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Hide information from my CV?
I'm preparing my application to send it to my dream university (it's located in Germany), and my problem is:
Since I'm coming from a country that facing civil war (Syria), I had real troubles in high school (no electricity power and such things), so I had poor results,So I had entered college I don't like (I want to study CS) also I fall in some troubles with my classmates because I came from a different culture, the general atmosphere was not friendly at all, studying with all that was very hard for me, so I have poor results again, after all I take my decision I left the college and retake the high school exam and I have got ~80%.
So the question is: should I mention that I have 2 high school certificates and I got out the college with poor results or just mention my second high school certificate, is that ethical? and is that will effect on my new university decision?
Just to get the whole picture : I had studied hardly for my second high school exam and I lost a lot of time with no academic results, in other hand I'm a good programmer, book worm, research enthusiasm, I want to continue my studies to get the PhD, I have industry experience in the field, and working on some projects as a volunteer to help my community.
I'm in bad situation and my academic future is depends on what to do now, so any advice are welcome.
Edit (clarification): I'm going as undergraduate student.

Hiding information in your CV that is later discovered gives them ground to terminate you after you enter the program.

Frankly this is not a problem, because they won't know if I don't mention it, my problem is: what to do from ethically point (and why)?, and how this will effect the university decision (what they think about me)?

@fredsbend the university that I'm applying for doesn't have such kind of programs, but yes what I think I need is "entrance awards", but with a look to my financial situation I don't need scholarship, I like to let it to somebody really need it.

This may vary with culture (I'm not sure how Germany views such things).  In the United States, your story about overcoming adversity and persevering may be very compelling to the admissions committee.  Universities rarely select only the best candidates based on grades.  They give extra consideration to those that may have had a tough time early on because of circumstances beyond their control.  So it may actually help you to talk about your history and not to hide it.

I would say that hiding information in anything of this nature - a CV, a resume, and so on - is always suspicious and usually unethical.
I would provide a brief explanation in your personal statement.  Given it has to do with a situation that is unquestionably out of your control, some universities might forgive less-than-exemplary marks.
Getting a masters degree before a PhD could improve your situation further - in this way, you can further prove yourself as a good programmer and book worm who wants to do research.  Naturally the CS field wants more than just these traits, but you seem willing to learn.
Edit: If you're going for an undergraduate degree, all the better!  Simply proving your aptitude should be sufficient.

Thank you, what I'm really worried about is proving my aptitude (and get a chance to do that), I think ~80% doesn't mean much for universities with high rates of applications.
my second question was:
Is mention my previous experience in education in CV make the things better or not? from technical point.

I believe Mark, above, gave you a good answer on this point.  Your previous experiences may matter more or less depending on the school and how forthright you are about them.

Whether or not you choose to hide/omit something is up to you and, in my opinion, unless it is pertinent or explicitly asked not unethical. That being said, you must be aware of a few things, firstly they may at some point in time discover your omitting. What do you think will be their reaction? Mind you this could have AFTER graduation, perhaps when you've won some prestigious award and finally the truth come to light, what do you think would happen and are you ok with that scenario? Secondly, don't assume what they will say or how they will react to information you have or have not given them. You never know how somebody will react until you tell them and it may well work in your favor.

In Germany you are required to give information on all previous schooling. Failing to do so can cause you to lose any degrees earned if it is discovered (and this applies to any level -- undergraduate or graduate). Be honest, and explain the problem in an additional letter.


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Is there a way to submit privately to claim intellectual property
Hypothetically, if I had an idea to improve an algorithm/theorem but

I wasn't sure it was correct, or
I wasn't sure it was significant or meaningful or hasn't already been published in a different form/somewhere else already or wasn't sure where to submit something like this .

is there somewhere I could submit a manuscript first privately to secure any intellectual property rights while I think about whether it is worth submitting or trying to do some more work on this and try to understand the field a bit better?

Does this answer your question? Pre-print service like Arxiv but with private option, so I can correct my mistakes without publicly advertising my mistakes?

Answer's here: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/151682/13240

Please note that this does not substitute proper legal advice. In the US, I believe that patent protection falls under the 'first inventor to file' rule. So it is not relevant who the first inventor is, but who the first inventor is who files for patent protection. So if you want to claim IP protection in the US then the only relevant place to file is at the USPTO. This is indeed private at first, since patents are made public a year after filing.
Also, please note the publishing your data before filing for a patent may constitute 'prior art', which could mean that any future attempt at filing a patent in the US would be denied.
The safest (and possibly only) option for you to protect the IP for your idea is to file for (and get awarded) a patent.
Renewed disclaimer: This constitutes my personal opinion and should not be taken as legal advice.

Indeed, the US has not been first to invent for some time now...

Just for clarification: "prior art" is still a criterion to invalidate a claim for the USPTO, right? "first to file" just means that the USPTO does not have to resolve who first invented something (e.g. via lab books etc.), do I understand that correctly? But if something is public, it cannot be patented, or does "first to file" override even that?

It is my understanding @CaptainEmacs that you can 'prior art' yourself by publishing your work before patenting it. So in fact if the OP wants to protect their IP they would need to be really careful in where and how to 'publish'. Of course, the OP was asking where to 'submit [...] privately'--which wouldn't be prior art, but then again, it would also not protect IP either.

My question was confusing, apologies, so I'll try again: assuming A has published technique, but B is first to file this technique. Does B get the patent because A didn't file anything? I would assume not, but haven't yet fully grokked the "first to file" principle, that's why I am asking.

I see. And I believe the general answer is that B gets the patent and A gets nothing. I also believe that this is at the heart of the CRISPR saga between In part, that is was one of the central issues in the CRISPR patent fight between the Broad and UCB.

Wow. If that were true, that would be despicable. I think, however, the CRISPR argument was more complicated than that, but at least Charpentier and Doudna got the Nobel. Also, I think the story is not over yet, as my google "Broad vs. UCB" seems to indicate.

Yes. There were two issues at play: Broad filed later than UCB, but filed as expedited claim so were awarded protection first. In addition, there was a challenge about whether the Broad patent application interfered with UCB filings (i.e. were the Broad filings already covered under the UCB filings). Fascinating read.

Thank you for an excellently informed answer. You might want to edit some relevant part of this conversation into your response for clarification, as I wasn't aware of that; others may also not be.

I'm reluctant to comment much more in the main answer since I am not a patent attorney and only have some layman's understanding about the process. Hence the disclaimers. But I will add in little more information.

Yes, Open Science Framework (OSF) allows you to save any kind of research ouput to obtain a timestamp. You can change the privacy setting so that your research output becomes a 'private project', invisible to the public.

But the OP does not want to share their result!

Oh, I overlooked that. I changed the response, thank you @user151413!

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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What can I do about someone publishing my work from GitHub?
I have many public repositories working on projects related to machine learning stuff, and it has recently come to my notice that someone has published a machine learning research paper based on one of the projects that I have in my GitHub with the same  results that would be obtained from running my code(without citing my GitHub, or taking prior permission).
I'm pretty upset. What can I do about it, from an academic route? And what could happen to the fraudster, if I do that?

First you need to assure yourself that it isn't just a case of parallel research.

Can you prove that they used your code? If so, then write to the editors/chairmen of the journal/conference with your proof and demand credit or retraction.

@CaptainEmacs Emacs How do I prove it beyond reasonable doubt? The only "solid" proof I have is that my code produces the same (numerical, to several decimal precision) results as their paper, and the methodology is the same. Is that enough?

The question could be improved by clarifying the nature of the projects and their use in the paper. For example, if you implemented some standard ML techniques, it wouldn't be surprising that someone else gets the same results as those produced by your code.

What is the outcome you hope for? Assuming your code was used, asking for a citation might be easier than asking for the paper to be revised/withdrawn.

@Enne You said that they produced results based on your methods. How do you know? If I invert a matrix I'll get the same results no matter whose code I use as long as it is matrix inversion. A couple of times, many years after I published something, somebody else (and more famous) did something very similar, but I don't doubt it was independent. A cool and actually quite natural idea, they didn't know about my work and thought they freshly invented the idea. This does happen. Of course, I could have argued with them about citing my old work, but frankly, I prefer to concentrate on my new one.

The first question you need to ask is what license is your code under? If, for example, you published your code under the GPL, then someone taking your code and publishing results obtained with it is entirely within their rights. It may be bad academic style to not say where they got the code from, but there is nothing that would objectionable from a legal perspective about the fact. You might be upset that they didn't acknowledge you, but you likely have little recourse -- lots of people publish research done with widely used software packages like PyTorch without referencing where they had it from, and the academic community appears to be ok with that. (Whether that's how it should be is a separate question not to be litigated here.)
On the other hand, if you didn't attach a license to your code, then it remains yours whether or not the code is available on github. If you can prove that they used your code, then you could presumably take legal action against them, though that is a matter from which the journal in question will likely want to stay about as far away as possible. The difficult thing to show in this legal argument is that indeed the person in question did use your code, and not just their own implementation of a similar algorithm. If you have good reasons to believe that they did indeed use your code, then you will get a chance to test your belief during the discovery phase of any trial -- but you already get the idea: This is likely going to get expensive.
What would happen to that other person: If your pockets are deep enough to actually win a law suit, then that other person's employer is likely going to be interested in following up because their employee used a piece of software illegally. If your software was available under a license that allowed the other person to use it, then people can have differing opinions on whether or not they were required to cite you, and nothing will likely happen.
Short story short: If you really really don't want anyone to use your software, you have two options: (i) Use github, make your repositories public, mark everything as proprietary software, and set aside a few $10k for potential law suits; (ii) don't use github, or make your github repositories private.

I don't have the money for a legal battle. Would it not be possible to email them my code and reasoning and get the editors to contact the fraudster's institution, like @CaptainEmacs suggested?

@Enne you have possible options, now decide what you will do.

Good answer, +1. One thing that might be relevant: if OP's code implements a unique algorithm which is mirrored in the paper, then the issue becomes one not of copyright, but of IP (which, if I make an educated guess here, is probably not protected by a patent by the OP). In this case, the OP still has the option of alerting the editors about plagiarism, which is not a legal, but an academic category of misdeed. I wonder if that may/should be added to the answer.

@CaptainEmacs Correct -- it has nothing to do with copyright but with IP. What kind of IP you have is determined with whether or not a license was attached to the code and if so, which one.

@Enne Yes, of course you can go email the author, the editors, anyone else you want, and complain. But what effect is that likely going to have? If I were the editor of the journal, given all I know about the situation, I'd just shrug and move on. If I were the department head of that person, given all I know about the situation, I'd ask the person next time we have lunch, I would decide that I don't know enough about who's right and who's wrong, shrug, and move on. The only thing it would achieve is that you might feel better. If that's what you're looking for, go for it!

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


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Part Time(Germany) vs Full Time PhD(Netherland)
I have a very complex situation. I am doing my PhD from last 14 months in the area of Computational Social Science in Germany. I have 2 publication(1 workshop and 1 Journal), 2 submitted paper(Tier 1 conference). My PhD was funded by a scholarship and the scholarship was not enough for survival. So, I decided to quit the scholarship and look for a job. I got a job in the public research institute in Germany with 100% TVL-13. The new work is in semantic technologies for biological data. In this case, there is no relation between my PhD supervisor and manager at a public research institute. My PhD supervisor agreed that he will not treat me as a part-time student but he will not pay anything(which is fine for me), here I can get a degree in 3 years. But I have two manage both works at a time.
I also got an offer from Netherland, where I have to restart my PhD. The area of work is semantic technologies for biological data. I will also get a good salary(lesser than Germany) in Netherland. Here, I have to invest in the next 4 years to get a degree.
In the long term, I wanted to become a professor. My preference is to get a good salary and finish my PhD quickly.
I wanted to live in Germany because I can get long term resident in 2 years and I am afraid to restart the PhD again because it requires a lot of work to understand the topic. I am also afraid that if I stay in Germany and unable to manage my PhD and job, then I will be in big trouble.
I am writing this post to have a genius opinion/suggestion regarding my conditions. I understand in the end, it depends on me but suggestions from experience person will be really helpful.

I think you get to the point at the end: It's all pretty much a question of personal preference that we can't really help you much with.

Depending on where you got the offer, you might be able to live in Germany and do your PhD in the Netherlands. This is not uncommon and there are many rules in place that take care of your tax situation and other things, not only in academia, but also in all kind of industries. This should also not prevent you from becoming long term resident, but better check before you sign.

@Mark Likely difficult if you are not an EU citizen.

Yes, the workplace is far from the German border. Will choosing Germany affect me in future?

This is really up to you. I would start with making a table listing all the advantages and disadvantages of each position. By the way you formulated that question, you already started that table
However, when making that table remember that the 3 and 4 years of funding do not correspond with how long it takes to finish a PhD; it only corresponds to how long you get paid. It is very common that people need more time to finish their PhD thesis. This is especially true when you try to do a PhD part-time. So I would predict that you will need to budget more time to finish in the German part-time position compared to the Dutch full-time position. This obviously depends on the specifics, e.g. if you have a very understanding boss and your PhD project is very close to your "normal" job, then the part-time PhD position could become very close to a full-time one. But that is something you have to find out.


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Part time Phd- Does it count negative in the path to becoming a Professor?
If some do a part-time PhD in Germany and work as full time in a research institute? Will it count as negative to become a professor.

Do you work in the research institute as a researcher, i.e with publications etc.? Then I cannot believe anyone sees this as a negative (note that many phds in Germany are, in fact, officially part-time).

The only negative thing I could think of is that you might not have as  much teaching experience. A few institutions might care about that.

So many other factors to be looked at on your application...

Yes, I work as a researcher, my tasks to publish one paper in a year. I am also involved in supervising research project and Bachelor and Master thesis. Do we only count teaching experience if I involved in some lecture or seminar?

@user111388: and even that may not be the case. I've been a postdoc at a German research institute which had anyways tight connections to the local university. I've been "lent out" to the local university to teach, other colleagues have also been teaching at the local university of applied sciences, and as student I also had lecturers from local research institutions outside the university. And of course the research institute will have students doing their research practica and all kinds of theses there.

@cbeleitesunhappywithSX: Indeed.

@AlexKujur: for a PhD student, also TAing a labwork practicum and looking after research students (or bachelor/master students) would usually count. Not the same as lecturing, but at least where I am, lectures were typically postdoc upwards. A PhD studend may be TA in a seminar.

@cbeleitesunhappywithSX Okay, thank you :)

I think the hardest part (in most fields) will be to develop a competitive publication record, compared to your peers. That's, of course, inherently harder when you have less time and energy to develop your papers. The recommendation would be to see what types and numbers of papers other people have who recently got a professor job in your field.

@Roland yes, will it affect on future? Is it good to show both working details in my CV?

@Roland Thanks, yes, I am aiming for University, not for Fachhochschule, I understand its a long run but just want to make sure, it won't make any negative in my profile.

A PhD is a PhD... it doesn't matter how long it takes, or whether it is full or part-time, the qualification itself is unaffected.
Amount of research produced over a certain duration has got some importance though.
The crucial question is the reason for the PhD being part-time. If that reason would reflect badly on your perceived fit as an academic, then it might have a bearing (if it implies too many family commitments, or lack of motivation perhaps).
However the fact that your full-time work is, you say, in a research institute is great for you in this regard. Your full time work is directly related to one of the roles of an academic. As such this should have no negative bearing whatsoever on the path to becoming a professor.

Employers should not discriminate based on family commitments.

Employers don't care about PhD duration, but the student should.  Completing the PhD promptly is good for the student's finances.

Thanks, will it affect in future If I show 2 experiences in my CV?

@AnonymousPhysicist they shouldn't, but it's possible that they could


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IBM/Google PhD Fellowship along with current salary
In Germany, PhD are covered by salary as a research assistant. But, is it possible to apply for an extra scholarship like IBM/Google PhD Fellowship?
If selected, is it legal to take both fellowship and the Salary?

I am pretty sure that this is explicitly spelled out both in the fellowship contract and your university contract. Besides legal and moral implications, most organizations have zero incentive to give double full-time salary for the same job.

I am also in such a kind of job and I was not eligible.

With a public contract in Germany, you are entitled to a "Nebentätigkeit" (side job) up to X  hours (typically X = around 8h/week).  For a fellowship, the situation might be different. But you will need to check both your fellowship conditions and the with the university (Does your fellowship come with obligations? Could these obligations conflict with your university contract?)

@user151413 Okay, thank you. But if somebody works for more than 8 hours, how does the employer check it?

@Coder Did you check with scholarship committee or university?

@AlexKujur If you break the law, how will anyone find out? You don't know, and you probably have a good change of getting away with it, just like with cheating on your taxes or jaywalking.  But don't complain if you are caught and fired.
Point is: Even if it is <8h, you need to inform your employer (or, depending on the type of job, get a permission).  So either you are honest here, or you lie about the hours.  Lying is generally not a good idea, at least if you get caught.


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Scientific paper format / layout
If you were to write a scientific paper which must include a section on 'Basic definitions', would you put this section after the Abstract and the Introduction, or before the Introduction?
What do you think about this layout?

Abstract
Introduction
Basic Definitions
Some chapters on the work / Methods used
Review of the literature
Results
Conclusion

Usually you have the related work section just before or right after the introduction.

@allo: It depends on the field, I've seen both. But "after introduction" seems more modern. In some fields they even don't have conclusions!

Now about "introduction and definitions".
Unless you really cannot do this, the introduction should in the ideal case be more accessible (say, understandable not only to an absolute specialist in your subfield). Even more importantly, the introduction should motivate the problem and present an informal overview.
This is introduction:

The order of the sepulation of sepulka is a well-known and important problem in Sepulka Sciences. We suggest an ordering of sepulation that increases the performance of almost each sepulka bundle.

This is main paper text:

Let ∆ be the main sepulation index of the current sepulka bundle, orderded lexicographically [Lem, 1957]. We denote with ∂µ the difference of sepulation gradient for...


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Submitting to Journals - impact factor versus subject specialism
I am coming to the end of my PhD in which I have been working under an NDA and not yet published anything directly from the thesis itself. Pretty soon we will be able to publish the work, and I am eager to get my chapters out there as papers.
I had eyeballed a journal within my field (a journal that I use/cite heavily) that I consider to be relevant and would give my paper great exposure to the people working in my field. I suggested this journal to my main supervisor, but they were dismissive due to a low impact factor of 2.31. They instead suggested going for more of a broad, catch-all journal with a factor of 4.57 that covers a lot of topics in my field albeit (in my opinion) not very thoroughly. Typically papers in that journal are not technical - the paper I want to publish would be technical and have my code/algorithm published alongside the manuscript for reproducibility.
So my question is what to do? The paper is primarily a new method, but also has a bunch of case studies alongside the method that tell their own story and are relevant in their own right.
If anyone is wondering, I am in Earth Sciences/Geophysics.

At least for academia, in general the higher impact factor papers you have in your resume the better. So, unless you think that your paper has no chance to be accepted in high-impact journal (so it's just a waste of time), I would suggest you to agree with your advisor. Keep in mind, that usually papers published in better journals are also better cited. The journals with broader audience are also more prestigious.

Do you have enough material for two papers? In particular, a paper with results for the general high impact journal, and a technical details type paper for the lower impact specialised journal.

Thanks for the answers! As for enough material for 2 papers, the answer is probably yes. I can take my model/method and present it fully with 2 case studies as a methods paper, and then perhaps present the detailed case study separately.
I guess at this stage you're both right, early career I need to think of CV/prestige boosting


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BAföG financial support for European students?
Are European students (Italian more specifically) entitled for getting the financial support BAföG to pursue an MSc Degree in a German University?

I don't have time to write a full answer, but the answer is yes, under certain conditions, which are laid down in BAföG par. 8: if you've lived legally in Germany for five years, if your spouse or parent(s) are working Work in Germany, or if you've worked in Germany for at least six months. See https://www.bafoeg-rechner.de/FAQ/bafoeg-fuer-auslaenderinnen.php

EU citizens can get Bafög but you have to fulfill some requirements that link you to Germany, for example:

have been living in Germany for over 5 years
your parents or spouse is working in Germany
you have been working in Germany before

You can find the full list here: In german though
If this is not applicable for you, you can try the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Program) which has an extensive selection of scholarships for students coming from or to Germany.


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Is it good to summarize your study cases in a thesis?
I am writing my thesis and it is a survey. I am making a classification of some algorithms in groups.
Will it be good to add a summarized version (max one page) of each article that contains one of the algorithms?
My prof wants me to make the thesis longer but I haven't encountered this approach before.

The very point of a survey work / literature review chapter / background section/related work section is to summarize the existing work that in other articles.
These sections are compulsory in my sub-field (NLP/ML). With all papers having a related work section, and all thesises having a literature review chapter.
More generally It is my understanding that even in fields that don't include a related work section in papers; they do include a literature review in thesises
The notion of one page max per summary, is I feel a bit constraining though.
For example in a book I recently wrote that summaries the state of my subfield, sometimes it took me 2-3 pages to summarize a particular complex or particularly important algorithm.
Conversely, other times I was able to summarize 5 algorithms in just 2 pages;
and I could highlight that infact they were all variants on the same overall principle (and highlighting these common features in works that are not obviously from the same source is a good thing to be doing.)


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What does it mean to do research with a phd student?
I am an undergraduate student and have recently been accepted by a professor to work on a robotics project in his lab. The professor mentioned that I will be working with a Phd student.
My confusion is as to what work I'll actually be able to do as the Phd student who is obviously more qualified will do majority of the work. So, will I just be left with useless work like analysis/ report writing or will I actually be given work?

What is left between analysis and report writing? That's all the science I do ...

Wait. Independent of the answers which are sensible in general, realize that for an undergraduate student of Prof X working with/in strong collaboration/under the practical supervision of a phd student of the same Prof X IS THE NORM!

You need to work that out with the professor and the PhD student. Before you start, get an idea about what you will be expected to do and how exciting or boring that will seem to you.
But, you should also settle the question about authorship of any resulting publications. You need to know in advance if you will be a co-author or will only get an acknowledgement of your contributions.
At your stage you may not be able to insist on much, but you should know going in what the parameters are. But as you phrase your question, it is impossible to answer, as the key is with those other individuals.

Can you give me some pointers on how to write an email to the prof about what I can be expected to work on


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Easy (funded PhD) vs Hard Path (Unfunded MS)
Notes:

I want to do PhD
I understand that ranking doesn't say much and that the professor and the research is what is
important
AOI - Area of Interest
This question is not personal nor opinionated and can be useful to a variety of students stuck in a similar or comparable decision point.

Due to having a low UGPA (2.8), I applied to MS programs (USA) in BME (neuroengineering) in hopes of boosting myself to a PhD program that does research in my exact AOI (Unis - stanford, jhu, rice, harvard). Luckily during my application, a professor that I talked with asked me to switch to PhD since he was interested in my profile. At the end I got an offer from the university for PhD and fully funded (note that this university is ranked >150 in usnews). The only issue with this PhD opportunity is that the advisor is new (though decently connected) and does not have translational research.
Now I have also got a MS offer from a top 50 university, not funded and private (so I need a loan). Now my question is this- should I take the easy, financial free option which does research in my AOI but doesn't have much prestige and enough funding to do translational research. Or should I take the hard path and go into that competitive university (top 50), secure a high GPA and do good research to get recommendations from leaders in the field; but this option will be tough and will either be successful or will lead to failure. While the former will lead to success but will be at a much lower level when compared to the success that I get from PhD after masters.

Not a duplicate, but closely related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/29504/is-it-worth-self-funding-a-phd-to-attend-a-top-10-university

Is it common in your field to get a master's before the PhD? In some fields, getting a slot at a top PhD program is significantly harder once you have a MS (they prefer to get people straight out of undergrad).

I don't think it's common nor uncommon, having masters is never mentioned as a prerequisite for any program tbh. People generally do masters either because they aren't sure about a research career, want to get better jobs, want to cover up bad undergraduate scores, or want more research experience.

So your question is: Do I take the high risk high potential payoff or the low risk lower payoff path? The answer is: it depends on how much risk you are willing to take. So why should this question not be closed as personal?

True, I can't counter that. But what about explaining if I could actually get into a better school assuming that I perform well in Masters cuz of my low uGPA and what exactly I need to do during masters to reduce this risk. I was expecting someone to help me weigh the pros and cons for each rather than explicitly stating the known. I will probably re-frame the question. Thanks.

Well, another direction would be if the risk is worth for grad school. It's extremely situation dependent. It can bee compared to you drowning in a sea after a boat wreckage and there being 2 options. First, is to grab onto a near floating remnant and slowly drift back onto land and Second, is to continue swimming towards a known direction/area with a large number of boats; if you work hard a push yourself you will be rescued and return to land fast but if you relax or giveup then you die or maybe take longer to get to land. 1st -> PhD and 2nd -> MS to PhD. Is it stupid taking this risk?

You said that the funded PhD offer matches your field of interest. To me this already looks like a clear win over the unfunded Masters degree.
The only point that could direct you towards the Masters is funding. So question 1: How necessary is significant grant funding for the research in your AOI? Question 2: How much funding does the advisor at the PhD institution have? Does he already have what is needed for your PhD research or is it more like, we will apply for a grant to get money for your research? I don't know neuroengineering but for example in maths, once your salary is guaranteed, further funding is mostly irrelevant. If you find that doing a good PhD at the lower rank institution requires some success/ luck with getting funding this might tip the scales towards the higher ranked institution. But note that funding is not guaranteed there either.

Will taking the risk at an unfunded MS for a PhD be worth it in terms of environment and research quality at a top institution say top 20 when compared to one ranked 180 but both being R1 institutions and having good researcher?

@Roshan Whether the lab next door to your is turning out amazing research or not is largely irrelevant to your own research. Additional expertise outside your lab may be required but you usually need some very specific knowlegde so the top lab next door is not helpful.


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Perception of Phi Beta Kappa on a resume?
I'm a student in the US, about to graduate with a BS in zoology. I've just been invited to join Phi Beta Kappa and am trying to find some more up-to-date discussions of whether or not it's worth it and I see a lot of conflicting opinions/information.
It costs $99 for me to join, which some have said reflects poorly on the society, while others say PBK is super prestigious and eye-catching. I've seen some saying it has gotten them positions, and others say its meaningless or they even look down on people who include it on their resumes.
I'll most likely go to grad school eventually and have no intentions currently to do any work/study outside of the US (I've seen many folks from outside the US saying they see honor societies and have a negative reaction because of Greek Life). Anyone have thoughts on this?

I would hope people responsible for graduate admissions do not take into account in which organisations you are in (but I am from Europe abd don't know this organisation).

Do you have any more obligations other than to pay this fee?

My mother, now in her 80's, has considered it useful to maintain her PBK membership for more than 60 years now.

Note: This is related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18193/do-graduate-schools-pay-attention-to-joining-phi-kappa-phi-or-other-honor-societ

And this: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/10173/does-membership-of-academic-honour-societies-carry-any-professional-weight-rec

Is the $99 fee one-time or per-year? I found an old answer on this site which states that PBK "does not require paying a fee to be inducted", so at the moment I have contradicting information about these costs.

I am looking at this from a European perspective.
Also I focus on the perception and not whether this is accurate, which does not matter that much – whether you like it or not.
You can neither expect readers to research this detail of your CV to fully understand it nor to suppress subconscious bias by the impression they get from items they do not fully understand.
As confirmed by some of the comments by other European members here, the vast majority of information of US Greek-letter societies that trickle over to Europe is about drug abuse, sexual misconduct, dehumanising initiation rituals, and nepotism. Therefore mentioning a membership in such an organisation (without any further explanation) risks leaving a bad impression. At the very least I would try to mitigate the risk by explicitly denoting it as an honour society – which can only have so much effect since that’s not a protected term.
Also, while a little Internet research suffices to debunk the worst associations, it does not leave the best impression:

It’s surprisingly difficult to find a recent independent characterisation on this society. You mainly find self-representation and Wikipedia (which is currently dominated by self-representation). The best you can find with reasonable effort are two articles from 1996 and 2005, respectively, about declining membership and recognition, in which the society leaves a rather entitled impression. Also, this very question and others on this site are already amongst the first things you find. This somewhat suggests that the society has since evaporated into meaninglessness.
The society’s main activity appears to be selecting and recruiting new members and documenting their achievements, which strikes me as awkwardly circular. There a few awards, scholarships, and fellowships, but these seem secondary.
The primary selection criterion seems to be grades, scholarly achievements, and learning another language, which should be featured on your CV anyway. It seems like a society that charges mountains to put a golden badge on them stating their height (analogy stolen from Leonard Cohen). Thus, listing membership appears to be somewhat redundant.

Mind that this is just an impression (after all the difficulty of finding information from reliable sources is one of the things that form this impression), but at the very least it suggests a considerable marketing failure.

Actually, the faculty in PBK are likely to sponsor a series of lectures on campus of distinguished intellectuals and academics and give students an opportunity to meet them.

And, do you look for ways to give your own best students a boost? Would it be worthwhile to have some formal way to do that?

@Buffy: Actually, the faculty in PBK are likely to sponsor a series of lectures on campus of distinguished intellectuals and academics and give students an opportunity to meet them. – If you need to point that out, that’s a part of the problem I am describing. (Also, I don’t see why you would need an honour society for this.) — And, do you look for ways to give your own best students a boost? Would it be worthwhile to have some formal way to do that? – I really do not want to debate the honour societies in general here. I am not saying they are bad; I am saying they leave a bad impression.

Include it. Phi Beta Kappa isn't a part of the Animal House culture. It is an honor, bestowed by the faculty and only those respected by the faculty are considered.
If someone confuses it with the Dekes it is their ignorance. The faculty who will review your applications know what it means, maybe even in Europe though comments here make me wonder. So, if you want to apply in Europe, explain that it is an honor society.
For those offended by this answer, note that PBK is not a fraternity. It has no initiation rites. It is purely and simply an invitation only honor society.

Disclaimer, neither a Deke, nor a PBK. No disrespect intended for either institution.

Caveat: Perhaps, for applications to any European institution you will need to make the nature of PBK blindingly obvious if you include it. The impression here, from comments and other answers, is that too many Europeans may make too many incorrect assumptions about Greek letter societies, assuming that all are only for drunks and such. And you may not get a chance to follow up. Sad.

"Even in Europe". Mm... not sure 'about that. I don't want to be disrespectful for such an institution, but I have no idea what it means, and I'm pretty sure that most of my European colleagues don't know it either. And, yes, like it or not, many people around this part of the world associate any fraternity to Animal House.

@MassimoOrtolano but I'm pretty sure you could google it if you saw it. Yes? It isn't a fraternity. It is an honor society. Look and learn.

I doubt that any "chapter" has a a chapter house and I'm certain that they never hold keggers. Afternoon tea, perhaps, but not keggers.

Do you really want a selection committee to Google a fraternity name? ;-)

@MassimoOrtolano, does everything Greek offend you? It isn't  fraternity.

Another European here who does not know PBK. The practical matter is that if I am looking at that CV, it will be one of many. I am not going google everything I see there. I probably won't hold it against her or him, but I will probably just skip it unless I am really interested in that individual.

I think it really depends whether or not your participation in that organization brought you any type of character development. On my campus, fraternities like to party but they also put a heavy focus on academics. In fact, if not for joining a fraternity, I would not be in graduate school (joining helped sky rocket my grades). If you are proud of the organization, put it in on.

another European here: did not know the difference between deke and pkb. i think inclusion into a resume would give me a bad impression

@Jakob. There are other honor societies, some of them discipline specific: https://upe.acm.org. The use of Greek letters without association with "social clubs" is common enough. You should educate yourself before you act on any "bad impression".

Who is "the faculty" mentioned in your answer, exactly?

Imagine a European professor reading a CV mentioning a Greek-letter organisation. The only thing most of them know about these organisations is Animal House or worse. They now have two appropriate options: 1) Educate themselves – which is a considerable effort for a single CV item and often impossible due to time constraints. 2) Try to forget it as good as possible – which is inevitably imperfect: We cannot avoid being biased. — What many of the above commentors are saying is that if they chose Option 2, this is the bias they would have. It’s not that they are intentionally ignorant.

For what it's worth, the concept of an "honor society" in general seems fairly US-specific (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_society). On a practical level, as someone in the UK who's not too familiar with US honor society culture, I'm not sure I'd know what to make of it, so I'd probably just ignore it in practice. Not saying that's a good thing, but that's the reality. I'd be much more interested in looking at your published papers and talking to you about them; what society you're in wouldn't be much of a factor in any decision-making.

Out of interest, what should one make of someone's membership in a US honor society, if anything? What's the acceptance rate for membership, for instance? (For example, if they only accept one in a million people, you're the one, and you weren't competing with muppets, that might be impressive; if they accept everybody, or only muppets apply, maybe less so.)

@StuartGolodetz, actually you don't apply for membership. It is an invitation only organization. It is fairly ubiquitous at prestigious US universities and colleges. There are many faculty there who are members and who, themselves, attended other prestigious places (Ivy League, and such). Those faculty invite students to membership. Most students would consider it a high honor to be invited - an indication of academic success generally. So, high performing students at universities that generally expect high performance.

@Buffy Thanks for the explanation. In that case, though, how is nepotism avoided, in practice? Are there objective minimum criteria that people who are invited have to meet, to limit the ability of faculty members to simply invite their friends (even if they're not so good)? And if so, are there also joining mechanisms for people who meet those criteria but don't have friends on the faculty to invite them? How are these organisations prevented from becoming "old boys' networks"? After all, going to a prestigious place and having prestigious friends are not quite the same thing as being good.

@StuartGolodetz, typically it is a group of faculty members inviting some students. Social pressures mitigate against inviting the unqualified. I don't know the specific procedures, but assume a faculty member would nominate someone and the nomination would be discussed. It isn't "I" invite "you", it is "we" invite you. It isn't a "friends" group. I've been invited to join some such things, but never had an inkling that I was being considered. One was a general honors society and the other was UPE (the ACM's CS honors society) so field specific. But if a student works closely with a (cont)

faculty member and does a good job they are likely to get nominated, I suppose. Is that somehow improper? As I noted before PBK has, as members, 17 US presidents, 40 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, and 136 Nobel Laureates. I think most faculty, voting member in, see the inductees as their academic heirs.

@Buffy Thanks. I guess that social pressure might help prevent people from nominating someone really bad (as in, it would reflect badly). And group nomination might help as a way of guarding against personal patronage. I guess I'm just concerned about how easy it would be for faculty to bias admission in favour of some students and not others, for reasons other than academic merit. Indeed, when you say that people "see the inductees as their academic heirs", that kind of hints at what I mean (i.e. there's a social/political element besides ability - people might favour their proteges).

Group nomination doesn't entirely guard against that, either, since you can easily end up in a situation in which "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine", i.e. "I'll help you invite your guy next time if you help me invite my guy now". Now, you might decline that offer if "my guy" is such a muppet that you'd be ashamed to be associated with inviting him. But if he's "above bar" but not great, and you really want your guy to be invited next time, and I'm the swing vote... It's that kind of horse-trading that ideally wouldn't be a thing.

I'm a European (UK) who has no idea what PBK is, and also has no idea what an "honor society" is. If seeing it I would assume it was a fraternity, which is also something that doesn't exist here, but is something that we're familiar with (for better or worse) from film and TV.

Save your money.  At best it's meaningless and at worse it associates you with all the negative connotations of Greek society and none of the benefits (such as the social life and a network of close friends and contacts you get to know over the many years at school).
I say it's meaningless because everything that it purports to represent - a high GPA, the acclaim of faculty, academic achievement - can be fully represented without it.  Simply including your transcript or reporting your GPA, including letters of recommendation from faculty, and reporting on publications, research awards, and so on, covers every base.
Therefore, the only remaining piece of information that joining it tells me is that you respond to phishing-like emails to collect a hundred bucks.
And frankly, I've been a faculty member at two American departments, one of which was selective and the other of which was highly selective (in the top ten most selective in the US), and I had no idea you supposedly get access to this through faculty nomination.  There's been a lot of answers focusing on Europeans who wouldn't know that it's supposedly a good thing, but I've been in the US academic system basically my whole life, and I also don't know that.

"respond to  phishing-like emails" is pretty uninformed and insulting. Invitations are actually likely to be delivered in person by someone you know. A professor or department head, perhaps.

The ones I saw were emails that looked like phishing.  It's clear you've had a very different experience with this place than many.


text:
Is dyslexia regarded as a severe disability for academic applications?
For the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) application they ask:

Other serious disability related to a physical, mental, or emotional
condition is included in my disability
(Please specify. Cannot exceed 255 characters.)

Here I listed dyslexia and the academic accommodations I receive. Is this appropriate? What do they mean by "Severe Disability".
My case is particularly harsh. In my Statement of Purpose I briefly talk about my history of overcoming this as well as how learned to capitalize on my other strengths to compensate for this deficiency. This is particularly important to me, but might not be something that should be mentioned.
This could apply to other academic applications. Is this something that should be mentioned on a PhD application, or is it best to avoid this topic?

Dyslexia is widely recognized as a disability.
Deciding if dyslexia is "severe" is a matter of opinion.  Only one person has a well-informed opinion about the severity of your dyslexia: you.  If you think it is severe, no reasonable person will question it.
Your strategy of mentioning your disability in the context of how you were successful overcoming it is a good strategy.

I hope to help people in my position. I could have very well dropped out of college if I hadn't been given the right resources. With them I became a straight A student. I know there are others like me that will never get these same resources.

I believe there is not one answer that suits all circumstances, as different bodies will ask the question about disabilities for different purposes. You need to be clear in each particular case what information they are needing from you and how that information will be used in their internal processes. Having that clarity will enable you to tailor the information to the needs of the organisation's selection processes.
In the particular example you gave, the NSF declares that they particularly seek to promote a diverse base for their awards:

NSF actively encourages women, members of underrepresented minority groups, persons with disabilities, veterans, and undergraduate seniors to apply.

So you would need to give information that would enable them to determine that you are part of an underrepresented group and  how you have worked to overcome your disability.
In other applications, such as a PhD application, they may ask the information to ensure they have made adequate provision for your interview, or allowed adequate consideration of the writing of your personal statement, or that they have appropriate provision in their research laboratories for you (such as in the case of more severe physical disability). Or equally in a PhD program they may be seeking to implement a positive recruitment program.
Some applicants believe that their application will be prejudiced by giving information on their disability and take the decision to omit that level of detail. I cannot say that this does not happen, but being informed as to the purpose of asking the question gives an applicant more confidence in supplying the level of detail that would enable their application to be well received.
Addressing the topic of dyslexia in particular, there is an increasing base of argument that dyslexia can give an advantage in certain aspects of intellectual and creative activities but again you probably have no way of determining if that opinion is held by the organising you are applying to or not.


text:
How to deal with failing ideas?
I graduated from my PhD last November and as I get along super well with my PhD supervisors, I decided to pursue research with them on my free time alongside my postdoctoral position.
We all have spent a large amount of working time (I can't say if it's months or years!) to make an idea concrete.
However, things did not go as planned.
Numerical experiments of our work shows that it can only remain theoretical.
Most specifically, our model works for very tiny instances (up to 15 nodes, in graph theory) and can not scale up at all. It already takes between one hour and two hours to solve such instances.
For real life size instances (starting at 50 nodes), the model would take far longer than hours to solve.
How should we proceed with such failing idea?
As my professor wanted me to think of a detailed plan of action, here are my thoughts to be improved, corrected and completed:
A theoretical model is still interesting to publish as eventually, computers performances will improve over time and maybe this model will serve on real life instances some day. Still this is disappointing to say it cannot scale up. Maybe some other researches will find ideas to make it applicable once it has been published?
Another possibility is to try improving the theoretical model but how could we know if this would last six months or 10 more years? We are currently out of ideas to make the model better after having tested a tons of ideas (some of them improved the model performances by 10%, some small ideas were thrown up, etc.)
A final possibility is to give up the research we conducted but to me, this is unacceptable with respect to the amount of quality work on this research topic. This is a year a half of my thesis and several months after.

Have you consulted with an algorithms expert?  Does your model require solving an NP-hard problem?  The right computer scientist could perhaps tell why your model is slow without even touching a computer.  That might inform next steps.

@AlexanderWoo, thank you for your comment. I believe my professor is an algorithm expert. Indeed we are solving a NP-Hard problem, we are working with knowledges on computer science and operations research. This is an interesting suggestion to ask for another expert's opinion

After further thought - I'm voting to close - an answer to this question strongly depends on the norms and values of your research community.  If you were a pure mathematician aiming for a job at a top research university, my advice would be to shelve this work as this kind of paper would have zero or even negative value (and every pure mathematician has file cabinets full of failed projects), but an applied mathematician aiming for a job at a middling research university would probably disagree.

@AlexanderWoo I strongly disagree with your suggestion to close, since I think folks run into this sort of dilemma frequently. I'd suggest that you put your advice in an answer instead.

@jakebeal: I just don't see how this question can have one answer - it requires a few hundred answers, one for each combination of field (sometimes subfield), country, and for some countries type of university.  Academia varies too much here for a useful answer.

In my field months of computing hours are common, why is it a problem in your field that it can take many hours or days to solve real life size instances? Ps: I suggest you to make your question more concise, I don't see why your relationship with your previous supervisors matters to the question.

@AlexanderWoo: this question strongly depends on the norms and values of your research community – … and as such it is on-topic here, because it is about the norms and values of academia (as opposed to the content of research). Sure, at the end of the day, the asker needs to evaluate whether further pursuing this path is worth the effort. But that’s exactly what the question is about (in my understanding): how to make the decision and not what to decide.

Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/30995/what-to-do-when-you-spend-several-months-working-on-an-idea-that-fails-in-a-mast/31082#31082

Have you tried to "cut through the Gordian know" by making one radical simplifying assumption? e.g. certain shared properties across nodes, self-similarity, and such, to radically reduce computational time. Then go for a "proof of concept" angle.

You did not have a failing idea. You just had an idea that did not scale (if I understood you correctly). These are two very different things.
Your approach brings a model to the table and a proof-of-concept study. That's the novelty. Maybe at some point, it is possible to scale it, via better computers, clever classical or quantum algorithms or possibly suitable approximations or probabilistic algorithms that do not guarantee results 100%.
There are instances where there is a cool idea that scales horribly, and then, after some time, people find excellent, and highly performative algorithms that scale much better; maybe with some compromise, such as approximation, random sampling or other. I know of a model for which no good approximation for around 6 years was known, scaling horribly, for which no obvious route to improvement was conceivable. The following years saw a spate of reasonable, if not gargantuan improvements. 15 years later a highly effective and elegant approximation was discovered. This is a very fast rate of improvement.
Even in the well-known realm of matrix multiplication, the naive O(n^3) algorithm can be substantially improved (I believe it's around O(n^2.372) now.
In short, the fact that it cannot be computed now, does not mean it cannot be computed in the future. If you have an interesting question, model and theory, it's definitely worth publishing.

Matrix multiplication may not be the best analogy, since all the fancy recent bounds are purely theoretical AFAIK.

The last paragraph is unknown here - there could be known theoretical reasons why this cannot be computed, ever.  Assuming P<>NP, there are indeed theoretical bounds on how well and how quickly solutions to NP-hard problems can be approximated.

@MarcGlisse: Indeed, they're "galactic algorithms", only faster with ridiculous problem sizes. Strassen's is useful in practice (n>100). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_of_matrix_multiplication#Strassen's_algorithm , O(n^2.807).  Same with BigInt multiply: Did the 2019 discovery of O(N log(N)) multiplication have a practical outcome? - no, Toom-Cook and Schönhage-Strassen are still the best practical algorithms for big problem sizes that fit on real computers (at least that anyone's interested in actually computing.)

@PeterCordes Of course, but for instance Shannon codes show that you may have excellent feasible approximations where the asymptotically precise calculation is galactic. The point is that, in general, you do not know if all good complexity calculations are galactic.

Even things that don't scale can have value.  For example, the typical person wanting a traveling salesman solver is looking to optimize a couple dozen stops at most.

Interestingly, TSP can actually be solved for much bigger problems than required in practice. For example “shortest path to visit all US cities with a population over 100,000”. This can be solved but the tour will take weeks or months.

Your answer: "you didn't have a failing idea, you had an idea that can't scale nowadays" and @jakebeal's answer: "you should publish your bad idea and move on" are the two answers' I would like to tick. I choose yours because it made me realise our idea, in a sense, could be a good idea some day. Since I posted my question, we have continued to improve the model. It still doesn't scale. Having in mind that the fact it doesn't scale doesn't make it a bad idea helped me a lot on continuing working on it. I hope that soon, my former director will say we can submit this work :)

Negative results are still results!
In my career, I've had a lot of ideas that have worked out, and also a lot of ideas that have not worked out. But when you've spent a lot of time on a project, you've almost always learned some things, even if they weren't the things you hoped for. Share that knowledge with others!
I always think that the saddest possible fate for a piece of work you've poured a lot of time and effort into is to have it die quietly in the dark. Instead, you can at least write a paper as a grave marker to mourn its passing:

Let me tell you about the life of my friend, Nifty New Graph Model (NNGM). NNGM was a bright and promising idea, full of energy and wanting to help people with [relevant application here].  When NNGM was young, it seemed full of promise, all the way up to around 15 nodes. But as it scaled, everything seemed to go wrong. And when we did tests, we got the fatal diagnosis: Bad Big O. Well, we knew then that NNGM didn't have the future we'd all hoped for, and so we're putting it into cryogenic storage. But we wanted to tell its story here: maybe others can learn from our experiences, or maybe even figure out how to cure NNGM's problems and bring it out of storage in the future.

Silly? A little, maybe, but I find that publishing a story like this (in more professional language, of course) really helps me to let go and move on. You won't put it in a glamour journal, but there's always solid society-level publications or megajournals that are happy to accept results that are true but not exciting.
And sometimes these articles really can be helpful to others too! Some of my own "gravestone" publications have dozens of citations, clearly having picked up an afterlife that I had never envisioned for them.
Bottom line: publish the sad things that you've learned, and then move on.

+1. This is a vital idea. Research isn't to prove our initial guesses but to arrive at knowledge and truth. Knowing something doesn't work can be as (more) important than knowing it does. Hydroxychloroquine.

In theoretical mathematics, if you are aiming for a research-oriented job, then I think writing this up is at best a waste of time.  Researchers who have several such papers in fact LOSE prestige for this work - people wonder why they're wasting their time with it.  And - no - the research community doesn't gain from the paper because we just won't find it; I still think there's a good chance that a determinantal identity that would solve the conjectures in my dissertation is in some 19th century paper somewhere, but no one will ever find it.

I agree @AlexanderWoo. Negative results are not usually published in mathematics (though I agree with Captain Emacs on the nature of this work). They're at best a good candidate for something in a blog post, but most mathematicians don't keep up a math blog, so it is likely not to gain any real attention.

@Trunk - as opposed to applied mathematics.  Some of us are staying away from the term 'pure mathematics' because the notion of 'purity' has unfortunate historical connotations (that are in fact historically related to the origins of the usage of the term 'pure mathematics').

@AlexanderWoo Which may be true but is actually quite idiotic. So OP and his colleagues had this great idea which didn’t work out. If nobody writes it down, it will still look like a great idea, and the next guy will look at it, and waste another year of time. And another one in two years time.

@gnasher729 - the math literature is so big and so unsearchable (because the same ideas are known by many names or no name at all, and it can take weeks of work to realize two ideas are actually the same) that the next person will never find the paper anyway.  Most math papers are never read by anyone other than the peer reviewers.  Adding more papers doesn't help the situation.

@AlexanderWoo You can say the same thing about lots of different fields. Doesn't mean we shouldn't publish anything but good results.

@AlexanderWoo What's worse, two ideas may be effectively equivalent, but the insight that they are may be nonobvious or even really deep. But it would be great if there were a LLM-like search engine for math for statements that appear at least shallowly equivalent.

Generally if there is a good method that doesn't scale well, it is sometimes possible to develop a scalable algorithm that approximates the method well. Of course you can collaborate with people who have the expertise for this, but even without such a thing, I think that a publication is realistic that in its conclusion clearly says that right now scalability is an issue and finding an approximation that improves scalability is a worthwhile project for future research. This may not fly in a strong impact journal, but there are many journals that would be keen to publish something that is original, correct, and presented with insight even if scalability is an issue. I have seen such papers. And somebody may later dig it out and develop a better algorithm or do something new inspired by this.

Something that I forgot to mention in my question is that my former PhD director nearly only publish on top journals with high impact and, if I understood their working habits well, would not let our work to be submitted to a "middle" journal and will continue try to make the model as good as possible

@JKHA Well, if you can get it into a top journal, fine. If you can't, but are personally interested in having it published at a somewhat lower level (for a fresh PhD with academic ambitions every publication counts), better than making assumptions talk with them!

First, stop berating yourself! You worked hard, you achieved a result ... and you have discovered the limits to which your results can be applied with current technology or, perhaps, pushed using current methods.
This is how much of mathematics proceeds. The work is incremental. One need only look at the history of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm to see that it took 160 years to get from Gauss's initial approach to the Cooley-Tukey publication in 1965. Tukey and Cooley had the significant advantage of having at their disposal a object that only came into being around 1940 ... a computer! Prior to that, the possibility of applying the FFT to siginficant problems was largely beyond reach ... the same scaling issue as is staring at you. Should Gauss have been embarrassed?
Consider also the paper by Terrence Tao on what constitutes good mathematics in which he presents a very incomplete list and even then, concludes "As the above list demonstrates, the concept of mathematical quality is a high-dimensional one and lacks an obvious canonical total ordering."
My advice: if you have not already done so, consult with someone who is an expert in relevant algorithms; they might have an insight that would lead to an improvement in scaling. But then, irrespective of the outcome of the consultation, write up what you have without feeling that it was a failed idea. Then move on.
Appendix: As an aside, although I have put in references to the history of the FFT, a more personal view is evident in the paper by Cooley that you can find here.

From what I understand, the result of your research is that you have indeed solved a mathematical problem, just that it is not applicable to real life scenarios.
Are you aware that most of what makes our computers work, is based on papers from the '50s when it was also entirely unfeasible to make practical use of them ?
So my suggestion is to publish. You don't know what the future brings.


text:
When I should submit previous published version(s)?
I'm going to send manuscript for publication in IEEE Transactions. Some parts of this manuscript were published earlier in little-known journals (in Russian). But in general manuscript is significantly different from previous papers. Should I upload previous papers as a ‘Previous Published Version(s)’, and upload summary of differences?
UPD:
I found the following in ScholarOne Manuscripts (IEEE Transactions manuscript submission site): "Has any portion of your paper been published elsewhere? If yes, please include your original paper and a brief summary of your changes. New material must be added before submitting the manuscript to this journal.". So, I should upload previous published versions?

Yes, you should upload your original paper and a brief summary of your changes, just like it says in the instructions.

@JeffE If I have three previous papers, should I upload them separately, or as single PDF-file?

You should ask the editor, but I would want three separate PDF files.

I have the similar situation now. I am also submitting in IEEE transaction. But in my case, the previous publication (which is a conference) will respond sometime in late July. Should I also upload the under-reviewed conference paper?

While I'm not too familiar with the IEEE publication process, in particular, the common sense tells me the following. Since your manuscript in its present form is "significantly different" from the previous versions, it very well makes sense to simply submit the current version as an original publication. However, it would be nice (and right - in order to prevent self-plagiarism accusations) to mention somewhere in the paper (preferably, in the introduction section) that the present paper is based on previous work by such authors, which has been published in such journals / outlets.
The "previous published version(s)" option that you have mentioned seems to be directed toward more closely related versions of the same paper, which seems to be not the case in your situation.

It's always best to err on the side of openness, particularly when dealing with a venue that is particularly friendly to expanded publication like IEEE.  Even when the new version is very different, if parts were previously published, I upload and explicitly mention those parts.
When most of a publication is new (as it sounds like is the case for you), then all it means is that it will be really simple for the editors and reviewers to determine that you are in conformance with their extended publication policy.  If, however, you do not declare the prior publication and a reviewer notices, then it is likely to at least cause a significant delay in reviewing while they sort things out (if not larger problems).
Having the previous publication in another language complicates things a little bit, but does not fundamentally alter the situation.  Translating the paper might be a bit much for appropriate level of effort, but you might at least make the life of the editors and reviewers simpler by annotating the previous and current documents to show which passages have been translated for the current work.  That way, they can easily see that the magnitude is much smaller than the current paper, simplifying their evaluation.
In short: there's generally no downside for declaring prior work, and plenty of possible downsides for not declaring, so it's almost always better to declare.

It is always a good idea to declare and provide access to similar or overlapping content, even if the current work is significantly different from the previously published ones. That way, it is clear that your intent is right and you do not wish to deceive or pass off parts of a previously published work as an original study. I'm not sure if translation or annotation would be feasible in terms of time and effort, but you should at least cite the previous publication if you have used any content from it in your current work.

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


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ScholarOne Manuscripts File Designations
When uploading files in SCHOLARONE Manuscripts (IEEE journals), I can pick an appropriate file designation for each. What is the file designations 'Summary of changes' and 'Summary of differences'?

Summary of Differences: If you are submitting an extended version of a previously published work, you may be required to submit a "Summary of Differences" between the new work and the original.
Summary of Changes: If you have made revisions and are re-submitting a manuscript that has already been reviewed by this journal, you may upload a file in which you respond to the reviewers' questions and comments as a "Summary of Changes."

If some parts of the manuscript were published earlier, then should I upload previous papers fully (choosing the file destination ‘Previous Published Version(s)’ ), or upload summary of differences only? Thanks.

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


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Should / How do I include my school's GPA Scale in my CV / Application
I'm preparing my grad school applications (CV, letter of intent, etc) and in these I need to include my GPA. My school uses the 4.3 scale and I feel as though not including this information is misleading since my GPA will look better when compared to someone who is actually marked out of a 4.0.
But I have not seen this in any online example nor have I seen it in any of the outlines that schools give for their expected applications.
Should I include the GPA scale and if so how do I do this? Would 3.9 / 4.3 be reasonable?
Update / Solution
By the general look of the comments it is best to avoid ambiguity by stating the scale up front. So, I think the general consensus is GPA/grades should be reported along side their scales.

I've never included in my CV, but I did always send my diploma supplement that contains a detailed explanation of the grading system.

In countries where GPA is unheard of, one always includes both numerator and denominator for marks. The Italian high school final exam is marked out of /100 and university degrees out of /110. You'll therefore see people writing things like 104/110.

Your official transcript will almost certainly explain your institution's grading system, including the fact that the top of the scale is 4.3, not 4.0.

I had the experience of sitting on a graduate admissions committee during my years in graduate school.  (This was at a "top-10" school in my field, though not a "top-5".)  In my experience, the raw GPA number was mainly used to make a "first cut" to weed out the fraction of applications that were almost certainly sub-par.  (Things like super-low GRE scores were also used at this stage as well.)    Once the applications got beyond this initial screening, committee members would read carefully through them;  and at this point, the raw GPA was put aside in favor of the more detailed grade information on the transcript.  Almost every transcript, especially those from US colleges or universities, had an explanation on the back about the system used to assign grades and calculate the GPA.  There's enough variety in the systems used by different institutions (even within the US—foreign institutions had even more variety) that I always had to read through this information to contextualize what I saw on the transcript.
Which is to say:  it's probably best to be honest about your GPA in the CV.  But if you don't mention it specifically, the committee members will almost certainly still be able to figure out that your school had a 4.3 scale;  and they almost certainly won't hold it against you for not mentioning it once they've figured it out.

"the committee members will almost certainly still be able to figure out"  - seriously? As each country/discipline/university, in a given year, can have a different scale, do they put so much effort in the very initial step? While 4.3 clearly indicates a different scale what if it were 3.9 or 4.0 (out of, say, 6)?

I can only speak to my own experience.  It's possible, of course, that faulty assumptions concerning GPAs are made and never caught by any of the multiple committee members reading a given application (though the fact that multiple people read each application makes this less likely.)  I'm merely saying that graduate admissions committees are aware that non-standard grading scales exist, and so they're generally on the lookout for them.

If your transcript doesn't include an explanation of the grading system (usually on the back?), then why not include a copy of the page in the bulletin or other official document that explains it?
I have to agree with the previous poster, having been a student rep on the admissions committee of my Ph.D. program (top-5 school), that 99% of those applying will have excellent GPAs and GRE scores.  The faculty told the student reps to look for people whose statements suggested they would be a good fit for our program (i.e., knew what the program was about and spoke to that in their statement, rather than submitting a cookie-cutter statement that would serve for  all ten of the programs they applied to).  Indeed, that made the good candidates stand out and was the best indicator of who was ultimately admitted.  The more you appeal to even an individual faculty member who thinks it would be interesting to work with you, the better your chances of admission.


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How to approach potential PhD advisors when you have submitted cranky looking paper?
I am a master student trying to approach potential PhD advisors in Canada. Unfortunately or not, I believe I have solved an important problem in my field. I have submitted my work to a journal, awaiting a response. If this does not look cranky enough, I also had bad grade in my  thesis, and my undergraduate major is not in that field.
The real question is, should I attach my manuscript in my email to the professors to show that I am not a crank (or the opposite)? Because I can't put it on arxiv (a signal that I am a crank), so the only way for professors to verify that I have potential is to show I have research experiences.

Why do you think it is "cranky"?

Arxiv is not for cranks, that's vixra.

@Buffy I assume the work done by someone who is not experienced and claim themselves solving important problem are cranky

This use of “cranky” is funny: lots of folks are cranky before the first cup of coffee!

The words "crank" and "cranky" are also funny in their relationship in that the latter is not the adjective of the former. If you're a crank, you're a quack. If you're cranky, you're a grouch.

Can't you get advice about the quality of your paper from your Master's thesis advisor?

If this is regarding your questions on MO then I'm afraid I suspect you have misunderstood the problem. That doesn't necessarily make you a crank, but it does mean that you need to be willing to learn some of the basics rather than just shooting for the open problem (which may also be less important/striking than you think)

As someone who has supervised PhD students in maths in Canada: I think that what people are looking for is a combination of technical ability, self-motivation/ambition, but also the ability to recognize one's mistakes and learn from them. I have been aware of cases of people who had the second, were a bit weak in the first, and were far too deficient in the third, and these cases did not work out well for either the student or the supervisor

Finally, I think your reasoning concerning the arXiv is flawed. Given how long it can take to get formal referee feedback on a submitted article, if you want to find out if there are mistakes in something you have done, posting to arXiv may be a much quicker way to get feedback. Yes, there is a risk that if you have made a mistake then this becomes public. But in that case, an honest "retraction" of the arXiv submission shows you can receive feedback and act appropiately, while the original posting shows ambition and self-motivation

Most cranks actually assume that they are not. I don't think you should judge yourself too harshly until you get feedback from the referees.
But, I wouldn't send the manuscript in a first contact. You want that contact to be very short so that it is easy to respond to. Say something about your area of interest and that you have been working on some interesting problems. Offer to send a manuscript, but don't attach it unless asked.
It is too easy to discard blind emails if they seem to require any difficulty to analyze and answer.
Here is something about me. I'm interested in xyz, as you are and would like to discuss whether you can serve as my advisor. I can send along some recent work if requested. Thank you.

If I attach my resume, they will still find out, is that going to hurt my chances?

Impossible to say. But if you are awaiting response then the paper is just "work in progress" and should be classified like that.


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Is it my responsibility as an undergrad student to figure out if my thesis is affordable?
I have an undergrad thesis idea that involves transformers. I am trying to take the lead on the idea before I contact a professor about it - i.e. figuring out exactly how I'd make it happen, and if it is realistic. The problem is that because of covid, the largest research funding I can get from my university as an UG is $500. I read a paper about a type of transformer, and I would like to apply that to an area it hasn't been applied before (my interest area). However, it seems like transformer based research is expensive.
I am worried about two things:

I don't want the professor to think I am idiot for suggesting an idea that might be big in scope / too expensive, but I truly do not know how to determine if it is too expensive / out of scope
I do want to publish first author. If this idea is too expensive, am I allowed to ask if he has any other projects for me (I can also provide him with my other interests).

Since you have tagged computer science, are you referring to transformers, the deep learning architecture? If so, what kind of costs do you anticipate? If it's only computing power, working with a professor will probably give you access to their resources, and they will definitely be able to help you figure out if it is feasible and worth exploring.

@GoodDeeds yes I am referring to the DL architecture, typically used in NLP. It is only computing power, but it might be a lot. Is this something I can explicitly ask him? Such as tell him my idea, and flat out ask him if it is realistic? I feel like gifted students should be able to determine this themselves

I don't think you need to have an exact idea, but knowing roughly where it lies in the spectrum between "can run on a desktop computer" versus "needs millions of dollars worth of computing power" can help. I believe (I may be wrong) the high computing cost mainly comes from the enormous amount of data used these days. Have you read papers related to your idea, and do you have an intuition as to how much data and so computing power (in terms of order of magnitude) you'd need? As long it's not ridiculously high, it should be enough to start a discussion.

Is it my responsibility as an undergrad student to figure out if my thesis is affordable?

Usually, no.  This is an example of where your faculty advisor should help you.
Do take a few minutes to research costs before discussing it with your advisor.
There might be exceptions if, based on your area of study, you were expected to know about costs already.

It's great that you're taking the lead and refining your ideas to come up with a well-defined research proposal. Your prospective advisors will appreciate the effort and it will likely increase the chances of them accepting you as their student.
Cost is certainly an important aspect in determining the feasibility of a project. From your question, it appears that the main cost will be for computing power. It would be a good idea to attempt to estimate computational requirements to the best of your ability, by looking at relevant literature that you base your ideas on. If the costs are likely to be extremely high (as an extreme example, take the cost of training GPT-3), you could shelve the idea and think of something else.
However, no matter how carefully you go through this, it is always possible to miss something vital. Particularly, since you are undergraduate and it sounds like you are not yet very experienced in this field, you may miss factors to consider that are obvious to your professor. This is completely fine: you learn by working on projects, and it is the role of the supervisor to guide you through it. As long as you make a good faith effort and are enthusiastic to learn, it is very unlikely that they'll think you are an "idiot" because of this.
So, it would be a good idea to prepare well, but not wait too long to approach the professor. Their inputs can prevent you from wasting time on infeasible ideas, and also help improve your proposal. If they consider the idea feasible and interesting and accept your project, they would very likely cover most of the costs too by providing access to their lab's resources, so external funding, while welcome, may not be necessary.
Referring to your second question: yes, you can certainly discuss other ideas and ask for suggestions, or offer to join an existing project. It is unlikely to be unusual for professors to provide complete project ideas at the undergraduate level.

Maybe your best approach is to contact manufacturers who would have an interest in commercialisation and see what advice and resources you can get from them

Comments coming in since your answer indicate that this does not refer to physical (electrical engineering) transformers, but to a computer science concept that uses code. Yeah, I went to a big hunk of iron and windings too...

My answer might still be valid, although now we are talking about software rather than hardware


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Emailing a professor about a potential research idea, is there a risk?
I am an undergrad who worked at a computer vision related lab. The lab I used to work at raised some red flags by saying that even if I contributed, my name could not be on the paper. I also transferred schools, so I left. The problem is, I have this potentially great research idea that I'd like to test. I still have the data (a one hour video) and was either a. going to ask if I could use it for solo research, of course crediting them b. try to find a new professor at my school to supervise me.
I decided I want to find another professor to supervise me, cause I have never written a paper before and this is kind of a big project. I have been reading papers and research this for 5 months now, and I have never seen my idea done before. It basically takes something from a different area of the field and applies it to the research area I am interested in. I have seen it tried before, but not in the exact way I plan on doing it.
My concern is, what if I email professors about this and they steal me idea? Sure, if your ethical you won't, but could that happen? I want to email this professor with my idea, and ask if has any data / ways I can explore this at their lab. What if he says no and runs with my idea? either way, I am hoping he can offer me some perspective, but even if he says no he can be wrong - and isn't that the point of research to explore things that may not work?
Another reason I want to work with him is because all though there is another professor who would be able to help, he publishes a lot in IEEE and Civil engineering journals. I am trying to get noticed by the AI/ML and deep learning community, and that is where this other professor mostly publishes in. Would it be bad to ask him if he knows of any professors I can work with, if my idea doesn't suit his lab?

Is the new professor at your new school?

A suggestion here is to write it up as a white paper.  It does not have to be written as an academic paper; just outline the problem and algorithm, and some results.  Post it to ArXiv with your name of course.   After that, point a targeted professor at the white paper, and ask him/her whether he/she is interested in turning the work into a proper academic paper.

Be aware that ideas are easy to find and hard to exploit. Reading your post it is hard to know where you are between "hey the technique of that other paper looks cool" and "I know what kind of results I would get but I need the paperwork before pushing the button".

no the professor at my school isn't new, I meant find a new professor to work with at my current school

Prof. Santa Claus that's a good idea, the problem is I need the data. I don't think I can post anything on ArXiv using the old lab's data, even if it wasn't a proper academic paper

Please refer to this for deleting your question. Since there is no upvoted answer, simply deleting it may be possible (I am not sure), and you could try that. But please do not keep the question and deface it.

Unless by mischance you are contacting people who are not actually respectable (on the world stage), the sorts of issues that worry you are non-issues.
The more genuine issue, assuming the above, is that more-expert people will not immediately have the same enthusiasm for your ideas as you do. For many possible reasons, including that they and their group have already thought about that, maybe many times, and/or they are aware of other peoples' thinking in such terms decades earlier, etc.
So don't be offended, and don't be suspicious, if/when people do not hail your ideas as revolutionary, etc.
In real life (in academe, in my 40+ year experience), although, yes, sometimes unscrupulous advisors and others do indeed steal their advisees' ideas/work, ... this is (mercifully) quite rare. In particular, again, unless you are unwittingly involved with nasty losers, this worry should by far not be your first consideration. Indeed, thinking in such terms would corrupt your thinking in many ways.
And, in any case, as Michelle Obama recently said, "when they go low, you go high".
Obviously morally ideal, ... and, yes, not always easily feasible in reality... but thinking in those terms is a much better base point than thinking in terms of endless dishonesty.

"Michelle Obama recently said, 'when they go low, you go high'." - A very relevant statement for many posts on SE Academia.

"sometimes unscrupulous advisors and others do indeed steal their advisees' ideas/work" - we do not know how rare that is. SE attests that it does happen to people, and that some people seem to attract trouble somehow. Dishonesty happens, and no matter how rare, it always is upsetting, like getting mugged. You will always remember the one time. A motto that sometimes works is: "develop more good ideas than people can steal from you". Another one is: "Make your idea initially sound dull enough that, by the time someone discovers that they should have stolen it, you've already got the credit."

Let me start this by saying that the scenario you describe is not very likely. If you have an idea, done the research, and have some preliminary models, then any semi-reputable professor (at the very least, in the United States) will not steal your idea. This is due to several reasons:

There are real repercussions to their reputation if you complain (say, by reaching out to student representatives or your institute's ombudsperson).
You are willing to do all the work and have made a lot of headway, all they need to do is simply supervise you and they get a free publication. Why would they steal it and then struggle to go at it alone/wait til their own students figure it out? ML, and vision in particular, is an extremely fast-moving field; for all they know, if they reject you, you'll find someone else who'd be willing to work with you and they'd be wasting their efforts.

That said, if you are genuinely concerned, the best way to avoid having someone steal your idea is to write it down yourself and publish a short summary. Now, I do not mean that you must go through peer review; rather, write down your general idea into a human readable format, and then post the draft to ArXiv, where it'd be timestamped and immediately recognized as yours.
Good luck!


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Hiring Process in Norway for Postdocs
Many months ago I applied for a postdoc position in a university in Norway. About one month ago I got a letter from the university with an evaluation of all candidates. In this evaluation, I was deemed qualified for the position and classified fourth.
I thought that the game was lost, since only one position was announced. But last week I contacted one of the committee members to ask for more information and he said that the other three candidates had already found jobs elsewhere, either in the industry, or some other postdoc position, and that very likely I would get the position if I'm still interested.
I can believe this is the case, since this is one of the slowest hiring processes I have ever been involved, and surely the other applicants already had time to get other offers.
They explained me that even if they know informally that the other candidates are not anymore interested in the job, by law they are obliged to send a formal offer to the first classified, and if they refuse, they will send an offer to the second and so on. My question is:

Assuming none of the candidates accepts the job, how long will the
process still take until I'm offered the position?
How long is the minimum waiting time for the answer of each candidate?

ps: Please, I would like to have an answer from somebody experienced with the Norwegian hiring system. In Norway postdoc positions are considered government jobs and therefore are subject to a very strict (and peculiar) hiring process.

The procedure and the length of the hiring process look very similar to the Italian ones. I've thought we had the slowness world record, but it appears that there are competitors :-)

I don't think there is a standard waiting period. The law likely has a minimum, but the university or the department may stablish a longer one, there may be some administrative overhead between candidates... You should ask them.

I have applied for both a postdoc and an associate professor positions in Norway. For the postdoc position, it took about 2 months from the time I applied to the time the position was offered to someone. The same took about 6 months for the associate professor position.

@adipro Could you make that an answer?

I see that the question is old, and hopefully, you have already started in your position. However, I will try to answer anyway for the benefit of others.
I was previously employed at a Norwegian university as a PhD student. The slowness you describe is sadly very familiar.
When I received offers for PhD positions (~5 years ago), I did get formal letters like you describe, but in some cases more informal contact forms were used to speed up the process. The deadline for me to respond to these formal offers was two weeks. As have been mentioned in the comments there may be some administrative overhead in between the candidates. I do not know for sure, but having observed how slow administrative units can move at Norwegian universities, I wouldn't be surprised if the overhead is substantial.
The best way to speed the process up is to find someone at the university that is interested in someone -- you -- starting in the position as soon as possible. Typically, this will be the professor you will be working for. This professor can then push the administration to work faster and contact the people ahead of you on the ranking list to kindly ask them to withdraw their applications, seeing as they already have accepted another position anyway. As there is no need to send formal offers to people who have withdrawn their applications, this last part can speed up the process tremendously. If you can't get a professor involved in your case, trying someone in the university administration can also be effective (but it is my impression that it is harder to get the administration involved).


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Whether to avoid collaborating with an academic because it would prevent them from being a reviewer on your post-doctoral research fellow application
I'm applying for a post-doctoral research fellowship in the UK, and a key part of the application is finding academic collaborators for the research. I already have two strong international collaborators, but I would also like a UK collaborator.
Now, one potential person -- let's say Prof. X -- would be a great collaboration, but they are also the person who is closest to my line of work in the UK. This means there is a good chance that they would be chosen for peer-review of my proposal, and I am confident they would give me a high score because I know that they think highly of me. Of course, if they are listed as a collaborator, they will not be asked to review.
Given this, I'm wondering whether it is better to take Prof. X as a collaborator to boost the quality of my application, or leave them out because there is a good chance they may be a reviewer and give me a high score. What do you think?

To succeed in a competitive funding application such as this one, you will need to convince not only people who work in your field, but also those working in more distant areas. Therefore, relying on impressing a single professor who knows your work well is not sufficient. As @Roland comments, you are far better off improving the quality of your proposal through collaboration.