the notes be texed adds other levels and brings other skills into play.  Some people will naturally go back and spend time prettying up their tex files; others won't.  (I started out as the latter and very slowly over the course of thousands of pages of notes am heading towards the former.  But for someone who has thousands of pages of texed mathematics on his webpage, my texing skills are distressingly middling.)
Thus if you prioritize (II), then I think you need to seek out the students who will do the best job.  This works against (I), and you need to look for extra compensation.  I agree with the other answers that providing good latexed notes is something that may be worth paying for.
If you really prioritize (II) then at a certain point you will decide to type the lecture notes yourself.  This is what I do in most classes I teach.  At this point I have a bit of a reputation as a guy who has lots of typed lecture notes.  When I begin a graduate course now, I often tell students explicitly that I will not be typing lecture notes as the course progresses, because that is very time-consuming.  But then, at some point in the semester I usually break down and reveal to the students where my heretofore secret lecture notes can be found.  I actually just did that yesterday in my graduate class this semester....with less than one week of class left.
Typing your own notes totally destroys (III): to get something that looks good you have to work significantly harder during the semester than you otherwise would need to do in order to deliver exactly the same lecture and you need to put more time into it after the semester is over.  On the other hand, I have found this practice to be extremely valuable to both my learning and my career: I have gotten a lot of wonderful professional interactions out of it.  Thus I would say that the real drawback is that it defeats (I).
To summarize a very long answer: I think you need to decide whether the point of this is the process or the end result.  You either provide a learning experience for all the students or you provide decent-to-high quality lecture notes, or you provide both but don't get it done until after the end of the course.  I don't see how to do everything at once.

To add to this from a student/scribe perspective: I think (I) is the condition that should be left out. It might be a good way for the lecturer to evaluate the students' performance, but it conflicts with each of (II) and (III) and creates bad incentives. (I tend to sit in certain classes merely to get an idea what they're about, possibly catch connections to subjects I am working on, and just to have an hour and a half of work time without an easy way to distract myself with reddit. Requiring everyone to scribe would scare me out of them.)

I also think a week is too little for a set of scribe notes to "mature", and MIT OpenCourseWare notes would heavily gain in quality if they would be maintained beyond the end of the respective classes.

@darij: Presumably some of the classes that you take or once took had actual, formal requirements.  Presumably you avoided some other classes because the actual, formal requirements did not appeal to you (I took no laboratory science courses after high school).  These are the standard rules of the game.  I think most students would agree that scribing lectures is not the most odious of actual, formal requirements: if you do that instead of a midterm exam or a couple of problem sets, is it so bad?

I don't recall attending a class with formal requirements since I finished high school. Some privilege and luck was involved in this (in Munich, where I was an undergrad, classes probably do have formal requirements now that they switched to bachelor/master, and at MIT undergrad classes have requirements). But that's not the main issue here. Having to scribe is a greater burden to us "course vagabonds" because failure is exposed (bad scribe notes appear in google searches for one's name) and because one is inconveniencing the lecturer (who has to "fix" the abysmal scribe notes) ...

... and fellow students (who might rely on scribe notes for their own learning). In contrast, my psets and exams remain between me and the lecturer or TA. I am not arguing against work requirement in general; I, in fact, wish for more (graded and returned) problem sets. I am just saying that making scribe notes a passing requirement turns away students who don't already feel safe that they will pass; and I don't think this is a good thing. (To end with an anecdote, I did pass a class by virtue of making scribe notes, despite having done barely any homework. I realize I am arguing ...

... against what could be understood as my own model. But I think it is totally fine if students can opt in to making notes and then get some credit for it. This being voluntary, they will usually feel more responsible for the content of those notes and deliver better quality. What I don't like is forcing this on everyone in the hall.)

BTW as for "I have a bit of a reputation as a guy who has lots of typed lecture notes"... I think you have more than "a bit" of this reputation; you are the first person that would come into my mind if anyone would ask me for an introduction into commutative algebra.

My experience with transcription:
Our university uses a lecture capture system (Camtasia Relay) that creates a video file with the instructor's screen plus the audio of the instructor's lecturing. We recently hired students to take the software's "best guess" captioning for a single course and create good closed captions.
To our amazement, every 50 minutes of lecture took roughly EIGHT HOURS to transcribe.
So my main answer is yes, your timeline is likely too tight.
You may want to look into some sort of lecture capture system.
My socratic teacher self also thinks that students creating their own summary of the discussion is likely more helpful to deep learning than receiving a transcript.
Or have students create a wiki or google doc for each seminar with the main figures (codes? equations?) provided for them to discuss. A different student could be in charge of each day's wiki setup and upload the appropriate discussion points and edit the final product and report to you on class participation.

As commented above, Suresh is not looking for a word-for-word transcription (and "transcribe" was not really the right verb; it has since been changed).  Rather, he means a set of polished lecture notes containing the details from the lecture in technical prose, something like these.  So they are not expected to record every word, but rather to digest the information, fill in details, etc.  It will still be time consuming!

Thanks for clarifying. I'm in my own little cocoon and didn't realize that my word choice could cause confusion :)

Despite the semantics related to the question this answer is a good guide - you might cut the time by 50% for a digested set of notes - if they're good at the material and slow at typing.  If the material is a complete mystery but they can type, treating it as dictation might be quicker.  It's not an easy task.

I originally wrote this answer back in 2014. I'm updating it for 2018, since I now have a bunch more experience.
I have had students scribe for me in graduate classes many times. You can read their work on the course webpages: (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). I have also twice taught honors classes where I assigned students to prove a lot of results in class and assigned them to write up notes on the day's work. You can read the more recent version here (1, 2); I also did this a previous time but no longer have a digital copy of those notes. Some advice:

Keep the assignment manageable. For a graduate student, I think writing up one 50 minute lecture is a reasonable task. If I were doing longer lectures, I'd probably break the responsibility in half. For undergrads, a group of 2 or 3 working together to cover 50-80 minutes of classwork is reasonable.
To make the assignment more manageable and the notes more uniform for my grad students, I made a big LaTeX template with all the macros I thought they might want.
For my undergrads, at first I required them to use LaTeX, working together on Overleaf, but I found I was spending a lot of time answering LaTeX questions, so I switched to telling them they could use any medium they wanted. You should probably decide whether it is worth spending your time teaching undergrads to use LaTeX. A downside of letting them use any medium is that there wasn't a good way for me to edit those notes.
Impose a tight deadline. My deadline now is to have the notes done 24 hours after the class, before people forget what happened.
To make the tight deadline fair, let students choose what date they want to work on several weeks in advance. Ideally, warn about dates which will be unusually diagram heavy.
I scribe the first lecture myself, to illustrate to the students what I was looking for. I post the TeX source of the notes along with the PDF, so that students could copy techniques from each other.
For my grad classes, I edit the notes, both to remove typos and to add additional comments on material which I had not covered well. This was probably 30 or 60 minutes of work per lecture, but when the turn-around cycle was tight, I felt that the time doubled as helpful preparation for the next lecture by reminding me what I said rather than what I meant to say. It would be better if I edited the undergrad notes as well, although I currently am not because so many of them are handwritten or in Word.
I frequently say things in lecture like "I don't know the precise answer to your question, but it is something like ... and I'll put the details in the course notes", and I in other ways encourage people to treat the notes as a reference.

Some things I haven't figured out a good way to do yet

Incorporate this into the course grade. For grad students, I just don't; I instead praise good work informally, in public and private. For undergrads, I had a small portion of the grade which was my feeling about how well they did on class participation and note taking, but I will freely admit it was very subjective.
Teach students to use LaTeX better, or to write better. It is pretty easy to fix their work, but I never feel that I have time or energy to tell them how to improve it next time.

Thanks. There are many good ideas in this, including using a breakpoint and double scribing, as well as giving students more notice and more information about what they'd be scribing.

(most of the links have stopped working sadly)

+1 for "I made a big LaTeX template with all the macros I thought they might want." :-)

As a student, I would send out a Google Doc to each member of my class. We would all collaboratively take notes together. This was, of course, chaotic and messy but it worked very well.  The anxiety about 'missing something while writing down something else' was alleviated with more eyes and ears on the subject. When the lecture already had or could have followed a written structure, (say a review sheet or an agenda for the day) we would base the document off this, which worked even better as people would focus on one topic or bullet point and make sure that was finished and fleshed out as the rest of the class raced on.
However, this does mean giving your students an additional task. Sometimes, as has been noted, active note taking and learning don't go well together. However, student lead, collaborative note taking is another option, if maybe not the best one.

Pay a student who's not taking the class, and preferably has already taken it, to capture the lecture and discussion. That person will be able to focus objectively on what's happening.
Alternatively videotape or do an audio recording that the scribe can use.
Ask everyone in the class to provide their notes to the scribe.
The scribe will be focused on trying to capture questions, answers, comments, etc. which means he or she may find it difficult to acquire a deep understanding of the material. The scribe also may find it difficult to participate in class because they're too busy writing down/typing everyone else's questions and comments.
I've performed as a 'scribe' as a graduate student--I was a TA and sat in the class to help deepen my understanding of the material and to know what the students were being taught. I was then able to expand on (and correct some equations) the material during lab sessions. I had to pay close attention, but having previously studied the material made it a lot easier.
I've also taken minutes for a subcommittee that I'm on occasionally. I find it tremendously difficult to switch focus between trying to capture everything important and actually participating through providing information or asking questions.

I like the idea of audio/videotaping, or in more general not having to rely on real-time note taking.

FWIW, there is free software that can capture audio, video from a computer and/or a camera. For blackboard lectures, it's also possible to set up a high-res camera that takes periodic shots of the board.

I have taught a similarly structured graduate course, and seen a similar wide variation in quality of the notes. I did assign scribes at the beginning of the class, and allowed them to swap as long as everyone ended up scribing at some point. I feel like this helped in matching students to topics they were particularly keen on.
For the future, I've considered having all the notes be in a wiki. There would still be a "main" scribe for each topic, but everybody (including me) could contribute to any page. They would be assessed on their overall contribution, which is trackable from the wiki history. The assessment structure is pretty much pass/fail anyway, so I'm not sure it makes much of a difference, but I like the idea of rewarding students for helping each other. Also, it means it's OK for each wiki page to start out as very rough notes, potentially from many hands: it can be progressively rewritten. This avoids the problem where the original scribe gets stuck at an early stage - if they missed something, or misunderstood something, then they can get help on it, but still be able to make a meaningful contribution to the end product.
This may not be suitable for you if you have a lot of mathematics or diagrams (depending on choice of wiki software), or if you would prefer things to be in LaTeX for other reasons.

I like this idea. And with things like sharelatex it's even possible to do collaborative latex editing.

You say it is an advanced course, so you may have met some of the students before in beginners courses, projects, etc.
Pick one or two competent and reliable students and pay them to write lecture notes¹. Repeat in subsequent iterations with the purpose of incremental refinement.
You can sell the idea to them by noting that

they'd get paid for work they'd have to do in some form, anyway,
they'd learn more because they'd have to do it a bit more precisely than for
their own jot paper and would get feedback from other students (and you),
they'd have external motivation to do said work (counter-procrastination) and
they'd have the chance to make a good impression with you.

I think lecture notes should be different from transcripts, but ymmv.

students are expected to produce a first draft within a few days of the lecture (lectures are once a week), and the hope is that a good version of the notes is on the website a week after the lecture.

The timing seems a bit strict. If the students have a lot of projects going on they may not (want to/be able to) make time for this. Maybe this is one of the reasons you are getting abysmal first drafts.

Yes. the constraint is that it's useful to have notes from the previous lecture in time for the new one. I should clarify that the students in these classes are usually 2-3rd year Ph.D students or even more seniors, so they don't have the same class load as (say) UGs or intro grad students.

@Suresh but clearly, PhD Students can be busy as well? Paper deadlines etc ...

It could help to assign the scribes further in advance, say, at the start of the semester.  Then they know in advance when they will be scribing and can try to clear their schedules accordingly.  But it seems to me that timing is probably not the main problem.

@NateEldredge Given the number of students who seem to do every assignment on the night before the deadline, regardless of when it was set, it's not clear that scheduling in advance will help anything at all!

You might find a "delta-scribing" process more effective.  To prepare, provide (enough copies of) a rough outline of the material to be covered in that lecture, ideally in the order to be covered, with a blank box next to each bullet point, and space somewhere (perhaps on a different sheet of paper).
Now the goal of the transcription team is to record the actual order of points presented. The order presented is recorded in the blank box, usually by a number.  The space is used to record as much of the additional words needed for the lecture, including particularly cogent phrases describing the material, as well as subpoints of discussion.  This may save just enough work on the part of the team that all the additional ("delta") salient points brought up in lecture can be covered.
If the lecture is actually more of a free-flowing discussion with many people introducing new points, it might be good to have each two-person team operate so that one transcribes the points the other person presents.  Perhaps a brief discussion as how to best transcribe the point might be in order, so that there is a "secretarial consensus" of sorts.

At the University I am a student at (Undergraduate in Liberal Arts), we have mandated discussion sections for courses over a certain number of students. In one of these discussion sections, we have two people each week (who signed themselves up ahead of time) give a short presentation/summary of all of the readings for the week and a recap of the lectures.
I think that (depending on the format of your class) having your students themselves present to the class their findings might motivate them to do a better job at taking notes.

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


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Data sets of questions asked in conferences
I am looking for data sets of questions asked in academic conferences. Ideally, it should contain a timestamped transcript as well as some reference to the talk (e.g. the paper it was presenting), but a simple list of questions would be already of interest to me.
I am mostly interested in the field of computer science (natural language processing and machine learning), and English-speaking venues.

@ThejusMahajan 1. Reference requests are on-topic 2. The question will help people like me.

I've never heard of any such data being gathered.  Presumably, if questions at a conference were going to be recorded and transcribed, and the data made available for use in research, the participants would all have to give informed consent, and I've never heard of a conference asking for such consent.

I recall having seen very old conference proceedings reporting questions and replies, but nothing in recent times, so I don't think they are typically collected.

No conference I ever attended did record questions

@vonbrand http://videolectures.net/ . Maybe someone took care of the ASR.

Such a data set probably does not exist, due to human subjects considerations.  While conference speakers are often asked to consent to possible recording of their talks, conference attendees are not generally asked for such consent.  Sometimes questioners do get recorded anyway, in those rare talks that actually are recorded, but they have certainly not provided any explicit consent for becoming experimental subjects.
Now, some researcher and their IRB might well be able to work out a way to build a data set from the decidedly biased sample of publicly available talks that happen to include questions. Doing so and then executing that project, however, is likely to be a rather large research and coding effort and with that much work the authors would certainly end up wanting to publish papers on it.
In short: if your literature search isn't turning it up already, then it doesn't exist.

http://videolectures.net/ does manage to record some conference talks. Also, there is no IRB in Europe, so it may be easier in some countries.

@FranckDernoncourt I believe that many other countries have strong requirements for assurance of ethics in research as well: see the HHS International Compilation of Human Research Standards


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Dataset of grad admission acceptance rate based on undergrad school
I am looking for datasets that would list the acceptance rates of graduate school applicants based on their undergrad schools. I.e. X % of students from undergraduate school Y applying to graduate school Z are admitted. Ideally, the dataset should also indicate the number of applicants.
I am mostly interested in graduate schools based in the United States, and computer science departments.

I am reasonably confident that an open dataset like this doesn't exist. First, because graduate admissions is a secretive process in the US, and second, because the combination of "attended Y and applied to Z" would be considered PII and shouldn't be released for privacy reasons. If you explain why you want this data (e.g., are you trying to measure elitism in graduate school admissions?) it might help someone guide you to another kind of dataset that might suit the same purpose.

@ff524 Purpose: curiosity. These statistics are aggregates, so there should not any PII issue (uneducated guess). One can of course exclude cases where a very low number of students from Y applied to Z, if needs be: the percentage wouldn't be much meaningful anyway.

At least in my department, to avoid releasing PII you would have to exclude almost all the data. For most undergrad schools, the number of students applying is nowhere near the number you would need in order to avoid privacy implications. In some cases, even if the number is large, those schools would still need to be excluded because releasing it would enable others to guess whether someone they already know attended Y and applied to Z was accepted or rejected.

@ff524 What number does one need in order to avoid privacy implications in the US? I'd guess one could skip years, or perturb the data in some other ways (e.g. random noise). Otherwise data may come from applicants themselves, e.g. http://thegradcafe.com/ (which claims to have "374390 grad school admission results in the database".)

The gradcafe data is so biased (sampling bias, reporting bias), I wouldn't consider it anywhere close to a reliable indicator of "grad admission acceptance rate based on undergrad school."

@ff524 Hence my question.

Yes to all of the above although I do know that at least in the case of undergraduate admissions some schools might keep lists of high-performing high schools from which they are more (or less) likely to admit students.  But agreed, the data set in which OP is interested certainly does not exist.

The specific dataset you seek is likely unavailable because of concerns about personal identifying information and the confidentiality of the process.  The number of applicants from small colleges or to small CS programs in any given year is in many cases too low for effective anonymity.
Many good undergrad programs will tell you about where their graduates went in terms that they are comfortable with, e.g. "x% went to grad school;" some will even list exactly which graduates went where - usually with the permission of both the graduate and the department head.  I don't think anybody's gathered this into a single dataset.
However, certain aspects of your curiosity may be satisfied by graphs and compiled data from a step later down the line, about which universities hire grads from which other universities for their CS faculty.  That kind of information can be found here (compiled by Jeff Huang and his students at Brown University, analyzed by Jürgen Pfeffer at Carnegie Mellon):

(source: pfeffer.at)

Thanks, how about large colleges/CS programs, and perturbing the data (e.g., random noise or skip years)?

The key issue is lack of motivation/incentives to gather such a data set: for what purpose would it be used?  There are so few large colleges/CS programs that limiting to those wouldn't tell you much, and analyzing random noise is not likely to be helpful in answering a motivating question.  Data could be aggregated over years (skipping doesn't reduce the PII specificity issue) at the cost of current/predictive value (programs change over time).  Data collection should be motivated by a specific question, so as to guide decision-making between the trade-offs involved.

This is exactly the link that came to mind when I read the question, but I was having trouble recalling where I read it. Thanks for posting it! I also recall something like a network analysis of "longest connection length", with the general idea that "for top institutions, it really is a small world" - that at top institutions they had 1-link long connections to everywhere, while at smaller institutions it might take 4+ links to get some other department. The one's I'm thinking of don't answer the OPs questions either though, I'm afraid.

This is interesting data. It's different from what the OP requested in two ways: besides for being about a different stage (as acknowledged), it only includes successful applicants, not rejected applicants. i.e. assuming these 51 school are the only schools in existence, you can use it to say "N% of hires at Z come from Y" or "M% of Y graduates who get positions end up at Z." But you can't say "N% of applicants to Z from Y are hired," which would be analogous to what OP wanted for grad admissions ("X % of students from undergraduate school Y applying to graduate school Z are admitted").


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Dataset of retraction fines per publisher
I read in the Nature comment Reproducibility: A tragedy of errors authored by David B. Allison, Andrew W. Brown, Brandon J. George& Kathryn A. Kaiser and published today

Science relies essentially but complacently on self-correction, yet scientific publishing raises severe disincentives against such correction. One publisher states that it will charge the author who initiates withdrawal of a published paper US$10,000.

(This Nature comment uses the term withdrawal in lieu of retraction)
Is there any dataset that lists retraction fines per publisher?

What is "withdrawal of a published paper"? Do you mean retraction? Usually withdrawal refers to withdrawing a paper before it is published. What kind of withdrawal are you referring to in your question?

@ff524 Thanks, good point, yes retraction. (I believe this Nature comment use withdrawal in lieu of retraction)

It is very unlikely somebody went to the aggravation of finding out... and it could very well change drastically over time, be different e.g. for a special topic issue, ...

@vonbrand I'm sure this is the kind of data http://retractionwatch.com/ would be interested to compile, amongst other organizations and researchers.


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What is the impact of using complex words on the paper acceptance probability?
Oppenheimer, Daniel M. "Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: Problems with using long words needlessly." Applied Cognitive Psychology 20, no. 2 (2006): 139-156. looked at the impact of using complex words on the graduate admission probability.
Is there any research/study/survey that looked at the impact of using complex words on the paper acceptance probability?
I am most interested in the field of computer science, and English-speaking venues.

Is there any dataset of submitted papers, labeled with editor decision (accept, reject, revision)? that would be a fun dataset to play with.

@ff524 yes such a dataset would be interesting, I'm looking for that as well: Does any publication venue make rejected papers available for download?

I don't know of any study like this, but I'd be surprised if there was a correlation. Sometime a complex word is a precise word, and therefore it adds clarity to the narrative. Other times, a complex word is nothing but a fancy word that obfuscates meaning. Above all, authors should strive to communicate clearly. Hopefully, referees judge papers based on the quality of the research and the clear understandability of the presented findings, and wouldn't be easily influenced by the injection of highfalutin synonyms.

@ff524, fun yes. Available, hopefully not, at the very least for privacy reasons.

@vonbrand what's the privacy issue?

May I add that we should write to our audience. I have no data either, but writing for a low level journal in a specific discipline would entail use of obscure vocabulary "of necessity." Writing the same narrative for a higher level journal with broader reach would necessitate more accessible vocabulary. Another interesting confound if that dataset is ever discovered.

@FranckDernoncourt If nothing else, at least some journals/conferences explicitly say that submissions (accepted or rejected) will be kept in strict confidence. So it goes to "reasonable expectation of privacy". Ethically it would also be highly dubious to release personally-identifiable data without the informed consent of the people who've submitted research data. It would also be an issue of copyright in many cases, as copyright transfers/licenses aren't given for rejected papers. A journal/conference could always change their conditions of submission to allow this in the future, of course.

Related (off site): Research papers containing abstracts that are shorter and consist of more commonly used words accumulate citations more successfully.

I agree with @J.R. that complex words sometimes add clarity and sometimes are merely pompous or serve to obfuscate.  I would add that referees should be able to tell the difference and might therefore be influenced either positively or negatively by such words.  Personally, I get annoyed by overly pompous prose. I don't think it would cause me to reject a paper outright, but it might make me more sensitive to other faults in the paper.

@ff524, a contradictory study.  http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004205

Similar question:  http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/65666/which-is-better-a-paper-with-pedantic-vocabularies-or-a-paper-easy-to-read/65668#65668

I cannot reply directly to your question on complex words, but it appears that complex (long) titles are associated with fewer citations (see Deng). So, you might extrapolate that complex words are going to decrease the likelihood of citations and, further extrapolating, possibly also of acceptance.


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How random is the graduate admission process in the United States?
I wonder how random the graduate admission process is in the United States. I am mostly interested in the fields of computer science, and PhD programs (i.e., not Master programs).
One way to quantify it would be following a similar methodology as in this study  (mirror), which showed that half the papers appearing at NIPS would be rejected if the review process were rerun. Of course it may not be flawless, but might give some decent approximations.
I am looking for referenced numbers, not guesses.

As candidates tend to to apply at multiple schools of the same level (5-10 I'd say at least), and the same people tend to get in or not in, it's probably not very random: a very specific student profile is preferred somewhat consistently across professors at different schools. This seems very similar to the quoted experiment; but I doubt you'll find actual numbers from some such experiment.

@gnometorule Good point, yes the experiment could be on student side (probably easier to get the data there).

I guess this is very similar to many conferences where the number of papers that can be accepted is much smaller than the number of submitted papers: the outstanding papers usually make it, the crappy papers are weeded out pretty reliably, and for all the good-but-not-outstanding papers in between the choice is influenced by a multitude of  factors (and becomes somewhat random).

In general, the sheer number of applications reviewed by admissions committee members in some departments will inevitably lead to decision fatigue.

@ff524 I recall having read some similar studies, but I don't recall such a high variation. Impressive.

@CrepusculeWithNellie Yes that's what I'd expect too.

There is without a doubt some randomness in the process, but I find your question impossible to answer. In the question, you implicitly assume that the "quality" of an application is a well-defined concept that could be used to replicate an experiment.
But this isn't the case. The only way you could do this is by submitting N "equally good" applications to the same graduate programs in the same year, and expect the same outcome for all. But this is clearly not a workable concept. Rather, different graduate programs may look for different candidates (for example because they have different areas of strength), and possibly may want to balance areas in successive years. In other words, the "quality" of an application is a concept that can only be measured against the current needs of individual graduate programs. You can't repeat the experiment at a different place or different time and expect the same outcome.

Actually, people do that type of experiment when researching discrimination in hiring and other markets.  In addition, this is not an answer.

It's true that one can make these sorts of experiments in a controlled setting using test subjects. What I wanted to point out is that to do it in the real world, using actual graduate school admissions committees is going to be exceptionally complicated and unreliable. One can say that this doesn't answer the original question, but it may shed light on why there is not likely going to be a lot of factual data.


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US grad school rankings based on graduate students' satisfaction
Is there any US grad school ranking based on graduate students' satisfaction? (satisfaction while in grad school of after graduation)
If department-specific I am mostly interested in computer science departments.

There might be a big difference between "being happy" while in grad school, and "becoming happy" subsequently, and with some hindsight and maturity.

I generally take measures like "graduate students' satisfaction" with great caution. On the one hand, it is a very subjective measure, which in itself is not a problem, but which becomes problematic because few, if any, graduate students can compare between two, let alone more institutions, while at the same time being strongly influenced by people at their own institution. On the other hand, it is a very wide measure, which in turn can lead to students cling to arbitrary, but verifiable criteria, to judge in a reproducable way (that, however, may be rather disconnected from their ...

... actual satisfaction).

I think this is an excellent question (although I anticipate the answer is "no"). While graduate students' happiness with their institution is certainly a subtle issue, it is definitely a problem if the majority of a department's students wish they were not in that department! And gauging student satisfaction is one of the main reasons to visit a prospective graduate school. (If you visit a department and the current students advise you to run away, you should probably listen to them.)

Furthermore, I have some rather satisfied friends doing PhDs that seem to suffer from Stockholm syndrome. "My supervisor is very nice, I only have to sacrifice my first born to her".

You are likely to find there is no such ranking, and if it existed you should probably throw it away without looking at the results - for a rather simple reason! There exists no standard assessment of graduate student satisfaction that is widely applied (I think not even in relatively small regional areas, counties, states, etc), and there is a good chance it could vary wildly according to what time of year you applied it to students. Also, existing published results are not actual research and are biased advertising pretending to be serious academic inquiry.
Published Satisfaction Results Are Extremely Biased
Whenever you see analysis of satisfaction results and such, note how they are remarkably positive slanted? That's because this isn't so much research as it is advertising. I'm going to get a little soap-boxy now, because this bothers me. Take for example the MIT survey and it's results. Note the questions like this:

Overall, how would you rate the quality of...
Your academic experience at MIT?
  Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good,
  Excellent

Do you notice something funny with that scale? Of 5 choices, 3 are positive, one is neutral (fair), and one is negative. That perks my ears up, because a normal bi-polar Likert-style scale like this is "Very Poor, Poor, Neutral [Average/Undecided/etc], Good, Very Good". Why would they choose an unbalanced, biased scale like this which would be utterly unacceptable in any legitimate field of psychological assessment and research? The item, as posed, is designed to elicit positive responses.
Further, the vast majority of items are asked positively as in "how satisfied" compared to "how dissatisfied" - in general serious psychological assessments  should ask in both positive and negative ways to attempt to remove a positive-selection suggestion for the measure as a whole. That is, if the measure is designed to get at how people really think and feel, rather than being an exercise in "tell us how great we are so we can tell people how great you said we are".
If this were peer-reviewed research to be published in a reputable journal, it should be rejected. I suspect all institutions run similar games, so
I don't mean to pick on any one institution in particular - but I hope this helps to illustrate how little stock you should put in such reports. It's not science, it's not even good polling - you are reading an advertisement from the institution designed to make you want to buy the product they are selling.
Interpreting People Is Hard
As a matter of psychological assessment, how the question is worded and it's context and framing within the measure itself can strictly dominate how the question is answered, thus the need to compare tests that have been proven comparable. Due to advances in our understanding of people's ability to judge their own satisfaction or happiness, we now know also that how such a question is asked will change how a person evaluates the question. Asking someone "Overall, how satisfied are you with..." will tend to elicit answers from the autobiographical "remembering self", which is based upon a reliably biased self-conscious memory system. On the other hand asking "Lately (or over the last few months), how satisfied are you with..." - or even just generally asking about feelings, emotions, or 'happiness' - will actually elicit answers from the "experiencing self", and will instead be biased based upon things like emotional state and very recent experiences and sensations.
If the questions are worded to call upon the remembering self, with questions like "overall...", based upon the literature I would expect institutions with economically affluent student bodies to show much higher satisfaction ratings than institutions with a less wealthy student base - even if the less wealthy institution were actually a much better place  or at least no worse. Wealthy is positively correlated with this kind of satisfaction, and there is no limit - the more wealth, the greater the satisfaction overall. So a measure of graduate student satisfaction would actually be a proxy test for "where the rich kids go".
On the other hand if the question calls upon the experiencing self, I would expect wealth to have a much smaller correlation generally with the largest effect being seen by students living below the poverty line. So campuses who ensure - through admissions or financial aid - that students don't live below the poverty line would do better than others, regardless of academic quality generally.
Daniel Kahneman gave a nice TED talk about this subject, if you are interested in a nice overview of the topic.
The MIT results are a good example of this - the MIT results show that 88% of students were at least somewhat satisfied with the graduate school, while 81% were at least satisfied with life outside the institution. In other words, people rarely say "gee my life sure does suck in general, but MIT is great!" The two questions are likely to be so strongly correlated that they are actually asking the same ultimate question and respondents may be literally incapable of attributing their general satisfaction to any specific source. "When you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you."
What's worse, this problem would extend to both currently enrolled students and follow ups after graduate school. A useful study of such rating would have to get more than just the answer to satisfaction, and would have to also collect other student information and attempt to control for other known factors (marriage, having children and what age those children are, health, etc) before we could even usefully interpret what a statement like "88% of students say they are satisfied with us" means - is that good, or terrible, or meaningless? We just don't know.
MIT's results alone help to point out how odd the responses are, when you think about them - at least, they are odd if you think that people's answer to such questions would be overtly sensible and comparable. 78% said their academics were "very good or excellent" (not the same scale as satisfaction, note), 56% said the same of student life, yet 88% claimed to be satisfied with MIT - so 1 in 5 say "academics are blah", and nearly half say "student life is ehhh", but 88% say "yeah MIT is great". Well, that just seems odd. And 81% say they they are satisfied with their personal life, yet 35% were not satisfied with their ability to combine the needs of academic and family life - life inside and outside the institution is asked to be a reflection of the institution, but combining both is requesting the respondent to criticize themselves. That's an interesting reflection on the measure itself, and makes the results even harder to interpret.

Some Interesting Actual Research
Graduate student satisfaction is not without some serious research, however. The largest attempt at seriously talking with graduate students and getting their opinions and feelings seems to be the PhD Survey. It managed to get responses from other 4000 students from some 27+ institutions, with a rather high response rate (over 40% at least) on a 20 page survey. It probably has the capacity to be used to make some comparisons between institutions, potentially, but the N of such comparisons will drop remarkably and would require access to the underlying data - and appears to not be published.
The study is so interesting though that I think just trying to rank institutions would be a sad use of such interesting insights, and even at least making comparisons between institutions would still be hard for the previously mentioned readings.
That caveat aside, I highly recommend the reports from the linked site - they make a fascinating read for anyone considering - or enrolled in - a PhD program.
Bottom line (TLDR;)
Even if people were honestly reporting unbiased findings - and they generally aren't - and people's responses could be interpreted in a clear and sensible fashion - and they can't - you wouldn't be able to interpret the results in a useful way or be able to compare different institutions.
A 3rd party poll with peer-reviewed published results using an appropriate measure would be potentially really interesting - but sadly I don't think that exists today. But if it did I would love to read it!
Some interesting research does exist about graduate student satisfaction and program effectiveness, but I have not found any that attempts to rank institutions, and I would propose it might very well be because we don't know what to rank them on! As shown in the PhD Survey, graduate programs tend to be focused on preparing participants for jobs they are unlikely to hold and not preparing them for jobs they will have - yet the unemployment rate is low and other studies show clearly that average income is still well above bachelor degree holders generally.
The studies that are done also highlight the fact that each department - or at least major degree field - has some very different experiences. While one field might have 17% of graduates working in tenure track jobs, for instance, another has nearly half of graduates in such jobs; in some fields a minority (30-something percent) of participants are interested in tenure-track faculty jobs, while in others more than 80% are so interested.
As such it would be potentially possible to compare individual departments or degree fields across institutions, but making such comparisons among institutions would likely result in highly deceiving results that one should not attempt to interpret naively.

Thanks I'm indeed ideally looking for a 3rd party poll with peer-reviewed published results using an appropriate measure. I'm fully aware that the MIT example I pointed to is mostly a publicity stunt.

@FranckDernoncourt I'm glad :) With that said, I have found some research that might interest you, though so far I've found nothing that considers ranking Universities.

I have updated my answer with some interesting research on PhD program surveys (next to last section).