text:
Why do faculty use the software "Blackboard"?
It is becoming apparent to me that, outside my field, use of Blackboard and other LMS software is becoming extremely common. Indeed, a rash of technical problems here is making it apparent students and administrators alike seem to assume that Blackboard is the exclusive (locked) gateway to the course's content. I have had to explain that, actually, my syllabus and homework assignments are posted on the web, freely available to anyone, anywhere.
I have used Blackboard a little bit (to mass e-mail my students and to post grades) and I find it to be slow, kludgy, and buggy. I would find it painful to heavily use this software, and I find it vastly simpler to create a course website.
My question is -- what is it that drives Blackboard's popularity? Is it that most faculty do not want to learn HTML? That faculty prefer to keep their course materials private rather than public? Are there other useful features which I have overlooked? Or other factors?

I find it vastly simpler to create a course website. — "What do I look like, some sort of computer nerd?  I don't have time to lean HTLM or whatever. Much easier to use commercial software written by professionals. You can tell it's quality because it costs so much.  Yeah, it's kinda painful to use, and it's kinda broken, but that's just how computers are.  Hey, you're a geek, can you tell me why I can't get this stupid thing to work?"

I would love to see some data on what portion of universities use various forms of LMS and the breakdown of which departments use it. Eg at my uni most use the LMS, but literally no-one in CS does.

I hope you don't mind my clarification of your question title. As it was, I was very surprised to find the question actually asking about a particular software, when, based on the former title, I had expected a question about why and how to use blackboards (rather than whiteboards, or rather than multimedia things) in class.

As for mere websites that don't include special educational features, wikis are often adequate CMS. For instance I see the Helsinki University wiki is huge.

Because we don't have any $%#(*&%# choice in the matter. Old joke with the serial number filed off and a new paint job: Knock, knock. Who's there? ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... blackboard.

You should see what we use at the last University I taught at. I WISH we used Blackboard.  So I did what you did, put up my own course materials on the Web.

It is needed for some purposes (correct email of students, online proctoring of exams, etc), and is required for some classes.

A widespread problem in the institutional procurement of software: lack of technical acumen among those making the purchasing decisions, leading them to rely on the largely irrelevant paper qualifications of the vendors.

Protecting this question because a lot of low-quality answer flags have been raised on the answers.

For everyone who hadn't heard of the software, see http://www.blackboard.com and Blackboard, Inc.

Just a note. I studied at two Universities that both use BlackBoard. At one University I found BlackBoard useful as a student. At the other university it was a hopeless mess. I think that if BlackBoard is set-up nicely and all the professors make an effort to work with it, it could be a nice product. But if that is not the case its a hopeless mess :(.

Blackboard is used by the university I teach at and I used it at the university I studied at -
Blackboard (BB) is mostly uniform. While you can customize your courses, to an extent, a student moving from one course to another using BB will already know where everything is. BB is simplistic and students have different technical abilities.
Having each instructor learn HTML is a large order. I teach with an 80-year old man who still has a flip phone and can barely use that. Contracting someone to create the webpages would also be an issue because costs and instructors changing the courses that they teach may want to change the webpage.
BB also has (at least where I studied and teach) a copy checker. If a student from Z class uploads the same paper to both Z and Y then when they upload it to Y the instructor is told that there is a paper within the servers (goes back 2-3 years I believe) that is x% similar to a paper submitted in course Z.

Plagiarism tools are by no means something special or uncommon in such software.

Correct. BUT different tools run different algorithms and if instructors made their own websites every one of those website would need to use the same tool, and run off of the same server. An institution would likely require certain things to be included and not allow some things on a self-made website for students. It could be no different than BB if an institution has strict guidelines.

Thanks for your response. One question: "A student moving from one course to another using BB will already know where everything is." Are faculty, in fact, motivated by this concern to use it? Maybe they are more unselfish than me. :)

I believe, as an instructor, that instructors should be interested in seeing every student succeed and give them ample time to focus on course work. Some instructors would make a website more simplistic than BB but I know of others that would try and make it the size of Google (obviously an inflated reality). A student shouldn't need to take the time to learn how to navigate their course when they need to be reading or studying an assignment. I give a lot of assignments that focus on research and use BB to post the assignments and relevant links they could use. I'm here to teach business...

courses and not to teach website navigation. Instructors would then have to take take to teach students how to use the entire new system.

Another thing I should mention is design. A poor website design could make things 100x harder for both the student and the instructor.

So... why BlackBoard? Why not Moodle or something less expensive/vendor-locked?

Blackboard somehow has marketed their product to be the de-facto standard for universities and public school systems (at least in America). Compare with TI-82 compatible calculators, which are overpriced, underpowered, teach no valuable skills, and yet somehow are required for all students above a certain math level in most public school systems in America. That's because Texas Instruments has done a good job of marketing or conning school systems, depending on your point of view.

To a student studying a dozen courses, it's easier to work around something which is ten times as complex and annoying as twelve easy to learn microsites.

This doesnt really answer "why blackboard". There are other tools out there that provide the same style of product, and you dont need to "learn html".

Read @ToddWilcox's comment. It's all about marketing.

@Memj, not really, for instance many plugins just defer everything to Turnitin so the datasets and logic are the same.

@ToddWilcox in the TI82's case it also helps that anything significantly more capable is generally banned because being able to do symbolic algebra makes it too easy to pass tests without actually knowing any of the material.  Anecdotally, using a Casio graphing calculator in HS during the late 90's meant that since I had to either find the "Do X" feature on the calculator or write a program to do it myself, I generally had an easy button to verify the work for new material my tests that the majority of my TI using peers were only shown how to use after we moved to the next topic.  ...

...  Although if any of them were more ambitious, our teacher loaded the full set of programs for her trig and calculus classes at the start of the term.  Almost none of my peers actually took the effort to learn how to use the programs on their own.

Moodle is the de facto standard in Germany and Austria.

You opinion about the state of Blackboard is pretty much what most of us who use it also think.
At the institution I work we (the faculty) are required to use Blackboard for all modules and there is a minimum level of information we have to post there about our modules in a standard format. This does at least ensure that there a minimum standard is achieved for each course and that it is consistently presented to students - the alternative of having everyone use a different system would lead to chaos and confusion for students. This is how it used to be before there was an institution VLE. This minimum standard is really a least common denominator and not too bothersome to set up.
Another perceived institutional advantage is that the management and running of Blackboard is outsourced. In principle this means less IT staff needed to maintain it however in practice we still need dedicated internal staff to assist faculty in using Blackboard and to act as a buffer between the institution and Blackboard when issues do arise (and there are still many bugs and idiosyncrasies in Blackboard).
Those of us who wish to use technology more effectively do find the limitations of Blackboard an issue. Some colleagues link from Blackboard to external sites to overcome this. My solution has been to write a set of tools that integrate with Blackboard that provide the types of approaches I want to use. These are actually run on another server but from the student and staff user point of view it  appears as part of Blackboard. The only limitation is that I cannot integrate into the grade centre of Blackboard for collating marks. In any case my own feedback and marking system actually provides much more flexibility and statistical analysis and copes properly with multiple teaching assistants marking different students so it isn't much of a disadvantage.

Nobody I know would use it if we didn't have to.

A lot of my colleagues that teach ground courses just refuse to use any online software. They believe that if that course has a classroom then it doesn't need to be taken online too. Personally I don't mind BB, mostly because I've gotten used to it.

There wouldn't be a demo of any sort, or a more detailed explanation of what you're talking about as your solution anywhere on the internet, is there John ?

No my own tools are used across departments internally but are not at a state I would want to release or support externally. I don't like having to do this type of cottage industry internal development. There are institutional risks but it does make my job more efficient.

There are a lot of answers already, but I want to add to @CreationEdge's answer: one of the benefits of LMS software is that it provides some features that would be hard to do using HTML.
Probably the most important is providing a secure gradebook which shares each student's grade with that student and no one else.  (In my experience, this alone is the "wedge" which drives LMS adoption---students love being able to check their grades online.)  Once you've started using one, there are often some other features---class discussion forums, support for online turn in of assignments, and a course calendar, for example---which are doable in other ways but which good software can do automatically and easily.
Just about every specific piece of LMS software seems to be pretty unpopular, in part because the underlying problem is hard.  It turns out that every professor wants to do something slightly different.  So either the software tries to accommodate everyone, requiring you to search through lots of options and get them configured just right to get what you want, or it's inflexible so a few people think it's perfect and everyone else loaths it.

"It turns out that every professor wants to do something slightly different."  The reason why most software is complex to use.

If an organization provides Blackboard for their faculty, then they're much less likely to also provide other services that accomplish the same general goal (like private web page hosting, course-specific fileshares, etc).  IT departments don't like having to maintain redundant services.  In those environments, users generally don't have any other option than Blackboard.
I believe the real question is why Blackboard in particular is so popular.  A big reason for this is that Blackboard was one of the first CMS systems available that focused on the educational sector.  Educators could try it out for free and since most schools didn't have any sort of CMS at the time, IT departments got a lot of requests for it.  Over time, Blackboard has bought out several of their largest competitors, further entrenching themselves and making it more difficult for a rival product to compete.  Blackboard also had a patent on an "Internet-based education support system and methods" that they've used to scare off competitors (the patent was eventually ruled invalid).
The real competition in this space is from open-source systems like Moodle.  They're insulated from the problems listed above since they don't live or die based on market share, and since Blackboard has pledged not to assert their patents against open-source or non-profit entities.  Unfortunately, it's hard for an open-source CMS to gain the same traction as a proprietary product like Blackboard, regardless of the quality of the product.  Blackboard puts a lot of resources into advertising and marketing, and open-source projects generally can't come close to matching that.  Decisions about which CMS to use are generally made by high-level management (not IT, faculty, or anyone else who actually has to use it).  These folks aren't likely to even know what "open-source software" is, much less what options are available, so they tend to base their decisions on what they hear from sales representatives.  If there was a company behind Moodle that was pushing it as aggressively and consistently as Blackboard, I have a strong feeling that you wouldn't see Blackboard anywhere near as often as you do now (surveys frequently show the overwhelming majority of blackboard users don't like it).
This isn't a unique tale.  You can replace "Blackboard" above with the name of almost any other piece of "popular" enterprise software and the story is pretty much the same.

My university uses Blackboard, so I am required to use it for entering final grades.  I use it for only that, because I find Blackboard to be not very user-friendly.
There are alternatives that are free, better, and don't require any knowledge of HTML.  I use Piazza to host course information, distribute announcements, and as a tool for students to ask and answer questions.

We had two different systems around here for a short while. Students hated them with passion, not the systems themselves but the fact that they were just different. Now we have only Moodle, and as long as no extensive customization is done, it works fine. Yes, it is quite dumb in some operations, I'd much prefer to have e.g. a command line tool to set up homework than the endless clicking around for a routine, repetitive task. But it works.

You're allowed the enter final grades into BB? Where I work we can put the final score of the final letter grade but final grades have to be submitted directly to the schools student information system (SIS). BB has a feature to hold such things and transcripts of grades but I was of the opinion most places do not use this feature to do security.

I think it has a lot to do with software patents. From the wikipedia article on blackboard:

The United States Patent and Trademark Office granted the company U.S. Patent 6,988,138 for "Internet-based education support system and methods" in January 2006. The patent established Blackboard's claims to the concept of connecting together web-based tools to create an interconnected university-wide course management system.[83] The firm announced the patent on July 26, 2006, and on the same day it filed a patent infringement lawsuit against rival education software company Desire2Learn Inc.[83][84] According to news reports, the awarding of the patent and the lawsuit against Desire2Learn led to concerns about patentability in the electronic learning community.

In short, they got the patent on this kind of software, and they started muscling people out of the business on the same day. While there are plenty of alternatives now, I think that for a long time, it was slim pickings. There were open source alternatives, but they were specialized projects not getting many contributions.
I can't find the version history online, but I remember that in the 8 years I was a student (don't ask), my university used Blackboard 6, and after those 8 years, Blackboard 7 came in, which looked exactly the same. Which suggests to me that Blackboard acquired a monopoly through the patent system, and then sat on their asses.
And of course, even now the whole thing is a far cry from what you'd expect from a modern web-application. Considering they employ 3000 people, I shudder to think what the whole operation looks like behind the screens.

It looks like you would expect. Many years ago I sent a letter with issues to a BB representative. She passed it on to IT with some nasty remarks about me, asking them to only answer the questions that were positive for BB. Which they did, inline, including her comments and passed the whole thing back to me. I informed colleagues in neighboring universities and the CEO, who actually called me that Christmas Eve at home to apologize. Needless to say, we didn't buy BB, but now have a Moodle instance running.

I think the reason why BB is popular in the US is that it was one of the first enterprise apps to hit the education market. There's a lot of other nice tools out there, but schools have been invested far too much in this broken product that getting rid of it is either difficult to justify or simply bogged down in internal politics.
There's some nice paid and free alternatives out there that do a much better job than BB. One good example that I have seen taking momentum in the open source community is Moodle but it doesn't have the marketing drive that BB enjoys and will take time to become mainstream.

+1 This is a good point, since my school requires 24/7 enterprise support from any LMS.

Is it that most faculty do not want to learn HTML?

On the contrary, I find that faculty who insists in writing their own HTML even when it is inappropriate is a very common trend.
Maybe you are an exception, but you should ask yourself a few questions to make sure you are not biased.
Are you sure you should write your site by directly editing HTML? Is your HTML accessible? Do images have alt tags, for instance? Does it have a readable color scheme? Is it responsive / does it scale well to mobile? Does it have a look that does not resemble a Geocities website from the 90s? Have you tested it on several common browsers? Does it take you more or less time to write than Markdown or the visual editor that you'd probably find in Blackboard? How long does it take you to publish a PDF file? Do your students find your website better and easier to use than Blackboard, on average?
I interact daily with both mathematicians and computer scientists, and I have found that on average computer scientists have learned not to mess with hand-written HTML in the past years, while mathematicians seem very resilient on it. It is a trend that probably comes from Latex-induced perfectionism. (And, looking at your profile, it seems to me that my guess that you are a mathematician is correct.)

In practice, these highly legitimate arguments end up taking the backseat versus public access (many lecturers want their materials to be public; university-installed CMSs don't normally even offer the option), quick access (on a typical HTML class page, each file is 1 click away; in Canvas/Moodle you have to navigate for a while) and exportability (Canvas/Moodle have their export options, but you're getting too much -- you don't want your students' homework). I'd love to have a more programmatic way to set up my class websites; it's just I don't.

@darijgrinberg Moodle offers the option to make your course public.

Interesting -- I guess I should have looked more closely.

@darijgrinberg On a course page, Users -> Enrolment methods -> Guest access -> Allow guest access.

Also, while these are arguments against LMSs, they are not arguments in favor of writing your own HTML from scratch. There are plenty of other choices: wikis, Wordpress and the like, static website builders like Jekyll. All these should allow you to set up new courses easily by cloning existing ones (but I think Moodle does that, too).

Glad you mentioned Jekyll, which is on my longtime "to learn" list. I really wouldn't include Wordpress, given how hard it is to get right (and if you don't, you're creating a sandbox for spammers). I guess if I had to make some structured website really quickly, I would fork and modify Joanna Rutkowska's minimalist blog or something similar. Still, nothing is as quickly deployed (talking short-term) and yet as durable as self-written HTML. I'm going to migrate my teaching page to a different university soon -- just a matter of copying ...

... over folders! I have no idea what I'd have to do if it was spread across LMSses, wikis or blogs, at least if the latter were on the university servers. (Again, the non-lazy long-term answer is to get one's own server...)

@darijgrinberg J. Rutkowska's blog is written in Jekyll, it seems. I use a similar solution myself (with webgen rather than Jekyll), and I find that it strikes the perfect balance for me between easy to edit and portable. As for my teaching page, typically it contains links to the Moodle page for each pair (course,year), so that's easy to migrate. The difficult thing is migrating course contents between different years, I agree, but typically this requires some amount of customization anyway.

BB might be popular but is by no means the only game in town. My University used to use BB but then we switched to Sakai which is cheaper. We are not forced to use Sakai. I post problem sets in my personal page. That said how do you make student grades accessible to them without violating privacy laws and wasting lots of your time? I can not see any good alternative to a system like BB or Sakai.

The main reason that we were given is that students expect it, or some similar uniform interface. Additionally, fFaculty in non-science departments may not have access to a general-purpose HTML server, and it becomes a major drain on staff resources if computer staff have to implement a course web page using whatever database system the college set up for personal web-pages. BB and its ilk somewhat require you to get on board with a particular uniform way of thinking about course content, and uniformity is a virtue these days. And it does make it easy to turn in materials online, by a fixed time, which is technically doable with some script writing, but many people in arts and humanities are not so familiar with scripting.

I can't comment on the specifics of Blackboard (we use Moodle) but Course Management Systems (CMS) / Learning Management Systems(LMS) / Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), whatever they're called, don't usually do anything that you couldn't do by other means, such as a web page, emailer, whatever.   Their advantage is that all of these functions are contained in a common environment, with a single user interface, and so staff and students don't waste time with the distraction of learning how to drive multifarious systems.
BTW, @MJeffryes, I agree that free software isn't necessarily more suitable for universities but the open-source aspect of a VLE like Moodle might be an advantage over Blackboard, etc.   There's a fairly healthy hacker community for the former.

Their advantage is that all of these functions are contained in a common environment — This is not obviously an advantage.  I like toast and eggs at breakfast, but it's hard to imagine a single device that does both well.  Similarly, I don't necessarily want to post lecture notes, securely store grades, and send email with a single program.

@JeffE:   isn't it useful to be able to cook your eggs and toast in the same room?

Sure, just like it's useful to have all those functions available on the same computer.  But I prefer to use software crafted for each task, just like I prefer to use separate kitchen tools instead of throwing everything into the microwave.  (Even if it does mean washing more dishes.)


text:
How do I determine if my contribution to an area of research merits publication?
I am a new worker in real functions with little experience and few published papers but not in top journals.
I together with my two colleagues found a new characterization of a well-known class of functions (first Baire class). I am pretty sure this is new. However, we cannot decide the extent of its significance because we are unable to find a good application. But suffice it to say there are some old results in the area that admit a very straightforward proof using our characterization. For instance, functions with countable discontinuities can be shown to be of first Baire class using our characterization with a very easy proof.
My question, is this enough for publication? I am afraid to submit it and got a snobbish review. By the way, I am from a third-world country.

I don't know.  I would say that it is publishable.  And if you are able to show previously known results more simply with your characterization, that is great, and I think worthwhile!

If you don't submit a paper, you're never going to find out it's publishable—unless someone beats you to it. Basically, if you and your colleagues believe you have a publishable advance, then write it up and submit it.
On a related note: have you solicited feedback from colleagues in the field? Has it been presented at a conference somewhere? What have you heard and done to "talk the work up" with colleagues? Has anyone told you it is (or is not) publishable?

The first sentence says it all....if you want to know if you can, then try and see what happens. A bad review might sting but it won't hurt for long. In the end, you'll be better off by learning how to improve.

Yes I presented it in a conference and one expert in the field said that our characterization is something new but did not hinted about the significance of our result.

It sounds like your work merits submission. Whether it merits publication depends on the journal. It's always good to consult with experts ahead of time, but failing that the best approach is to find a journal that seems in tune with the results (maybe it's the one where the prior work was published, or one that contains most of the relevant material that you needed for your result). Then submit it and see what happens. In the worst case your paper will be rejected, but then you'll expect to get review feedback, which is really what you're looking for.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Research Gate gathering data
Does anybody know how ResearchGate gather data? I just clicked on a scientific paper in my browser (not through Research Gate), and in less than an hour I had received an e-mail notification that the author of my recent read is on ResearchGate. Is this legal?

You probably downloaded the paper from ResearchGate directly, because sometimes the Google scholar points to the ResearchGate copy of the paper.

No, I read it directly on the ScienceDirect and I was even not googling it. That is why it is surprising for me.

Do you have a researchgate account? If yes, you clicked through the terms and conditions and you probably have agreed to them knowing every time you bat an eye.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is about the proprietary mechanisms behind a particular commercial site, and thus both not publicly disclosed and likely to change without notice.

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


text:
How important is the choice of a guide/adviser for pursuing PhD in a topic
I am really in a fix in my career.
I completed my Masters in 2014. I qualified in a PhD Scholarships Test in 2015 and in the same year joined in a University for research work.
My interest lies in Linear Algebra, Topology, Abstract Algebra. My guide offered  me to work in Spectral Graph Theory. As  I was not quite acquainted with the topic I took up this topic for research.
As I am reading on my own, I am getting stuck on many theorems and some problems.
My guide has said recently that he does not have much expertise on this topic  besides the preliminaries and hence he can't answer each and every problem of mine. He has said that the topic is new to him also. I have found now that also does not have any research papers to his name on Spectral Graph Theory as well. I was not aware of this before
My question is how important is the choice of a guide/adviser for pursuing PhD in a topic and what needs to be checked before joining him.
Is it wise  continuing to  work with him or should I look for some alternatives. Does getting a PhD depend a lot on your guide or I am  expecting a lot from my guide? Does pursuing a PhD mean you have to do all along yourself?
I know there are many in this site who have got a PhD or have served as guides/advisors for many students. Please help. Any suggestions will be helpful. I would be happy to give more inputs if required.

There's still hope. If your advisor doesn't have domain expertise, search for a mentor who does.

Working on a PhD in an area where your advisor appears to have little to no expertise in is fraught with danger. A PhD degree is in some sense an apprenticeship - while you need to do the heavy lifting, you also get/need to learn the tricks of the trade from an accomplished master. Every craft has subtler/finer aspects that are not acquired easily. Would you want to rely on someone who himself doesn't appear to know much, even at a high level? I wouldn't do a PhD with such an advisor for the same reasons I wouldn't learn painting from someone who doesn't know it himself/herself.
On a more important side note, it might not be very wise to jump into a doctorate in an area you have such little knowledge/interest in. You do appear to have the right background, but even with that, doctoral level research in Spectral Graph Theory (and applications, if you are interested in them) is not going to be easy to pick up, even with an expert advisor.

I disagree. Many very successful PhD students have worked in areas that are not precisely in the expertise of their supervisor. Certainly nowadays, when you have the web, and easily connection to other resources this is quite common. It also indicates independence and shows initiative.

@Dilworth;is it possible to pursue a phd only relying on the web ?

@learnmore, the web as a starting point, yes. Then you should meet with people, and especially let them know your work. Also, you can almost never rely on your adviser to teach you things. You should be able to develop your own self-studying routine. This is essential in phd. PhD is a lonely road (in math, and other theoretical areas).

@Dilworth: PhD studies require 'independence' and 'initiative' regardless. The question is, why make your life harder still, esp when you have the option of making it easier? How is this extra machismo going to be of use, given that the enormous risks of picking a dilettante advisor are only too well known? The OP would be competing against peers (for awards, publications, jobs, etc.) who have better equipped advisors. It makes much more sense to keep it simple and play it safe. This business of working with amateur advisors ends badly all too often (exceptions of course are always there).

@andy, you are confusing two things here: an amateur advisor and an advisor who is not an expert in some sub-field. There are excellent and professional advisors that had great students not in their sub-field expertise. If someone is an "amateur" advisor, even to have a phd in his/her area of expertise is not worthwhile.

Also: Spectral Graph Theory is quite close to algebra (abstract and linear).

And yet another point: many excellent phd students have advisor who knows almost nothing in their area, e.g., in MIT it is usual to have an advisor with whom you don't publish anything. These are of course very good students, so it might not be for everyone.

@Dilworth, Yes that's what I meant. I didn't mean, amateur per se, but an amateur in that particular research area. And yes, like I said, exceptions are always going to be there. But for a vast majority of the cases, this approach is simply just inviting trouble. Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

A chief hazard in working on a topic (in mathematics, for example) in which your advisor is not expert (and for which you have no other immediate expert co-advisors) is analogous to the idea of trying to make money on the stock market only with knowledge available to everyone else. Yes, there is the internet, but it is available to everyone else, too. The way to make big money on the stock market is with "insider information", but in the U.S. this is illegal (unless you are in Congress!) Analogously, unless one imagines that one is "special", it is not so easy to get started in some line of research without expert advice. Luckily, it is legal, and certainly desirable, to have expert advice! Otherwise, one may fail to understand relevant keywords, for example, and thereby be unaware of work already done. Or be unaware that dozens of other people are already working on whatever problem one sets as project goal, setting up a situation in which one's thesis inadvertently turns out to be old news? Or that one's project-idea is known (to experts) to be infeasible? How to avoid such issues?
Despite frequent claims on this site and others about a Ph.D. simply being "learning how to do research", I would also claim that there is such a thing as "expert knowledge base(s)", and these are not easily replicated simply in software (with or without the internet).
(By the way, the usual style in mathematics is that advisors are not co-authors on PhDs, in any case.)

... that is, yes, there are considerable risks in the situation you describe, and they are not standard and certainly not required. Unless you consciously choose to accept them, you should change your situation.

It's crucial. You can get technical help elsewhere, but your advisor is ultimately the gatekeeper to your future career. And it is a career; just being good at math is not sufficient without the set of contacts and public presence that your advisor controls access to. You're in theoretical mathematics, and it's extremely difficult to get an academic position in that area, and it's extremely difficult to do any significant research outside of such a position. (It isn't difficult to find a random high-paying job with a degree in pure math; but if you only wanted that, getting a PhD is not an efficient method of going about it.)
The point of grad school is to prepare you from an academic career, and that involves (and, honestly, is mostly about) getting the appropriate CV that will allow you to enter that career. Your goal at this point is to churn out publications. Ask your advisor if, given the difference in your research interests, he can help you with that. This involves knowing enough about the subfield to direct you toward the better journals and conferences, identifying the cool problems that will attract notice, and avoiding the problems that are intractible or just not interesting. He may be able to do this; if so, there's really no reason for you to switch advsiors. If he can't, find someone who will.


text:
How can I include figures with non-English text (and a translation) in the appendix of a research paper?
I'm writing a research paper in English, but my data is in another language.
I want to include some pictures in an appendix, but they contain some writings in the foreign language.
How can you include translation in an appendix?
Is it a common practice to write the translation over the picture since it has the necessary space. I don't want to put the translation below the picture to avoid taking too much space.

Are writings in other language important for your message? Can you remove them in some graphics editor and replace by English labels?

They are very very important. The picture, with the writings, is pregnant with cultural meanings and should remain so. I'm asking if I can the translated text in the picture using a software. Thank you

As the comments state, if the wording is of any significance to understanding your manuscript then a translation is in order. Depending on the type of figure you have several options
If your figure exists in editable digital form, you can see if actually changing the wording is possible. Even better if the format is a vctor graphics is to redraw the figure completely.
If your figure is a bit map, you could ad labels to the figure and provide translations in the text or figure caption (preferably).
Clearly the possibilities vary with the format of the original but it will be important to make the figure as understandable as possible for people not familiar with your native language.

Could you please further explain the second option?

Since you cannot change th etext in a bitmap you need to figure out some other way of adding translations. Introducing some form of markers and then providing the markers and the translation of the word in the caption might be one way. I am not advocating a single method but to use your creativity in a way that would make it easy for the reader to understand the figure.


text:
Can a single bad letter of recommendation ruin my chances of getting admitted to grad school?
I am dealing with one very mercurial professor and I had a bit of an incident with him. I think I might have offended him slightly (I told him about the deadline to submit a letter of recommendation (LOR) in the nicest possible way and yet he flared up on me). My seniors tell me that he has the habit of extracting revenge on people who ask him for a LOR if they irritate him. I am afraid I might have offended him; he kinda scares me. But he is a very good researcher in computer networks and I performed well in his class. I don't want to drop him and choose another faculty.
Now I know very well that the other two lecturers are going to rate me well, but if this lecturer gives me a bad rating will it harm my chances of getting admitted?

As a side note: I was always taught to not only ask a person for a LOR, but ask whether he/she is willing to write a positive LOR. The reason to ask explicitly for a positive one is that in many countries a professor/boss is formally not allowed to deny a request for a LOR and therefore will agree, but write a negative one. He/she is allowed to deny to write a positive LOR (obviously), and in that case you can find someone that is willing to write a positive one, because, as mentioned by @BobBrown, a negative LOR is something you really want to avoid.

@Michiel must be noted that at least some will not refuse to write the letter, but will suggest you get a better reference.

@Davidmh:  That's been my approach: "Ask someone in whose courses you performed better."

Ofcourse @DavidKetcheson.

@dannsh13 If you are talking about the legal notion of "defamation of character" in US law, then what you said is not accurate.  That term only applies to false statements.  I think the same thing is true in the UK as well (although in UK law the burden of proof regarding the truth of the potentially defamatory statement falls on the defendant.)

@TrevorWilson - this is my understanding of the law too.

Pick someone else if it isn't already too late.
The actual answer to your question is this: It is far better to have a good letter from a faculty member who is relatively unknown than a bad letter from someone they recognize and respect.  In fact, the latter is probably the worst thing that could happen.
If it is already too late, i.e. you have asked Professor X, he's agreed, and you've sent him the material (which is probably an online link these days) then work hard to make writing the letter easy.  Put together the following information and send it fast:

Include your student number.
Remind him which of his classes you have taken, and when.
How did you distinguish yourself in those classes?
How would you describe yourself? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? He is going to have to answer those questions when he writes your reference, so the more details the better; but these must be things your referee knows himself.
What are some of your academic and nonacademic accomplishments that he may not remember?
What makes him particularly qualified to write a letter for you? That is, why should the recipient of the letter value it over a letter from someone else?

This goes in an email that says, "Thank you very much for agreeing to write a reference for me on very short notice.  I hope the following will be of use to you when you write it."

One of the other two faculty told me that they had the LOR printed on a college letter head, signed it, scanned it and uploaded it. Is it necessary for colleges? Cause I am pretty sure he wouldn't do that extra work.

That's an entirely different question, and you should be able to find the answer in the admission material of the institution to which you are applying.

Yes.
A bad recommendation can ruin your chances. If a letter writer were to write that you had committed some grave academic dishonesty, for example, that would look extremely bad for you, even if the others were generally positive.
An answer to another question says that even a "good but not great" letter could keep you out of some departments.


text:
Value of recommendation letters from professors in a different field
I will be a second year math under-grad in September, and currently doing an internship at applied math research institute. However, my interest after my bachelors is to do PhD in pure math at a top math school. My question is:
How important would the recommendation letters from my current supervisors be while I apply to grad school? (Note: My supervisors are very active in their field of research, but are not quite famous.)

Recommendation letters may also represent soft skills. Hence, they are important. Your personality is independent from your field of study, so there is little point in withholding recommendation letters - indicating what kind of person you are - to future supervisors (or committees) if you are going to spend the next 3-4 years working in a team or with a supervisor on a project.
Source: PhD Student


text:
How difficult is it to get a paid PhD studentship in physics in Germany?
I would like to ask about the possibility of getting a paid PhD position in Germany.
 I am going to defend my thesis in Physics after a few days and I am thinking of applying for a PhD.
My specialization is in nano-science and surface physics.
The average of my Master's degree will be at most 2.7, which is between good and satisfactory.
Does the average play a pivotal rule ? Is it difficult to get a paid PhD position?

Good grades can help, but they aren't the be all and end all. If you put together a great CV and have positive references then you've got a good chance of gaining an interview.
More important than grades I think is simply showing that you are, and will be, a good researcher. Not every great academic was a hotshot from Harvard in their undergrad years. And not everyone with a perfect GPA from Harvard would make a good academic.
I can tell you from personal experience that you don't need amazing grades to get a PhD scholarship. Just put your best foot forward in proving that you're an excellent researcher and go for gold.

Is it difficult to get a paid PhD position?

In Germany, most PhD positions are paid. In physics, you would typically get a half to three quarters full-time equivalent position as a university employee. I don't think it's particularly difficult to get such a position, if you have the right qualification for it. This will also depend on the place where you got your Master's degree.

Does the average play a pivotal rule?

A lot of professors that I know do care for good grades. And many university regulations ask for at least a good degree for admission as a PhD student (in my place, that translates to 2.5 or better, though there's a tolerance for students from abroad to take care of differences in the grading systems).
My suggestion would be to look for position being announced through for example in:

http://www.academics.de
http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/
http://www.drarbeit.de

and apply or get in contact with the person there to see how far you can get.
Also try to use your personal network: Ask your supervisors whether they know good labs to apply to, or whether they could even throw in a word for you.

From my personal experience (just started a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in Hannover), it is not difficult. As @silvado mentions, most Ph.D. positions are paid with about 75 % equivalent of a university employee (corresponding to about 1500-1600 EUR after tax per month). You can look at the Internet for open positions or try and contact group leaders that you would like to work with (possibly after a consultation with your current supervisor). The latter, however, might require some time as the professor will need to find funding.
Regarding grades, some professors might care. In my case, that was not the case and only my research results (i.e., my master thesis) were important. Nevertheless, that is just a single experience and it might be different elsewhere. Anyway, I guess you can always ask about this and, if you can reasonably explain why your grades are not better, this might not be a serious issue.


text:
As a post-doc, should I pursue incremental research or revolutionary research?
I've recently finished my PhD (the field almost doesn't matter, but applied mathematics if it helps), and begun a 3 year grant-funded postdoc with a heavy but very flexible research emphasis, in the same general area as my dissertation.  At their request, I sent my doctoral adviser (a super senior/recently emeritus professor) a list of the papers I'm currently working on/close to submitting, and my ideas for approximately the next 6 months to a year.
All the papers I'm currently working on represent incremental progress on projects that either developed from my dissertation, or formed as collaborations with others.  I didn't outline any wide-eyed ideas, because all the wide-eyed ideas I have will take several years and a long list of incremental progress to come to fruition. In my opinion (formed in part by reading science philosophers like Kuhn), this is how science progresses: incremental progress as long as it yields fruit.
My adviser responded with an alarming level of "concern" (to put it gently) that my current projects are not ambitious enough and he feels they don't match his expectations of me nor do they sufficiently challenge the status quo.  I got the impression that he seemed to think that by publishing works that are only a slight improvement on the existing literature, I won't amount to anything, which I took to mean I won't be able to get myself a "real" job once my 3 year postdoc is up.
Oh, and by the way, he suggested a solution, which is essentially to drop everything I'm doing and spend more time working on a particular idea that he thinks will revolutionize a particular area of science.  I'm always skeptical any time someone says that, no matter how good the idea, so I pushed back and said no, I'm going to pursue an array of topics, some of which are pretty mainstream, in order to build up a good publication record and good relationships with people in my field.
Ignoring the complexities of funding (my funding is flexible enough to permit me to work on a wide array of sub-topics), am I right to think that an early career academic doesn't really have the political (or emotional!) capital built up to make a "bold move" into an unproven field, which inevitably might involve trying to convince many experts they're doing it wrong?  It seems to me like "challenging the status quo" is a dangerous game that can only be played by those with Tenure.
Or do I have it backwards?  Is academic science so competitive that one can only progress, career-wise, by challenging the status quo?  If so, aren't we just chasing each other around in circles, scientifically speaking?

This doesn't answer your question (perhaps subverts it), so I'll leave it as a comment: Perhaps it is okay to do incremental but meaningful work, and even if that means you don't have as "good" of a job in the long term, it might still be worth it.  Others in non-academic fields give up on jobs paying much more for quality of life issues.  Even if you aren't finding the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet you could stand your ground here, especially if other mentors see your work as valuable.

if you're in a hot growing area, then you will get a job no matter how incremental your output, as long as you are productive. Betting everything on a revolutionary result is risky then. Conversely if you are in a stagnant field where you and the other hundred graduates this year are waiting for each retirement to have a shot at a job, your research will need to be revolutionary.

I wouldn't go so far as to call this an answer, but I for one think it's too risky to bet everything on one high risk/high gain idea, especially if my funding was not directly related to it (I've seen some funding calls specifically for high risk/high gain ideas as well). I think being able to show recent publications from your current postdoc is vital in finding the next position. If you can do it on the side or build up to it and explore it that way, it might be worth it. I am very interested in other answers to this post.

Consider that he may be correct.
There may not be an upper bound, but there is certainly a lower bound to the 'boldness' of work that will move you to the next level.
Indeed, while progress is usually incremental, few good faculty positions go to individuals that produce 'usual' work. Your senior advisor has certainly had time to feel out what is likely to succeed.

I'll admit the existence of a lower bound, but just because a new approach is bold doesn't mean it will necessarily pan out.  In this particular case I have scientific reasons to believe that this new approach won't necessarily yield the promised revolution.    I'll admit that most faculty positions must require research uniqueness (we can't give this job to anyone else, because only you do this), but I seem wary of the idea that research uniqueness is only found by jumping off a cliff.

just because a new approach is bold doesn't mean it will necessarily pan out — Exactly right. But if you know in advance that something will out, it isn’t really research; it’s just homework. Good faculty positions (and research grants) don’t go to people who only do homework.

Rather sounds like a rhetoric question to me seeing the competition on positions with tenure.
And this is not restricted to the post-doc phase. I have worked in groups where the professor already and intentionally choosed research questions/methods with high risk of success/failure of the individual PhD student. Different professors will have very different research/risk/diversification strategies. Some groups work with same amount of people on one topic, other on 3 or 4.
If you have funding for 3 years, which is over average for post-docs, I think it is clear you are expected to deliver something significant, not only incremental. Results that would allow to acquire further funding.
Also, I don't have the same understanding of philosophy of science (Kuhn) as you. Paradigms are not shaken by incremental research, general relativity etc. were revolutionary theories that were adapted slowly and incrementally by the community. It's fun to read about this. There is even a stackexchange site (history of science)
Another view is, do you win scientific prizes with incremental research? Most of them go to researchers that developed new concepts/measurement methods/theories. Of course incremental research has to be done and most of the tenured researchers and PhD students work most of the time on such projects. But the post-docs, in my opinion, are really the one selected to risk something and being able to manage to accomplish it. And you can also find that a nobel prize on average gets awarded on average over 20 years after the discovery and it is known most of the researcher, depending on field, make significant discoveries in their 20-30s, PhD and post-doc phase again.
In the best case you already acquire funding during your post-doc time and can hire PhD students on your own as PI. Then you can diversify your research topics from risky to incremental
I don't think it would be a wise decision, to follow his advise 100% and drop all your current topics you are experienced in. From his overall strategy this can make sense to put single researcher on very risky new topics, I know such professors myself. In the aftermath, if it succeeded and you got outstanding results, you and he did everything right, if not it is very likely you regret it to not have proceeded with projects you were experienced and successful in. I would suggest to negotiate again with him how you diversify the research projects and how division of labour is organized with PhD students.

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


text:
Why don't major research institutions systematically publish their subscription fees to scientific journals?
I read on https://ropengov.github.io/r/2016/06/10/FOI/:

Finland becomes to our knowledge the first country where annual subscription fees for all individual publishers and all major research institutions have been made available.
[…]
Limited access to detailed pricing information and agreement details are likely to result in suboptimal contracts (Cockerill, 2006; Shieber, 2009). Improved access to subscription costs can hence be expected to lead to better deals and lower costs for the universities. It can also facilitate transition to the Open Access (OA) publishing model.

Why don't major research institutions systematically publish their subscription fees to scientific journals?

References:

Shieber, S M (2009). Equity for Open-Access Journal Publishing. PLOS Biology 7(8): e1000165.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000165
Cockerill, M (2006). The Economics of Open Access Publishing. Information Services and Use 26(2): 151–157. Available at: http://content.iospress.com/articles/information-services-and-use/isu499 [Last accessed 28 October 2015].

Why would they systematically publish those fees? They don't systematically publish other specific expenses.

@DavidRicherby See quote in the question.

Most governments don't mandate it. Without a legal requirement, what's in it for the university?

@DavidRicherby is the quote unclear?

@FranckDernoncourt No, but the quote only tells how someone speculates that it might be beneficial to all institutions if they all did this. It does not tell how it would be beneficial to an institution if they are - for the time being - the only one to do so.

@Jasper if you disagree with the quote and its references, feel free to write an answer.

Presumably an important reason is that publishers contractually forbid libraries from disclosing this information, see for example http://access.okfn.org/2014/04/24/the-cost-of-academic-publishing/:

And then libraries are not allowed to tell anyone what these costs are. Libraries are placed under huge amounts of pressure not to release this data, and in the case of Elsevier, they are explicitly forbidden to by non-disclosure agreements in the contracts they have to sign.

This is a reference from 2014, so perhaps meanwhile things have changed (but I would guess not).

Relevant, from April 2014: Tim Gowers went on a campaign to file Freedom of Information Act requests to Russell Group university libraries in the UK, with mixed results. That post also has lots of relevant information, including in particular some glimpses into the mechanisms used by publishers to keep their contracts with libraries under wraps.

My favourite from that post, highlighting the contradictions that emerge from that: (in response to a librarian's refusal to provide information: "You say that the disclosure of the information I ask for would be likely to have a detrimental effect on Elsevier’s future negotiating position with that of the university. You also say that it would be likely to prejudice the commercial interests of the university itself. I do not find these two statements easy to reconcile. Could you please explain how it is possible for both parties to lose out?"

It's extremely common that parties to a contract prohibit each other from disclosing details about the contract. For instance, I work in business software, and AFAIK, all our customers (large grocery chains) are forbidden to give out details about license and other fees. This is not confined to academia. Yes, I do realize that there are different dynamics at work in the public and semi-public sector.

@E.P. it's a bit too basic a question, but you could try asking it on [economics.se] anyway.

@StephanKolassa That is a false equivalence. Of course this happens in private-private transactions - that is not in question. However, unless you can provide examples in the public sector, and particularly where a public institution is forbidden from releasing those details to its members and constituents, your business-software example is completely moot.

@E.P.: I did mention that dynamics are different in the (semi-)public sector. Plus, quite a few universities are private corporations (e.g., Harvard), even if they do get tax money. Finally, contracts are contracts, and I'd say that private-private contracts provide at least a useful starting point for understanding public-private ones. I'll happily admit that there is some tension here when we talk about taxpayer money.

@StephanKolassa Indeed you did, but the equivalence remains false. The real tension here is that it's not only the university that is a public institution - the scientific publisher is also a part of the academic commons, building a monopoly over freely donated labour, and they're plenty happy to keep up the pretense that they are there to serve the academic community when that pretense suits them (and then drop that once the lawyers come to the table). A private-private contract is a terrible model for this situation.

Perhaps it's because if many universities had enough backbone to do this, they would already have started a full-on "war" against journal publishers and their outrageous contracts, and the prices would have come down to something reasonable and uniform?