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Do US universities allow a professor to work in a brothel?
Watch Sold in America: The Workers at 5:15, the owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch Dennis Hof says:

I have three PhDs working for me. One of them is a professor at UNLV (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) and a working girl for me.

Is this plausible?
Do US universities allow a professor (part-time or full-time) to work in a brothel (full-time or part-time) while he/she is working as an active professor at the university?
My question stems from the fact that this gives rise to the possibility that a student may end up having sex with the professor in the brothel. I knew US universities do not allow professors to engage in love affairs with students. So, having sex seems to be a far cry.

Moderator’s notice: The ethics of prostitution is off-topic here. Any statement debating this or hinting at your opinion about this will be deleted without warning to avoid this debate. Same goes for any jokes on the topic. Take all of this to chat. Read this FAQ before posting a comment.

You could probably check the UNLV faculty handbook to see if there are any regulations against this.  However, this doesn't prevent someone from taking a second job and not reporting it.

It may also depend on where the brothel is -- brothels are legal in some parts of Nevada, but not in much of the US.

Your question contains an implicit premise that US universities can control what other legal employment their professors take up in their off hours. Are you sure that this premise is correct? Seems a bit dubious to me at a general level regardless of anything to do with brothels specifically.

Then you have an XY problem: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem ...ask your actual question rather than about your solution/path to your actual question.

@user366312 agree with Bryan. This scenario is indeed problematic, but one can imagine a situation where a professor is employed at a brothel but informs her brothel bosses that she may have to refuse certain clients to avoid violating her university policies. Assuming that’s acceptable to the brothel, we avoid the issue you are describing. So again, as long as the professor took care to comply with university policy, it’s not clear to me if the university could legally disallow her from taking this kind of employment. But I’ll admit I don’t for sure whether they could or could not.

The one part of this story that’s completely believable is the fact that a UNLV instructor might need a second job to make ends meet.

@DanRomik, the business is not only legal, it is regulated and taxed. The regulations may disallow a worker from refusing any individual client. Discrimination laws would certainly apply.

@Buffy yes, anything’s possible I suppose. We are falling further and further down the rabbit hole... But to address what you said, somehow I doubt that prostitutes are legally forbidden from refusing a client they don’t want to... do business with, for whatever reason. That would surely be a pretty bizarre regulation, not to mention very likely incompatible with sexual assault laws.

They would probably be disallowed from excluding protected groups under antidiscrimination laws, but "students in my Calc II course" is not a protected group.

Many full-time faculty contracts require the faculty member to get permission to have outside work.  It would be unusual for requests that do not prevent the professor from doing their job to be denied.  Off-campus sex work not involving students would probably be approved.
Adjunct faculty, who are the majority, would not have this requirement to get permission, and could work wherever they please.
Professor Melissa Febos used her experience as a professional dominatrix to advance her academic career.  Some academic research methods call for participating in the activities studied.
Faculty are required to follow sexual misconduct policies.  These policies would not normally limit sex work with customers not affiliated with the university.  Certain religious institutions, however, do fire faculty who do not follow religious rules about sexual activity.

It's typical for US universities to require disclosure of certain types of outside activities due to concerns with conflicts of interest and to comply with federal guidelines:
https://www.unlv.edu/research/coi#guidelines
There are also typically clauses that don't allow outside activities to negatively impact work with the university.
I think it's likely that this would fall into a grey area where there is clearly no direct conflict of interest for the purposes for which such policies typically exist, but a broad interpretation could allow a professor to be removed if those outside activities were considered too much of a distraction. If students were aware of the other position or could be clients, that might be seen as more of a problem.
That might lead to a legal challenge but I'm not aware of any related legal cases related to brothel employment by professors, and broadly US employers have a lot of leeway in deciding who they employ. There is this story of a journalist-stripper-professor who was fired from her journalist position when her employer learned about her blog about stripping, but apparently not her lecturing position.
Note that having outside interactions with students doesn't need anything as potentially controversial as sex work. There are lots of ways students could potentially have a conflict of interest with a TA or professor if they have some financial relationship: if they hire them as a tutor, if they work at a bar/restaurant and are left a tip, if the students' parents buy the professor's house, all of these could raise a potential conflict of interest situation.


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Can someone enroll in an on-campus PhD program on the basis of a "distance learning" Master's degree?
What would be the status of a distance-learning Master's program in academia? Would it fulfill the requirement of an on-campus Ph.D. program?
What would be the status of a distantce-learning doctoral program in academia? Would it be considered on par with an on-campus Ph.D. program?

Yes, someone "can" do that.  In mathematics in the US: you could take the Graduate Record Exam subject test in mathematics; a good score there will probably suffice to admit you to many Ph.D. programs.

To answer the question literally: Yes, I know for sure that it is possible, because I have done it. I've studied Computer Science at the FernUniversitaet Hagen (https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/), the leading German distance-learning university. I got my BSc and MSc from them, before being admitted for a PhD at the University of Cambridge. At no point during the admissions process to Cambridge (nor when it came to later job applications) did I feel that the distance-learning nature of my prior degrees was held against me.
Whether it would all work out just fine for you is subject to two caveats: First, whenever you are doing something in an unusual way there is a certain risk that the specific decision makers you encounter are put off by this, and have it count against you. Second, I'd reckon that there are more "bad apples" amongst distance-learning universities than amongst in-person ones. So you'd want to be sure that you are dealing with a reputable programme/university.

"Fully online masters/doctoral program" is too broad to make a general statement. It would depend on who runs the program and how it is run.
And the formal answer to the topline question is yes, you can enroll if you are admitted, but the judgements of others will be required to make it possible, just as in any other case. One doesn't just "enroll". One must be admitted.
Moreover, it is individuals who make such decisions and there are no general rules about the equivalence or non-equivalence. But, I think most people would be skeptical, as I would be, and would want to see some details about any such program.
Certainly there are reputable universities running reputable programs. In UK, I'm only familiar with Open University, which I believe does a very good job and has a history of success.
But the issue that many would have is how much actual learning has taken place in online programs and how much can claims be depended on in making decisions such as employment and further education.
Personally, I worry about such programs due to the possible reduced interaction, especially personal feedback, between students and faculty. I'd be especially skeptical of anything of a massive nature. It is possible to run such programs with a student faculty ratio of 1000/1, of course and my trust in such a program is about 1/1000. It is also possible to serve a large number of students in a "class" but with a ratio of 20/1 as is done in some Harvard programs (800 students, 40 staff, though only one professor). This is hugely different.
The "status" is actually undefined and will be judged by whoever is in a position to have to make a judgement. This will probably remain true for some years until there is better overall information about the long term outcomes of students who have done these programs.
Certainly one can learn in an online program, but it is harder to judge whether someone actually has, given the possibility of much-reduced interaction and evaluation.
If you intend to do such a program, look first at the student-staff ratio and at how much feedback you are likely to get in the program and how easy or difficult it will be to get good answers to your questions along the way. Of course, the same can be true of face to face programs. The second thing I would look at is whether the program has found a way to encourage active learning. If the system is too passive (videos and exams primarily) then I would personally judge it to be of low quality. If it requires fairly extensive writing or other exercises and personalized feedback then it is (IMO) likely to be of higher quality.
Note that I've taught both ways. Nothing massive in the online world, but small groups who met face to face only rarely and who had essentially constant opportunity for internet mediated group conversations and contact with faculty. That can work.

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How many [conceptual] sections should an "Introduction" contain?
How many [conceptual] sections should an "Introduction" contain?
I need to know this so that I can better arrange the Introduction section of my paper.

Just asking, why are there 2 down votes, I don't see any problems in this post

@HeckerCat, I think that a few users here downvote quite a lot of questions. My best guess is that they don't think the question should be asked at all. But that's just speculation. Close voters might also downvote I'd guess.  But unexplained down votes can best be ignored, IMO.

@HeckerCat I did not vote on this question, but presumably it was downvoted because it is obviously unanswerable without reading the paper.

At a very high level, most introductions try to accomplish a few tasks:

Motivate the problem, ideally by connecting it to a larger goal in the field.
Provide a literature review of relevant work to (a) provide historical context and pointers to more information, (b) show the state of the art, (c) show what gap you will fill or how you will push the state of the art forward.
Explain the novel contributions of the present work at a high level.
Outline the rest of the paper.

In some papers, there may also be an extended review of technical results that will be used later on. This review could be its own section, separate from the introduction.
There are no hard rules that apply to all papers. Not all papers will include all of those bullet points. For papers that do, how long the text for any of those bullet points can take will vary. Some papers may explicitly include headings signposting the different parts of an introduction ("Related Work", "Outline", ...), other papers may simply have a single "Introduction" section that covers all that ground, and still others may not have any section headers at all (no explicitly marked "Introduction"). For journals with a strict word count (which are also typically higher-impact journals), you typically want to reserve your words for explaining the novel contributions, with very little space taken up by a review. For papers giving a long and technical argument, it may be appropriate to have several "introductory" sections to lay the groundwork so that all the details are laid out in a self-contained way. For review articles, very little if anything in the review will be novel, so the introduction will likely focus on giving a motivation, pointers to the most important references, and a detailed outline of the review.
Because of these and other nuances that depend on the paper you are writing, is impossible to give an answer to the question you asked that is both straightforward and accurate. The real answer is that you should do what makes the most sense for your paper. If you have no idea, some things you can do to gather data are:

Look at other papers in your field that are at a similar level of technicality (perhaps some of the key papers you cite), and see what they do.
Look at other papers in the journal you are going to submit to, and see how papers are written for that journal.
If you are a student, ask your advisor for guidance. If not, ask a trusted colleague.

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Does getting a PhD in a language 'L' from a non-'L' country have any drawback in case of academia?
It is a common belief that "if you want to learn/study English, you must go to an Anglophone country." This belief is compounded by the fact that English teaching franchises are constantly advertising ELT as a commodity and their authority on that commodity. Some language schools do not even recruit language teachers other than the native speakers.
But, my question is about academia.
So, if someone acquires a Ph.D., say, in English  1  (linguistics) from a university, say, in Israel 2  (where the native tongue is Hebrew), would he be considered on par with a Ph.D. from an anglophone country in an anglophone country?
What kind of problems may he face if he moves to an Anglophonic country to be in academia either as a researcher or a professor?
Note: 1 might be any language other than [2] and vice versa.
Note-2: I am talking about academia.
Edit: the context is the following:

If someone is refused a visa in any one of the “Five Eyes” countries, does this affect his subsequent visa applications in other “Five Eyes” countries?

What do you mean by "worth it?"  People do not get PhDs in literature for their financial benefits.

to cash --- This probably does not convey what you intended, and perhaps a more appropriate phrase is "to take advantage of". Also, I think your research and ability to contribute/fit the needs of a specific academic department are much more important than a satisfying a checklist of the type you're asking about.

After revision, it is unclear what you mean by "worth" or "advantage," so I have voted to close.

Also, "linguistics" and "literature" are totally different.

it seems extremely broad. Compare to "is it worth it to get engineering degree in Germany to work in America". It depends

A Ph.D. in a field is a recognition of having done publication-worthy research in that field, and in being prepared to start an independent career in that field. When that field is "Language L", it refers to research in some facet of its language, application, pedagogy, or literature (though your mention of 'linguistics' seems to imply that is not the case here). It is not intended as an advanced credential in applied language ability in that language (though one would assume some moderate language ability would be part of the skillset needed to have completed the Ph.D.).
All of that means that there is no inherent reason for such a Ph.D. to be devalued for an academic job in the field, anywhere.
That being said, while publication pedigree is the most important, pedigree of the degree granting institution, the specific department, and the supervisor do matter in the initial post-Ph.D. job. For English, I don't know, but I suspect more respected departments and advisors tend to be in the Anglophone word. I'm sure that's not universally true, and definitely not true for all world languages, but it is am issue to think about in whatever is the specific situation prompting your question.

What kind of problems may he face if he moves to an Anglophonic country to be in the academia?

No matter where he did his Ph.D., he is likely to face an extremely tight job market, with many more extremely qualified job candidates than open tenure-track positions.
In general, to get hired, it is to his advantage to make himself and his work known to whatever sort of department he hopes will hire him. So, for example, it is a good idea to attend (and speak at) conferences in countries where he intends to apply for jobs.
It is also a good idea to take steps to "understand" the sorts of universities where one intends to apply. For example, from what I can tell, the "small liberal arts college" model seems to be uncommon outside the United States and Canada. If he were to apply to such jobs, it would be to his advantage to learn in advance about how they operate, and to learn something about what they value.

The question relies on the common misconception that the institution where one does their PhD matters a lot for their future career.
What will matter at the end of any PhD is the work which has been done: quality of the publications and of the dissertation itself, ideally projects and/or contacts made with the international community in the field, involvement in the academic life in general (although this is usually after the PhD), etc.
As long as one contributes to their field and establishes contacts with their scientific community, their work will be recognized everywhere. On the contrary, an isolated PhD without international publications/contacts is a hard sell even from a prestigious university.

I wish this was true, but it's wrong.

This is probably true for job #2+ in most fields. But it is certainly not true for job #1 in many fields, among them math (me), social sciences (my spouse) and literature (cousin). Indeed, in some fields, one is lucky if at graduation one has any publications at all, beyond a dissertation manuscript, maybe a paper/preprint, and/or a conference poster.
It is hard to decouple institution (and advisor) reputation from "contacts with community", of course. But also conditions at job #1 influence research support/time, and so cascade to job #2+.

The question isn't about the institution, it's about getting a degree dealing with a language from a country where that language isn't the first official language versus one where it is.

I have got my PhD right this way.
My group was international in composition and language L was the one used as working horse. The whole university there also encouraged some use of language L.
Under these circumstances the answer is yes. And so it might be even in less favorable ones.
This is for the PhD title per se.
For the life out I think it very much depends on what is the L non-L pair, the knowledge of the candidate of one or both languages (I knew none :)), and other cultural aspects. Be prepared for rather hard moments, out of the lab.
Not sure about specific language related fields, such as literature or so.
edit I did not get the point. OP is asking about a language related field, so that I think the answer should be more like those by Academic, Erwin and Houska. Still my experience might be useful for a young student considering to move to an institution within the L non L situation.

OP is asking about specific language related fields.

@Bryan Krause edited. Thx.


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Does it make sense to pay tuition fees for a PhD degree?
Some Ph.D. programs charge tuition fees. Others are competitive.
Does a Ph.D. done by paying tuition fees have the same gravity as a Ph.D. done on stipend when it comes to an academic career?
When does it really make any sense to pursue a Ph.D. by paying tuition fees?

This is perhaps too flippant for an answer, but I am tempted to say: when you are wealthy and are viewing the PhD as a form of leisure consumption.

Being funded by a teaching assistantship may be a positive point when applying for one's first teaching job, especially if one has taught whole classes (as opposed to holding recitation sections, grading papers, etc.) and has done a good job.

@Dawn Or when you get a funded PhD in France that covers your employment for 3 years in terms of full salary, travel and publishing expenses, but still expects you to pay your (symbolic) tuition fees like any other French student.

The answers above say that no one will ever know how you funded your PhD. I somehow disagree with it. At least in social science where self-funded PhDs are not so uncommon and PhD programs often ask if you anticipate you can attend the program without any financial aids provided, the prospective hiring committees can learn how your studies was funded from your CVs. It is reasonable that you don't mention any information about your funding source if you are self-funded, but keep in mind that other PhD candidates on the job market would mention theirs if they received a grant. So if you don't mention this, it implies you don't have any grant. THEY WILL KNOW.
Tips for you is to find some CVs of PhD candidates in your subject/field to see how frequently they clearly state it.
Besides, how good is your dissertation significantly overweighs how your PhD is funded. This is of course true but not to everyone. The rejection rates of a postdoc position in a reputable research group or a faculty position are quite high nowadays. Once you're on a shortlist, you are faced with a cohort of candidates whose profiles are almost equally interesting to the hiring committees. Various factors play a role in the final decisions and usually the hiring committees will have deliberation unless someone is obviously much better than others. The grant you received in your PhDs is a signal. The signal tells them either that your past merits are not fully matching the reputation of your university (means if you request for fellowship, you're very likely to be not admitted to the university you're in but a much less reputable one) OR you're not that good among your peers (assume if you again fail to secure funding in your later years of PhDs unless you can prove that there is a convention in your program for PhD students to be self-funded). It's a negative signal even when other candidates and you are equally matched.
My conclusion is unless you assure you can do a great job achieving a good record of publication under the supervision of your advisor OR the universities you're going to self-fund are extremely excellent (as even your work there is mediocre, at least the title of you university can send you to a well-paid position in industry), let's say Oxford or Cambridge as what has been discussed above, self-funding is never recommended.

there are some countries where there are no ways of doing PhDs without paying tuition fees. E.g. Portugal.

I got accepted to a PhD program in Lisbon and 90% of my tuition fees were waived. Besides, Portugal provides FCT scholarships for PhD students to apply for. I learn in some countries tuition fees always need to be paid either via the scholarships or own funding, but as long as you can secure a PhD grant, it doesn't lie in the scope I discussed.

I got accepted to a Ph.D. program in Lisbon and 90% of my tuition fees were waived. --- could you kindly tell me how that process works? I am seriously considering Portugal.

It's a structured PhD program of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. Tuition fees are automatically waived based on the application's merits. And this is renewed each year. I think it may depend on the program.

Where can I inquire about this?

You may first find the PhD program you want to apply for and check the website and/or brochures of the program to see if they indicate any information of funding and fees. If they do not provide such info, send an e-mail to the program coordinator. They should answer you. At the University of Lisbon, you can apply for the university-level scholarships after you enroll in the program.

Thank you, brother!

Using the translation function of Chrome to browse through their websites rather than simply switching to the English websites provided by them if you do not understand Portuguese. It may help a lot. Good luck!

Nobody will ever know. In fact, nobody will likely ever ask you about this.
At the end of the day, for an academic career, what matters is that you have a PhD and have shown an ability to do independent research. Who paid for the PhD never enters these sorts of considerations: You may have been funded on grants and only done research, or you may have been a teaching assistant to get a salary and have tuition paid, or you may have paid for the tuition yourself. It really doesn't matter, and nobody will care. What people do care about are your qualifications.

What they care about is your capability of applying, using or passing on what you have been taught...

I think this answer is too optimistic. If you are paying tuition, you are presumably in the bottom x% of admits. Unless you learn quickly, you may also be in the bottom x% of graduates. If you are in a field where the bottom PhD graduates get jobs that are not much better than those an undergrad could get, it does not make much sense to pay for a PhD.

I'd say it depends on the wider context. If the university is known (or speculated) to be a paid-for PhD mill, where you are quasi-guaranteed a PhD for paying a certain amount of money, then many people will certainly be very cautious wrt hiring OP.

Good answer. As an exception to Who paid for the PhD never enters these sorts of considerations would be if you get a graduate fellowship that you applied for such as an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. However, even the "bump" of those fellowships fades after a person's 1st job.

You're all pointing out the wrong thing. Of course, if you get an award, a scholarship, etc, you should list it because it's a positive thing. But the absence of a positive thing is rarely recognized as a negative thing: Just because you don't list a scholarship on your CV isn't going to prompt people to ask questions whether you were supported by the department or self-financed. That's really not a question that matters to anyone: You got your PhD, tell us about how you're qualified for the next job. Who cares how exactly you made it there.

Agree with the other answers saying no one will ever know how you funded your PhD. But, I don't see anyone addressing this:

When does it really make any sense to pursue a Ph.D. by paying tuition fees?

Blunt answer: very rarely.

If you already have a job in industry doing research and need a PhD to progress, it could make sense.
Ditto for certain, extremely competitive institutions (e.g., Oxford).
Perhaps in some countries, the financial gap between funded and unfunded positions is less wide.

But I usually don't recommend taking an unfunded position, especially in thu US, because:

Professorships and similar positions in industry are incredibly competitive. If you're not currently "good enough" to get any of the ~thousand funded PhD slots, you should be realistic about your odds of eventually getting one of the ~dozen faculty jobs in your field that are open each year. Of course, it is not impossible, but I would strongly consider other options with a better risk/reward ratio. It could even make more sense to spend a year or two strengthening your application and then reapply for the funded position.
Fiveish years of tuition fees + living expenses is very expensive. Even with a high-paying job, it can be difficult to pay back that level of debt, particularly since many industry jobs (and quite a few faculty jobs) tend to be in a high cost-of-living area.

This is extremely bad advice and is un-necessarily discouraging to the user. Unlike in USA and Canada (and probably many parts of Europe) where essentially all PhD programs come with a stipend, Oxford doesn't work that way and while many people do get scholarships, many people pay their own fees. Getting into Oxford (funded or not) is harder than getting a funded PhD position at many other places. But more importantly, you are saying that an undergrad not "good enough" to get a funded PhD is unlikely to be "good enough" for a faculty job. It's completely wrong. People bloom at different stages

Thanks for your note. I added a caveat about very prestigious institutions, which should address your first criticism. To your second point -- sorry, I disagree; while it is true that people bloom at different stages, we have to be realistic about how competitive the job market is. The alternative would be analogous to encouraging someone who couldn't make their college football team to go deeply into debt so they can pursue a career in the national league.

Personally I excelled as an undergrad and graduated with a dazzling CV, got a very competitive full scholarship to Oxford, and began my PhD while friends that started their undergrad with me were doing their 5th or 6th year of undergrad or spending a year not knowing what to do with their lives; but as grad students they became interested in academia, had a series of successful experiments which led them to immediate faculty positions (even earlier than me). Dmitri Iouchtchenko is one of the best grad students I've ever met, but he entered his MSc in 2013 with no scholarships, then got several

awards/scholarships in 2015, 2017, 2018 and again in 2018 as you can see here (no funding in 2013 or 2014 though, he told me that his grades were hit-or-miss during undergrad... some 90s and some 60s). The part that strikes me as a little unfair is that you say "if you're not currently good enough to get any of the ~thousand funded PhD slots" - this seems a bit harsh. Some people don't adjust well to living away from their parents (or moving to a different country to study, often needing to learn a new language). They are "good enough", but blossom later

Thanks for the discussion. I agree that the door to an academic career is not closed forever at the age of 22. But OP is asking about taking an unfunded position -- in the US at a top-50 school, this would likely be $40K in loans (between tuition and room/board) for at least 5 years. I think that's a terrible idea, if the goal is an academic career -- better to do something else and then reapply for a funded spot. Perhaps in other countries, the financial gap between funded and unfunded is not as wide -- I will edit in this caveat.

At Oxford (more than a decade ago) I think it was 18,000 GBP/year for university fees, 3,000 GBP/year for (mandatory) college fees, and you had to prove that you had 10,000 GBP/year cash available for living expenses, so 30,000 GBP/year which is 90,000 GBP in 3 years or maybe $150,000. I spent the last term of my undergrad looking for loans, until I was offered the full scholarship. I met plenty of people there, that went into debt for the experience and they gained priceless value.

I agree with you that being funded is far better. The part I don't like is the suggestion that someone can be "not good enough". To even write those words strikes me as a bit harsh.  Certainly I agree that being funded is very highly preferable. Perhaps OP could ask for a deferral and start one year later. I don't think someone should be discouraged from doing a PhD because they're unlikely to be "good enough" to get a faculty position though. Instead maybe they can be told that they can do it as a last resort, and encourage them to explore all possible funding options exhaustively.

+1 - This is my standard advice. In the U.S. at least, an unfunded PhD offer should be viewed as a soft rejection.

@Fomite That advice is extremely short-sighted and there are many, many reasons to self-fund a PhD if it's affordable to you. I think the industry is filled with this tribalistic non-sense. I was offered funding and rejected it because I could handle the research and class load with my tech job and I have a very flexible advisor willing to work with me and my schedule. My advisor encourages me to hold a job for as long as I can because the entire idea of "being one of the guys" and suffering making less than minimum wage is an absolutely catastrophic financial plan.

France
In France, paying tuition fees is not the same as paying for your PhD. This is just a technicality in terminology, but I think it's good to have this information for completeness.
PhD students in France are in a really odd sort of limbo -- French academic system is organised into institutes which work closely with Universities. The institutes provide the Professors for the courses at the University, and in exchange the University acts as a primary pool to get students in for summer projects, internships and finally PhD programmes; and also serves as a host institution for PhD students. This means that a PhD candidate in France is, at the same time, an employee of the institute, and a student at the University.
A funded PhD in France therefore means the following:

An external body (e.g. the French government, a foriegn government, or a company) will sponsor the PhD, ensure the funds for 3 years of (gross) salary, publication and travel costs, i.e. they cover the employment of the PhD candidate and expenses one is expected to incur during this time.
I'm not sure if equipment is something provided through this funding, or by the host institute. I think there's a good chance this funding might cover any visa or other immigration expenses, or the institute might, if you ask nicely.

The PhD candidate pays for yearly student tuition fees to the host University themselves. This is often a hidden cost which nobody remembers to warn you about.
Fortunately, this is a minimal cost: when I was doing my PhD, it was around €400 a year. Not a pleasant surprise when you're on a measly PhD salary, but definitely affordable, and unfortunately unavoidable.

Summary: Obtaining funding for a PhD programme in France is very competitive. Proceeding without funding would mean you are doing a full-time job for 3 years for no compensation, and since not even your publication costs or travel costs would be covered, I doubt any advisor would accept such a candidate. On the other hand, all the PhD students in France pay their own student tuition fees, which are however very low and affordable.

All PhDs charge tuition fees, the question is not whether they are charged, but who pays. In those "competitive" cases you posted above a 3rd party research funder will be paying the fees.
You'll also note that to get one of the funded places "you must either be eligible for employment in the Netherlands or obtain a knowledge worker visa to qualify for a paid PhD position". This goes for the UK as well - a student must be British, or an EU citizen usually resident in the UK (and this will stop at the end fo this year). One of the most common reasons for people to do self funded PhDs, at least in the sciences, is because they are not eligable for a funded position, usually due to nationality.
Thus, being a self-funded student brings no judgement - all universities accept both funded and unfunded students, and many unfunded students are unfunded simply because they were barred from apply for funded positions. In the end, a CV will not say either way whether your PhD was funded or unfunded.
A 4-year self-funded PhD will set you back about 120,000 - 150,000 euros, including about 15,000 a year to living expenses.
Why do you want a PhD? I can think of three reasons:

Financial. This is subtle. For example, in Biology, people with PhDs earn less that those with just an undergrad degree. But thats because most undergrad degree holders don't stay in biology. Within Biology (industrial, commercial or academic), those with PhDs earn much more than those without. A PhD will cost you around 150,000 euros. Whether you will recoup this in the length of a career is something only someone in your industry can tell you.
You want to be an academic. Only about 2-3% of students, funded or unfunded, will make it as far as a permanent faculty level position. Now, if you are getting paid to do a PhD you might think its worth rolling the dice. But if you are paying for the privilege of only having a 3% chance of a job? Only you can say. Also bear in mind that if you were eligible for a paid position, and didn't get one, you must ask yourself why. There may be good reasons. Perhaps admissions tutors don't think highly of your school. Or perhaps you are in a minority that is discriminated against. But it is also possible, in the kindest way, knowing nothing about you, that you are not in the top part of your class. I'm not saying other people will imply this about you because your self-funded (people won't know, see above), but it might never-the-less be the case.
Because you love the subject, you've got the money in savings, and want something worthwhile to spend it on. Only you can say if this is "worth it". If a PhD will make you cry, it will stress you out. You will hate your subject and everyone in it. I large number of student experience mental health problems in a PhD.  But, it can be the most special experience and meaningful experience, in-and-of itself (as opposed to a means to an end). 3-4 years to do something for no other reasons than you think it is cool/interesting/important.

In the US, all schools that I know of charge tuition and fees. So there is no dichotomy of programs in this sense. Though some schools do not allow students to attend their doctoral program without having funding to pay that tuition/fees, either by a fellowship or from their advisor's grants, or perhaps via industry sponsor. I suspect this is because the faculty don't want to promise any time to advise students when they aren't getting funded for their own lab as part of the deal. The funding source, if there is one, then pays the tuition/fees. Beyond that, "self-funded" students are generally the same as those with fellowships; they can choose their project more freely and are not committing part of their time to being lowly research or teaching assistants. They may well have an industry job instead.
One drawback of course is a student is not a great judge of what is a good direction. Whereas the advisor's dogged pursuit of grants would tend to pull their own projects in the direction of more important problems which are probably better for the student's career. Choosing one's own direction also requires a patient advisor who is willing to continue advising while the student does run off and chases their own interests more freely.
At an opposite extreme is advisors who treat self- (or externally-) funded students the same as if the advisor was providing the funding anyway. I.e. they expect to set tasks and supervise the student, rather than simply advise them. Then you're paying out of pocket to be a research assistant. Which is certainly unfair.
As for whether there is some kind of ranking in the mind of hiring committees or firms down the road, regarding how you were funded, nope. A PhD is a PhD. It's primarily a hazing process anyway. The self-funded student will just be missing that line in the CV regarding your assistantship, which many do not put anyway since it is pre-doctoral.

In the US, all schools that I know of charge tuition and fees. — My US (public R1) university waives tuition for all students on teaching or research assistantships.  No, this does not mean that the tuition is paid from a different pile of money.  The tuition is actually waived; the university does not receive the money at all.

UK perspective
Unfortunately, self-funded PhD students are often regarded as ipso facto less suitable for an academic career than PhD students funded by a grant.
The reason for this is that, rightly or wrongly, an important criterion for many academic jobs involving research is "grant capture" or "research income". For an early-career academic applying for a job, grants obtained for/during PhD studies are valuable in demonstrating to a hiring panel that the candidate has a track-record of obtaining grants.
On the other hand, self-funded PhD students in the UK tend to end up with more teaching work, and it is arguable that having lots of teaching experience is more relevant than "research income" for an early-career academic, since a lot of early-career academic jobs in the UK are "teaching-only". Many universities are wont to informally discriminate in favour of self-funded students when it comes to allocating teaching work (by the way, this practice is probably illegal, and is morally wrong, since funded PhD students still need lots of teaching experience if they are to be taken seriously by the academic profession these days, so I would argue that the allocation of teaching work to PhD students should be determined solely on the basis of who would do the best job for a given topic/module/course [declaration of interest: I am a fully funded PhD student, permitted to do up to six hours' teaching per week under the terms of my funding, but have been given more like six hours per term, despite being far better qualified for many topics than the self-funded students who got allocated teaching work on such topics])

You might want to put a caveat that Oxbridge is an exception. Someone graduating from Oxford University unfunded is more likely to land a faculty job than someone graduating from Oxford Brooks that was fully funded.

This is poor advice, or at least extremely very field specific. Firstly, no one I've ever met, nor non of the hundreds of CVs i've looked at lists their PhD studentship as grant capture. This is, at least in part, because for most studentship it is the supervisor that applies for the money, and then finds a student, rather than the student applying for the money and then finding a supervisor. Because of this no one will know if you were funded or not. As far as teaching opportunities go - in STEM no one expects you to have teaching experience, and most early-career jobs are research only.


text:
Is studying at some universities relatively harder than the others?
While going through the lecture and study material on the internet, I came to realize that, in some universities in some countries (e.g. Hong Kong, New Zealand, etc) lecture materials are far more streamlined and easy to grasp.
For example, in the following universities, the teacher-supplied materials are easier to grasp as if they are prepared for Kindergarten students (in a good sense!):

this is a lecture note on stochastic processes at the University of Auckland
this is a lecture note on stochastic processes at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

On the other hand, in the following universities, the teacher-supplied materials are very hard to grasp:

this is a lecture note on stochastic processes at the Jagellonian University, Poland
this is a lecture note on stochastic processes at the Free University, Berlin, Germany

I have the following questions in this regard:

Why is this difference prevalent?
is it because of the salary level of the teachers or is it because of policy or something else?
if it is because of policy, why are their policy different?

The differences seem to result from presuppositions about the students' background. In part, I'm referring to background knowledge; for example, do they already understand induction or must it be explained? More important is background mind-set; do they think mathematically, so that precision and rigor are second-nature, or do careful proofs confuse them?

Lecture notes serve very different purposes to different instructors, it may be that one is designed for engagement with the lecture, but others are not

Hmm, you seem to be under the impression that (a) the quality or level of detail of lecture notes were consistent throughout a course (or university, or even country), (b) it were possible to assess the "difficulty" of a course by reading the lecture notes only, and (c) that "difficulty" (of lecture notes or of a course) were measurable in an objective and general way. But none of these three point is correct, in general. [...]

[...] Why (1) is not valid should be more or less clear. One possible explanation why (2) is not valid has been given in @AzorAhai-him-'s comment. Concerning (3): I just took a look at the various notes you linked. [...]

[...] Personally, I find the "exceptionally hard to understand" lecture notes from Stanford pretty clearly written (since at least everything is written down in a mathematically precise way), while I find the notes from Auckland very difficult to read (for instance, I find the "definition" of the binomial distribution barely understandable - the notes don't even specify in this definition which mathematical objects the various variables are supposed to denote). (The latter point is of course closely related to @AndreasBlass' comment.)

I was tempted, and then succumbed to that temptation, to point out that two mathematics books with the same title can be at drastically different levels -- Algebra by Don Blattmer and Myrl Shireman on the one hand, and Algebra by Serge Lang on the other hand.

Are you seriously asking whether some universities are better than others, in terms of how much you (are required or able to)  learn there?? That seems so obvious.

Comment because it's not exactly answering the same question: schools often have international GPA equivalencies due to different countries having different grade inflation and standards of what "83%" means as a grade, see eg https://www.sgs.utoronto.ca/admissions/admission-application-requirements/international-credentials-equivalencies/

At UPMC in Paris, many research level masters courses were so hard that most students failed. In contrast, in the U.S. I had the impression that courses are usually supposed to have some standard level of difficulty; if there is a deviation, it is typically because the course is relatively easy.

The question is ill-posed because you are not comparing like with like. However, a few important points: In Hong Kong, English is a second or third language for most students, the professors are paid two or three times more than in Germany or the U.S., with students expecting high quality support material, while at the same time not purchasing the textbooks. Also in countries like Germany, France, Poland, Hungary, even Russia, the level of math, on average, is higher than the U.S. or U.K. or H.K. (on average, of course M.I.T. or Princeton are something else).

@Peter-ReinstateMonica: I think the question is less about the amount you learn and more about the effort required to learn the same stuff. To which the answer is: Of course a good university will teach you more in less time and with less effort required. For example because their curriculum is well structured, their lecture notes are good, their professors are good, their equipment is good and so on.

@Michael Well, that some teachers are good at explaining stuff and others are bad (and that good universities attract well-teaching teachers) seems even more obvious. I'm really not getting it.

Not only between universities but also within the same university..I have lecturers which require genius level understanding while others which require only the most basic understanding for the same topic...

Surely this is like trying to decide if a book is easy to read based on if it has easy to understand Cliff's Notes.

(Answering title question)
Yes, studying at some universities is harder than others. This is because the curriculum is different, in turn because with better students one can also teach more difficult topics. That's why the same BSc degree from a top university is worth more than one from an obscure university, even neglecting the brand name of the university. Other factors could be that a lecturer at one university could simply be more familiar with the topic being taught than a lecturer at another university, and therefore teach it with more rigour.
There are also cultural differences. Here's a quote by Nobel Laureate Andre Geim:

[Andre Geim] started at the Moscow Technical University at the age of 17 and worked hard. He says that getting an undergraduate degree in Russia is much harder than in most western countries, because the course is more comprehensive and goes into greater depth. He says he may have learned a lot more than he really needed to, but the course was so tough that many people simply dropped out, or even cracked under the strain.
He says: 'The pressure to work and to study was so intense that it was not a rare thing for people to break and leave, and some of them ended up with everything from schizophrenia to depression to suicide. I would say that people work 10 times harder than in any UK university, even Oxford and Cambridge. Many of the things I learned I never used in my professional life, but I guess it helped develop some of my axial lobes. I used those lobes to replace the lobes I lost due to the amount of alcohol we needed to wipe out after the exams.'

One can imagine what would happen if one tried to raises standards without students who are able to deal with the material: the students would fail, many would leave the program, and the university would run a loss.

An excellent, accurate answer, completely in line with Soviet colleagues I’ve had. There wasn’t much accommodation academically for anything but the cream of the crop. National educational philosophies differ.

During my BSc/MSc alone there were 2 suicides and 1 homicide in my uni. You either make it or don't survive the system - unfortunately, sometimes quite literally. It's getting better but like elsewhere, tenured positions are scarce and people mass migrate from academia. Bologna process also changed the game quite a lot, we'll see... EDIT: the quote is bit confusing - to me, Moscow Technical University would likely be the Bauman university - Geim has studied at MIPT.

@Lodinn: But what fraction of students are (or were,  historically) actually looking for tenured positions in academia?  Indeed, given a stable population, any given professor only needs to train ONE student in the course of his career to keep faculty numbers constant.

@jamesqf MIT guys did a decent write-up on the topic I'd rather not oversimplify replying. It's definitely not 1:1, some unexpected things happen as well, but currently it could be a bit on the extreme end. In the US, this crisis is quite pronounced as the linked study estimates; in Russia, it's bit different - most of the people get education to go to the private sector and only ~10-16% of PhD students end up getting a degree, to the total of ~2-3k PhDs awarded yearly.

So we have plenty of MSc's but not a whole lot of PhDs and for most people academic career looks significantly bleaker than the private sector as compared to a generation or two (way back in Soviet era) before. One might think that this ensures little competition for faculty positions are not so much sought after: in part it's true, but the good positions are, and their numbers are dwindling by year.

@Lodinn: Looking at the intro to that MIT paper, it seems they're still starting from the premise that all, or nearly all, PhD candidates want academic positions.  I don't think that's true.  It certainly wasn't for me: I was much more interested in lucrative and/or interesting jobs in research labs or industry.

@jamesqf Maybe 1/7 stays in academia while of the remaining 3/7 it was the plan all along to move to the private sector, who knows. Point is, they can't stay even if they wanted to. I'd imagine people who want to follow the private sector path to just go there not "wasting" years doing a PhD. It probably differs by country a lot, but this study I've linked elsewhere recently has some more interesting data. In particular, seemingly about half of PhDs there give or take are trying to stay in academia after graduation.

And in Russia, people often would work in the industry and get a PhD way after, being in their 40s or 50s; getting a BSc/MSc with no intention to stay in academia, however, is ubiquitous. Luckily, we have more lax universities just for that...

@Lodinn: At least in the US, BS->MS->PhD does not need to be a continuous process.  You might get your BS, work in industry for years (perhaps taking a course or two in your spare time), realize you're in a position to finish the MS, work more and then decide to do a PhD.  I knew at least two multi-millionaires who were working on PhDs.  It's one way to keep your brain from going stale once you no longer have to worry about making a living :-)

Note that the notes from the University of Auckland seem to be for an undergraduate course (Bachelor's Degree), while the notes for Stanford are from a graduate course (Master's and Doctoral students). It doesn't seem surpising to me that the undergraduate notes are easier to grasp. Graduate courses are generally going to assume more background and more effort.

These two happen to be the only two I glanced at, and what you said seemed perfectly obvious to me. The Auckland notes seem to require not much more than (and maybe not even more than) roughly 2 semesters of a U.S. elementary calculus sequence (differential and integral calculus). Even mathematical induction is explained with examples in one place, at a level one might even see in a precalculus course. The Stanford notes are clearly for a course one would expect students to have studied some graduate level measure and integration theory, several years beyond calculus.

Another issue is that there are different courses at the undergraduate level on the same topics, even within the same university.  E.g., at my university, in the math department we have 2 intro statistics courses---one is more theoretical and the other more applied---and a number of other departments have their own statistics courses, which tend to be even "easier" (less mathematical) than the math department's applied course.

As someone who has studied the same course at multiple different universities, I can tell you that quality of teaching materials varies vastly between universities and departments even for similar programmes. I reckon you could probably quarter the amount of work students need to put in to achieve a degree (or 4x the amount you teach them) if you picked the best course notes from each university and compiled them into one program.

@NicoBurns: Your last sentence seems like a strong exaggeration to me. Just in order to talk about a concrete example: Both universities I've been employed with so far offer a three years BSc programm and a two years MSc programm in mathematics, and no doubt there is a considerable variation of teaching quality even within each of these programs. One can certainly get a very solid maths education at both of these university, though not anything "top-notch". [...]

[...] But no matter which teaching materials were used, there is zero chance that any significant number of students would be able to learn the contents from the (in total 5 years) BSc + MSc programs at one of these universities in, say 1.5 years. One of the reasons for this is that by far the most time when studying mathematics is spent on understanding things for oneself - good teaching materials will certainly help, but they can't change the fact that the vast majority of the "thinking effort" still has to be done by the students themselves, and cannot be abbridged by good materials.

To answer the question in the title: yes, studying at some universities is harder than others
My answer is more a comparison of universities within the USA as opposed to around the world; nonetheless from my experience how challenging a university/department/program is depends on several factors:

How large/reputed the department is
How competitive the department is (if the bar to get in the program is higher, the department may make the classes more challenging to suit the students in that department; if you were trying to transfer in or didn't start out with much experience, the department made the "weed out" classes much harder compared to the intro classes at another university)
The expertise of faculty in their fields (although this may generally apply more to their research, several faculty in my undergraduate department designed and taught electives or special topics courses that provided perspective one may not be able to gain from a standard upper-division course (one example being a cloud computing course that I took in my senior year which was one of the most challenging courses I took but gave me new perspective as to what is involved in software development)
How much emphasis is placed on undergraduate research as opposed to just taking courses (my department fell into the latter, with not as much opportunity for undergraduate research outside of finding REU's as opposed to other universities which may take ugrad research more seriously)

I'm not sure that salary would play such a role into this.  Instructors still have their own teaching styles, and the difficulty of a course at a university will largely depend on their teaching style.  Occasionally, at the "weed out" level in a competitive university, certain policies may dictate how a course is to be taught or graded, but this is generally for required courses, if not just weed out courses, rather than upper-division electives from my experience.
Also from a graduate school or even job-searching perspective, companies and graduate schools know that not all departments are equal.  It's been said before that a 3.3 GPA from a very good school is just as good if not better than a 4.0 from a lesser school.

I think a very important factor is:

What is the teacher-supplied materials for?

Sometimes it is:

To replace the teaching for students who did not turn turn up
Or to get the students thinking about the subject before the teaching
Or to remind students of the important details, so the students don't need to take notes so can understand the background information that is covered in the teaching
Or even because the person doing the teaching can't be trusted to explain it.

Broadly speaking, there are three main factors affecting how difficult it is to study at university:

The student's prior knowledge and competencies before arriving at university. If all else is equal, a student who is already better at their subject will have an easier time studying the course.
The level of knowledge and competencies the student is expected to attain in order to successfully complete their course. If all else is equal, harder exams at the end of the course will make for a course which is harder to study for.
The level and quality of support the university provides for students to achieve the desired learning outcomes. If all else is equal, a student who receives more effective teaching will find the course easier to study than a student who studies the same course but receives less effective teaching.

All three of these factors vary widely even within the same country. Some examples from just Mathematics at universities in England:

Different universities have different entry requirements for their courses. For instance, students applying to Cambridge University must receive a top grade at A-Level Mathematics and also do sufficiently well on the the even more challenging STEP exams to achieve their place on the course, whereas students may enter other universities with lower grades and no additional entrance exams.
The syllabuses at different universities are not intentionally aligned with each other, so sometimes it is very clear that the requirements are at a different level. For instance, the exact same question "state and prove the orbit-stabilizer theorem" occurred on a first-year exam at one university and on a final-year exam at a different university.
The quality of teaching can vary wildly even between different lecturers at the same university. When I studied abstract algebra, the lecturer assigned to teach the module had such a reputation for incomprehensibility, that another lecturer voluntarily taught the whole module unofficially on the side, because he didn't want students to later take his more advanced module without a good understanding of abstract algebra.

It's of course true that these factors can be expected to cancel out somewhat, particularly universities with higher entrance requirements will tend to have a more advanced syllabus. But overall there are still very often big differences between universities.

Much of it also depends on the professor. A tenured professor can sometimes be a worse teacher than a TA if the TA has focused on making improvements to their teaching style (or vice-versa). I've had some professors at community colleges who were better than those at state schools, and even within departments I had some professors that were great teachers, and others where Khan Academy taught me 10x more than the professor.

@RobinClower Yep, that's the third one on my list. Without a doubt, what you describe is not uncommon.

Both instructional quality and difficulty vary considerably among universities. I don't know how it works worldwide, but the Publish or Perish paradigm at research universities in the United States and the UK (maybe Canada, too?) puts pressure on university professors to publish large numbers of papers in academic journals. Little emphasis is placed on teaching.
I personally attended research universities through Ph.D. and I can say that on the whole, I was disappointed with the instruction I received. And I got better instruction from the older professors who already had tenure than the younger professors who were trying to get tenure.
What I don't know is if instruction tends to be better at non research universities. One hypothesis is that at these institutions, professors are judged more on quality of instruction than quantity of published papers.

Not all universities have equally strong programs.
as to course material, this depends on a lot of factors, most obviously the instructor and the level of preparation of the students.  Teaching philosophies and learning outcomes are also different: if you take a grad course in a department which is research-active in the area as a prerequisite for a thesis or a project, it will likely be more technical than if the focus of the unit is on another topic.  It may also depend if the course is required or an elective.  It may depend on the total number of contact hours, the availability of the instructor after class, etc.
Of course the best set of notes is the one you like best.

In addition to the other answers, there is also the cultural aspect.
France has an obsession for maths that goes beyond reason. You can have up to 10 hours per week of maths in high school, for people who will be then going to study finance where their needs are hardly above basic arithmetics (but you still need to show proficiency in math at a truly advanced level).
If this was not bad enough, the "purity" aspect is primordial, so when students are introduced to new concepts, they get a big fatty definition first, some time to recover, and then four weeks later the actually sensible way to approach the topic.
This is one of the possible reasons that some topics may be much more difficult in some countries, with the equivalent curriculum.

As a graduate teaching assistant at one state university in the USA, my answer is not necessarily reflective of all universities. Instructors mainly professors and also teaching assistants with the support of the course instructor have the leverage to create new courses and edit courses. The undergraduate program and the department stipulates certain knowledge that is supposed to be taught, it is the responsibility of the instructor to teach this information. However, how the information is taught is up to the instructor.
Instructors can create new courses. There is one instructor in the Biochemistry department of my institution who created a new elective course the "Biochemistry of Beer". He teaches students how to brew beer, teaching the students about the enzymes involved in the production of beer and the enzymes involved in the metabolism of beer. This is a lab course so the students get to actually make beer. The department is happy about this because the cost of running the lab is cheap compared to running a lot of other teaching labs, the department is also happy because the students are learning enzymology by brewing beer, and this fulfills one of the professor's teaching obligations and it is fun for him.
I am a graduate teaching assistant and my course instructor allows me revamp courses. I can teach really advanced modules in the course so long as I present the information simply. I have written computer programs to show the practical application of advanced statistics concepts that would otherwise not be taught in the biochemistry major. The biochemistry program is happy that I am teaching the students advanced applied statistics concepts that they couldn't figure out how to teach, the students are happy because my computer programs make understanding the statistics concepts easy to grasp, I am happy because my employment is more secure because now the program has evidence that I am a good instructor so they would rank me higher among grad students competing for Teaching Assistanceship positions.
Also, if you checkout for example the journal of biological education, the journal of chemical education, the journal of visualized experiments you will find creative experiments developed by instructors to teach undergrads. Most of the articles in these journals are original experiments that are cost effective and easy to implement in a lab setting.
Also at my undergrad university, there was a course called Biochemistry II. We are supposed to learn about stuff like amino acid biosynthesis, but the course instructor that year instead taught us strictly about the business of biochemistry. The course instructor got terrible reviews at the end of the semester, but he wasn't too sad because he started his own company. So instructors do need to teach students certain fundamental skills in their major.

Of course it is absolutely possible, but universities may a be way too coarse level to look at this issue.
There may be large differences even between different faculties of the same university or even between individual departments within the same faculty (that will mostly concern graduate students only).
At general universities the faculties could bee to different to make any comparison meaningful (everyone expects the math for physicists, economists, social scientists, philosophs... to be different) but at technically oriented universities you will have all faculties technically oriented, all teaching introductory and more advanced mathematics but may well have different level of difficulty.
Alas, even the same courses might be taught at different levels. I know that at the Czech Technical University you can choose between A-level math and B-level math, at least at the faculties I have som knowledge about. You can only get into some specializations (like mathematical physics, mathematical modelling,...) with the harder A-level.
There are many factors that determine the difficulty and level of a course and the university itself is just on of them and by far not the most important one.

Yes and no.
If the admissions process functioned like a frictionless marketplace, everybody sh/would end up at a place that is subjectively as challenging to them as it is to everyone else at all other places.
Of course in reality there are many factors that introduce "friction."


text:
Is improving a simple algorithm without beating the state of the art still publishable?
In a particular field there are two algorithms being used:

Algorithm Simple: you understand it in five minutes, you can implement it in fifteen.
Algorithm State of the Art (SOA): requires very specific mathematical knowledge to understand and is hard to code. Beats Simple by a big margin, both in terms of speed and results.

However Simple is more popular because of its simplicity and not-so-bad results. Simple has 130 citations, SOA has 80. In 2016 Simple had 20 citations, SOA 17.
While trying to use the Simple paper, our results were so bad we spent more than a week looking for a bug in our implementation. Finally, we discovered a one line change that makes it work much better, improving a mathematical approximation in the Simple paper that is easily overlooked. After reviewing recent literature, it seems this is not known (we can reproduce recent papers).
We can prove that the one line change is statistically better and equally fast as Simple but statistically worse and slower than SOA. We also have a 5-line-change improvement which makes it both better and faster than Simple, worse results than SOA but slightly (10–20%) faster than SOA.
What should we do? Since we are not beating SOA's results and it is a one line change it may be hard to publish, but it is clearly something people in the field would profit from.
Edit: some have noted it's similar to this question. There are two differences:

We are not coming up with a different algorithm, just making a small modification.
On the other hand we are a simpler algorithm than SOA, and there's value in it. In particular the 1-line change is as simple as the Simple algorithm and the 5-line change is still much simpler than the SOA algorithm.

Not having done so myself, but I hope that's publishable (i.e., it sounds like people should have that available).

Related: Can I write a paper on a method that is novel but yields similar results compared to existing methods?

I can't really add enough for a full answer, but I'd say it's worth publishing... The simple case is used, having a better version would be good AND the way it's improved might be educational for others.

There are certainly examples in the "standard" numerical algorithms for optimization, where the difference between a "good" and "bad" version of the algorithm is no more than a re-arrangement of the same mathematical equation, to reduce the effect of rounding errors accumulating over several iterations in a rather non-obvious way. Publishing the reason why your version is better may be a valuable contribution to the subject, however trivial the change to the code might look.

A good idea is to establish that it works better than Simple on a representative range of problems. Then, simplicity may be an argument for publication.

Also, there is the following philosophical argument as to why this should be publishable: suppose that Simple+ImprovementA+ImprovementB beats SOA. If the person who discovers ImprovementA buries it in a drawer instead of publishing it, we will never know until someone randomly rediscovers both ImprovementA and ImprovementB at the same time, which is much less lilkely.

Am I correct in assuming that both of your versions are still much simpler to understand and implement than the SOA?

You spent a week debugging the SIMPLE algorithm and you found a 5-line change that makes it work MUCH BETTER.  Why are you so confident that your algorithm is correct?

Well if it matches SOA, then maybe it has some Okham value.

See How inefficient can a sort algorithm be? and also Sorting the Slow Way: An Analysis of Perversely
Awful Randomized Sorting Algorithms.

Your claim your new result is faster than the state-of-the-art-for-accuracy.  Well, now there are two state-of-the-art algorithms, the existing one for accuracy and your modified Simple, for speed.

@Ray yes, the 1-line change is just multiplying some quantity by a magical number, the 5-line change is still much simpler than SOA and easy to understand if you understand the Simple algorithm

@emory it didn't work well for our application, but the same code was able to reproduce the results on the original paper. The modification gives other results, you can then perform a t-test to show that they are statistically better than the original.

Sure this is publishable, but the real question is where?
The applied mathematical community, especially the one in which the state of the art methods are developed will probably not see the improvement of the simple algorithm as worth publishing in their venues. Why should they? They know that there is something better which they understand well. In fact, I know of at least one journal which states explicitly that algorithms published there need to beat the state of the art to be suited for them. But the community of practitioners who may be struggling with the nuts and bolts of the state of the art method and often fall back to use the simple method may be impressed.
So, choose you publication venue right and things should go well.

One problem the referees of the publications the “community of practitioners” read, are likely to be the experts that can understand the state of the art….

I'm not familiar with the mathematical community, but in other communities a possibility would be that of submitting a short communication, or equivalent.

Computer science is the one area where anything less than an order if magnitude improvement is often considered uninteresting...

I would check out a "letters" track of a conference (e.g., "Operations Research Letters". Usually these are shorter papers for this type of thing.

Adding to @Dirk's fine answer:

If you publish free-license code rather than just an algorithm/pseudo-code - that's a publishable novelty.
If your analysis of Simple is not merely an application of the analysis used to obtain SOA, then this in itself is publishable unless entirely trivial; I would also look into whether the same 'trick' can be applied in other settings, which would allow for a paper on "Improving X, Y and Z by frobincating the bar" and the Simple imporvement would only be a part of it.
Simple-to-implement algorithms can sometimes beat asymptotically-better-but-heavy algorithms under various constraints of various kinds, such as limited asymptotic space complexity, no randomness, switching from average case to worst case, or even not having enough memory to store the program code, requiring very compact implementations (e.g. in hardware) and no dependence on large libraries. Perhaps you could explore that.

frobincate (sic.) was a new word to me. In case it is so to others as well, here's a reference.

As a civil engineer who develops mathematical models, I publish this sort of result fairly regularly. In my field, we focus on models that are 'good enough' and can be adopted and adapted quickly easily. Quickly means we can make more profit on future jobs, and easily means less chance of mistakes / easier for reviewers to check the working.
We would tend to take this sort of thing to conferences rather than scientific journals.
Journals tend to need the greatest, newest and best. At conferences (specifically, those I'm familiar with that are attended by civil engineers), people are often interested in what is practical that they can use tomorrow.
So, I'd recommend submitting a paper to a relevant conference describing the usual problem and how you've improved a common method for solving it. The people who use the simple method will be pleased to attend your talk. You won't be lauded as the next Einstein, but your work will still be referencable in the conference proceedings, and you'll be able to put it in your CV.

Expanding on the issue of where to publish, you should also consider in what format.  For example, IEEE has several "Letters" (I seem to recall an "Information Processing Letters") that tend to be short (4-page) papers that could welcome something like what you describe.
Also, some conferences (and journals) welcome also position papers that, among other things, can challenge commonly accepted paradigms (what you describe could fit into this --- you're challenging the perception of not-so-good performance of the simple algorithm).
Lastly --- some conferences and journals welcome short papers, where there is novelty but not necessarily substantial amounts of new ideas or analysis or experimental results.

Some journals call them "short communications" as well.

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text:
What does "intended date of enrollment" mean when registering for the GRE?
I am trying to register for the GRE this fall and I'm confused by what is meant by "intended date of enrollment" here.

Note - these questions are there so that the company running the GRE can sell your information to graduate schools who buy this information to advertise to potential students.  They aren't actually necessary for you to take the GRE.  I would advocate for people to answer randomly.

Could you clarify what you found confusing? Granted I'm a native speaker, but the meaning seems quite clear. What possible meanings are you torn between?

@Nobody Using a season like "fall 2024" works in the northern hemisphere. :)

To summarize and make a formal answer:
The intended date of enrollment is a future date at which you hope to begin study. In giving a date, take account of the fact that applications take time to process and some places have fairly definite (published) application deadlines for future enrollment.
At the moment, August 2023, and in the US, an intended date of Sept 2024 would be reasonable, or any date thereafter. That assumes that you are ready to begin the application process soon.


text:
Do I cite introductory material in a subject that helped me indirectly?
I am writing my undergrad Bachelor's thesis in computational physics where I do C++ programming. In some C++ books, I read some things that were quite useful during programming, but they do not have a direct connection to the physics.
Since I was proficient with LaTeX before I started the thesis, I do not see a point in adding anything about that in the references. That is rather a skill than specific facts, and I did not really read about it during my research.
Another thing are resources that I consult for an introduction into a topic when I do not understand something in a paper. After reading that introduction material, I often understand the paper to a sufficient extent. When I then write the text, I think I could get by by only referencing the paper since it contains virtually everything needed. But it also seems wrong to omit that I read introduction material.

Should I cite sources like the C++ book?
Should I cite introduction material like Wikipedia, websites or easy books?

Well, my BS thesis included thanks to Gygax for giving me something to kill when I needed to, and to the states of Alaska and Confusion for no reason whatsoever....

To quote a source is to copy material from it with acknowledgment. You probably mean "Should I cite".

Do not quote Wikipedia.

@jakebeal likewise, this also isn't really about Wikipedia

You don't typically cite material that helps you understand a topic. You cite material that you explicitly use in a paper. So source books like a C++ book don't need to be cited unless you're using an unusual and explicit construction mentioned in one of those books. For example, there's a technique to draw a geometric object using GPUs that was first mentioned in an graphics programming textbook: people using the technique will cite that textbook.
Wikipedia is not supposed to be a repository of original material, so if you found something on wikipedia then there's likely to be an original source that Wikipedia should cite and that you should as well (once you verify it).
For a website it's a similar principle. If the website contains code that you're using, then cite it (or better yet, cite the associated material that the code authors might suggest you cite instead). But if the website merely contains expository material that helps understanding, then you don't cite it.

I think that is the essence: “You cite material that you explicitly use in a paper.”. So when I would take some algorithm out of the “Numerical Recipes” book, I'd cite that, if I brushed up on object-oriented programming, I did not really quote anything from that book.

The caveat to this is: you do not need to cite general knowledge within your field. However, you would need to cite material from other disciplines that might be considered "standard knowledge" in their field, but is otherwise foreign to your own.

I agree with Suresh, There could possible be multiple material/sources which has indirectly inspired you while writing your paper but unless explicitly mentioned, you need not cite all of those sources. But good supplementary reads can always be mentioned.

As Suresh says, you cite the material directly used. If you also cited everything that helped you understand it, you'd be on an endless trail. You wouldn't have been able to understand the introductory C++ book if you didn't already understand X, Y and Z and their introductory books and, eventually, you'll be citing your parents and primary school teachers for teaching you how to read, and the sources they used to learn how to teach people how to read and... :-)

"You don't typically cite material that helps you understand a topic." I would add that it's often good to cite material that helps a reader understand a topic, particularly if that topic is not part of the core "wisdom" of the target audience.

To add to Suresh's answer, I agree that it is not necessary to cite books, etc, that gave you background information but weren't directly used in your work.  There's no general rule that "you must cite everything you read".  However, if you found a source particularly helpful, it might be nice to give a citation to share it with the reader.  This is often phrased like "A useful introduction to this topic can be found in [3]."

So to sum up, you cannot cite less than the minimum resources required to reconstruct your work, but you are invited to cite more on what you want to share to the readers

My university gives students a document of guidelines for planning, organising and formatting their dissertation. It addresses this question, and I think their answer is pretty good. This is basically what it says:
Your references and citations should contain anything you've quoted directly, anything you've used a figure or diagram from, and anything you've referred in the text to for a fact, assertion, statistic, etc. Any time you state something that's not blindingly  obvious from first principles or the product of your own work, cite where you got it from. (I had a lecturer tell us to imagine we're being followed around by one of those Wikipedia users who goes around sticking [citation needed] on everything.)
If there are other sources that you haven't used directly but still feel would be valuable to anyone attempting to understand or replicate your work, anything you made significant use of while doing the work that didn't make it into your citations for some reason, or anything you read to help your understanding of the topic in order to carry out the work, you can add a separate bibliography section, which lists those works.
As far as I'm aware, the distinction between "references" and "bibliography" is well-understood in the academic community, but you could always drop in a line or two at the top of each to explain if you feel it would help your audience.

The section you call "bibliography" might also be titled "Further reading", which I think should avoid all confusion.

"A reference list, generally, contains only sources you have cited in-text in your assignment. A bibliography, generally, is a list of all the sources you have used. This means, in addition to listing the sources you cited in-text, you also list resources that you read or referred to generate your ideas about the topic." https://studenthelp.secure.griffith.edu.au/app/answers/detail/a_id/1676/~/what-is-the-difference-between-a-reference-list-and-a-bibliography%3F

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text:
Funding opportunities as a guest researcher in the US
I have an opportunity for a monthlong stay this summer in a laboratory in the US. I am looking for funding sources that would be available for such a stay.
Looking at the NSF website, I couldn't find anything.
Does anybody know of any opportunities?

Did you also check if there are funding opportunities at your home institution?

Sometimes there are funded exchange agreements between specific pairs of countries.


text:
How can I find out if a student’s thesis is just the translation from his native language (Spanish) to English?
One of my student’s MA thesis is very well done. I know him and I worked with him enough to notice that something is going on. I talked to him and he always seemed confused about what he was doing and he did not seem to know the source so well.
Is it possible that he just translated and paraphrased another thesis from his native language, which is Spanish? How can I find it out?
The thesis contains citations and everything but it’s too accurate and I have some doubts.

"Too accurate." What does that mean?

I talked to him and he always seemed confused about what he was doing and he did not seem to know the source so well.. I know it is not ethical but he gave me reasons more than once to doubt about him.. how possible is that international students taking advantage of the native language do something like copying from another thesis done in their own language?

Your question suggests that you are not sure which of the following is true:

Your student worked hard and produced an excellent thesis
Your student plagiarised a thesis from another language

In either case, this warrants extra attention from you.
The first step would be to discuss the work with him further. If he was able to discuss said work intelligently, this would be an indication that he did write the thesis. However, you said that you spoke to him, and he seemed confused about what he was doing, which raises legitimate suspicions.
To find out whether he can (and has) produced good written work, but finds it hard to discuss said work in person, you can ask him to edit his written work. Unless the thesis is 100% perfect in every way, you can identify a potential area of improvement that should not place an undue burden on the student. For example, you can ask him/her to

add some extra detail to one section
compare to another related work in the literature review section
etc.

If the student did the work and independently produced a great thesis, this is positive attention that will help improve the work. If the student did not do the work, it will become evident when he tries to improve it following your suggestions.
Of course, if you know someone who speaks the student's language and who can be counted on to keep your request quiet, you can (without sharing the student's name) ask him/her to search the web in the student's language for publicly available theses on the subject, and see if a match turns up.

I'm just adding a small idea which was not contained in the other answers.
If his work contains references, you might try to check which articles in the student's language have the same or similar references.
I'm not aware of a tool that automates this process, but you could use e.g. Google Scholar to get a list of all works which reference a particular source. Add those to a list. Repeat for every reference and note down the repetitions of each item.
Finally, you will have a (hopefully not too long) list of works with similar references. Those with the highest count are your best bet to check.
Obviously, more 'obscure' references are more useful in this process, while very widely cited sources add no value and can be omitted. If the work only cites widespread sources, this 'fingerprinting' approach is unmanageable without writing an appropriate automation tool first.

It is not unethical  "to be suspicious on your student because he has done his job very well." It is called having a reasonable doubt. The student obviously has not demonstrated an appropriate intellectual level during the course. That is why we have Turnitin. Nothing unethical about it.

However, Turnitin wouldn't be able to determine whether this was a translation into English of someone else's work.

Apparently, the professor's concern is that the student's "brilliant" thesis is too far out of line with his other work. It's possible, of course, that this student excels at one academic aspect, i.e. prepared writing. But the possibility ought to be considered that the student hired a "professional" to do his work for him.
The first thing the professor should do is try to get a sample of the student's other writing. The most obvious source is an in-class test (not a take home). Of course it will be less polished than a thesis, but even so, there should be clear badges of common authorship. Otherwise, the professor might even ask to see one of the student's other papers. Perhaps this could be co-ordinated with one of the student's other professors.
Perhaps the best possibility is to consult an expert in "Spanish," and specifically the "kind" of Spanish where the student comes from. Such an expert would know how a "native" would likely translate his sentences into English, and whether it is at least possible that the translation came from him, or from a "different" Spanish speaker. Perhaps the Spanish expert can also quiz the student in Spanish to see if he understands the material in his native language to the degree implied by his submitted thesis.


text:
MSc in mathematics from MChem?
I was wondering is it possible to study an MSc in applied mathematics with a background of a masters in chemistry? I have an absolute passion for mathematics and would love the opportunity to study a single year masters.
Would I be given the opportunity to take the entrance exams without formal training? Or would I be discounted instantly?
I have read extensively into the content of the course I have in mind including looking at all their past papers.
I understand it is going to be an individual basis depending on the university and my grades but wanted to hear has someone done or heard of anything similar?

In what country were you thinking of applying? In the US, graduate programs typically do not have entrance exams. Admissions are decided mainly on the basis of grades and recommendations. There is the GRE, but it usually has only a minor effect on the admission decision. So if you don't have prior coursework preparing you for the program, you won't be admitted.

@NateEldredge I am looking at a course in the UK, and it does have an admissions exam to the programme, my main question is would they allow me to sit the entrance exam, would there be any scope for admission if I were to do alright on it, or is it a discipline that people can (albeit rarely) switch into. The course is rather involved, but I am well aware of its content.

Just from a quick look at a few applied MSc programs, there are a number of classes that would be difficult to complete without serious background in mathematics: classes like partial differential equations, applied algebra, probability theory and combinatorial algorithms were a few that showed up in most that I doubt you could manage without rigorous undergraduate preparation. However, if you have taken classes to prepare you for this (like a minor as an undergraduate), or the MSc you have in mind is less rigorous, or you are willing to devote a year or so to prepare on your own, I fail to see why they would refuse you to take the entrance exam. At least in the US, a good subject score on the math GREs would show the university that while you have a less traditional background, you can still do well in the program.
Basically, it comes down to how mathematically rigorous the program is and how strong your math background is. Liking math is unfortunately not enough to pass a class on PDEs. You would probably need to provide some evidence in your application that you have a sufficient math background, and taking a standardized exam with a good score, even if it is not required in the country you are applying, would be one way to do so.

Thank you for your answer, you have given me a lot to think about and encouragement for the future! :)

@RedPen I'm in grad school doing a PhD in math myself, so I think it's a great choice, as long as you have the necessary background :)

My experience is that students with bachelors degrees in the physical sciences and engineering often work out well in our graduate program in applied mathematics.  The key factor is that students need to have at least the equivalent of a strong minor in mathematics (including undergraduate courses in ordinary and partial differential equations, vector calculus, probability and statistics, linear algebra, and analysis.)  Students in math intensive majors like physics and electrical engineering often take many of these courses anyway, so the additional course work required to be prepared for graduate study in applied mathematics may not be that much.
If you don't have this undergraduate mathematics background, then you will probably have to take some or all of these courses before you can be admitted into a graduate program.


text:
"Anomalous citation patterns" as exclusion criteria in Journal Citation Reports (aka Impact Factor)
Can someone explain how these "anomalous citation patterns" are identified in JCR and what they mean exactly? They sound like the academic version of link farms that Google has to fight against.

It is referring to practices such as citation rings (e.g. this account), excessive self citations within a journal or other malpractices to boost the impact factor of a journal or a group of journals.
These three articles will give you some more background and examples:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/420794.article
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/06/record-number-of-journals-banned-for-boosting-impact-factor-with-self-citations.html
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/06/29/citation-cartel-journals-denied-2011-impact-factor/

I don't know if the exact algorith used my Thomson-Reuters to detect “Anomalous citation patterns” has been officially published. However, they look at things like change in impact factor between years (which can lead to false-positives) and the citation networks between journals. As you note, the practice is very similar to link farming.
This quote, from another Nature article on a Brazilian citation cartel, offers some information on how Thomson-Reuters work to detect malpractices:

Marie McVeigh, who leads Journal Citation Reports, Thomson Reuters’ annual report of journal citation patterns and impact factors, says that the firm does not assume intent in the patterns it sees. “We just analyse data, and see where the impact factor, due to this unusual concentration of citations, is not a reflection of the journal’s citation in the broader literature. Until we can algorithmically measure motive, we are just going to measure citations.” She says that because citation stacking is only a problem if it excessively distorts journal rank, only four Brazilian journals, and not all of those that Rocha-e-Silva says participated in the arrangement, have had their impact factors suspended.

Wow, a non-soapbox, substantiated answer on such a question. Give this user a cookie.

@CapeCode I'm aiming for a soapbox full of cookies.


text:
What to name a section at the end of thesis containing original material for future development?
I have written my master thesis. The last chapter is "Summary and Conclusions". After this chapter which ends the thesis, I want to add a specific note of my own. It is a new idea which needs lengthy explanation and it does not directly relate to the contents of the thesis. It is a new algorithm which is not used in the thesis but I want to introduce this algorithm for future development of the field.
I want to know under which section I have to write it. Should I write it as an appendix? Thanks in advance.

It sounds a question for your thesis advisor.

If it does not relate to the thesis, why do you want to include it?

@TobiasKildetoft thanks for your reply. I have edited the question. I have mentioned that it is not dircetly related. It is a new algorithm which is not used in the thesis but I want to introduce this algorithm for future development of the field.

If it's related to the ideas in the theses, then it sounds like a "future directions" subjection in "Summary and Conclusions."
If it's really not related at all, then it should go in a different paper.

The calculations in the thesis are based on old algorithms. This section which I want to add introduces a new algorithm which is not used through out the thesis and no one else has done any calculation with this aforementioned algorithm. Therefore I cannot include it in the  main body of the thesis, since I cannot site to any published work.

@Yousof Then it definitely sounds like "future directions" to me.