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How do you validate a scientific paper that uses a non-public cell/animal line?
Recently my lab published a paper that uses a mouse line from another lab.
Without going into too much detail since not everyone here is a Biologist, this other lab has a mouse with a reporter gene in it for hetero/euchromatin formation (DNA "openness"). This took them a long time (and a lot of work) to create. Basically, if the chromatin structure changes significantly in the mouse, this reporter gene is activated. Tens of thousands of these mice are then randomly mutated, and if a mutation happens to cause a big change in the chromatin openness, their reporter gene flashes up, and the mouse is given an ID and becomes it's own little mouse line to study why/how the DNA openness changed.
My lab was given a few individuals from one of these mutated mice lines - enough to start our own breeding colonies. However, there were some restrictions on what we could do - we can't reverse-engineer the reporter construct, we can't use the reporter construct ourselves for anything, and we obviously can't give the mice to any other labs. We can only examine the phenotype (and find the causative mutation).
Now our work on the phenotype has been published (quite highly in a major journal), and i'm interested to know how Science is supposed to validate such experiments?
I presume my lab still cannot give out the mice we used to generate our data to other labs.
I presume that the lab we got our mice from is under no obligation to give out their mice either - and they may not want to since it would contain their reporter.
So I presume this means the results cannot be validated by anyone else without them going through the whole process of creating a new mutant mouse line first (and even then, it doesn't speak to the validity of the data on our mice).

What prevents other labs from getting the mice the same way yours did (i.e. from the lab that initially bred them)?

They would have to ask, and the final say would be up to the whims of the person who answers the phone. Of course they might say yes - but the risks for that lab would seem to outweigh the pros now that a publication has already been made for these mice.
Really i'm curious to know if their exists a precedent for some sort of legal or contractual tool (perhaps designed by the grant-funding body or journal as a condition for money/publication) that the mice must be accessible upon request.

Interesting, how would you propose to fund the thing? You can't request a lab to keep breeding mice indefinitely for free just in case some other lab, someday, decides to replicate the experiments.

Very good point - I have no idea :D
Ideally validation - if it was a requirement - would be done as soon as the results were first published, and funded by the same people who funded the publication. But honestly I have no idea what the process for validation is like in science. I don't even know if it's possible to secure funding specifically for repeating an existing/published experiment. My whole question assumes that there is a process for validation. If there is not, it doesn't even make sense to ask how validation works in instance XYZ.

When the original lab created the mouse line, did they publish an article on that? If they did, I would expect them to provide enough data for another bio group to reproduce this line. If they didn't, I would expect them to do this sooner or later, as soon as they milk enough profit from their mice.

You've published the results in a prestigious journal.  In most of those journals, that means you've promised to make those mice available to other researchers.  For example, Nature says

An inherent principle of publication is that others should be able to replicate and build upon the authors' published claims. A condition of publication in a Nature journal is that authors are required to make materials, data, code, and associated protocols promptly available to readers without undue qualifications.

(Emphasis in the original)
Science says

After publication, all data and materials necessary to understand, assess, and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available to any reader of Science.

Similar verbiage is in most high-quality journals.  Typically, you agree to those conditions when you submit, or when your paper is accepted, by agreeing with and/or signing forms.
So you may not have known it, but you have already promised to make those mice available.  Do you feel that you can't do that?  Then you shouldn't have agreed to do so when you published.  If someone requests the mice, and you refuse in spite of your agreement, you may end up being blackballed by the publisher and may never publish with them again.  Conceivably -- though I haven't heard of cases reaching this point -- your article could be retracted over your objections, or you could face an academic dishonesty investigation.
(The same applies to the original researchers who made the mice, of course, and in practice most researchers would consider the onus to be on them, not you, to provide the mice.  But that's a pragmatic thing. As I say, you've most likely already explicitly guaranteed that you will make the mice available on request, and it's your problem to make good your promise.)
Edit to point to an even more explicit explanation from the NIH, in the Grants and Funding section, Frequently Asked Questions: Sharing of Model Organism and Related Resources:

What is NIH policy regarding the distribution and sharing of mutant strains of model organisms created with NIH funds?
The NIH expects that new, genetically modified model organisms and related resources generated with the aid of NIH funding will be distributed and shared with the scientific community in a timely way, generally at least upon publication of the primary results announcing the development of the genetically modified model organisms. Investigators submitting an NIH application (including competing renewals) are expected to include a concise plan addressing the timely distribution of organisms and resources, unless the proposed research will not generate new model organisms and related resources.

Question 9 is particularly relevant here:

... I don’t want to share my novel animal strains or the reagents used to make them. Can I be forced to do so?
Sharing of research resources is a very important NIH policy and is included as a term and condition of your award.

(My emphasis)
So not only have you agreed to make the mice available when you agreed to the publication terms, if your work was NIH-funded, you also already promised to make them available, even if you don't want to.
That section notes that there are possible reasons for not sharing, and the NIH will consider them, but they must be explicitly stated in the grant (and putting that in your grant will make it less likely to be funded).  If it was not explicitly stated in the grant originally, this is not an acceptable excuse.
Other granting agencies have similar policies.

Excellent! That is exactly the kind of tool I was hoping would exist :)
Thank you iayork - faith in humanity restored! :D

I do not think that such publication agreements obligate researchers to give away their materials. If I build a laser with certain never-before-achieved properties and publish a paper on it, am I committing to giving away my laser to anyone who asks? No, I'm (at most) committing to telling people what I did to build the laser.

The agreements are very clear and unambiguous.  I quoted and linked to them and they explicitly say you must provide "materials", not just data.  If you've agreed to the conditions by publishing, it's dishonest, and arguably illegal, to unilaterally declare that you don't feel like providing the "material" after all.  If you do feel that the agreements don't mean what they clearly say, I suggest that the next time you publish a paper, you cross off the "material" part of that agreement, and see how the publishers feel about your amendment.

@TomChurch Agreed, the mice here are clearly physical property that should not be required to be given away.  However, the scientific procedure to produce the reporter gene could not be witheld - other labs cannot be forbidden to reverse-engineer it and, in fact, should be provided with the explicit procedures used to replicate it themselves.  The IP of how each step in the result was achieved cannot be made secret.  I think the meaning of "material" here is entirely relating to documentation and information - things that can be copied and transmitted to third parties.

You've agreed to provide materials.  If you don't understand clear English, ask the publisher for clarification.  You have agreed to provide the mice, tortured interpretations and wishful thinking notwithstanding.

@iayork Required is that "After publication, all data and materials necessary to understand, assess, and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available[.]"  Are researchers required to provide microscopes? Mouse cages? Tuition for advanced degrees in biology and genetics? Researchers clearly can't be on the hook for all the materials required to reproduce research.  They're required to provide what's needed to "understand, assess, and extend" the research.  I think extend is the most flexible of those, but clearly researchers needn't become funding agencies in order to publish.

Here's a general legal tip.  When your interpretation of a requirement sounds like something a moderately clever 10-year-old would come up with to try to get out of their homework, it's probably not something to base your academic career on.  The publishers have presented a clear requirement, in plain English. Stop the silly word twisting and read what's said, instead of what you would find convenient.

@J.J I am not sure why are like this answer so much. I think you should reread it. All iayork said is that, by submitting your paper to the journal, while knowing that you did not have the ability to give anyone who asked these special mice, you possibly technically lied and possibly committed academic fraud.

Iayork, I want to replicate some of your work, I need you to give me your laptop urgently.

Seriously, this attitude is not suitable for an adult, academic forum; you're behaving like a 10-year-old.  If you disagree with the absolutely clear policy from the NIH, or the absolutely clear policy from the journals, you can choose to either not accept NIH funding and not submit to the journals, or you can try to change the policy.  But simply having a tantrum and waving your little fists in the air is not going to do anything.

You are the one not being serious. Clearly nobody but you believes laboratories funded by the NIH or publishing in Nature are distributing their lab equipment for free to all people asking for it. Users of this site are generally interested in things happening in the real world.

Coincidentally, with a half hour of you posting that comment I got a request for a set of reagents my lab published last year. I get such requests fairly often (including for transgenic mice I made).  I always do provide the reagents.  So do the labs I was associated with before becoming a PI.  So have 90% of the labs I've requested reagents (including mice) from.  I'm sorry you have such a parochial and bitter view of the scientific world, but your view is the minority, and becoming increasingly so.

All right, now that you almost stopped insulting me we might be able to exchange some interesting information. Now clearly you admitted that there is room for interpretation and that I cannot request all your material. So how long are you expected to keep your transgenic mice lineage available? 5 years, 10 years? How do you fund that?

Once again, I think you'll find that using silly phrases like "clearly you admitted that ..." are much less impressive off the 5th-grade playground.  If you want to understand this policy -- which I am not in charge of, in case you don't understand that -- talk to your grants administrator, who will be more than happy to explain the responsibilities that you've agreed to.  I'm sorry this policy has come as such a shock to you.  It's essentially universal, is explicitly covered by all the funding agencies I'm familiar with, and has been in place for decades, so you really need to look into it.

You answer your own question. If your method is a secret, protected by copyright, or otherwise proprietary, others cannot repeat your experiment, by definition. That is the entire point of protecting the special mice in the first place, to restrict who benefits from them.
And therefore no one can verify your method. They could use a completely different method to prove the same result, but no one who does not own these proprietary mice can directly verity your data.

But can't someone force the owners of the mice to give them up for validation purposes? Can't the tax-payers who paid for our/their grant, or the readers of the journal article, or someone?
Instinctively i feel you are right, even thought this is the answer I really didn't want to receive :/

Well, undoubtedly it would be very bad form for the lab to lend out mice to allow you publish a paper and then hold them back if someone wanted to verify this paper. As some might argue, what makes a scientific proof is the ability of it to be repeated. But, property law is almost certainly on their side, and it is very unlikely anyone could force them to do anything even if they were willing to go to court over the issue. And the lab is far more likely to bulk at lending out the mice to some other scientists they do not know, possibly on the other side of the globe.

Yes, your last point was exactly what I feared.
Oh well. I guess Julian Assange should start thinking about wiskerleaks.org -_- hahaha

Nothing in the question says that the method is secret. It's about a given breed of mice obtain by a well described process.

@JonathonWisnoski I'm one of those who might argue that.  If your work can't be replicated, it isn't really science.  It's ultimately no different from any other argument from authority.

@JonathonWisnoski Balk at, not bulk at.

@CapeCode The mice are part of the method, and are proprietary. But it's a generic situation, they might as well of just labeled something a trade secret and refused to disclose a key step.

Just declaring that something is "proprietary" is meaningless.  This isn't magic; you can't back out of legal agreements you made when you were funded simply because you unilaterally decide it's inconvenient.  It's possible that the people who originally constructed the mice did modify the standard agreement with NIH, and that there is something special about their status.  But the default option is that if the mice were made "with the aid of NIH", then  they "will be distributed and shared with the scientific community", and that's something you agreed to when you received the money.


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To teach English at the college level, is there an advantage to having a masters in English vs Education?
I'm currently in my second year of teaching English at the secondary level, and I'm wondering if it's better to pursue a Master's  in English (I have a Bachelor's in English Lit.) or Education. Is there a strong advantage to one or the other in terms of professional development for teachers? I also see myself teaching at the college level someday.

Assuming you are in the U.S., a master's degree in English may qualify you to teach at a community college (but there are enough unemployed Ph.D.s in English that the competition is tough for those with only a master's degree).  It would definitely not be enough for a regular faculty position at a four-year college, but it could be a step towards earning a Ph.D.
A master's degree in education could be a valuable credential in secondary education, depending on how your school system handles it, but it counts for nothing if you'd like to teach English at the college level.  (Furthermore, it doesn't qualify you to teach in a department of education, which would require a doctorate.)

Anonymous Mathematician is correct. If you want to teach at the university level, you're most likely going to need a PhD in English. The academic job market is extremely tough, and it's very unlikely that a master's degree will get you an interview, much less a job.

In general, college-level instructors are expected to have much more in-depth knowledge of their subject areas than someone teaching at previous levels of education. Therefore, it would seem imperative to have the strongest possible degree in the field in which one wants to teach (or a closely allied field). So, in this particular case, a degree in English would be more useful than education.
If "secondary" means "high school," the calculus changes quite a bit, as what is expected often will vary from state to state or even school district to school district. You should see if an education degree is required, or if a lower level of proficiency (such as some form of certification) is sufficient.

With regard to your professional goals, I would hazard the following:
A master of education can offer state teacher certification,  allowing one to teach in public schools and abroad.  This qualification is of utmost importance to public schools but of comparatively limited importance to private or independent schools. Nearly all public schools will consider the credentials equivalent for the purpose of pay increases, so long as both masters are regionally accredited.
In private or independent schools,  a master in discipline will generally be given substantially more weight by hiring authorities than a master of education,  unless the latter was earned at Harvard, Columbia,  or other similarly prestigious institutions.
Teaching at university (and increasingly at community college) will de - facto require a PhD,  unless you possess truly extraordinary, publicly acclaimed research or teaching experience,  or you know the hiring authorities personally and they are disposed to offer you a position typically granted to PhD recipients.
A U.S. master in English will likely not be available by distance learning and may be extremely costly to pursue without a TA, which at programs of distinction would very likely be offered to PhD students. Certain DL options from the UK exist (I reference in particular Birmingham and Wales Trinity Saint David), but unless backed by a PhD from a leading university would be unlikely to lead to university employment in the U.S. except for adjunct or non tenured roles.

source: Stack Exchange

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How to refer in an acknowledgements section to a group of people in industry who helped you in completing your thesis?
My thesis was done in industry environment, therefore in the acknowledgements I would like to thank all the people that helped me, but I do not know how I should call  them. Colleagues does not sound right to me since I am not actually employed in that company although I spend there every day of the last 5 months.
Which is the right english word? (I am a non native english speaker, but I have to write my thesis in english). Moreover, which is the right word for my industry tutor? Shall I call it advisor (whereas my professor will be my supervisor)? Or is it better to say co-supervisor?
And lastly...shall I write both their name and surname or only the name?

My answer is similar to but slightly different from jakebeal, but gives more meaningful context about this company's contribution and why you are thankful to them.

I am indebted to [COMPANY] and their managers and employees for serving as host and advisers to me for five months as I performed the core of my research.  In particular, I would like to thank [NAME], who graciously tutored me about [TOPICS] which enabled me to [CONTRIBUTION].  I would also like to thank [NAME], [NAME], AND [NAME], who provided feedback and guidance along the way.

You should list first and last names for each person, including titles if they have a PhD or are a medical doctor: "John Jones, PhD" or "Dr. John Jones".

You can largely avoid the terminology question by saying something like:

Thank you to my company supervisor [NAME] and to the people at [COMPANY] who I have worked with, including [NAMES]

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How to get back to STEM phD thesis after a long break?
If one had to interrupt writing the phD-thesis (for various reasons, that don't belong here):
What is a good strategy to get back and finish the thesis?

The writing would take place while working on a full-time job.
Assume that the supervisor already signalled to support this project with reading the 99%-final version and do the necessary formalities. The thesis is done in a STEM field, all lab work and calculations are finished. Before the interruption took place, the thesis itself was around half-written: out of four main sections, two are done, one almost done, one just an idea collection. Additional sections and Appendix are in a draft status, proofreading etc. has to be done as well.
One of the main concerns is the literature-review: As it currently is, it would be awfully outdated. Is it worth the effort to spend time on an extensive literature research (if so: how much?) or should one just draw a line and use the literature as it is (i.e. only the literature from before the interruption)?
The thesis is based on own, already published articles. Which should avoid running into plagiarism issues.

Actually I assumed, there was already a question that would cover this, but I couldn't find one. Bear with me and let me know, if this is a duplicate.

"only literature from before the interruption", you might plagiarize something unintentionally. A PhD thesis proves you know the literature in your field and made something new. Did you publish articles and most results before interruption?

@MichaelSchmidt Good point! Yes, the thesis more or less merges my already published articles.

Did your papers get a lot of citations? If not this saves you probably a lot of work ;-) Yet, without giving an overview in the introduction what happend in your field the past years and outlook how to build up on your work a thesis would feel incomplete to me.

@MichaelSchmidt I had the same feeling of incompleteness, but was told from co-workers/friends I was too pedantic and in the current situation quickly finishing was more important that overly correctly finishing.

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How do I cite an image from wikicommons in my thesis?
I want to use some images from the wikicommons in my thesis, some images state that 'Attribution is not legally required', but I understand that if I don't cite an image it's as if I'm claiming it as my own.
Let's say I want to use the google logo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google_2015_logo.svg
This is the attribution mentioned:
By Google Inc. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Do I just put that attribution under the image in the thesis?
Thank you!

It depends on what style you're using ...

If it's on commons, it likely came from somewhere else. In this case, it came from Chromium.

I only used the google logo as an example here. I want to know how to properly cite any image from the wikimedia commons where in my thesis.

This answer may be of interest: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/67209/acs-style-image-citation/104049#104049. As you surmise, you may want to mention the license you are using the image under in the caption, in addition to citing it.

Even if its in the public domain its always good to cite where you get your information from, be that data, images, or whatever, even if its public domain
When I use images that are governed by a license (including public domain, and "fair use") I identify

the source,
the original author/photographer/painter/etc, and
the specific license that governs its reuse.

Using thorough and accurate citations ensures that you've done everything that needed to give proper credit where credit is due.
It also allows the reader to verify that what you cite is really at the source you give, and is licensed for the use to which you put it.
It doesn't hurt to include in the source, links to the actual source, and to the license (say as defined by Wikipedia, or the specific source you used.

So for any normal image you would need to do a few things:

Get permission to use the image from the copyright holder.
Cite the source.
Place text close to the image or as a footnote indicating copyright and permission to use.

You have probably come across such an example in your reading. With a Wikimedia commons image, there is a license that indicates how you must use it. See this link for detailed information on the licenses. From that link it seems that you don't need (1). To be a good honest researcher, I suggest you always do (2) (in this case it would be an electronic / web source) and with (3) indicate the license as a comment suggested.

The image you linked is a public domain one, because it's below threshold of originality. Therefore you don't need to cite nor acknowledge the source of the image.
However, the Google logo is protected as a trademark. You may need to acknowledge it by the trademark symbol or a disclaimer.
Furthermore, if you want to cite the origin of the image as a benefit to your readers, you should cite Chromium or Google as the original source (not Commons), as it's done in the Wikimedia Commons page for that file.

You may need to acknowledge it by the trademark symbol It's better not to: see https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/21521/958 (don't stop at the first answer).

While this technically answers the question as currently written, it doesn't help me because I'm looking to use this image, which doesn't seem to be public domain or below the threshold of originality.

The answer would be different for different images. If you want an answer about a different image, I suggest making a new question about it. However, Wikimedia Commons could have already the answer in https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia

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Strategies for teaching with facial aphasia (inability to recognize faces aka prosopagnosia, face-blindness)
I'm a math grad student in my first year, which means that I have not yet taught a class (in my program first years grade or provide one-on-one tutoring for students who struggle in calculus). I have facial aphasia, which means that I am completely unable to recognize people's faces. After a while (upwards a year) I can reliably recognize someone based on how they move, dress, wear their hair and so on. Before that I will just have a vague feeling that I recognize someone, but I can't put a name to them . It happens that I can't recognize people I've lived with for several years, or, on a few memorable occasions, my own family members. This causes some problems on occasion, but nothing I haven't been able to work out. However, up until now the people I've been expected to learn to recognize have been friends, or coworkers I see every day that I can explain my problem with faces to. My question is:
How do I handle teaching when I can't recognize my students and it would take me a year minimum to learn their faces? I know from my own experience that good instructors / TAs learn their students' names and faces and this helps motivate the students to learn, because they notice that their teacher cares about them. How can I compensate for my facial aphasia?
EDIT: Thank you for all the great responses! I feel a lot more confident that I can do well as a TA with all these ideas to work with :)

In large classes, I don't remember students' faces either. Judging by the way they interact with me, I get the impression that my students think I know who they are even when I don't.

This is a great question, and I hope the answers may also be useful to those of us who are just ordinarily bad at keeping track of faces and names.

FWIW, students so far never seemed to expect me to remember their names just based on classroom interactions. (but this is based on central Europe, maybe norms in the US are different)

@ff524, Johanna seems to be describing the neurological condition Prosopagnosia, which goes far beyond the everyday inability to remember people's names that all of us have. If I changed glasses / hairstyle / clothing then my wife (who has the condition) would literally not be able to pick me out in a crowd. Or recognise (say) her own mother or father. It's an inability to know (from their face alone) if you have ever met a person before, however close to you or well-known to you that person is.

I'm terrible with faces, a fact for which I occasionally apologize to students, and in general I don't call on students by name during class. It's a little embarrassing to me, but my students seem to genuinely not mind.

@AE: Isn't that exactly the situation in large classes described by ff524 and xLeitix, that the lecturer has no idea whether they have ever met any of the students before?

Are there any characteristics you know you usually use to identify people? They might be a starting point for where to look for ones you could use while teaching. For example, are you good at recognising voices?

@AE: yes, I understood that. I am questioning the premise that it's necessary to recognize students in order to be a good teacher ("I know from my own experience that good instructors / TAs learn their students' names and faces...")

@ff524, I see what you're saying. I agree with you that that's the situation for the 'large classes' you mention, assuming they're a couple of hundred people. OP's biggest problem is likely to be in smaller classes or one-to-one tutoring where it would be rude to 'blank' somebody in the lift that you've just spent an hour talking to! ;)

You could stop believing in the socially constructed myth of absolute facial recognition.  Most actual faces, devoid of surrounding context, do look pretty much alike.  Or I should perhaps say fall into a relative few basic types - think of trying to tell the difference between blonde movie starlets, for instance.  It's sort of like fingerprints.  Yes, every one is unique, but unless you're an expert, you just distinguish loops and whorls.

Maybe a dumb question, but: is it possible for you to recognize students by voice instead, if you can't recognize students by face? For example, my family has several cats which look almost identical, but have different facial features; I can distinguish their faces easily, whereas my father is completely incapable of recognizing them by face. However, he can still tell them apart by voice/meow. Likewise, my mother takes phone calls at work often, and can tell who is calling by their voice before they say their name (assuming she has heard their voice before). Could you use voice to help?

In large classes (auditorium-style seating) that I've attended, I've never expected the lecturer to know me by my appearance. In fact, the only lecturers I expected it from during my undergraduate years were: the professor who also assisted in my degree planning, the department head who I frequently worked very closely with in a 1-on-1 setting, the lecturer who was also my direct supervisor during a summer internship, and the professors of the classes I took with fewer than 10 students. (I would also note that none of the above ever applied to any math course I took!)

@jamesqf, UCL (London) have done some interesting research on this - my wife has been one of the research subjects. In one of the projects they give her a series of faces, stripped of surrounding context - so not even hairstyles, just the face itself - and the difference between her ability and mine, to tell whether the face is that of a famous person (e.g. prime minister, president) is astounding. Of course my recall isn't perfect but I can recognise the Queen, for example! :) She just can't.

@A E: Well, I can't recognize your queen either, except by context :-)  For me, the face is only a minor part of the whole recognition gestalt.  When I think of an absent person, I don't really recall their face, and have a hard time recognizing people from pictures.  Yet I have no great problem recognizing actual people.  (I do much better with dogs & horses, though.)  Bottom line for the OP is to forget about the face recognition problem, and think of the whole person.

Are you able to distinguish if a person is who they say they are with their ID?  If not I'd be sure to get help from someone who can during exam days lest some sneaky students get their friends to take exams for them.

Unless it is too embarrassing to you, you might actually consider simply telling your students about your facial aphasia at the beginning of the semester.  You can explain that even though you care about them and know who they are as people and students, you won't be able to recognize them by appearance.  A more familiar condition you might make an analogy to is color-blindness.
You might then ask them to identify themselves by something that you will be able to recognize them by.  For example:

If it's a small class, you might make name tags to sit on students' desks in front of them during class.
In a large class, you might ask students to say their name when they ask a question.

You know your condition best, of course, and what things will work well for you.  You are, of course, admitting a weakness and some of the nastier undergraduates might attempt to use it to play pranks on you or to cheat in some way.  I suspect, though, that at that age in most cases it may be better to play it straight and people will respect you more for doing that than for attempting to hide it.

Something made me think, "color-coded hats".

@Raphael In a large lecture class? You'll have to dig deep into the Crayola box for that.

@RogerFan QR-coded hats, then? :)

"some of the nastier undergraduates might attempt to use it to play pranks on you" - while of course a possibility, in 8 years of studying at university (I dabbled in a couple of things...) I have never seen a student be rude to a lecturer/instructor, let alone actively hassling them. I don't think I'd worry too much about that.

Thank you for the great ideas! I'll try just explaining it to them and ask for patience and help :)

I have had a lecturer (who ran his own tutorials), who always insisted on all students putting there names in front of them on a folded page. He didn't have any real difficulty remembering names (not after a few weeks.) but he insisted on it anyway, as the tuitorials were marked on quality of students responses (they were not traditional tuits in that sense.), and he wanted to always make sure the right people were getting the marks.
While your tuits might not be assessed, it does show that asking for name tags is not unheard of in a university enviroment.

Good answer :)
I am also terrible with names: I don't think I have facial blindness, I am just very distracted..
I turned it into a joke with my students; sometimes I call all of them by the same name (on purpose), sometimes I just try names until I get them... It's a sort of running joke, and it makes them laugh for a bit, and then focus on the question rather than on my.. distraction. If you feel comfortable about it, tell them about the "memorable times" where you couldn't recognize your family members.

Turning it into a joke also preempts any kind of prank/rudeness from undergrads (which is unlikely anyway, but you never know)

@G.Bach And I would add one thing. While I know it may not be easy, but it helps if you sort-of accept it as given: When you yourself are willing to make a joke about it, then the nasty students know this isn't gonna help. As an example of similar things: We've had a prof who couldn't walk well, used crutches and was lecturing seated; when someone got noisy during the lecture he said: "Be quiet down there or I strike you with the crutch!" Everybody just laughed.

Similarly when a black French teacher was explaining the word "(se) rougir" (literally "to redden" with the meaning "to blush"), and he said: "Well, I can't really me rougis, you see?"

@RogerFan Use this to pick colors so that they are ``maximally perceptually distinguishable.'' :)

I'd like to add an addendum to this answer: Make sure you explain what facial aphasia is, and that it is a disorder and not just 'forgetfulness'.  I know far, far too many people who would not understand the difference between an actual disorder and just 'forgetfulness', so being quite serious and clear about your explanation is very important.  If your students still do not understand...that's their problem, not yours.

I am absolutely terrible with names and faces. I simply can't remember them. I will forget the name of my next door neighbor of eight years. I have a friend who has facial blindness and I know that there is a difference with what she has. My own version is closer to facial aphasia (recognizes face but cannot recall name) rather than blindness (cannot recognize face), so please take my comments in that context.
I am upfront with my students about this at the beginning of the semester. I tell them I will forget their names repeatedly, but it doesn't mean I don't care about them. They do get confused because one week I will remember their names and then the next week, it'll be an utter blank.  It then becomes a little bit of a running joke in the class but that's ok. I try not to stress too much over it.
Note that there are different strategies for lectures (i.e. big classes where there is minimal expectation that you will have to remember names) and for seminars and discussion groups (where some students will expect you to remember their name). Finally, doctoral students in your own lab will also expect their names to be remembered, but since those are a longer term presence, this can be less of an issue.
Here are some techniques that can be useful for  larger classes and for seminars:

As some have mentioned, some course management systems  have "photo rosters." I don't find these useful because 1/4 of my students go by nicknames or middlenames that don't show in the CMS. And the photos are very old. And if I could remember someone's name by looking at their face, I wouldn't have this problem to begin with.
You can ask students to always sit in the same seat each day. For seminars, during roll call, I write down the seating arrangement of the students in my roll call chart. In some schools, students have assigned seating. And so instead of recognizing the face, I can associate the seat with the name -- so I ask Jillian-who-sits-in-the-back-left, not Jillian-who-has-a-face-I-can't-remember.
I have asked students who look very similar to sit apart. They giggle and think it's a joke, but after a while they realize I really do have a problem and generally comply.
I ask students to try to wear the same distinctive item. For example, I remembered one student because of the eyeglasses that he wore. The frame stuck better in my mind than his face. When he changed his glasses, 'poof' it was gone.
I ask students for mnemonics. One student named Steve, I only remembered because he was Japanese-American and made a peace sign, so 'V' -> Steve.  Some students can come up with good mnemonics, others can not.
You can ask students to have name placards, although most lose them in the first few weeks (and for me, my problem lasts longer than that).
You can ask them to always say their own name when speaking up. In seminar, you can have them say their own name as well as physically say the name of the student who preceded them in a comment: "This is Charlie, I want to follow up with what Alice just said there...."
You can make it a running joke so that the students know that they have to help you constantly.  Students are usually surprised when I forget the names of even the most active students in the class, that's when they recognize that it's equal opportunity facial aphasia and that they need to step in to help me.
You can have your teaching fellow help you. For example, if I talk to a student after class and forget their name, I ask my TF to tell me.
In seminar, I occasionally nominated a student to go around the table saying all of the names. It helped when I realized that the students only knew half the names. Better than me, but still it showed that we are all fallible. It also encouraged the quieter students to be more vocal if they wanted to be remembered by their peers.
You can design your classes so that it isn't important for you to have instant recall of their names.
Ask for things in writing. I have trouble remembering the names of students who come up to me after lecture asking for a variance on their grade or attendance policy. I ask them to send such requests to me by e-mail.
You can schedule your office hours so students have to sign up with their names in order to see you (i.e., avoid an 'open door' office policy). That way you can greet them by name (and look up their records) before they come.
For your advisees, you can keep a portfolio on your computer where you record their name, face, year, identifying characteristics (student who always wears a vest, is a smoker (recognize by smell), etc.), and then things about their academic and family life that you'll need the next time you meet them.

In summary, it's not the end of the world and many faculty have difficult with this. Students recognize that they're just one in many. They also recognize the difference between professors who forget who they are because they are apathetic, and faculty who care but genuinely have trouble with this issue. One or two students will consistently raise it in my student evaluations at the end of the semester, but there are enough  more positive comments to overwhelm them.
Again, you'll find many faculty with some version of this. You can ask your learning and teaching center at your school for other tips and techniques.
Note:  You may want to register this as a disability with the disability office. As a student, you may be able to get some support (i.e., an assistant teaching assistant). As a faculty member, it might be helpful to have this in your file so that student complaints about this do not count against you when you are reviewed for promotion and tenure.

Name placards are a good idea. A colleague of mine deals with the loss issue as follows: he keeps the placards himself between classes. When he  comes in to class each day, he  puts the placards on a table by the door and asks each student to pick up their own, then return it at the end of class. You can make them out of paper or cardboard so they're easily replaced.

I suppose that helps with keeping attendance as well.

Your last point, keeping a record of people with identifying features, is a good tip for everyone and in many workplaces as well. It does wonders for customer satisfaction (and avoiding embarrassment) if you're in a client-facing role such as tech support, consultancy or HR.

How about learning from a seating plan? If the class have designated seats, take a note of where each student sits in the class with their corresponding name and then learn that. It may take a while but it will take much less than a year to master.
For me, this idea spawns from waiters in a restaurant, they have to learn the floor plan extremely quickly, and remembering a customers surname when serving 10 tables at once will be very difficult. So having the customers name assigned to a table number makes it much easier to manage.
Good luck in your teaching and I do agree that you should be honest with your students and tell them that you do have this condition. Hopefully they will understand you are trying and support you throughout!

I've never come across a university setting that has assigned seats (outside of exams, and sometimes not even then).

Law schools occasionally use assigned seating.

Even if your institution doesn't normally use assigned seats, you could  certainly adopt that system for your own class. You could even let the students choose their own seating plan.

In my experience, students tend to pick a favorite seat and stick to it unless forced to move around. I suspect that if you made a chart of your students favorite
positions in the first week, it would be pretty accurate for the rest of the term.
Making this chart could also be a good opportunity for you to explain your situation to your students and to ask them to stay in their locations, without making them feel that you are assigning seats as in grade school.

Thank you David :) I think this could work pretty well in a smaller class or a recitation, which is what I'll be doing for the next few years.

At least in lecture halls like this one, I have never encountered such a "favorite seat" behaviour. Many students may have a preferred half of the lecture hall (rear or front ...), though even that tends to vary dynamically (arrived late or knows they have to leave early => prefer sitting in the back, or wherever is closest to a door; forgot their glasses => prefer sitting in the front). Also, horizontally, places are mostly determined by the order of arrival (as middle seats are easier to occupy first). ...

... And in smaller seminar rooms where tables and chairs can be freely placed, the whole placement of chairs and tables seemed to change every week, anyway, due to other events taking place in those rooms (e.g. job fairs, special presentations, "socializing" events, project meetings with external guests, ...). (All of this is not saying your answer is bad advice, just that it is not very generally applicable across all universities.)

Agreed regarding large lecture halls. Our small rooms have a default that the seats are supposed to be returned to, and usually are, and that's where I see a favorite seat developing. But sure, I imagine this happens in some situations and not others.


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Posting a paper on a preprint repository (SSRN) before publishing (economics)?
I am a young scholar and I have a paper that is virtually finished. I was thinking about posting it as a working paper on SSRN to get more feedback and comments. However, I worry if it will be still possible to submit it to a journal.
After a search on an internet, I found that people from various fields disagree on this and I am not sure how it goes in economics. I am especially confused because my paper is almost finished, but I worry I might have overlooked something, but it is also possible that the final version will not differ at much. Thanks in advance for any useful advice.

Ask more senior people in your department.  And maybe see if there is something about it on the web sites of economics journals.  You want to avoid the situation where SSRN is considered "prior publication" and thus disqualifies the paper from that journal.

Your department may also have a working paper series. A lot of these are indexed/publicized by SSRN as well. So you may be able to get that distribution working within established channels in your department.

The disagreement is not merely between fields, but even between journals in the same field, published by the same organization!
For example, the American Chemistry Society (ACS) recently launched ChemRxiv as the chemistry counterpart to arXiv.org in physics. However, as of the launch date, only The Journal of Physical Chemistry series of ACS allowed authors to submit to the preprint server.
So, you need to check with the requirements and rules of the journal to which you want to send the paper to determine what is permissible.
In any event, though, if you can't submit the paper to a preprint archive, you could distribute it to trusted colleagues for feedback before submission!

Your example indicates that Chemistry is not a field where acceptance of preprint servers is the norm. For mathematics, it is. If there should be some math journal not accepting papers previously available on the arXiv, then they are weird and noone should publish with them. The question here obviously is where economics falls into, and this is not an answer to that question.

@Arno: While this answer doesn't directly answer the question, it does give the OP some important information: If the OP finds that some journals do / do not allow prior posting, they cannot assume that will be the universal practice in their field.


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Low quality papers on Arxiv
How is it possible that people which are not in academia nor affiliated with a research institution can publish on ArXiv?
I know that arxiv papers are not subjected to peer review
but to publish there you still need credentials or to receive the authorization from people who already publish. My question therefore is the following: how is it possible that there are so many low quality publications on Arxiv? See for example this "proof" that P ≠ NP.

While this paper is garbage, I think it's not so nice to provide a link to it.

There are even low quality papers in high quality peer-reviewed journals..

IMO this question answers itself in respect of the specific example when you do five minutes' web searching and discover that the author was an associate professor for ten years and already had an arxiv account then.

Submissions do go through a moderation process to ensure that the paper has "refereeable content"; at minimum this means that the paper must present "original or substantive research" but it does not require that the research methodology is actually sound or that the findings are actually correct.  Establishing soundness (and to a certain degree, also correctness) is the point of the full peer review process, which is something arXiv lacks by design.
In summary, the reason there are so many bad papers on arXiv is that arXiv intentionally makes it easy to post unreviewed material.  If you are doing a literature review and finding high-quality papers is important for you, you would be better off browsing or searching an expertly curated list of papers, such as those contained in a journal or a volume of conference proceedings.  Of course, even some bad papers can make it into such publications, though the proportion will be astronomically lower than in an (almost) free-for-all self-archiving service like arXiv.

I signed up a month or two ago on arxiv and the site told me that to publish I needed the authorization of a person who had already published on Arxiv ... I don't know if it's a restriction introduced recently or not ...

The first part of this answer is wrong, arXiv does have an endorsement system https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement

@Yamar69: Even if that's true, that's a pretty low bar to pass. As you observed, there are already a lot of low-quality papers on arXiv. Surely many contributors of such papers would happily authorize other potential contributors' requests to upload their own low-quality papers.

@Psychonaut it is a relatively low bar, but higher than what you describe. "Contributors of such papers" might not be able to endorse other people, not all authors are endorsers.

@fqq: Thanks for letting me know. I've revised the answer accordingly.

@Psychonaut yes, once there are "bad" authors, it is easy for them to authorize others of the same level.What I don't understand is where and when this chain  started.
There must have been, at some point in the history of the archive, one or more authors who have "given" authorizations lightly.

@Yamar69 That would be an interesting new question.


text:
Asking name to be taken off a paper
I am asking about the etiquette for getting my name taken off a paper. In grad school I did a collaboration with a PI and the results were limited but okay and I used a very specific microscope to take the images. (The animal I work on has thick tissues and can really only be imaged on the confocal.). The PI wanted to redo the experiment using two replicates so that we can have images all from the same microscope so it can be uniform meaning that I have to use a different scope for the condensed repeated experiments. The new images are so blurry and do not convince me that the experiment is working this go round let alone will they convince anyone else. The PI even tried working with the scope and my animal and concluded the images are subpar. I feel like if the data isn't working this go round in the new environment and the new equipment and I feel like if it isn't reproducing the way I want the right thing to do it to bow out and take my name off (or ask to be given credit for other parts of the manuscript I have worked on).
Idk I just feel meh about my part of the data and not sure how to express that without coming off flaky.

I think you can mention that you don't feel comfortable. Say it in a diplomatic way, maybe that you would have expected more from your own work and are not happy with it. Be honest without blaming others. You could still just end up in the acknowledgements. Should be OK if you are not the first author

Do you mean just not listing you as an author, or removing your name completely?

Well I worked on other imaging aspects of this paper outside of my animal so I would be okay with being in the acknowledgments. But my area of the collaboration was done just me so I feel as though my name should be removed completely as to not bring down the level of science in the manuscript. It sucks but I don't want to put my reputation into question let alone anyone elses

@Buffy What is the difference between not listing and removing completely?

@AzorAhai, not being acknowledged within the paper is more extreme than not being a co-author.

@buffy I definitely don't want to cause issues by taking my name completely off but I guess my thoughts were if the experiment wasn't behaving the same way in this new environment then it is considered not reproducible. But maybe that is not a correct assumption

My suggestion, actually, is that you don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You aren't satisfied with what you did. Fine. But something was learned because of it. Better.
I'd let it go. If the PI thinks you are a co-author then defer to their experience and judgement. You haven't set science back because you tackled a difficult problem and weren't able to reach a perfect conclusion. That is, in fact, the nature of scientific research.
But if you really don't want to be co-author, just say that. It should be fine. However, if you also don't want to be listed at all, even in acknowledgements, then you leave the others with a serious dilemma. They will have to write the paper in such a way as to avoid plagiarism of your work, if you won't let it be attributed to you. That seems to me to be the worst outcome. Something is known that wasn't previously, but it becomes difficult to let the world advance upon it.

Thank you! I have a meeting over Zoom with the PI tomorrow where I will share my current images along with my concerns. I just had concerns that if my section of the manuscript couldn't be reproduced by others using different microscopes than a confocal it might be damaging. But I do state clearly in the methods that a confocal is the microscope I used to carry out all of the original research so.


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Quarantined at home because of COVID19 - how can I do engineering research productively?
I started grad school last September, and so far have been primarily busy with courses, but have been trying to do a little research on the side whenever I can. I recently finished all my courses though, and now I'm expected to dive into research.
My advisor hasn't assigned me a project and expects me to come up with one on my own. I don't mind this really, I like the freedom to work on whatever I want. However, this was only really feasible when I was in my lab and surrounded by senior PhD students with whom I could bounce ideas off and get a lot of guidance from.
However, now I'm stuck at home because of the COVID19 lockdown and don't really know how to productively spend my time doing research. My advisor is busy taking care of his family at home because of the lockdown, so he isn't very responsive right now understandably. I'm all alone at home so I don't have the guidance of senior PhD students either. I've tried messaging senior PhD students but it's not fair for me to constantly be harassing them for help...
Apart from heavily guided stuff in undergrad, I have next to no real research experience... Since I assume I'll be stuck at home for the next several months, how can I be productive research wise with basically no guidance or help from anyone? I don't want to just waste the next few months...
FYI, I'm doing research in engineering but everything is done using simulations, so while I have all the tools and equipment I need to do research at home, I just don't have the experience or guidance to efficiently do so.
I've been trying to just read papers in the meantime, but I can only read so many before I get sick of it. I don't want to just be reading papers for 40 hours a week for the next 3 months...

I voted to close because this question is essentially "How do I work from home?" which is not specific to academia.  There are many articles online which will answer that question.

If you have questions specific to your research, I suggest asking your supervisor.

@AnonymousPhysicist This about how to do research from home, something very specific to academia.

@MassimoOrtolano No it is not.  The "specificity" is just boat programming.

@AnonymousPhysicist The mindset required for research work and the relationship with a supervisor in academia are quite different from that of most of industry jobs, and you can see an answer that addresses exactly this point.

@MassimoOrtolano I do not agree.

You can try to fill the gaps in your knowledge and skills. For example, learn some techniques that are commonly used in your field. Even if you will not need them for your immediate project, there is a chance that they will be useful for the next one. For example, if you do engineering, you are likely to need to write some code, so you can improve your software engineering skills. Your colleagues may give you some more ideas on what is useful to learn.
If you feel sick of reading papers alone, you might try to reach to other junior students and form a virtual study group where you discuss and critically analyze recently published papers. You may actually come up with some ideas for research project based on the discussions. Good luck!

In my experience scientific PhD life roughly looks like this
while funding > 0:
    gap = gapAnalysis(literature)
    rq = formulateResearchQuestion(gap, phd_topic=None)
    experiment, performance_metric = design_experiment(rq)

    data = experiment.perform()
    results = performance_metric(data)

    paper = Paper(intro=contributions(rq, gap),
                  relatedWork=gap,
                  methods=experiment.description(),
                  results=(data, results),
                  discussion=defend(contributions(rq, gap))
                 )
    paper.addSupervisorFeedback()
    paper.peerReview()
    paper.publish()

Guidance on what to do comes from your experimental design, which is heavily informed by your research question. If you are unsure about your experimental design, i.e., what experiment you want to perform, than you should think more about how to test the consequences/implications of your research question. If you are unsure about your research question, you need to reflect on the knowledge gaps in the literature and on how to approach them. If you are not even sure what the gaps in your area are, you will have to go back to the drawing board and spend more time reading papers with a focus on open questions.
Personally, I have noticed that people in 'pure' engineering (by that I mean non-interdisciplinary) often do things backwards. They start with an experiment, i.e., build some system / create some model, then try to come up with useful research questions that fit with the experiment post-hoc, and, finally, try to find related work that supplements this idea. This hinges a lot on strong guidance from your supervisor, because you start doing stuff without knowing if it will be relevant to the community; whereas your supervisor, knowing the literature, does.
So, the answer to your question is: Likely, you will have to read more literature. You can also consider creating more documentation around what you are doing: spreadsheets / notes for papers, drafts of experimental designs, documentation of code or results, ... This will help with long distance supervision, because your supervisor can look at those documents in his own time and then provide async feedback via comments / email.

Lol, +1 for the Python code.

First, although your anxiety about not knowing how to research productively without the normal support structures is completely understandable, here’s a suggestion: try it. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. You may end up being successful beyond your expectations, and all the anxiety and worry would have turned out to be premature.
Second, and this is equally important: you need to make your advisor, and more generally your department’s leadership (graduate program chair, and possibly department chair and others coordinating the response to the COVID-19 crisis) aware of your concerns. I can tell you they have all been really busy lately coming up with appropriate responses to the situation and solving all kinds of problems that come up all day, pretty much every day for the last few weeks. It’s completely possible that the particular difficulty you are concerned about is something that’s escaped their attention amidst all the noise and other urgent (probably more urgent than this one, let’s be honest) problems. But that doesn’t mean they don’t care, or wouldn’t want to help or wouldn’t be able to help if they were aware of the issue. So reach out to them and discuss it. In a well-managed department they would add it to their list of things to figure out, and hopefully come up soon with some workable solutions.
At the very least, if you talk to the department administrators they might reassure you that although you can indeed expect to have somewhat reduced productivity in your research endeavors while working from home, the same is true for everyone else and they will be adjusting their expectations accordingly and not penalize you. This could help relieve some of the stress and anxiety if nothing else.
Good luck!


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How to list both journals and conferences on your CV when you have worked in two fields with different publication cultures?
I used to be in a field where journals were much more prestigious than conferences, so I kept journals and conferences in separate sections (assuming that people would care a lot less about the conferences).  Now I have switched to computer science, where conferences are the main venue of publication, and my only first-author paper is now a conference paper.  Do I still keep journals and conferences separate?  It feels weird to put my only first-author paper in the same section as a random poster presentation my coauthor gave.
I'm also thinking of having one section for "publications," and listing all the papers reverse-chronologically, except for the non-important conferences, which I'd put at the end.

I work with this situation myself right now, as I am active simultaneously in two fields with these opposing publication cultures.  This is further complicated by the fact that some of the publications I am most proud of are not peer reviewed in any fashion (e.g., standards documents).
I thus simply organize all of my publications according to categories and try to include enough information that people from different fields may at least understand that there is a culture gap.  The current categories in my CV are:

Journal Articles
Book Chapters & Theses
Peer-Reviewed Conference Articles
Peer-Reviewed Conference Abstracts
Workshops, Symposia, and Seminars
Published Whitepapers and Technical Reports

This allows me to distinguish between conferences that people should take seriously ("Peer-Reviewed Conference Articles") and those which they should view as "light weight" ("Peer-Reviewed Conference Abstracts").  Conference poster presentations that haven't even received meaningful peer review I don't even list at this point, though at an earlier stage I would have put them down as another category.

It's a hard question since you're likely to confuse CS folks who have different experiences with how conferences and journals compare for quality and selectivity between your old field and CS. In my PhD field, conferences rarely had an actual paper, and were usually just a talk based on a submitted abstract with no peer review. CS tends to have strong archival papers with good peer review at its conferences with occasional post-publication of selected conference papers in journals.
I would have 3 sections: Journals, Peer-reviewed Conference Papers, and Conferences. Whether the latter is just talks and/or non-peer-reviewed papers, you should label the entries clearly.

What if I'm not sure if the conferences were peer reviewed?  For one of the conferences, I kind of fell out of touch with the first author and didn't realize the work had been presented until I googled my name and found the citation on the internet.

@user45329, ask your co-author. The fact that you've got someone in your life publishing stuff without telling you or letting you review and approve the material is not very good. You might want to have a discussion with this person.

I haven't talked to him in several years and I don't think he likes me very much :(

+1. Distinguishing between the CS-style conferences with stringent peer-review and proceedings, and other types of conferences is definitely the way to go, and quite common in CS.

Create a field called Most notable publications and put both of them there. You may decide to sub-divide it by the field or not, but you need not sub-divide it by the publication type. Rather, you can distinguish proceedings and papers by the format:

J. Doe. My Article on ABC. Journal of DEF 55(3):500–540, 2010.
J. Doe. My Conference Paper on KLM. In: “International Congress on NOP” (Atlantis, 2013), Proceeding Series in QRS 5187:350–355, 2014.

This distinction is so clear that nobody should be confused. Also, you can then make a list of All publications or Other publications, if you want to make the CV longer, but that depends on the reason why you write the CV and on your preference.


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If I quit my PhD, would it make my advisor look bad?
I am considering quitting my PhD in computer science, because after doing a software engineering internship I realized I enjoy that kind of work much more.
My advisor has been very kind to me, on both a professional and a personal level, and if I quit it might make her look bad. She is an assistant professor and I was her first student. I do not want people to think she was the one who made me quit.
Are people going to wonder if she was the reason I quit?
How much of an effect would this have on her career?

How much of an effect would this have on her career? — This is really not your problem.

You are a nice guy, but let me tell you this: no matter if it makes your advisor look bad, if you really like the job in the company and believe it's the best thing for you, then you should quit your PhD and take the job. Doing your PhD just because of your advisor will not do any good to either you or your advisor.
Because pursuing a PhD requires a lot of determination. No matter how your advisor is kind to you, making your advisor look good will not be enough as a sole motivation for your PhD. If you don't quit now, you will quit later and it may cause more damage to your advisor.
For a complete stranger like me, if a guy quits his PhD after 1st or 2nd year, there are many reasons beside a bad advisor: maybe the guy himself finds PhD too difficult, or he changes his mind etc and etc. But if someone quits his PhD after 5th or 6th year, I would think there must be something wrong with the supervision.

Basically good advice, but I disagree with the last sentence.  There's simply no way to know why someone quit the PhD unless they tell you.  You shouldn't assume.  And even if the student places the blame on the advisor -- well, there are two sides to that story.

@DavidKetcheson I agree with you. But I was saying as a complete stranger, knowing nothing about the situation. That's my first guess.

@DavidK:  it's basically (another instance of) statistical discrimination or trying to extrapolate from a population to an individual, repugnant as it may be, like how policyholders who have an auto accident will see their premiums rise (because the insurer fears you to be a bad driver and even when it is not your fault, the lingering doubt and, well, statistics kick in) and how the successes of the winningest athletes are popularly ascribed at least in part to actual skill, even after accounting for regression to the mean.  I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, but that seems to stop no one else.

I disagree with the comments that quitting a PhD does not reflect on a supervisor.  I have known a supervisor who has had one postdoc and one PhD student quit under his supervision.  It has affected his reputation and he has definitely been reprimanded (although I don't know if anything formal has been done).

@Tom that makes 2 quitters—which seems infinitely more meaningful than 1. There’s no information to be gleaned from one quitter, whereas there’s 1 glaringly obvious thing 2 quitters had in common: their advisor. The only other consideration is how common quitters are in context

If I quit my PhD, would it make my advisor look bad?

Absolutely not -- at least, not in the eyes of anyone who wasn't born yesterday. Most of us realize that PhD students are autonomous creatures with their own lives, hopes, dreams and ambitions. Although certainly there are scenarios in which a bad advisor is the cause or catalyst for a graduate student's decision to quit their PhD, only a fool would jump to the completely unsubstantiated conclusion that this was the case here.
With that said, it is certainly true that if you finish your PhD, it would make your advisor look good.
And with that said, a PhD is such a huge undertaking that I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks anyone should ever do a PhD to please someone else. You shouldn't do a PhD to make your mother happy; you shouldn't do a PhD to make your girlfriend or boyfriend happy; and by the same token, you shouldn't do a PhD to make your advisor happy. If she was kind to you, go and buy her a present, or write her a poem, or dedicate your first software product at the engineering firm to her. But I strongly advise you to stick with your PhD if, and only if, this is truly what you, and only you, want to do for yourself.

I strongly disagree with your first paragraph. "Look bad" goes beyond just people's opinions; I know researchers whose grant was not renewed because, despite their proposal and publication record being very good, their were deemed to not have finished enough graduate students.

@MartinArgerami you are free to disagree with what I wrote of course, but I think your interpretation of "look bad" differs from the standard meaning of this phrase in English. Personally I consider "will it make her look bad?" and "will it hurt her career?" as two separate questions, and I was referring to the "look bad" aspect. In that context I fully stand behind my first paragraph. As for "hurt her career" I leave that to others to discuss; your comment does seem to have something to say on that topic, but for semantic clarity I would prefer keeping that separate from the "look bad" issue.

@MartinA - "Not finishing enough graduate students" is an aggregate problem. This question is about a single student. Some level of attrition is inevitable and should be expected. This becomes a serious issue only when people are leaving in droves beyond the normal rate.

+1 for "If she was kind to you, go and buy her a present, or write her a poem, or dedicate your first software product at the engineering firm to her."

I read your original post; allow me to respond to that first. In my opinion, based on the information you provide, you may want to examine your Ph.D. situation ignoring the internship for the moment. Do you enjoy what you're doing? Do you like working with your adviser? Is it a good learning experience? Do you value the prospect of holding a Ph.D.?
If the answer is Yes, I would caution you against jumping to conclusions based on an internship. Internships are good fun, in fact they are meant to be since the goal is for you to fall in love with the company as much as they are the other way (if not more). A Ph.D. is a bet on the long run (as is a college degree) and there are sacrifices involved.
If the answer is No, you have a tough decision to make and I can't really tell you what you should do, but in general it wouldn't seem wise to stick to something you dislike or not enjoy.
In general I would disregard what "people have been saying." You have not experienced the kind of jobs that you can access only with a Ph.D. Some of them are insanely fun. This is your decision, not theirs.
As for your adviser, yes your decision may hurt her career if she is an assistant professor on a tenure clock, and/or depending on many other factors. I doubt anyone would see this as a failure on her part, however.
All the best.

Downvoted: a. 90% of the answer addresses a different question than the one that was asked. b. the part that actually addresses the question is based on the false premise that OP has some kind of moral obligation to help the advisor's career, and that failing to do so is "hurting" the advisor. (See my comment in response to Corvus's answer for why this premise is wrong.)

Upvoted: "If the answer is Yes, I would caution you against jumping to conclusions based on an internship. Internships are good fun, in fact they are meant to be since the goal is for you to fall in love with the company as much as they are the other way (if not more)."

@DanRomik I removed the sentence because I understand where you're coming from. But I disagree with your explanation: The OP does have a degree of moral obligation toward the adviser and vice versa, because their mutual adviser-advisee relationship is already ongoing. What would you say if the adviser were the one asking "I thought I liked this student but there's a new student much smarter and I only have funding for one person; if I dump him, will it hurt his career?" That is not to say that this obligation is absolute and should trump the OP's best interests.

Ok, thanks. Un-downvoted. I still disagree about the moral obligation - the advisor-adviser relationship is not symmetric, so if it was the advisor who wanted to bail out my answer would be different. Another small point is that I doubt that such a kind advisor (or any other reasonable advisor) would want their student to stay in a PhD just for the advisor's sake when the student prefers doing something else.

Correction: Of course I meant to write "advisor-advisee relationship", not "advisor-adviser".

I feel that most of the other answers do not adequately address the question, as most of them focus on the question of what you should do, rather than the effect on your advisor.
If your advisor already had a track record of graduating students with good theses, then you dropping out would have no effect on her reputation.  Since you are her first student, however, you dropping out will give her a dropout rate of 100%.  Everybody knows that sometimes things just don't work out with a student, but it's a bad omen to lose one's first student, and it puts your professor in a much more vulnerable position with respect to the next students she hopes to graduate.
This will likely be compounded by the fact that your professor is a woman, and likely to be judged more harshly than male colleagues, due to the implicit sexism still rampant in the field.
Moreover, in some fields and departments, graduating a student is a hard requirement for tenure.  If you are not just her first student but her only student, leaving may make it very difficult for her to obtain tenure.
That said, if you need to quit, you need to quit.  But it will have an impact on your advisor because she is so early in her career.

You're quite right about not adequately addressing the question, at least as far as my answer is concerned.  Seems the OP needs to summon up his courage and discuss this with the professor in question.

Without knowing more about your situation, it is hard to estimate the magnitude the effect on your advisor's reputation. Under normal circumstances, however, this effect would be minimal. Everyone understands that students may choose not to complete a PhD for any number of reasons.
But what I can tell you is that (1) you have zero obligation to continue for the sake of your advisor, (2) you need to do what is right for you and (3) any harm to her career from you quitting will be vastly smaller than the harm to you and your career, where ever that may lie, from continuing if a pursuing PhD is not in your best interest.
Addendum: Based on information provided in a comment below, apparently the OP is the advisor's first student. This might be a bit different, perhaps, especially if the department has expectations that an advisor graduate students before tenure and there are not others in the queue. Hopefully this is not the case. It seems perhaps reasonable to expect an advisor to be able to recruit students before tenure, but it is in no one's best interest to demand that he or she graduate students before tenure. Still, I've seen that expected on rare occasion. Other examples of "not normal" circumstances would be cases in which an advisor already had a worrisome track record of driving students out of the lab or out of the program. In this case, it might be more reasonable for people to be concerned, particularly if supported by other sources of evidence that the advisor was failing to do right by his or her students.

I disagree that "Under normal circumstances, this harm would be minimal;" if the OP is the adviser's first student, for example, it may not be "minimal." If the OP is a senior student about to produce results, it may not be "minimal." I think those situations are pretty normal. I similarly disagree with the "vastly" comment. The OP simply doesn't provide any useful info to make such an assessment.

It might be helpful to see his previous question for context. In fact, @Prof.JoséF.Martínez he is the advisors first student.

I agree that being the advisor's first student is a bit different, and is not "normal circumstances". I'll edit accordingly. But I still think that it would be a toxic environment if a student acing in his or her best interest by moving to industry were held against the advisor.

any harm to her career from you quitting will be vastly smaller: I am really irritated by the entire premise that the OP's quitting can "harm" another person's career. You and @Prof Martinez are conflating "harm" and "lack of benefit". For example, if the OP chooses to stay in the PhD instead of traveling to Turkey to help Syrian refugees, would (s)he be causing "harm" to the Syrian refugees? No, of course not - because no one thinks OP has an obligation to help any refugees. The premise that OP has an obligation to help the advisor's career or make her look good is equally flawed.

@DanRomik I think that the OP has zero obligation to the advisor. I tried to make this quite clear in my answer, and up-voted your answer for the same reason. But the OP asks for the effect on the advisor's career. That effect could be negative (though I believe it ought not  be) and we would be deceiving ourselves to pretend otherwise. I have to answer what I believe to be the truth, not what I wish were the truth.

@Corvus yes, I understand and think your answer is pretty good too, but my point was that it's not that the effect would be negative, but that a previous positive effect would be rescinded. It's an important distinction: any action that we take will have negative effects on someone when referenced against another, hypothetical, more positive, effect - as in my Syrian refugees example. Quitting the PhD would simply mean that the OP would cease delivering a positive effect (which he/she has no obligation to deliver) to the advisor, and instead start delivering positive effects to other people.

... For this reason I'd prefer if you don't use the "harm to her career" terminology. In any case, thanks for the upvote, I also upvoted your answer.

@DanRomik the Syrian refugees case would be a good analogy if the question were "If I decide not to pursue a PhD with advisor X, will I make her look bad?" The answer to that question: of course not. But leaving mid-PhD is different because, sadly, in my experience people do sometimes discuss completion ratios "Only two of his five PhD students managed to finish" when discussing promotion issues. By adding to the denominator but not the numerator, one does decrease that ratio by starting and not finishing. Still, I'm happy to rephrase to try to address your objection.

Though I agree that a student should not feel morally obligated to stay in a Ph.D. program just to make the adviser look good, I disagree with the Syrian refugee analogy. The adviser has presumably invested some time and effort in helping the student; Syrian refugees have not.

@AndreasBlass and Corvus yes, my analogy is not perfect and you are right to point that out. It was a reductio ad absurdum sort of thing. Maybe a better analogy would be if the OP had already spent two years helping refugees and was now deciding not to help them for two more years. As for "the adviser has [...] invested some time and effort in helping the student": well, the student has also invested time and effort! Again, I take issue with the presumption that the advisor's help morally entitles them to an ownership share of the OP's future work. Present and past work - ok, but not future.

My mother quit her PhD program back in the 50's, because she wanted to have children and didn't feel that she could put the time into both.  This was a disappointment to a number of people, because, in those less enlightened days, they wanted to make her an example of the ability of women to get a doctorate.  She decided that the issue of women's equality wasn't as important to her as starting her family.  My father said it was her decision and he would support her either way.  A number of years later, she became an English professor anyway, spent 40 years at it, and raised seven children along the way.
To quote the old saw: be who you are, because those who matter don't mind and those who mind don't matter.  The trick is finding out who you are.
One more thing.  If this lady is good at what she does, you can't do anything to hurt her career.  If she isn't, nothing that you can do will make her career.  So, your decision isn't particularly important to her career one way or the other.
EDIT: Looking at other answers and reading comments, it's clear that there are considerations that I didn't think of.  I guess in the end, we can all spend a great deal of time working out the effect that this will have on your professor, but the only person who really can tell you is the professor herself.  You need to "fess up" and tell her you're thinking about quitting and why.  Maybe she doesn't share your concerns, maybe she has concerns none of us have thought of.  Maybe you can work something out that will benefit both of you.  But you never will really know until you face her and tell her what's on your mind.
By the way, I have 30 years experience in the IT field.  PhD's in computer science generally make better money than software engineers, and often find interesting work.  If, for example, you want to write software programs to calibrate scientific equipment, that PhD will help.  If you want to design websites or databases for health care companies, it probably won't.

I think this answer overlooks some aspects of having a student (e.g. compare your answer to @jakebeal's)

You're absolutely right, and those things ought to be taken into consideration.

If one student aborts a Ph.D. on a mentor, or even a few over the course of a career, that's par for the course.
If this sort of thing KEEPS HAPPENING to a mentor, it should raise some red flags for that person's colleagues and any committees involved with placing grad students in labs.

Ask yourself this: If people knew you stayed on as a Ph.D. candidate because somehow you got to worry more about how this would reflect on your advisor, this in itself would reflect very poorly on him; and perhaps on you as well. So... don't let the how-it-would-reflect-on-him concern worry you.
H-O-W-E-V-E-R! There is the "Neighbor's grass is always greener" effect. It may be the case that leaving your Ph.D. track has detriments you might not be taking into account, and on the other hand, maybe you're stuck in your Ph.D. work and, arranged differently, it might be more interesting and rewarding. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case but sometime it is. Also, some people switch to working on the rest of their Ph.D.s part-time. Again, that doesn't work well for everyone, I'm just saying you need to carefully weigh your options etc. etc.

The only real effect your dropping your PhD program will have on your advisor, is that it might leave her short on her "stuff profs need to do in their jobs" list.  i.e. most universities have a teaching requirement, a research requirement, and a service requirement.  She's now lost an advisee, so she's a bit "thin" on her service requirement, and may have to scramble a bit to pick something else up to fulfil that.  Other than that, though...no, it will not harm her career.


text:
Submission of two papers in one conference?
I wanted to know whether it is allowed and also plausible to submit two papers at the same conference? Does the acceptance or rejection of one affect the acceptance or rejection of the other paper?

There is nothing wrong or unusual in submitting two papers on a single conference. For specific detail you should refer to the conference author guide. In my experience, there exists an upper bound of papers (about 3-4), but I have never encountered a conference where only a single paper was permitted.
The acceptance or rejection is individual, every paper is peer-reviewed on its own account.
You should keep in mind that the conference will charge every paper separately. You should also watch the presentation schedule for any conflicts (though, they are very unlikely)

I've never encountered a conference where a single author could not be on multiple papers, but I have encountered a conference where a single individual was not allowed to be first author and/or present (not sure which) on more than one. Just more reason to check the rules for the conference :-)

"that the conference will charge every paper separately" - this does happen sometimes, but the word will is a bit strong here IMHO, given that it is not necessarily the case (especially if the papers are of different "classes", e.g. one full paper and one short paper or one poster).

@SimonW: I once encountered such a conference. My professor considered that completely inacceptable and started a fight with the conference organizers over it (which he won eventually, I was allowed to present two papers) :)

@O.R.Mapper honestly, the only instances where conference charges nothing that come to mind are (undergrad) student papers and invited papers. However, my statement was primarily meant to emphasize that one should not expect to present multiple papers for the fee of one.

@user3209815: It is true that conferences often have a (quite low) upper limit of papers included in the registration, but more than one is not uncommon: "one full or limited registration is valid for up to 3 papers", "one full registration is valid for up to 3 papers", "one full registration is valid for up to 3 papers", etc. Alternatively, the second paper sometimes costs less than a full extra registration if first authors match.

Weird. The conferences I attend only charge to attend, not to present, and the same speaker giving multiple talks (at no additional charge, of course) is quite common.

I wanted to know whether it is allowed and also plausible to submit two papers at the same conference?

Yes, it's generally allowed. (Unless the submission instructions explicitly forbid this.)
It's also plausible - it's even common. If your work is closely related to the scope of a particular conference, it's not uncommon for you to have multiple pieces of work to submit. (This is especially true if there are not many conferences in your subfield; you might choose to "save up" publications for a particular venue, rather than submit them somewhere else where they will be on the edge of the conference scope.)

Does the acceptance or rejection of one affect the acceptance or rejection of the other paper?

No, papers are generally reviewed independently and each submission of evaluated on its own merit.

Definitely check the conference website. For instance, one in my field (not CS admittedly) rejects automatically anything with the same first author.
https://www.eshg.org/abstracts2015.0.html

This is major difference between fields: I have never heard of such a policy for a CS conference.  In CS, this would be tantamount to saying you can only publish one article in a journal per year.

@jakebeal The question is about conferences, not journals.

@DavidRicherby Maybe my comment is unclear. I meant to make an analogy: restricting a CS researcher to one submission to their primary conference would be like restricting a researcher in another field to one submission per year to their primary journal.  In other words, not at all reasonable.

@jakebeal OK, I see what you mean. But I don't think the analogy is really helpful: it's essentially saying "Doing that would be just like doing something that's almost identical to the first thing!" which isn't a very strong statement.

My two little cents:
It is of course generally allowed. I personally, did that a couple of times (2 or 3 papers). I have different experiences. There were conferences where both of the papers were accepted.
However, at one conference both of my papers were sent to one reviewer (though there were other reviewers). And that particular reviewer though that the underlying formulation of both of papers were same (!), which sounded as a serious accusation and the editor of the conference rejected one of the papers. I responded to the reviewers that the problems presented in two papers were completely different, though both of them definitely had some similar (15-20%) formulations. I am a PhD student working in a single funded research project; so there will always be some similarities in formulation among my publications.
There is another point to consider (which is my personal speculation) - when the conference editor/publication chair sees a number of paper from the same author, he/she might think, just might, you are using the conference as a dumping ground or just trying to save money (as usually papers after the first one gets some discounts) and reject the paper when the reviewers' give neutral comments. I may be completely wrong though.


text:
What date should I put on a paper that I hand in to my teacher?
I know that it is important to have dates on papers that you hand in to teachers. I usually put the date that I start the paper, but sometimes I change it to make it seem like I'm not procrastinating. I've also used the date the paper is due. No teacher has ever said anything to me or taken off points for how I have the date.
So my question What is the correct date to put on a paper?

Any date prior to the day after the due date is acceptable. But honestly I don't think anybody serious cares.

I prefer to have students put the date the assignment is due - this helps me sort some assignments better, particularly if they don't put the assignment number on the paper.

Regardless of whether it is homework or any other sort of technical document, the correct date to put on a technical document is the date of its most recent revision.  If the history is important, other dates can be added as well (e.g. the submitted/revised/accepted dates on some journal papers).
As for your professors never saying anything... they likely had no reason or even ability to discriminate between the different systems you used to date, and it likely did not matter for the purposes of the class.

I agree.  I think of this as a file last modified date, as opposed to the date of creation.

To add to what Jakebeal stated, going with the date you LAST touched is important to get in the habit of from a work perspective too.  If you are working on a document that helps write out the steps needed to be taken for a certain process, documenting when it was last touched is key for co-workers.  This helps them to know if it has been updated or not any time recently.  If it is older and they know the process has changed, they may ask for you to change it or go in and change it themselves.
Say though that you put in the date you first started the document, but, due to doing other duties, takes you 3 months to document this process.  Someone may think the document is not up-to-date or missing information that may have been provided after the date.  So by always keeping the date of when you last touched it current, you help others know the validity of the information.
If all else fails.... there is an option in word to allow for the date to be changed automatically to when you next open/edit I believe.  I know there use to be not sure if it is still a feature.