text:
Near the end of my PhD, I want to leave the program, take my work with me, and my advisor says that he lost all of my drafts
My advisor has been neglectful throughout my program, and unfortunately, switching advisors was never an option. He provided no scientific guidance, only emailing me every six months to tell me to submit a thesis and graduate. I believe he underestimated my abilities, assuming I wouldn’t produce significant work, so he didn’t bother helping, thinking he wouldn’t benefit from a noteworthy paper.
Despite this, I persisted and worked independently, relying on occasional external guidance. After years of effort, I managed to produce original work. At conferences, external professors who saw my presentations encouraged me to publish, recognizing the value of my contributions.
When I shared my drafts with my advisor (without my name on them), he became resentful, likely realizing he hadn’t contributed to my progress. He belittled my work and started pressuring me to submit a thesis and make a public defense. Now, just one month before my deadline, I still haven’t published my work to secure intellectual ownership. My main concern is that during a public defense, anyone in the audience—especially those experienced in publishing—could steal my ideas and publish them themselves, leaving me with nothing.
After much thought, I’m considering leaving the program. I no longer care about the degree; I care about protecting my work. The university itself is low-ranking, and I would rather publish independently and apply for a PhD elsewhere.
Recently, I asked my advisor to return my old drafts, especially since I’ve learned that other PhD students are now working in the same area. I fear he may share my drafts with them so they can include his name as a coauthor. He claimed that he either returned the drafts to me or lost them entirely. I firmly told him I never received them, emphasized that this is my original work, and questioned how he could lose them so easily.
I’m devastated and deeply distrust him at this point. I suspect he might either use my work himself or pass it on to others, and I get nothing. He said he would look for my drafts again, but I have no confidence in him.
What should I do?
What are my options? please don't tell me that I should have left, I know but I don't have the time to fall in regret, I want to get out with minimum losses. My work is more important than the degree for my future career. Since he doesn't want to give me my drafts. there is a probability that he has given it to students or he is taking revenge on me.
I plan to extract two papers from my thesis, where one paper depends on the other. My goal is to submit the independent paper before finalizing my thesis. However, with the stress of this situation and this being my first paper, I need help with the writing process.
Would it be appropriate to contact a professor I briefly met at a conference, who is also an editor for the journal I intend to submit to, and ask for their opinion or comments on my work before submission? Additionally, I hope that their acknowledgment of my work could serve as a safeguard for my intellectual property in case someone tries to claim or steal my ideas.
Is this a reasonable approach?
I am in the middle-east working in numerical optimization.

"He claimed that he either returned the drafts to me or lost them entirely." Did you give himi paper drafts?

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@AzorAhai-him- You're right; I've undeleted the unanswered comment and added the answered information to the question. OP: Azor Ahai and others  are asking whether you gave drafts printed on paper rather than something digital; they're not asking whether you gave "drafts of an academic paper". They're trying to make sense of your insistence that there is something physical to be returned to you.

First, don't walk away from years of work. Get the degree now, if you're close, rather than having to start all over somewhere else.
Second, you are publishing your work as part of your PhD thesis. If others do take your work as inspiration for their own work, you can always point to your published thesis to say that you were first.
Third, it does not happen very often that others "steal" an idea and publish it as their own. That's because it takes quite a lot of work to do that: You have to understand another person's idea, repeat the experiments made, and then write it all up. That likely takes a year or more. You will have plenty of time after your PhD defense to get your stuff published first, before anyone else could do that based on your presentations.

I don't know what field this is, but in my sub-field, presenting a result at a conference (which the OP seems to have done) and then writing up the corresponding proceedings certainly counts as published.

More's the point, you need to be pretty confident that you can get away with the theft. It only takes you producing an earlier draft (which they won't know you've lost) to prove that it was your original work they're claiming as their own.

To be honest, I think you are being a bit paranoid. If you have left any public record, you can refer to it. In particular a completed thesis, and its defense is a public record.
Your best option is to finish the thesis ASAP and defend it. Perhaps submit a pre-print of a possible publication to arXiv or similar. Or leave copies of your drafts with another professor whom you trust.
Note that you don't own "ideas". You hold copyright to certain expressions of those ideas, but the ideas themselves are free to use (exception in the case of patents).
Note also that parallel work in research is common in academia, even in independent institutions, and one sometimes gets "scooped" in offering them for publication. Those who do get scooped need to move on, usually with extensions of those ideas for which they are probably well placed.
But, publication doesn't, in fact, give you ownership of the ideas. It gives you a claim of priority.
Note that it would be misconduct for anyone to represent your ideas as their own, whether that is the advisor or one of their students. But, you need to finish, and you are most likely the one farthest ahead in the race, should one occur.
Leaving your program seems to me to be the absolute worst option. It will set you back in time and let those which similar thoughts about your research area catch up to you.

Plus, people don't steal ideas and go publish on them. At best very rarely. Too many other good ideas around, and way too much risk.

@JonCuster  for something that apparently happens so rarely, we hear about things like that here often enough.

@ScottSeidman: we hear a lot about advisors adding their name to the author list, or people fearing about their work being stolen. The situation is different here.

@Taladris exactly. We also only hear one side of those situations. And it's very consistently the students. Who based on my experience being one and teaching many, are rarely even remotely objective.

@ScottSeidman "Stealing ideas" is the Loch Ness Monster of academia. Everyone talks about it, everyone knows a story of somebody who it has allegedly happened to, rarely this is the person telling the story themselves, and when it is, a closer examination usually quickly brings to light that the story is a lot more complex than "my advisor / reviewer / colleague took my draft and replaced my name with his".

@ScottSeidman Or, in other words, you hear so much about it because some people would really like it to be true. "My idea got stolen" is easier to accept than "other people made it work better or earlier than me".

@xLeitix I think a common scenario is "Person A failed to finish a project and someone else picked it up later; when they did so, they found little useful or what was available wasn't described in enough detail to be used, so it had to be re-done from scratch. After it's published, Person A thinks their work was stolen".

@BryanKrause Indeed. Or "I had a very vague, fuzzy idea but never acted on it, and somebody else (who I may or may not have told about it) has actually implemented something that shares some similar techniques or goals - hence, that person stole my work."

There are a few reasons what you are suggesting is, I think, a bad idea.
If your supervisor really did want to steal your work, they could just photocopy your drafts. I certainly don't carefully file drafts given to me by students, I usually just throw them away after giving comments, they are drafts!
At many Universities, you cannot use work from before you started your PhD, on your PhD, so you can't just go start over somewhere else and keep your existing work, you'd have to write a fresh PhD. Also, I would personally never accept a new PhD student who had dropped out of their previous PhD just a month before finishing, without an extremely good reason -- and you don't seem to have a good reason to not just finish in your current location.
While it will take some time for your final PhD to be published, that will happen a lot faster than any alternative, and also get you a PhD, which (as I said above) there is a very good chance you will not get anywhere else.
You also mention reaching out to someone about if your work is publishable. This is, seperately, an entirely sensible thing to do. Do try to write something which isn't going to use too much of their time, and make clear you aren't looking for them to fully review your draft paper (which isn't a reasonable request for someone you don't know that well).

OP asks if they can contact a professor they respect. Do you count it as a bad idea?

Before I really start, I'll say that I'm sorry you find yourself in such an upsetting situation.
I don't know what country you're in, or what the academic norms and legal scenarios are there, but in the US, the fruits of your labor tend to belong to the university, not to the individual, which makes your planned course of action a little less appealing.
I get that you don't want people using your stuff without you being properly credited, but to demand that your mentor needs to move on as if you never existed or did any work in the lab comes across as petulant.  What you're trying to do is sometimes described in the US as "taking your ball and going home" -- meaning that if you can't "have fun", you'll do everything in your power to make sure nobody else can have fun either.
Further, your mentor, or maybe your school, for better or worse, supported these efforts, and the best outcome is probably for you to make your work available to your group with the understanding that you would be included as an author in any attempt to publish.
If you're worried that efforts will be made to exclude you, or that your mentor will make believe your drafts are his personal work, perhaps a better course of action would be to simple widely distribute your draft to your entire group, thus establishing provenance.  Hold on to a copy of the email you use to distribute it.  That at least establishes that you have what you need to level an accusation of impropriety with the relevant editors should your work be published without your authorship.  Of course, accusing anybody of any form of misconduct is serious business, and should not be undertaken lightly.  Note also that as you've presented your work at conferences, you already have published to a certain extent.
There is no guarantee that your mentor won't simply toss your stuff and start fresh if you take this approach, or maybe even try to disguise your contribution, but it may still be a good path.
Trying to get this right, where the work may be likely to see the light of day, and both you and the lab get credit for contributions, is a much more mature path to take than the path you seem to be planning.  Look through our archives, and you'll see quite a few cases of an investigator trying to prevent publication in various ways, at the expense of the group.  Those are unfortunate cases that can often be avoided and resolved to everyone's satisfaction with rational discussion and maturity.
I feel compelled to add that I agree with others who seem to think that your plan to leave your program is somewhat precipitous, and I gently suggest that if there's a way for you to finish your degree in the near future in your current program, you might strongly consider it.  You mention that you're "devastated" by this situation.  Some have suggested that you might be overreacting.  I have no idea whether you are or aren't, but either way, it might be a mistake to make major decisions while you're devastated.  Try to depersonalize the situation, and when you can  look at it as an outsider might, that's the time to make your decision. This doesn't mean that I think you need to change your decision. Indeed, you may give this a calm, cool look, and decide that there's no way that you can productively work with a person who is treating you this way, and that leaving is the right thing to do. This is certainly a "do as I say, not as I do" situation, as I have a hard time sometimes making non-emotional decisions myself -- and very much wish I were better at it.
You're in a less-than-ideal situation.  It's a real skill to be able to turn a less-than-ideal situation into a somewhat better situation. Those who do stuff like that well tend to be impressive people.  In fact, when I'm training undergrads to work on ambitious problems as a team, I try to change their view that a leader does the lion's share of the work, or simply tells everyone what to do to "a good leader is someone that makes bad situations better" (and that's a direct quote from my slides).
Think about how describing your current situation would go over at say, a job interview, or in an application to a new PhD program.  You can say "Something bad happened, so I started fresh", or you can say "Something bad happened, and I worked hard to try to save the situation in a way acceptable to everyone involved.  Those efforts were successful, and I leaned much from the experience".  Which way do you think will reflect better on you?  Being very frank, if I were the interviewer, I would simply pass on an interviewee with the first story (it may be the wrong thing to do, but I'd opt for a candidate with less baggage), and probably put somebody with the second story in the positive pile, even if there were some other things in their portfolio that I didn't like. To me, the first is a negative that drowns out positives, and the second is a positive that might even lessen the importance of some of the negatives.

You should follow your advisor’s advice to submit a thesis and make a public defense.
That is kind of the point of doing all the PhD work in the first place. That is what you do when you produce significant work. It is what shows your claim on these ideas.
It is, notably, what you are supposed to do with the PhD work. It is, notably, what your advisor is justified to expect if you want to claim these ideas.
Not doing this is, notably, a clear sign to your advisor that you are not going to publish this anytime soon – and that he has to get another student working on it if he or anyone else is supposed to build on it.

My suggestion, learned from experience, is to copyright and patent eveyrthing that can be.  You are in a race-condition.  The first to file, even if it is a provisional patent, gets the rights.
It's not fair, particularly if a professor delays you while they file patents.
I am not saying this is happening to you, but I have seen it happen with both patents and papers.  Professors, stall students on a topic while they, or worse, a friend of theirs publishes a remarkably similar paper - the student only knows that they have been "scooped".
WARNING:  You will likely get a hostile reaction from professors that do plagiarize student's papers if you have copyrighted everything before you turn it in.  I have noticed the the copyright symbol on the title of your papers seems to provoke continued hostility from such professors.   But generally not from professors that do not plagiarize student's papers.

Note that, in the US anyway, patents are usually claimed by the institutions. They also cover cost of filing and defending patents, and usually share any proceeds with the "inventors". And, copyright in much of the world is automatic when the "expression" is first fixed in a tangible form, such as print.

Surely that's not meant literally? Copyright is automatic in most countries whereas patents are complex and expensive. At least in my neck of the woods, most scientific work isn't patent'able to boot. If it is, the university actually has a claim on it in most cases.

In the U.S. a work is copyrighted when it is published.  However if you expect to have reason to go to court, the $35 filing fee documents the fact that you published - instead of hoping that proof of the publication still remains on the professor's computer.  In this case it seems not to have survived.

Under the Berne convention, creative works are copyrighted at creation, not at (later) publication. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright. This convention/treaty is in force for most of the world. The traditional copyright mark is no longer needed, though it is helpful to remind readers about who owns the rights, not their existence. What is needed, however, is some creative content, which is not at issue here.

I would get annoyed (what some people might consider hostile) from students insisting on copyright and patents too, without any intention to steal their work. This just shows a blatant misunderstanding of what these mechanisms do and how they apply to science. Copyright does not protect "your ideas". "Your ideas" are not yours in a myriad of cases. Having to deal with such misguided believes of ownership is a major headache for actually publishing.

@Buffy.  Unequivocally NO.  Nobody can prevent you from filing for a patent, look this up at the USPTO.  Individuals that obtain patents can assign the patent rights to others.  This is done by many companies that pay engineers to design and develop things.  The engineer can patent anything they design. However, their hiring agreement usually stipulates that the employee has agreed to assign all intellectual property rights it funded.   I am not aware of ANY university that imposes this as an enrollment requirement.  In fact, research grant contract negotiations often center on this issue.

Hmmm. Don't try that at IBM or Google. And even in the absence of contracts, patents are expensive, requiring searches and probably lawyers. And even more expensive to defend.

@Buffy, you are confusing assignment with licensing.

Not at all, I've considered neither. Just filing. Obtaining a patent requires more than the filing fee. Sorry, but I need to drop the mic here. This isn't getting us anywhere. And FWIW, I haven't voted this post.


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Writing a new book on known methods/algorithms
I am quite young but embarked on a rather new challenge for me: writing a book. There aren't so many books on this specific topic in my field: maybe 2 or at most 3 good references, with the first two quite old. The trouble for me is that although there is some clear original stuff in each chapter/section, the main reason for writing the book, the methods (some algorithms and numerical stuff, many equations) are quite standard and all good lecture sets (not too many) draw from these two books.
My book would be clearly better organized than the previous ones. However, the methods are basically the same. I mention that this chapter draws from x and y source, and sometimes that the theoretical part of a certain section is according to z source.
Would citing my sources be enough in terms of not having issues with plagiarism?

"Enough" for what?

"My book would be clearly better organized than the previous ones.": beware that the result might be quite different from the intentions ;-)

FYI, writing a book is a rather risky endeavor. If you don't have a publisher lined up and/or aren't aware of whether you'll have a wide market, it's very possible that you'll spend several years writing the book only to have nobody really care. You're probably better off just doing research - both for your own career, as well as for the algorithms community in general.

@01010110011001 May I ask what is the sample size on which you are basing this advice? In particular, how many books have you written, and how many of them were unsuccessful?

@DanRomik My personal sample size is 0. My sample size of professors I am friends with who have written books, however, is sizeable. Most of them, even the ones whose book publications have been very successful, advise against writing books for the reasons I mentioned above.

Of the professors I know, two of them have written unsuccessful books, and both of them sincerely regret doing so. In addition, it sounds like OP is relatively early in his career; and would probably have a much easier time writing a book in general after he/she has more experience writing and performing research (and probably teaching an algo class or two).

@01010110011001 ok, good to know. I partially agree with your view about the difficulty of writing a successful book. More precisely, I think your observations are statistically correct, but I think it's dangerous to extrapolate such statistical data and form from it generalized advice of the kind "you're probably better off doing research". Whether that's true for OP really depends on a lot of things about him/her that we don't know.

@DanRomik Agreed. Perhaps I should have been more clear about playing a bit of devil's advocate.

It is under contract with Elsevier. I am already very content inside myself with writing it. I just want to have a well written book I could be happy with even after 20 years :)

Plagiarism is literally copying the text (or making only minor changes to pretend that you are not copying the text literally). Writing a book about something that is known is not plagiarism by itself, as long as you use your own words to explain the "standard methods".
If you do this, and if you do not copy figures and exercises (if there are any) it is not plagiarism. If you do need to copy a figure you usually need permission from the publisher (because of copyright, but that is a different issue than plagiarism).
So if your book has a different structure, is written in your own words, and cites the sources, it is probably not plagiarism. Your text simply needs to be clearly different from the original text(s).

I already say the sources for a specific topic at the beginning of each chapter. This chapter draws from x, y and z. My feeling is that if for a given section I don't draw from a specific source too much, I can leave it like this (of course, everything in my own words, no uncited figures from other sources). What about a specific section that draws mostly from 1-2 sources, is it better to mention this specifically in that section? (like: I follow mostly w and y for the theoretical exposition?)

You need to understand the difference between "copying" and "relying on sources". The first is plagiarism, the second is not. Even if you use only a single source this is perfectly fine, as long as you use your own words instead of copying the source text. If the sources deserve as much credit as you say it may indeed be a good idea to mention them specifically in the text, but that has nothing to do with plagiarism.

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Is an American University Professor allowed to share grades with the class?
I am in a bad situation with a professor. He shared my grades and my classmates grades with the class. He had our names and everything put up on a projector!!!!  He even scrolled through it slowly so we could find our name and see what we are getting in the class... It was like everything...I was horrified. Basically he took all of his classes and put them into one file and then put that on a overhead projector to show us our grades. I think he did this for each of his classes... All of our names, etc... are in there too... so we can see who got what for all of his classes.
there have been lots of problems... he is very forgetful and makes a lot of mistakes in grading. Students catch him all the time... and he fixes the stuff but we have to catch him. I don't want to go on about this, but mostly sharing our grades with the class...
I'm sorry if this is confusing. I'm very flustered!!! English is also not my best language.
I don't know what I am supposed to do. Is this okay? I felt very uncomfortable and upset when this happened. I thought my grades were private?
Thnx for help!!
edit
The proposed duplicate is a different situation with a favorable outcome. Additionally it was something he could stop. This has already happened and IDK what to do.

I do appreciate the link. The situation seems very different to me. This was much more extremely and has already happened....

Exactly what difference do you see? "It [] already happened" in the duplicate as well. And it can't be more extreme - the grades being shared openly is as extreme as the violation can get, short of printing them in a newspaper.

I have always understood this to be illegal.

To put in perspective, when I was in an Italian university it was absolutely common to print exam results (or graduatories to phd or whatever) on public boards (wooden ones). Typically you waited for someone of the assistant to go up and pin the sheets to the board to know your grade. Typical for written exams. It was not a violation of any law.

Is he from Russia? It is normal practice here in Russia. It is always hard to learn all those quirks that are meaningless in one place and a big deal in another.

This is a clear violation of FERPA. Bring this up to your department head or a dean of your college.
To prevent this from happening, any identifying information should have been removed. Your name (and if were there, a student ID number) should have been redacted.
As this has already happened, I would promptly report it to the appropriate campus administration.

Typically a student would talk to department head, but it is also a good time to check your university's website. In a larger university, there will be an ombudsman or similar person available to discuss grievances. Or perhaps check the site of the Student Affairs offices or Grad School offices to see if they have similar person. Best practice in any case is to be polite and concerned, wanting an apology or acknowledgment of it being impropoer, but realistically the practical outcome you are aiming for is that univ admin educate the professor so it doesn't happen again.

That's terrible! I'm quite sure that showing students' names and grades to the whole class is a violation of FERPA, the federal laws in the U.S. that protect student privacy. (I assume "American" in your question title means "U.S.") See for example http://www.emich.edu/registrar/registration_info/FERPA/Faculty%20FERPA.pdf Moreover, it's pretty obviously a bad thing to do, for reasons of student privacy, interactions between students, etc. What should you do? You could (1) talk to the professor, or (2) contact the department head. As a professor, I'd prefer (1) if it were me -- though I can't imagine being as clueless as your professor! However, I have to instead recommend (2), to preserve your anonymity with respect to the professor. Inform the department of what has happened, and politely note that the professor may be unaware of policies and norms about student privacy.

There are several institutions that are not in the US but have the name of American University. There is one in Beirut, Lebanon for example.

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How should I ask my advisor on help with something I should know how to do?
I am creating a mathematical model in R (programming language) as part of my thesis. I created the first part of the model no problem and sent it to my advisor. She said I did a fantastic job on it. For the second part, I need to look over some class notes as we did it in class last year. This part is very challenging and I even remember in class that I didn't fully understand it. I have been working for 3 days trying to create this model, but I am not even close. I just can't figure out the code to use. I am trying to use the same code as we did in class, but my model is quite a bit different than the class examples so I can't figure it out. I tried looking online as well, but this type of model analysis is not very common so there are not many resources available.
I need to get going on the project so it may be better to meet with my advisor so she can show me how to do it. But I am afraid to ask as this is something I should know how to do. I would like your help with drafting up an email to ask her for help.

Don't worry too much that you don't know everything. Don't worry too much that you might have missed something. Meeting and asking for guidance is an excellent way to handle it. You may have some minor misconception that is blocking you from moving forward. Many students do, actually.

Is this a PhD thesis? It would give a better idea of the level of complexity you are likely to be dealing with.

There are good answers already, but try to think that you may have been trying to work with poor/incomplete references, whereas, if your advisor is an expert in the field (and especially if he knows how to code in R) he should know good references and gladly send them to you on request.

Often, academic materials handed out for students are oversimplified, because they're being taught how to use tools rather than how to develop them. When working with research, you'll need to do both. And references to understand how to develop a tool may be hard to come by in some specific fields.

The way to frame your question can have a huge impact. If you did your due diligence and researched some material on this (books, lectures, papers, StackExchange!), and are still stuck, then there is a chance that your questions are more than valid.
If you start your email or personal question by: "I have tried three ways to do this.."  and then show/tell them that you have honestly tried your best, your supervisor should help you out. That's what they are for.
Also, feeling like a fool today may accelerate your advance in the future. Postponing communication like this is not always wise (given that you've done your part).

I have been working for 3 days...but I am not even close

Research takes time, three days isn't very long. (Albeit, I'm unfamiliar with the specifics.)

I am trying to use the same code as we did in class, but my model is quite a bit different than the class examples so I can't figure it out.

Ask your peers, a teaching assistant, whoever taught the class, ..., how to apply what you learnt to your model.

it may be better to meet with my advisor so she can show me how to do it

During your regular meeting (if you don't have them, start), explain what you've done and the problems you've encountered, your advisor should be able to offer guidance. But, you can ask others too.

I would like your help with drafting up an email to ask her for help.

Ask in person.

Actually, no. The advisor is the best person to ask. That is because, if they are wise, they won't just "answer" your query but help you reach it yourself, deepening your learning. Others will just give you an answer that may be correct, but still contributes very little to your learning. Good advisors give hints, not answers.

@Buffy If someone "just give[s] you an answer that may be correct," then you've asked the wrong person. Assuming "[t]he advisor is the best person to ask," limits the student's network of knowledge. An advisor is a resource, use them sparingly, for the hardest of problems.

Your supervisor is there to guide and mentor you during this process. As long as you have done your due diligence and can show the avenues you have tried and why those avenues didn't work, your supervisor will most likely be perfectly happy to help you with what your next step might be to solve the problem.
I work in a research environment, have supervised students and work closely with colleagues who do the same. Postponing communication, as @MPIchael says, is not always wise, especially if you have made a genuine attempt to solve the problem. Waiting too long wastes precious time. Both yours and your supervisor's. If one of my students can show me their thought process and give me something to work with, I am very happy to point out where they might have taken a wrong turn. I am not thrilled when someone comes to me and just says "I don't know what to do" without giving me anything to build on.
From the sounds of it, it is not for lack of trying that you are struggling. You even said that she was very happy with the first part of the model so she clearly sees that you are working hard. If this is a PhD thesis... the work is meant to be complex and original. It would be odd if you weren't struggling at some points.
I would suggest using email to set up an appointment to discuss your progress. It is a good idea to have face-to-face meetings when you are trying to understand and convey more complex topics. When you meet with her, explain your thinking behind your approach, what you have tried and why it hasn't worked and then ask her if she can see anything wrong with what you have attempted and whether she could point you in the right direction :)

I agree with MPIchael but want to present it from a somewhat different angle.
You're feeling embarrassed that you don't know how to do something, that your supervisor previously taught you. This isn't needed. Science isn't easy. If it was, anyone could do it and we wouldn't need to go to university to learn.
Consider it a matter of professionalism. Suppose you're working at a company and you're tasked with a project. You get to work but then you run into a problem that needs to be solved before the project can go forward.

You could go to your team lead for help. Your team lead probably knows how to do it, but they're also busy with other responsibilities. Your team lead thought you could do this yourself.
You could try to solve it yourself. You don't know if this is going to take a few hours extra or a few weeks extra.

What should you do? If you go cry for help immediately, you'll look bad. If after a few weeks you have to admit that you still haven't gotten close to a solution, you also look bad, because now the project is badly behind schedule. So the most professional solution is to try yourself for a reasonable amount of time, but go to your team lead if it starts taking too long.
Your situation is the same. You're not in high school anymore. In high school you should never have gotten any assignment that you weren't able to handle. But in university (and the rest of the "real world") it's entirely possible to run into a problem that you won't be able to handle without help.
So after doing your due diligence, seeking help is the most rational thing to do. And in university you should never be ashamed of being rational.

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Is it a FERPA violation for instructor to display grades in public computer file system?
My instructor placed grade sheets for our first two projects into a "Dropbox" file system which has absolutely no access control.  So not only every student could see every other student's grades and written assessments, but anyone walking into the college library could sit down at a computer and look at our grades without having to present any kind of credentials whatsoever.

Two things: 1) If a student's name - is attached to a grade, then yes. If it was by student ID, perhaps not. 2) I suggest you do not talk smack about other students, saying that they are "considered too dumb to work with credentials and access controls."

Is this a college-wide approach to grading? Or just your instructor's approach?

I don't understand -- your instructor put the grade sheets in a public dropbox folder, that anyone with the link could access?  I can see that this is not secure, but I don't understand how any Tom, Dick or Harry would find out where to look for that file, when sitting down at a computer in the college library.  Did the instructor include a link to the files from his or her home page, or course webpage?  Also, please clarify how the students are identified in the grade sheets.

FERPA prohibits public posting of grades together with students' names or social security numbers (including last 4 digits of SSN).  (This prohibition includes, but is not limited to, posting grades where other students in the class can see one another's grades.)
(FERPA's treatment of student IDs depends on whether they are treated as personally identifiable information - in which case student IDs can not be disclosed in a way that allows student IDs to be matched to individual students - or whether they are treated as electronic identifiers, in which case they can be disclosed as "directory information" but may not be used to post grades. See this document for further details.)
In general, FERPA allows schools to put educational records in the "cloud", but places certain restrictions on how these records must be protected. Some "enterprise" or "education" versions of cloud services are FERPA-compliant (or can be made FERPA-compliant through special arrangement with the provider), and can be used to store educational records. A few "consumer"-grade cloud services are also FERPA compliant. Personal Dropbox accounts (not including Dropbox Business) are not, and should not be used to store FERPA-protected records, even as private Dropbox files that require authentication to view. See e.g. guidelines at UC Davis, University of Michigan, University of Oregon, University of Utah.

Since the OP's case is not final grades, just grades for 2 projects (out of many, presumably), is this necessarily a FERPA violation? The students' final grades can't necessarily be inferred from the posted grades of the first 2 projects. (Regardless, I agree that this was a bad move on the professor's part.)

@rturnbull FERPA prohibits the disclosure of "personally identifiable information from education records". All grades, test scores, project scores, etc. that are recorded by the instructor are considered education records, not only final grades.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. I'm a little rusty on the law (I live in Europe).


text:
professors reply "I will get in touch in future if a position is available"
I asked one of my professor my interest in pursuing a PhD in her group (who was a great mentor during this year). She told that no position is available and hope that new positions will come in the future and she will let me know. Nothing more about my application and if she wants to supervise me and if I can be a potential candidate.
Do you think it is a polite way to decline my application or is it really what happened in academia and she is being honest at the end.
At the end, I don't know what to think about it...

What country? .

Please do not deface your post.

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She told that no position is available and hope that new positions will come in the future and she will let me know. Nothing more about my application and if she wants to supervise me and if I can be a potential candidate.

No position is available. So, if you want a position now, you need to look elsewhere.
Nothing else was said about your application  except she will let you know if there is one in the future. There's no guarantee there will be one in the (near) future. There's no offer or guarantee that you will be the best applicant if there is a future position. All you know is that you have not been told that they never ever want to work with you.
I don't think you should take seriously that they will contact you if a position becomes available, not necessarily because it's not genuine but because these things are easy to forget or they may assume you already found something else.

The professor is not lying in the sense that she genuinely believes that if a position becomes available (i.e. if she has funding for it), she will contact you. She genuinely believes it in the moment.
However, a week later, she will be busy with stuff. Preparing exams. Marking. Writing curriculum. Dealing with emails. Applying for grants. Receiving rejections and rewriting old grant applications into new grant applications. A never-ending cycle of academic life.
A few years later, some funding surely will come her way. Will she remember to contact you? Will she find your email buried deep in her inbox under piles and piles of admin/teaching/research stuff? Unlikely.
Do not expect her to remember her promise and act on it without prompts from your side. If you really liked this opportunity, don't hesitate to email her and reaffirm your interest. Do it on a regular basis, until she either asks you to stop, or makes you an offer.

Are you really suggesting the OP should just keep spamming the professor until asked to stop? That seems like a very good way to ensure that they will never work with her. I am guessing you mean "email her once a year or so but no more", right? Not an email a week or every month or something.

@terdon That's roughly how I got my research master's position. I re-affirmed my interest and secured a meeting with the prof before he had funding available. I agree to be careful with too many reminders but the occasional reminder is not spam, I think I only sent one after a few weeks. In any case, the right project did come along after a few more weeks, prof got in touch and I started grad school there in Canada right after graduating college in the Netherlands. Another prof I had talked to from the same Canadian university made it very clear to me that she wants me to send many reminders.

A good answer ... until the last sentence, which I recommend removing. "Do it on a regular basis, until she either asks you to stop, or makes you an offer" is doomed to leave a bad impression. The OP should put themselves forward for any normal opportunity, and should feel free to contact the professor in conjunction with that. But "email them until they ask you to stop" is weird advice to say the least.

@terdon Not contacting professor is also a very good way to ensure they will never work with you. As I said, a vast majority of "I'll call you later" promises are never fulfilled. By "regular basis" I of course did  not mean "weekly".

@DmitrySavostyanov the answer suggests the OP should keep emailing until asked to stop. That is not just contacting, it is suggesting that the OP keep bothering the professor over and over.

@terdon Perhaps. But it's not unfair. Prof is making a promise she is unlikely to fullfill. For a student who is less familiar with academic lingo, "I will let you know" sounds like a promise, which it is not. It is important that we collectively move to a more transparent, responsible and honest communication. Attaching consequences to prof's promise helps towards it. I believe it's useful for the prof too to appreciate that she actually made a promise that student relies on.  Feel free to downvote if you disagree.

The professor is being honest. They currently do not have a position for you. They may have no positions, or they may have other positions, but not one they would use on you, for whatever reason. So yes, it is honest, but you don't know the full scope of the answer. Nor does it matter, because at the end of the day, this is still a rejection (because the outcome is the same, you do not get the position you asked for) and you should take it as a signal to keep searching.

I would take it exactly as she said it, not as a rejection. It may be that nothing will develop as such things depend on too many factors, including funding and other students graduating.
If you have a sense about the length of the cycle for such things, ask again  at the beginning of the next cycle if you are still interested. But don't wait for magic to happen. Continue looking for other opportunities.
There is nothing to be gained by assuming the worst, but you need to plan in any case.

As I said in another answer, a PhD can look like another degree, but it is really a job. Indeed, universities often advertise PhD openings as jobs (here's my university's jobs page which, as of posting, shows two PhD scholarship opportunities).
In the majority of industries job postings are advertised when a manager has (1) something that needs done (2) which they've got money to hire for because they've convinced their bosses that the job will increase the firm's profit. A university isn't that much different, except that university lecturers get that money by applying for research grants.
So what your professor is saying, more explicitly, is that if she gets a grant that lets her hire a PhD student she will let you know, and she currently doesn't have any grants of that sort. It's her job to apply for grants and get back to you. But here's what you can do:

Keep an eye on university press releases and on your professor's website. When professors get grants their university often makes big announcements, and more importantly their university website gets updated. For example, here's my university announcing their medical grant successes. If your professor gets a grant, send them congratulations -- and briefly ask again about PhD opportunities.

Find where your university announces specific PhD openings. If your professor puts one up, apply for it.

Most universities have a few "generic" PhD scholarship places each year. Find out how your university does it and apply, looping your professor in once you're sure you will apply.

All the best!

Actually, the nature of doctoral education differs by place. In the US, for example, a PhD "position" isn't a job, but an educational experience that, in the absence of something like a TA requires tuition payments. It is true that many(most?) doctoral students here have TAs, at least in some fields, but it still isn't seen as a job. Australia and parts of Europe are different and more as you suggest here, I think. Among other things, in most fields in the US, application is to a department, not to a professor and admissions us controlled by a committee, mostly, or entirely, of faculty.

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text:
Can a school make a grad student TA if the student was promised an RA by admissions?
A student applied to a 5-year PhD program after graduating from an undergraduate program.  The student was accepted to the graduate program and was promised a research assistantship and tuition waiver for the first three years.
The student accepted the offer, and enrolled in the university.  It  turns out that the department does not have enough teaching assistants, so the student and other students who are in analogous circumstances are being told they are now a TA as well.
This is being framed as a "must do," not as "please TA this course, we need help."  Can they do this?  The main attraction of a research assistantship is being able to focus on research and being saddled with a teaching job largely cancels this out.  Seems underhanded.

After re-reading your question, I think we need slightly more information. Is the TA requirement in addition to the RA, or in place of (a portion of)?

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@CGCampbell I do not know for certain but the original RA was 50% so either 25% of that was switched to TA (and likely lost as payed RA time because it's unlikely to be saved for later (or is that untrue?)) or the student is working 75% time which is also not ideal whether they are being payed for the additional time or not.

The promise of an RA-ship, or any other such promises, are mentioned in your official offer letter signed presumably by the Director of Graduate Admission. In reality, I don't think it would be worth your time or effort to take this to court of some sort.
Besides, I really don't buy the "not enough TA's" excuse. It's more likely that their RA funds are scarce. A research university can always find TA's by simply posting the job to other-related departments or even good undergrads.

The department needs to fulfill its promise to the student. If the student was promised an RA-ship, they are owed an RA-ship. And if the student didn’t agree to be a TA, they cannot be “told they are now a TA” without their explicit consent. Moreover, if the student refuses to be a TA, which they 100% have a right to do, that does not release the department from its earlier commitment to give the student an RA-ship.
That being said, organizations — even university departments — will sometimes behave in an unethical and even illegal manner. “Can” they do it, and get away with it? That depends on the situation, the level of resistance offered by the students subjected to this behavior, and the norms of the institution and country where this is taking place.
To be clear, the behavior is more than just “underhanded”. It is a clear attempt to renege on a formal promise made (in writing, I assume) to the student, about something material that would clearly heavily factor in to the student’s decision to attend this graduate program, and which could significantly affect their chances to do well in the program once there.
My suggestion to the student is to seek help from their local graduate student union, the university ombuds office, or other available resources. The department’s behavior is not acceptable. Hopefully with a modest intervention by responsible adults, the department’s administrators will be made to see the error of their ways and find more acceptable ways to solve their TA shortage.

I like that this answer focuses more on the ethical obligation rather than the legal one. The legal side is unlikely to be on the student's side in most places in the US, but that doesn't mean they have no recourse or should simply agree to it.

@BryanKrause certain behaviors are so obnoxious that whether they are legal or not is in some sense irrelevant. A department that does not honor its obligations to its graduate students in such a blatant way probably has more to fear from the loss to its reputation, and resulting loss of ability to recruit good grad students in the future, than from a lawsuit.

(Also, legal opinions are off-topic here, so while it's understandable that you and others want to opine on what's likely or unlikely from a legal perspective, we should try to avoid this unless we have information we are very certain of, since we have no legal expertise, and the legal jurisdiction wasn't even specified in the question.)

This answer seems too judgmental to me. The degree to which the department's behavior is underhanded or unethical depends very carefully on exactly what they told or "promised" students, which we don't have access to.

@aquirdturtle in the US, admissions offers for graduate program come in the form of a letter listing the terms of the offer. Whatever is written in that letter is my interpretation of what OP means when talking about what the student was “promised”. This is the canonical and most likely interpretation for this sort of thing. Obviously one can imagine a “promise” of a different sort, less formal and more tentative, where what I wrote wouldn’t be applicable.

Unless they have something like a contract or the legal equivalent of a contract, they can probably do it. And, it might actually be a career advantage to do a TA for a while, even with an RA, assuming the person wants an academic career.
I doubt, however, that the "time and effort" equivalent would increase, and would assume that the RA commitment would be reduced accordingly.
Note that faculty actually also get such "surprises" occasionally in their career and it is good to act in a "collegial" manner to help the institution function properly. Being seen as a "team player" can lead to other opportunities as time goes on.
But, everyone's needs and preferences differ. If the person feels strongly enough about it, they can decline the offer, though it still has advantages in terms of tuition waiver and the rest. And, in the following year, the "full" RA might be restored when they have a chance to rebalance their "offers".

Personal note: It was long (long) ago, but I once held a four year full-ride fellowship for doctoral study in the US. But even that required a year (IIRC) as a TA, since it was considered a good career move.

Ah yes, the good old "team player" fallacy/emotional manipulation technique...

I have no issue with teaching assistantships.  I assume you knew going into the fellowship that you would be TA'ing.  My issue is that students appear to be getting promises of full coverage via research assistantship then having additional duties sprung on them after they have made a commitment to the school and other trains have sailed.

@DanRomik, note, please, that I was answering the question asked. "Should a school..." is a different question.

My concern is that the whole concept of being a "team player" is a way of subtly (or not so subtly) pressuring people into accepting various types of abuse by their employers and being made to do things that they should not be required to do. See the other discussion I linked to. So when you say 'Being seen as a "team player" can lead to other opportunities as time goes on', although I'm sure you mean well, you unfortunately reinforce that unhealthy notion.

Of course, one is not literally sold to slavery upon starting their PhD.
But in your case, it is a question of recourse. You just have virtually no leverage at that stage. May you antagonize an entire department and still survive and defend successfully? Maybe. Is it wise to do? Probably not.


text:
Can I take classroom supplies provided by a grant after a year of use
I wrote a grant for 10 whiteboards for my classroom last year.  The grant was not a group grant, but an individual project grant. I used them for this year and am looking to move schools.
Would I be entitled to take these whiteboards with me, or are they attached to the school? I cannot find the specifics in the grant stating this, other than it was required to be used for this school year.

By "school" do you mean a college or university, or a primary/secondary school (e.g. K-12)?  The topic of this site is only the former.

This would depend on the details of the grant. It is likely, however, that the grant was to the institution, not to you as an individual. I'm surprised it isn't clear in the grant. Perhaps it can be made clear if you ask the funding agency.
You might also need to negotiate it with your institution so you don't get accused of theft by taking them.
I've had grants that specified myself as the recipient, though they were from companies. And, even then, the institution managed the funds to assure they were used properly.

It usually depends on the school policy, not the grant policy. Usually things bought with grants transfer to the school, then the school disposes as per their own policy. In my experience, there's no way to predict, and you have to ask. Don't take without asking, though. If there is a policy against it, it's grounds for firing.

"Grounds for firing" is not particularly important if the scenario is wanting to take equipment with you when you move to another job, which is the case for the OP. Theft, however, is also illegal.

The OP is "looking to move schools", so I think it's fair to assume he/she does not want to get fired before they have secured the next job.   Most schools have a strict decommissioning protocol, that's why it's important to ask first.

I don't see how they would be taking classroom supplies with them before they have secured the next job.


text:
My institution only counts two publications in the same journal for promotion; I have four. Can I retract them and republish somewhere else?
My institution's policy is to consider a maximum of two articles published in the same journal for promotion appraisal.
I published four independent articles at different times in the same journal. The Committee for promotions only considered two of them based on the policy.
Can I retract the other two and publish them in another journal? There is nothing wrong with the articles in terms of quality or content.

Why did you do that, knowing the policy?

Too many Nature cover articles! No tenure for you!

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By promotion, do you mean moving up the academic ladder, or do you mean promotion in their marketing material (website, news articles, etc)?

So confused! Reaction is considered as a serious bad record for a researcher. You don't want it, trust me

The journals I'm familiar with do not like issuing retractions, and reserve them for cases with substantial scientific errors, misconduct, improper ethics approval, and the like. See the COPE Guidelines for the types of criteria editors use to decide on whether retraction is warranted. Notably, your wanting to republish the papers elsewhere so they'd count differently in your performance review would not be sufficient reason. In addition, be careful what you wish for. Given that retractions are predominantly issued for such negative reasons, it is preferable to not have retractions to one's name. And the same silly institutional policy you are worried about might well count them negatively...
What to do going forward depends a lot on the time frames involved. Perhaps you can eat this mistake and spread your publications more broadly in the future. Perhaps it's too late for that, and you'll have to look for another institution. In that case, it is likely much better to not have retractions.

Indeed. The only way that the OP's question makes sense is if they do not at all appreciate how serious of an action retracting a published article is, thinking of it instead as some sort of minor clerical step.

Notably, your wanting to republish the papers elsewhere so they'd count differently in your performance review would not be sufficient reason. - In addition, any reputable journal isn't going to want to publish a paper that has been retracted from somewhere else.

@Kimball I didn't go into that because I think it's not quite so cut and dry - republishing retracted articles actually seems to happen every now and then, at least in some fields, including in reasonable journals (but maybe not the top ones?). The linked COPE guidelines note that this can be done "if not all of the content was found to be unreliable" and if done transparently. That said, I'm not sure any reputable journal would be interested doing so for frivolous retractions, potentially opening themselves up to the same treatment in the future.

It is not clear to me that a (reputable) journal would be willing to publish a paper that has already been published, and then retracted, elsewhere. This fact is likely to be detected when the journal runs their anti-plagiarism checks, as your original manuscript will probably be in their database. To avoid this creating problems, you would need to declare up-front that you had previously published the paper and then retracted it.
Any editor seeing this unusual behaviour is going to be concerned: why are you doing this? No doubt you would explain that it's because of your institution's rules, but the editor might wonder whether that's the complete story. "Are there other problems with the paper that are going to emerge if I accept this? Perhaps it's best if we just say 'no'."
In addition, note that your paper would need to undergo a full review process in any new journal, and there is no guarantee that the reviews would be straightforward.

Also OP's institution might have something to object: this ruse could be seen as an attempt to circumvent their policy.

One of the very few legitimate ways to republish an already published paper is translations. It used to be common for Russian mathematicians to publish articles in Russian in Russian journals, which where then translated and republished for "the West".
If your institution is based in a non-English speaking country, there might be local-language journals that would consider publishing a translation of your previous articles. This is way more likely if the subject is something that might be of particular interest to locals. If you have transfered the copyright to the publisher of the original articles, you would also need permission from them.
Of course, your local rules also might only count international journals.

In fact, since late 1930s (and until the end of the USSR) it was a requirement that before an article by a Soviet scientist was published abroad, it has to be published in USSR.

This is a clever idea. Even if you're not based in a non-English speaking country, there's nothing stopping you from working with a translator to publish translations of your articles, assuming you can find a journal which would accept them.

So much better an idea than a retraction!

You could hire a freelancer from one of the many websites to translate them professionally for you, if you are unable to translate them yourself.

Aside from copyright issues (maybe side-step by rebranding as an analysis of the original paper, with some scattered perfunctory words thrown in here and there for the analysis), this answer might cause a cottage industry of such journals. We've already had Antarctica Journal of Mathematics, so why not something like Ganymede Journal of Mathematics published in Esperanto? (Machine translations to  Esperanto accepted.)

@MoisheKohan A requirement of who? The USSR? The journals?

@AzorAhai-him-: Soviet authorities. There were two, somewhat conflicting, explanations for this policy: (1) Soviet patriotism, (2) prevention of leaking of state secrets. Furthermore, one could not just send a paper to a foreign journal, it had to be done through "proper channels" (after vetting by a "security department").

@DaveLRenfro I see nothing wrong with (translated) articles published in Esperanto – there is a community of Esperanto speakers (on Earth, not on Ganymede) which prefer to read articles in Esperanto compared to English. Though these translations of course should not count in addition to the originals for the policy here, and you'd likely want to still have some peer review for it to count at all.

Absolutely NO. You don't retract papers to publish them elsewhere. It's much easier to change the institution to another one with more reasonable rules.

Can I retract these papers and republish them?
No.  No no no no.  You can't do this.  No.
Journals generally only ever retract papers for serious problems, such as major errors in the papers or academic misconduct on the part of the authors.  Retracting a paper because you submitted it to the "wrong" journal does not rise to that level.  That's on you.
Moreover, when you agree to have a paper published in a journal, you are typically required to provide that journal with some kind of exclusive license  to publish that paper.  This means that you cannot submit it to another journal—publication rights remain with the journal in which it is first published (there are generally carve-outs for posting a copy of the paper on a personal website or on a preprint server, but that journal gets to be the only journal in which your paper is officially published).
And, even then, supposing that you were able to retract the papers, no other reputable journal would publish them.  Once a paper is retracted, it should probably be seen as dead.  It looks very suspicious to most people if you retract a paper, then re-publish it elsewhere—whether true or not, it looks like something sneaking, underhanded, and suspicious is going on.
Given the state of the world, there is very little that you can do with those papers now.  You need to write new papers, and submit them to a more diverse catalog of journals.  I would suggest doing that as quickly as possible, and get over the sunk costs of having published four papers in one journal.
Read the syllabus.
When you take a job, or are looking for promotion, you need to read the syllabus.  That is, you need to look at the requirements for the job or for promotion, and make sure that you understand the rules, and that you are following them.
Your institution has a rule:  only two papers from any one journal will be counted towards promotion.
You should have known about that rule before you started working towards promotion, and should have had plenty of time to build up the diverse portfolio of publications your institution requires.  Note that I am not making any judgement about whether or not this is a good rule—that is irrelevant.  It is your institution's rule, and you need to follow it.[1]
The moral of the story is that, like a student taking a class, you need to read the syllabus.

[1] As an example of a stupid rule that I have to follow:  a condition of my employment is that I swear/affirm an oath which states that I will protect the Constitution and the State of Arizona from all enemies, foreign and domestic.  It is dumb, but I have to do it if I want to get paid.

I totally don't understand why anyone would want to maximize the number of journals you publish in. Say, if you have 4 papers published in Science, why would anyone prefer that two of them were published in some "Journal of Irrelevant Results" instead? What's the point?

@Vosoni I made no comment about whether or not this is a good or reasonable practice.  Personally, I think it is kind of optimizing for the wrong thing (I understand why such a policy might exist, but you point out an edge case in which it gives the wrong result).  The point is that it is the rule that the asker's institution has.  If you care about your career, you follow the rules, however stupid they are.  Once you have tenure, you can try to change the rules, or move somewhere else.

That being said, I highly doubt that the original asker has four publications in an A+ journal, and that likely isn't the edge case that this policy is designed to put a stop to. Rather, I would imagine that the policy exists to prevent a person from using four publications in "Journal of Irrelevant Results" (which is edited by their good buddy) in order to advance their career.  This publication-counting is a dumb way of promoting people, but I can see the reasoning behind it.

Putting a threshold on the impact factor or just counting Q1 journals would certainly work better.

If you care about your career, you follow the rules, however stupid they are. Questionable logic. I would try to change the rules or quit the institution with such unreasonable rules, if I care about my career. You follow the rules only if you don't care about your career and just want to flow with the current.

@Vosoni That is terrible advice for someone who is early in their career.  The academic job market is not very friendly right now.  It is generally not wise to make waves in your early career, and it is not always possible to just find a new job.  Once you are established, yes!  work to change the rules.  But a lot of early-career academics are already in a tenuous place.

I think quite the opposite. At the moment when you are about to be promoted is the best time to collect more job offers and choose the best. Say, right after you completed your PhD it is normal (and recommended) to search for a postdoc elsewhere and not just wait that your old institution "promotes" you to a postdoc. Same with tenure. Someone with just 4 publications is likely to be at an early postdoc stage, that is ideal time to seek a better place. Right after getting a new job quitting and going elsewhere would look suspicious and also there is much less motivation to do so.

@Vosoni These things almost always get pushed from the top: government agencies, so the ask is to go move to a different country. That's far easier said than done.

@Vosoni Frankly, the advice you give seems terribly naive.  You seem to be saying "If you don't like something about the way that your organization works, you should just find another organization to work for!"  This is simply not feasible for most people in academia---ladder positions are few and far between, and increasingly being replaced by adjunct faculty.  Postdoc positions are highly competitive.  There just aren't a lot of options for someone who wants to remain in academia.

Moreover, the issue raised in this question is about one aspect of a job.  Maybe the asker really loves the geography of where they live, and have a great group of colleagues to work with.  Perhaps they have great compensation, wonderful health insurance, and a light teaching load.  There are many variables which contribute to quality of life, and having to have publications in multiple journals seems like a fairly inconsequential issue to storm out on (assuming that this is even possible for the asker). And, again, read the syllabus.  This requirement should not have come as a surprise.

@Vosoni: Say, right after you completed your PhD it is normal (and recommended) to search for a postdoc elsewhere and not just wait that your old institution "promotes" you to a postdoc. --- This sounds almost as strange as saying: "Right after you graduate high school, now is the time to search for a job, and not just wait for the school you attended to promote you to a teacher."


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Is it bad that I gave the wrong answer to a question during a recorded talk?
I had to give an important talk about my field. Then during the talk a professor asked a question, he wanted me to give an example in a different situation. I tried to remember and told him the equations I recalled (I didn’t work with that for quite some time now), but then I realized after the talk I made a small mistake in each. The formulas were slightly different, but the difference is important.
In any case, the issue is that the talk is recorded and will be on youtune. If not for that, people would most certainly forget this, but it is recorded. Is it super bad that I messed up that and didn’t remember it properly? Or is it acceptable? I’m a postdoc, and this was really the first more important talk I gave.

FWIW: I always appreciate people making mistakes, because it destroys the illusion that everyone knows anything at all times. It's human and normal to forget things or remember them slightly wrong and it doesn't set absurd standards to students. As mentioned in an answer, just put an Errata up and be done about it.

It's ok, nobody goes on youtune.

It should not be a big deal at all. Very, very few people watch math talks on YouTube. Also, you could easily edit the YouTube description (or ask for it to be edited, or leave a comment) explaining the minor modifications needed to make it correct at that time stamp. That kind of thing is very common, with all the talks people recorded during the pandemic, and all the inevitable mistakes that were made.

+1 for description and comment! Also, the comment containing the errata should be pinned so that it stays at the very top, just below the video.

I sort of disagree with "very, very few people watch math talks on YouTube". It's not wrong - very few people study maths at all - but of those that do, I would guess that the vast majority of them watch talks on YouTube sometimes. A maths talk generally gets a small audience, but it's likely to be made up of people whose opinions the OP cares about. (I agree with the answer overall though - the issue is easily fixed by leaving a comment.)

@N.Virgo - and pretty much anyone who does watch the video will themselves have made an error in similar circumstances.

Having a clear comment about errata is much better than for published books where the errata is on some not well known site.

I would strongly recommend this approach. Everyone makes mistakes; if you go out of your way to acknowledge and correct your mistakes you are demonstrating integrity and a commitment to truth  - important values in math & the sciences, and academia writ large (or at least they should be!)

@N.Virgo: Plenty of people watch math videos on YouTube, but they’re mostly watching a relatively small pool of videos made by dedicated math vloggers, not the much larger pool of conference/seminar talk videos.  The point here is that a typical math seminar video is watched by very few people indeed.

@PLL you misunderstood. I'm not saying a maths seminar will get a big audience I'm saying the few people who do watch it will likely be people whose work is related to the OP's.

"Is it bad?"  My first reaction was "well, it isn't good but it shouldn't be a big deal" and, in a way, I stand by that and am one of the 20 people upvoting David's answer, above.
But in another way .... It might be good. I can think of two good things about it:
First, you learned something. Not only did you learn what the right answer to the question was (that's not a big deal, you ought to be learning things like that all the time) but you learned to say "I don't know the answer to that, I will look it up. If you give me your email, I can send you the answer."
Second (and not quite contradictory to the first) you took a chance. You gave a talk that stretched you somehow. And, you made a mistake. Oops. **** happens. And it happens to everyone. Pete Seeger once said:

The only way to never sing wrong notes is to never open your mouth and
sing. What a tragedy that would be!"

I think this is a great way to look at it. I'd stress that every presenter has probably made mistakes in off-the-top-of-their-head answers in Q&A sessions—whether they know it or not! These sorts of things are always best effort, and no one should be upset if an unplanned, unpolished, possibly unresearched answer to a Q&A question was wrong.

"you learned to say 'I don't know the answer to that'" - yes. Always better to openly acknowledge you don't know than say something you're not sure of. If you want a compromise, state your speculation with a heavy dose of uncertainty - "I'm not sure I'm remembering correctly, so I would double-check this, but if I believe [...]" or something.

If you can resubmit the video (you own a copy, you have the right to do that, ...) and really wat to fix your mistake, I would add to the video a caption with a star, and make the correction there.
I cannot find an example after having scrolled through a few I recently watched but will add a screen capture when I find one. Here you go:

source: 3blue1brown | https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown
This only makes sense if you expect a large audience for that video. For reference, my keynotes in super big conferences got a tiny amount of views and proportionally fewer comments. If someone pointed out a mistake, I would have corrected it as a response to that comment, probably.
EDIT: another idea would be to cut sharp the original video right after the problem and inlay a commentary video if the explanation needs to be longer.
Something like "after integrating over the universe, we easily find out that the answer to everything is 43" CUT, then a short video of you telling "at this point a minor mistake crept in. After a careful review and a new calculation, I realized that I double counted the top quark so the answer is actually 42, which is more in line with the current literature" CUT and you resume the initial video.

Just a note that you can't "resubmit" a youtube video. You can delete the old one, you can edit the metadata, and you can upload a new one and mention it in the comments to the old one, but you can't modify the actual video once it's published.

If you use YouTube studio tools, then the video can be edited "in situ" without having to submit a new version. That includes trimming, blurring faces, etc. However, there's no tool to overlay text on a video so that would indeed need to be a whole new version.

I actually think that the EDIT I did would be nicer than just the overlay


text:
Public University - How to get competent help?
I recently went back to school at a local public University. I'm not sure how to approach getting help (from any department, admissions, registrar etc.).  I understand they're state employees (I've dealt with the DMV more then enough in my lifetime).
Basically if I email it's rarely returned, if it actually is the short message wasn't fully read - and I get fragmented sentence answer (and this is from the head of the department).  I know they're understaffed and being anything but nice as possible will get me no where....
How do I approach this so I can get answers from staff without losing my cool?

"I understand they're state employees (I've dealt with the DMV more then enough in my lifetime). ... How do I approach this so I can get answers from staff without losing my cool?" - Start by thinking of them as people, rather than "state employees" which sounds like you are going in with some presupposed low expectations (that's an appropriate approach for all state employees, by the way). Also know that many of the things they can help you with are probably already provided on the university's website. Try as best you can to help yourself before asking others to help.

Any student who thinks they're going to get me to prioritize highly their problem just because I am a state employee (and refer to me as such) would be deprioritized to a level that is unbounded below.

You said elsewhere here that you were surprised by the responses you got so far. There is a lot implied in your question that you may not have intended to imply. First, you asked how to get "competent" help - this implies the help you are getting is incompetent, rather than focusing on your own communication strategies. Second, you bring up the DMV, often used as a comedic target for government inefficiency, which again implies you think someone at the university is at fault. Third, you say "without losing my cool" which, along with the rest of the context, suggests an anger problem.

You also mentioned there that "I’m calling about a letter I got 2 weeks ago saying I’d be unenrolled unless a payment is sent - 5 days left now. I shows my payment is complete and FASFA confirmed the same." - This is not an issue to address with the head of any department, rather this sounds like an issue for the Burser's office or a similar department that is involved with the collection of tuition payments.

E-mailing the head of a university department as a student is like e-mailing the CEO or vice president of a company as a customer.  They simply don't have time to interact with each individual customer who needs assistance.  You'll be more likely to get useful help contacting the company's customer service department.

Please do not vandalize your posts.  By posting on the Stack Exchange network, you've granted a non-revocable right for SE to distribute that content (under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license).  By SE policy, any vandalism will be reverted.  If you would like to disassociate this post from your account, see What is the proper route for a disassociation request?

Make a phone call or meet them in person. That's usually the most appropriate way to get a reply from secretary staff. Very busy employee would disregard email response as not the top priority.

In my experience, meeting in person works great. This might be difficult for the head of the department and professors; you'll need to schedule a meeting. But for department administrators, financial aid officers, the registrar, etc. going in person is easy and usually wait time is minimal (unlike the DMV).

I'm very sympathetic to your complaint! Indeed, I'm a professor and I am sometimes frustrated by my own university's bureaucracy.
In general, I recommend using the internet (and Google) to try to figure out answers to your own questions. You might need to ask for help anyway, but instead of

"I need to sign up for Course X, but it's full. What do I do?"

you'll be able to ask

"I tried to sign up for Course X, but it's full. The department website says I should sign up for the waiting list. I didn't understand where I should sign up though, could you please point that out to me?"

As a related issue, try to figure out the correct person to whom to address your question. Sometimes, students will show up to department offices and simply ask their question of the first person they see. (As an undergraduate, I was often guilty of this.) They might be in the middle of something, in a hurry, and/or not have job responsibilities which include knowing the answer to your question.
If you send e-mail to someone who doesn't have responsibility for addressing your particular question (e.g., you ask the department chair how to pay your tuition), it may be ignored as spam. Good manners dictate that they should at least say "Sorry, I don't know", and direct you to the correct person to contact (if they know) -- but they might not.
So, in short, try to figure out who is responsible for what, and take first steps towards answering your own questions. And, finally, remember that sometimes you'll do all the right things, and still not be treated politely. That happens. Good luck!

I understand what you're saying but these are related to having my transcripts reviewed (sent in May), do I need to take X class as decided by dept. chair as this all hinges on my audit.  Also getting my tuition paid would be a plus.

@WentzWagon: I'm afraid that don't understand what you mean, or are trying to do. No need to clarify here -- I won't be able to solve your problem anyway -- but allow me to add to my advice: write your e-mailed requests so that the recipient can tell exactly what you are trying to do, why and at whose request, and what you are asking them for.

@WentzWagon It's pretty hard to understand what you are trying to say: in your question, your comments, and your non-answer answer. Some of this might be because you are being purposefully vague here, which is fine - that's actually appropriate, if your question is too specific it will be closed. However, I would rethink your form of communication to this department head, you might not be making much sense to them either, and you might think they are the right person to deal with but they aren't, all of which makes you difficult to help.


text:
Can you receive a PhD offer in late April?
I had applied for PhD to a university, I was asked to sit for an interview in late January with my prospective supervisors who told me that they like me. 15th April has passed and I have had no response from the University, the professor who had been helping me out with my application, and has otherwise been prompt with responses has gone silent when I asked him the status of my application after the 15th of April and so has the graduate advisor for this course. It's 20th April now.
What could be the reason for them ghosting me out? Why am I being ignored by both the professor and the graduate coordinator? Should I consider myself rejected at this point?

Please see the linked canonical question. The relevant paragraph states: “ For US graduate admissions, most decisions are made between mid-January and mid-April. If you haven't heard anything by mid-March, it's probably not good news, but some students do get admitted later, even after the April 15 deadline.”

Rolled this back because you re-posted the same question separately.

Now, one question is what happened to the communication since one would have expected some answer. Did you hear anything after the interview? I presume US, but confirming in the text would help.

A month after the interview, I asked the professor about the status, he said I'm still under consideration. This was 19th March. And then I asked about my status on the 14th, no response since.

I do not know your field, but most PhD offers go out well before April, with a deadline to respond around April 15.
Given the lack of response from your prospective advisor and program, it is likely you will not receive an offer.


text:
When writing a paper, what do you do with statements that you know are probably true, but you have not checked the details?
The background is mathematics.
There are a few results I think are highly likely to be true, but proving them would take up some length, and they are not central to the paper I am writing.
They also are not important enough to become an independent paper, so it is unlikely someone will come and prove them later.
So what should I do? Is it appropriate to say "the result A should be true, and one can prove it using method B"?
Edit: those statements are generalizations to a proposition and are not needed for the proof of the main result.

I‘m not from the field of mathematics, so my opinion is not worth a „real“ answer, probably. But at least in the more „math-heavy“ papers I am familiar with, the authors added remarks about such issues within their papers. Maybe you could try to write up the paper without the proofs while being transparent about why you excluded them and then letting the reviewers decide whether the proofs are necessary or not.

Do you need those results in the rest of your paper, or can you safely skip them?

@FedericoPoloni they are just generalizations to a result and are not needed in the rest of the paper.

I'd skip it if possible, unless you can find other papers with similar "this is likely to be true"..... if I was a reviewer, I'd probably flag it

If the details are not sufficiently different from the proof provided, you can say something along the lines of, "Using similar techniques, one can prove the following: /statement/" -- I have seen this in several number theory papers, but the extra technicalities for the more-general statement are typically only minor nuisances that divert attention away from the main assertion of the paper.

You can say it in pretty much any format you want provided that you convey the meaning exactly as it is, which, if I understood you correctly is "It is quite possible that method B gives a slightly more general theorem A but the details have not been verified and this generalization is not needed to prove any results that are claimed to be proved in the paper".
I would use a wording that puts it as a challenge to the reader (having primarily a student reader in mind, but not exclusively). It would read something like the following.
Remark: It would be interesting to see if our method can also yield a slightly more general statement, namely that /insert the formulation of A/. We believe that it may be quite likely but, since this more general statement would not give us any advantage as far as the proofs of the results in the present paper are concerned, we will not pursue this issue any further here and leave it to the interested reader instead.
If somebody later would like to figure it out and publish something, he would be able to refer to that as "a question raised in [X]", which is, probably, just what you are looking for. Claiming, like Fermat, that you know a proof of something but it is too long to be included into the text would be rather impolite in a published paper, IMHO, since you are not annotating your personal copy of some book but give a detailed public presentation instead.

I should hope that the referees or reviewers would severely frown on "pulling a Fermat" unless the statement is so elementary as to be "obviously" true.

@Kevin Or you are a Perelman who can hope that their audience knows how to fill (quite nontrivial) gaps. Which, as turned out to be, was not the case with all relevant audience members and a reason for much contention.

I don't think "conjecture" is exactly the right word for what you have in mind, because that would imply you don't know how to prove it. If I understand the question, you're asking about small improvements that you have convinced yourself you could prove, but aren't important enough to include the full details in the paper.
In this case, I usually see people use language like "We expect Proposition X could be extended to the more general setting Y, at the cost of more careful technical arguments." Possibly followed by a few words about the specifics of the necessary arguments, if you can sum up the idea concisely. But there are a few caveats here:

You need to be able to back this up with details if someone (such as a referee) asks.

It's best to do this sparingly (perhaps once or twice per paper, at most) because at a certain point, if you're devoting so much verbiage to this extra unproven stuff, it should be important enough to actually prove some of it formally. To say it another way, there's a limit to how much anyone cares about mathematical claims you don't prove.

It's important to word these statements carefully, to make it 100% clear that you aren't claiming to have proven the thing in question. ("We expect one can prove it using X method" is better than "one can prove it using X method.")

If the result is proven to be true (or claimed to be true, ideally in more than one place) by some reliable source(s), you can cite that, especially if the proof would he straightforward. Of course, if the main result of your paper would have relied on this result, you would have to cite a source with a detailed proof or provide one yourself.
Otherwise you could consider the following options

You don't claim the result to be true (call it a conjecture or similar) and treat is as such.

(My preference) Provide a proof for the result, if it distracts from the remainder of the paper, put it in an appendix. You will do others a service, as they now have something to cite for the result. I am in theoretical CS, and have seen some cases of people doing this in similar situations.

This is assuming the statement really is too small to be in its own (short) paper.

If they are proved elsewhere, search the references and just cite them.
If these statements are new in the sense that the available literature does not contain their proofs, you can state them as conjectures and remember that the validity of your arguments that make use of these conjectures will be subservient to the truth value of these conjectures.

I'm not sure "subservient" is the right word ("will be dependent on", or "will depend on", or "conditioned on ...")

I completely agree with the first paragraph of fedja's answer: the only crucial point is that you need to be clear that these assertions are not needed for the proofs of any of the main / formally stated results of the paper.
In order to figure out what to do with these "probably true but not fully checked" assertions, I suggest that you think about your purpose for including them.  From your comments, it sounds like these are stronger forms of intermediate results, where "stronger" means stronger than you need to prove your main results.  What to do here is an interesting problem that may (or may not; I am curious) be relatively specific to the academic field of mathematics.  One aspect of this to address is:

Why not include the stronger forms of these results?

In my opinion, all other things being equal it is a good thing rather than a bad thing if one's lemmas are stronger than strictly needed for the theorems they are used to prove.  Virtually all academic work is done with the hope that it will be useful to other academics in the field, and this hope should include methods rather than just results.  If the idea of proof of Lemma X also proves more general Lemma Y, it may well be more efficient in the long run to state Lemma Y from the outset, as otherwise there may be future mathematicians having to state and prove Lemmas Y.1, Y.2 and so forth.  (Now these mathematicians may simply say "The proof of Lemma Y.n is similar to that of Lemma X and is omitted," but I don't really like this and I am not the only one.)  This is especially true if you plan to make use of Lemma Y later on.  For you it sounds like that is not the case.
However it is not always a good idea to follow the above procedure.  If you have 20 pages of lemmas to prove a theorem when in fact 5 pages of lemmas would prove that theorem, then a different kind of disservice is being done to the reader (and one that referees are especially likely to object to).  Thus I think that realistically you have to evaluate the risk/reward in every case.  However I will make the following suggestion: If at all possible, you should write out a precise statement and proof and then decide whether to include it.  I hope it doesn't sound paternalistic when I say that this is the kind of thing that sounds very onerous until you get into the habit of doing it, and then it is often not so bad.  Another perspective on this is: you are never going to have a quicker and easier time writing down the proof of Lemma Y than when you have just written the proof of Lemma X.
This is a SE answer rather than an essay, so I will have to stop soon, but I think there are yet other interesting aspects of this question.  Here is a hint of one: how valuable it is to "write down the most general version of your lemma" seems surprisingly field-dependent.  I am a number theorist who is very algebraically minded (I am happy to make active use of commutative algebra), but often my work gets combined with other work in a more analytic style.  It seems to me that in algebra there often is an "optimal result that the idea of proof of Lemma X actually proves" whereas in analysis this may really not be the case.  There are other branches of mathematics too...


text:
How to properly write a brand, corporations in my report?
I have a lab report where I have to show my results using PSpice simulation software. I take screenshots from my screen to illustrate my results and paste those images inside my report. Below a figure, should the label text be:

Figure 1: Schematic using PSpice

OR

Figure 1: Schematic using pspice  (without giving attention to the formatting used in the brand name)

What is the most appropriate way?

Possible duplicate of Is it mandatory to include the registered trademark symbol ® next to the name of a computer program?

Yes, the registered trademark symbol is a duplicate question. I am going to edit the question. But I still don't know how to properly write the software name: Using capital letters or just plainly writting pspice.

The approach I take is to look at (1) how the organization formats the name and (2) how other researchers write it. It doesn't make sense to make up your own formatting for it (unless maybe the formatting is just excessive).
Usually those two match, so in your case I would write it as PSpice.