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Renting a house to a graduate student in my department
I am a professor at a US university, and I'll be away on a sabbatical for all of the coming academic year.  I would like to sublet my house while I am away, and I think that one or two of the graduate students in my department might be interested.  I'd prefer to do that instead of renting to a complete stranger.  However, since I would effectively be their landlord and they would be paying me rent, I am wondering if this raises ethical or conflict-of-interest concerns, since those students may be in my courses in the future.
(I have checked my university's regulations and they do not address this situation.  I would certainly check with my superiors before going ahead; this question is just to find out whether this seems okay in terms of general professional ethics, or presents the appearance of a conflict.)
Some possibly relevant notes:

My department's graduate program is not in my research area, so there would not be any chance of me becoming the dissertation advisor of any of these students.  However, I could serve on their dissertation committee.
The sublet would end before I would be teaching classes again, so I wouldn't simultaneously be a student's landlord and their instructor.  It is conceivable, though, if they fell behind on the rent, that they might still owe me money at that time.

At least one of the older folks on this site has said it was quite common for them (I don't remember who).

I'd be a bit wary of the worst-case scenarios, and it might be worth reading and considering some of the nightmare situations people have gotten into by renting to (even distant) family, for example.

So just rent to students who are past coursework and already have a committee.

the scary thing about this kinda limited rental is making sure the occupant will be ready and willing to move out by the time (or before) you are coming back from your sabbatical.  you need to rent to someone that you can trust will care for your property, not destroy nor steal, and will not force you to sue to evict.  renting to someone you know, at least a little, is better than renting to a stranger, all other things equal.

@robertbristow-johnson this can be with any tenant, I think graduate students, in particularly PhD, would be a lot more reliable than undergrads.

More as a chuckle: when I was a TA in Germany in the 2000s, my contract still referenced 1930s legislation (Reichsassistentenordnung) that allowed them to directly deduct the rent from my salary under those circumstances, because you were essentially an apprentice to your advisor anyway.

A faculty member in my department rents out his second home, and prefers to have grad students in the department stay there rather than complete strangers. He also gives better than typical rates to help the students a little financially.

If they miss payments and you need to charge them, either personally or by legal means, or even if they destroy your property and you are still in bad terms with them, from my point of view that all goes into the bucket of "I dislike him/her/them for personal reasons". Which is always a risk. One of them could crash your car in the parking lot by accident and the same issue would arise. As long as you can refuse to be in their thesis committee, and you can ask someone else to independently grade them for a course you give, you should be fine. If everything goes well with the rent, better yet

At the time they sign the lease there is no conflict of interest. Further, there is no conflict of interest anticipated throughout the duration of the lease. There is of course the possibility that an unforeseen conflict arises, but this is always a possibility. You are putting yourself at an elevated risk of a conflict of interest, so it is probably worth mentioning it to you department chair. If an unforeseen conflict does arise, just let your department chair know and do what ever is needed at that point.

Together with the chair OP can also discuss what the actual probability of a conflict of interest arising later on is (I see a difference between OP teaching courses that practially everyone takes at some point vs. teaching specializations that < 5 % of students take) and whether there are feasible ways to resolve such a conflict of interest if it arises.

The rule of thumb for conflicts of interest is: "If you think there might be a conflict of interest, or wonder whether there might be, then there is." That's because the perception of a conflict of interest is just as bad as the conflict of interest itself.
So yes, whether you feel conflicted or not, other people might believe that you could be, and that's just as bad. A better choice would likely be to rent your house to grad students in other departments.

"A better choice would likely be to rent your house to grad students in other departments."  .... That may be from your POV of avoiding every perception of COI.  But he might not know the other grad students as well as he knows the grad student in his own department.  Renting his furnished home for just a year is a very vulnerable thing to do.  You need to be able to trust your renters a great deal.

True. So maybe a postdoc in the department who is in a different area and will never be in a class by the OP. Or a visiting professor. You get the idea: someone who for sure will never be in a supervisor/supervisee relationship with the OP.

As a side-note, I find this heuristic often does not work well: a) lots of people whom I wouldn't trust to be able to separate issues and deal fairly tend to not perceive any conflict of interest. b) OTOH, people who worry whether there may be a conflict of interest tend to be the ones whom I'd trust to be fair.

@cbeleites -- just because some people don't get it doesn't mean you shouldn't behave the right way.

@WolfgangBangerth: of course not (and I wholeheartedly agree both with renting outside dept being better and already possibly perception of conflict of interest being bad). What bothers me about that saying is that our own feeling of comfort is known to be a frequently used but bad surrogate for truth/reality/knowledge [e.g. Kahneman]. IMHO for such ethical questions (like for many other questions), different people will be anywhere between Dunning-Kruger and Impostor syndrome. OP is obviously in the camp of people who do think beforehand that a conflict of interest could arise in future.

@DavidRicherby: They don't. Which is why it's a safe choice. (I recognize that one can read my sentence in the second comment above differently, but I meant to imply that they don't take classes.)

@WolfgangBangerth Ah, gotcha. Not sure why I didn't see that parsing, given that it's the one that makes the sentence true!

@robertbristow-johnson Unless you know someone very well (and even then I am skeptical), renting to people who have a more distant relationship with you is in my opinion actually safer—because then if they default you feel less compunction about simply following professional procedure (eviction, late fees, contract adherence, and so on). By entering into a business relationship with friends & colleagues, you create significant risk, no matter how much you think you know and trust the person. Who would you rather send to a collections agency, someone from a remote department or a friend?

well, @ErikE, i know what it is like as a defacto landlord evicting someone who is stubborn and won't get out voluntarily.  the entire problem is that, when i rented, i did not know this person's character.  all i had was employment records and i think he was living with his mother before he moved in.

@robertbristow-johnson I agree, there is a trade off here. How can you increase the certainty of no problems occurring at the front end, and how can you increase the ability to deal with serious problems if they occur? The standard advice is to NEVER do business with family members. I think that advice exists for a very good reason... but nothing is certain!

well, i certainly do not agree with the standard advice.  and i know what it is to loan money to a sibling and never get it back.  (but i also know what it's like to have another sibling literally bail me out.)  in terms of business, i am not in biz with any sibs, but i know of many, often farms, where sibs are in business together.

If there is no supervisory relationship and you won't be teaching them while you are gone, I see no issues with this other than the possibility for misunderstandings over money.
One way to avoid some of the problems is to work through an agent as long as that doesn't restrict you to offering it to the public first. It also helps if the student has to leave mid term and you need to find another tenant quickly.
Another issue you should be sure to deal with is a damage deposit. Again, working through an agent would help avoid conflicts. A rental contract is a good idea as it can lay out expectations explicitly.

There's no conflict -- now.  That doesn't make it a great idea.  Let's say you go ahead and do this, and the rental goes well.  Now, let's say your department needs someone to serve on the examination committee of the student. There would be an argument to be made that you have a conflict with that student, having received thousands in income by way of that student.  The conflict might be an inconvenience for your department, even if you do the cautious thing and recuse from the examining committee, as they have to dig up another faculty member who might not be as appropriate.
Again, nothing wrong, but you might not be so happy with the decision to do this in the future.  Personally, I would post the sublet opportunity, and see if I can attract somebody from a different department.  If I got into a bind, and couldn't find someone, I might look into the department.

If you are not actually working with the student, there shouldn't be much of a conflict. There's a slight caveat in that if the renting student annoys you, it could potentially damage the student's reputation among faculty. But then non-professor landlords might happen to know some faculty too, and most universities expect students to conduct themselves well with people unaffiliated with them.
I would have noted that it can be difficult to predict that you won't interact with the student. Courses and committee memberships can sometimes be surprising. But you say that you will be on sabbatical the whole time, so sounds like there's not much of a risk in your case.
Still, there might be an alternative that largely takes care of all such potential concerns. Simply ask another, wholly unrelated department if there are any interested students. The tenants you get will still be trustworthy as students of your university, but nobody could reasonably claim that there is a conflict of interest if they are not even in your department.

I have checked my university's regulations and they do not address this situation.

Do you mean that you asked them, or that you read their policy documents and found no clause covering this? If latter, it might be worth trying to ask the HR department if your university has one (in addition to asking your supervisor like you already intend, which should also be fine).

I am wondering if this raises ethical or conflict-of-interest concerns, since those students may be in my courses in the future.

I believe you're asking the question wrong. Try:

I am wondering if this raises ethical or conflict-of-interest concerns, which would be difficult to address since those students may be in my courses in the future.

And then the answer is no. As others have indicated, no foreseeable conflicts during the rental period; and later on - it will not be much different from when you teach a class and one of the students is, say, the child of one of your neighbors, or a friend of a family member, etc. These things happen and are dealt with reasonably. For example, perhaps you might have some teaching assistant handle their grading; or you would find someone impartial to double-check your evaluation of them etc. It's not a big deal IMHO.
Go ahead and sublet your house to them. And - don't overcharge the starving graduate students! Their salaries ("stipends"/whatever) are probably super-low.

You want to sublet your house, namely you decided to become a supplier irrespective of whether graduate students were interested or not.
The existence of interested graduate students present an opportunity to you to mitigate the transaction risk. This may not have a direct monetary value, but it is a financial gain nevertheless, in expected value terms: say, lower risk of default or of destruction of assets.
In other words, you are thinking of entering in a supplier-customer relation with a student of your department, because it increases your financial gain.
Once you do that, concurrence or not of professor-student relation with the supplier-customer relation does not matter.
That there was past financial gain will always be a potential factor of corrupting the ethics of the future professor-student relation, or even of the "colleague of a professor who is in a professor-student" relationship with the student that used to be your tenant.
And conflict-of-interest is a matter for the courts, while potential conflict-of-interest is what interests us here.

I agree with @strongbad that there is no conflict of interest right now, it is all about the possibility of one arising in future - which may not happen at all.
In the case of the students taking a course with you, I'd say attending your lectures is not the point of trouble. Possible conflict of interest arises only in the context of the course exam/grading. But then actually in various ways: in case of a negative experience with the rental you may be biased against them and/or they may be afraid of this. Other students may be afraid [jealous] that you prefer them (more with a positive rental experience, but in practice probably independent of how/whether the rental experience works out).
I'd say the overall level of conflict of interest would be similar to e.g. a colleague's child or a relative of yours attending one of your courses (which is maybe a scenario for which established ways/guidance is available)
Depending on how your courses are graded, there may be comparatively easy ways to resolve any conflict of interest in case it arises:

In case of oral exam, maybe a colleague could examine them.

When I was a student, for the important oral exams a number of professors could and would do them (say, phyiscal chemistry -> any of the professors for physical chemistry).
I once had a student in a minor exam (final oral of a labwork course) whom I failed twice. After the 2nd time, I asked a colleague to do the exam to make sure it was not just me being unreasonable or biased.
Who's your backup if you fall ill during exam time?
There's a bunch of possibilities that are in between you with possible (perceived) conflict of interest and someone else doing the exam: having someone taking detailed minutes of questions and answers (that was anyways the case for all important exams).
Oral exams were semi-public: other students could listen to the exam unless the student to be examined asked to be examined in private (results were always given privately). Under such rules, you could encourage any student that may perceive a conflict of interest against them to bring a fellow student as a witness to make sure there's fair play.

In case of written exams (or homework), over here the grading usually isn't done just by the professor. Instead, many people of the professor's group are involved. If that's the case, you could either not participate in the grading or grade yourself only questions that don't give any leeway. As always, detailed grading schemes help.
(computer-graded exams are trivial in this respect)

In any case, I'd discuss this with the dean and also state this to the students (in particular, "as a consequence of this lease, you'll have take your final oral exam with a colleague, but not with me: that could be perceived as a conflict of interest").
I tend to trust people who worry about possible conflicts of interest beforehand and take measures to avoid them much further. IMHO it's the ones who don't worry and aren't aware of whom one needs to be wary...

All that being said,

there may be other people/students whom you know equally well through other channels like sports club, religious group/church, ...
if you do a sabbatical somewhere else, there may be some other professor coming for a sabbatical to your university. Whom you may not know, but in case you consider the population of professors on sabbatical as sufficiently trustworthy in general that may be an option. Plus, that'd be a population that suits very well in terms of time frame of the lease.

Advertise at other departments.
If you are a professor in say physics, then advertise at the departments for social studies, law and what not.
If a student-tenant studies a subject completely different than your subject, then a potential conflict of interest is very unlikely.

Bad idea.  Don't fish off the company pier.  To start with, grad students are not ideal rental customers.  Then you complicate any possible future confrontations with being work colleagues.
Just go through a rental agent and have them handle it (maintenance too, you don't want the phone calls when the toilet breaks).  You may make a little less money but with much lower risk and hassle.

Why do you say grad students are not ideal rental customers? Professional, educated (and you know how much they make and if it's likely to change)

Yeah good points.  they are fine.


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Is there an advantage of branching in version-controlled paper writing?
I use a version control system (formerly subversion, now git) to write papers, which for me works very well and is convenient. A few times, I even worked with branches for different logical versions of a paper, such as versions submitted to different journals. However, I found branching of little use for paper writing. When I used different branches for different journal submissions, I found myself working only on the "latest" branch anyway, since I can anyway only submit one version per time, and, if it is rejected, will not continue to work on that particular version at a later time. I didn't find any other good use of branching in paper writing, and later skipped it completely.
Is there any advantage of working with several branches when writing a paper with a version control system? How should one organize the writing process in order to profit from such an advantage?

I use HG, but it is essentially the same as GIT, in that branching is easy. I branch all the time when working with coauthors. The branches tend to be short lived and merged pretty quickly. Basically, I distribute a copy to my coauthors and each set of comments I get back form different branches. This lets me see each authors comments individually. I then work on merging the comments back into the main trunk. Sometimes the merge is easy and the branch is one commit long. Other times it might take longer if I need to work out something (e.g., math, model, or analysis) which might require a couple of revisions before it is ready to go into the main trunk.

A similar strategy: branches are useful when collaborating with co-authors who don't/won't use HG/GIT/etc..  In that case, it is useful to branch of a copy of the paper as it existed at the time when you sent the draft to co-author X; then when you later get comments/diffs/changes, you can apply them and then merge.

Several good answers. I accepted this one because it seems to be the most frequently applicable use of branching...

Personally, I've never used branches (for papers), and would certainly not use branches for different chapters (WTF? like keeping different branches for different files in a programming project; except for the case when different collaborators edit different parts of documents, then - maybe), but maybe it may work for:

arXiv/non-arXiv version (or e.g.: working version with notes vs release candidate) of a paper (the exact use-case of projects with some differences, from minor to e.g. also additional sections, see also arXiv preprint and final paper differing by sections and appendices),
Beamer slideshows for different talks based an similar slides.

Related: git + LaTeX workflow at SO (so, use "advisor" branch):

Branches are also extremely helpful if you are a graduate student. As any grad student will attest, the advisor is bound to have numerous corrections, most of which you don't agree with. Yet, you might be expected to atleast change them for the time being, even if they are reverted later after discussions. So in such cases, you could create a new branch advisor and make changes to their liking, at the same time maintaining your own development branch. You can then merge the two and cherry pick what you need.

;)

I like the point for presentation slides. It's not really compatible with my current model of one git repository per talk, but that could be something worth reconsidering. On the other hand, I'm afraid of adding confusion as to where to find my files a few years later...

I also tried with an arxiv/non-arxiv version once, but that didn't work for me. I preferred having the two versions available without switching branches, and for porting changes between files direct patching works as well.

In principle, branches seem like a good idea. A potential use case would be:

working on a draft of a paper
as we get close to the conference deadline, putting the paper in the conference format and reducing to the prescribed size
finding typos in this version and fixing them
merging the typos back into the "main version"

In practice, I've never done this, because I'm not organized enough. Also, svn is not as friendly to this workflow as git is, for other reasons.

Thanks, this could indeed be useful when starting to prepare a journal version of a paper before having done the final revisions of a conference paper.

Size reduction is a very good point. That's actually something you might very much want to revert in case the paper is rejected and you plan to submit it somewhere else.

An alternative to branching in some cases, especially for short lived branches like for journal submission, is using patch queues. Mercurial has mq. I believe Git has similar things, but I'm not a git user.
As the question says:

When I used different branches for different journal submissions,
  I found myself working only on the "latest" branch anyway, since I can
  anyway only submit one version per time, and, if it is rejected, will
  not continue to work on that particular version at a later time.

I have had similar experiences when using different (named) branches for submission to different journals. The problem is that one ends up having dead branches which correspond to journals the paper was rejected from, or perhaps journals you never ended up applying to. These live forever in history, which is annoying and sub-optimal.
The advantage of using patches, at least with mq, is that one can maintain multiple patch queues, each of these can be managed as a distinct mercurial repository, and they do not become part of the main repository's history unless you want them to, though of course you can push them to remote since they are regular repositories. Also, one can use them with general non-vcs tools like patch and quilt, which is occasionally useful.
However, when applied, these patch queues are a bona-fide part of a mercurial repository, and can be treated as (anonymous) branches. So, suppose one has two patch queues Q1 and Q2. Then if wants to work with both versions simultaneously, one can make a clone of the main repository, thus resulting in two identical copies of the repository. Then one can apply Q1 and Q2 to the copies, and then work with them as one would with regular branches, using mercurial's merge machinery and so forth.
Another use of patch queues which is very useful, and not specific to paper writing, is to queue up small changes in the queue till one is ready to commit them. I usually just stick everything in one patch, though one could divide the changes into multiple patches. Then, when one is ready to apply some or all of the changes, one can do
hg qref -X .   # apply the patch as local changes, making the patch empty
hg qpop --keep-changes  # pop the patch

This results in
a) the patch being applied as local changes to the working directory
and
b) the mercurial queue patch becoming empty and being removed (popped) from the repository.
Since the patch is now local changes to the working directory, we can easily commit what parts of it we please. When done one can resync the patch with
hg qpush --keep-changes    # push the patch back onto the repository
hg qref                    # put the local changes back into the patch
hg ci --mq                 # commit the changed patch (to the mq repository)

Then the patch is recreated with the portions of the local changes that were not committed.
See the loosely related questions What's the Git approach to publish a patch queue? and git equivalent to hg mq?.

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Am I required to return sabbatical payment if I do not return afterward?
I am about to go on sabbatical. I do not know if I want to return to the institution afterward. Our faculty handbook says that sabbaticals are granted with the expectation that faculty return for at least one year.
Does that mean I am legally required to pay back the money if I don't return, or only morally required to return it? This is in the United States.

This really comes down to your contract, and we couldn't give legal advice even if we knew the exact wording.

I think I've seen it both ways, and even seen it argued and changed back and forth in amendments. "Expectation" sounds weak though so I'd be hopeful.

It's not uncommon for sabbatical leave policies to impose such a requirement, but it's something that depends on your particular institution's policies.

I agree we cannot answer as to whether you would be legally required to repay.  Still, I think it might be possible to reframe this into a question about whether such rules are generally legally enforceable, and what specific aspects of the wording might tend to make them more or less so.

You will probably have a contractual obligation for one year. You may even need to sign a document affirming it before you can be paid. Talk to someone at your institution to learn the rules and the consequences of not returning. You might want to find someone outside your department if you don't want to signal your ambivalence.
You might also consider that any new institution might not be pleased if you step away from an obligation at the old one. No way to be sure, of course.

I have had prior sabbaticals and was never asked to sign a contract. FWIW, if I left, it would be for industry, not another institution, but I would almost certainly pay it back anyway.

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how to present a talk on work in preparation
I guess this is very common, to do a presentation to your lab. I wonder how I can cite in my slides that the presented work will be part of a future paper.
I remember to see in past presentations a footnote with " Author A & Author B (in preparation)", but I am not sure.
or I should forget all this and just present the work?

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how to share to mention/publish large datasets?
When writting an article with outputs (by outputs I mean a big dataset created), how do you share them?
Do you ask the readers to contact the main author? Should I pput them in a university website?

This is a very important question that seems to have no standard answer yet.  The US National Science Foundation now requires all grant proposals to answer this question, for all data to be generated by the proposed project, in the form of a "data management plan".

A very similar question was asked on the stats site.

Related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/987/data-publication-basics-where-why-how-and-when-should-i-publish-my-unpublis

See Also: Data Sharing and Management Snafu in 3 Short Acts

More a comment than anything, but I believe http://academictorrents.com/ is worth checking out.

Take a look at http://thedata.org/, which provides free, permanent hosting of data allowing you to cite a specific iteration of a dataset in your printed work.

seems to be down for now, but a good solution

Within the machine learning community there's also the UCI repository (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mlearn/) and libsvm (http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvmtools/datasets/) both of which may be suitable for your dataset.

It depends on your field. If you're not aware of major repositories, ask a librarian who specializes in your field.
Most fields in most countries are getting field specific repositories. For example, I'm currently working on a project building a repository for Australian Archaeological Data (as well as collecting it).
We're forking our repository from tDAR in the United States, and are cooperating with the Archaeology Data Service in the UK. The list just goes on (Open Context, OCHRE, etc...).
When trying to investigate data publishing, always try to check for other countries as well. There are many data publishing projects getting off the ground. It may be worthwhile engaging a research librarian for this task.
Never try to reinvent the wheel, here. You are not experiencing a common problem, and local university library archival storage is... sometimes very much a mixed bag.

+1 - There are also other benefits to utilizing already available services. For instance ICPSR (for social sciences, mainly in US) they have analyst do quality control for the data, disseminate it in various statistical file formats, can restrict access to only individuals who have applied, and can even anonymize the data for you.

Depends. Some journals have online depositories for supplemental material such as data tables and multimedia files that are not appropriate or impossible to be included in main articles. For example, here's an excerpt from the official website of Physical Review Letters:

Supplementary material associated with an article (e.g., data tables, color-image files, multimedia files) may be submitted electronically for joint review. If the article is published this material will be deposited as Supplemental Material. Information about Supplemental Material is available via the Supplemental Material links on the Information for Authors subpage at http://prl.aps.org/author-information/, in the Authors, General Information section.

I've also seen many mathematics papers that cite authors' websites for computational results, and actually I've written one where I gave a link to my co-author's website for mathematical objects found by a computer search. Different journals may have different policies about how you should present and maintain such material. So you should check that on your own before submitting your work.

In addition to the answers outlined previously, I would like to add that some authors/researchers just share the datasets freely on their own websites or on their university's data repository. For example, see this (an example of multiple datasets shared on the author's website and referred to in subsequent papers) and this (example of dataset shared on the university e-commons repository).

I like https://zenodo.org/ for the following reasons:

It is free (as in beer)
You can publish datasets up to 50GB
Your Dataset gets a DOI
The interface is clean

I've recently published a dataset there (paper, dataset)

In my field (chemistry/spectroscopy), it is so far rather uncommon to make the data directly available, so the strategy is email the author.
Here are my 2ct about the reasons for storing the data in private repositories:

I'm working in a research institute, not in a university. Public release of data here has to be decided the same way as licensing for produced software is decided. However, here this is rather easy from a legal point of view, as basically the institute owns the data. At universities this is often far more difficult as the ownership can be shared between several persons and institutions, e.g. if not all people involved in producing the data set had a working contract that includes this data collection (e.g. PhD students, guests).
The data set is often the primary product of a researcher. Collecting samples and conducting experiments can take lots of effort (I'm talking of years).
Sometimes there is sensitive (e.g. patient) data. In that case, better be on the safe side. What if later on a flaw in data anonymization is found in a publicly accessible data set?
It is often difficult to share the data anyways (that is: in the way that would be most valuable for us spectroscopists) because it can be extremely hard to combine data sets acquired with different instruments.
These points together usually mean that if someone is using someone else's data for new original research it is usually done in the form of a collaboration.
People who do offer data for sharing often like to keep at least approximately track of how many people get their data because this number is useful for all kinds of end of the year / end of the project reports and  number of people who asked about the data is a much more convincing number than download counts.
All in all, we have a central server here, where raw data and source and possibly intermediate results are stored together with the final version of the publications.
The size of such a package can easily be of a size that would mean that a few downloads would equal the monthly internet traffic of the whole institute. This is outside the supplementary material policies of the journals in which I have published so far. Some friends in another institute in the neighbourhood share their data with collaboration partners by mailing hard disks...
Last but not least: there's also a question of reliability - will, say, github still be there in 20 years? Will your university web page still be there in 5 years? (OK, the corresponding author's email may vanish just as fast..., but it is usually not that difficult to track down the new email or the email of another of the co-authors).

@DSVA: this is only practical for sufficiently small data sets (I can easily acquire about 100 GB of nice FTIR images in a work day. The nonlinear imaging colleagues talk in TB). The main reason however is: I'm bound by my working contract to obey the institute policy which is: data is archived on central server at the institute (My working contract does not even allow me to keep a backup of the data and analyses I published as employee there once the contract ends - even though good scientific practice asks me professionally to be able to answer questions on the paper years later)

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Student feedback and jealousy between colleagues
As a student, I know that some lecturers just do a better job at getting their point across than others, consequently I would give them better feedback than others. I assume that teachers receive their feedback, so they know how popular they are with students. And presumably, they also talk about it with colleagues.
I imagine this to be a considerable source of conflict between academics, so I was wondering: How do those in a teaching role at a university/college/... deal with this problem? Does student feedback create awkwardness between colleagues, or is there some kind of unspoken law not to talk about student feedback?

This question is based on the assumption that faculty value student feedback and want high marks.  In some (many?) US research universities, the only ones who do are the ones who are already getting good scores, and the others really don't care.  Some faculty see the only goal as being not to get such low scores that the administration becomes upset.  Others are suspicious of high scores and wonder whether that indicates an easy grader.  In any case, I don't see a lot of discussion beyond complaints that it's more of a popularity contest than a fair measure of teaching success.

While that's quite insulting to students' ablity to give neutral feedback, it's some interesting insight. Thanks :) It's true that I did assume student feedback is actually valued. I imagine it may be more so here in the UK because university rankings solely depending on student feedback are often what applicants use to gauge where to apply. Otherwise, the whole 'Your feedback is important to us' deal is a pretentious sham.

Yeah, it's depressing.  There are real issues with student feedback (it can be biased in some ways, and it's not clear that the perception of learning a lot or enjoying the course really tells us what we want to know about student learning - it's possible that the students who hate the course and feel terribly confused are actually the ones developing the skills that will serve them best in the future).  However, it's one of the most useful tools we have to distinguish between good and bad teaching, and we shouldn't dismiss it just because it's far from perfect.  Sadly, this can happen.

"I imagine this to be a considerable source of conflict between academics" - No. :)

...except when someone dares suggest that someone else's teaching just isn't good enough.

By the way, @AnonymousMathematician: At my uni (all UK unis?) we are not usually graded by the people who teach us; it's other people in the faculty who do that. So the issue with teachers giving easy grades doesn't exist :)

@Armatus: That makes a lot of sense.  In the US, it's the same people, which presents obvious conflicts of interest.  I have no idea why we use this system.

@JefE: I do recall such things happening. the usual solution is to change the defn of good enough :)

My feeling is that most colleagues just don't care about the feedback. Long before those feedbacks generalized, we already knew who are the good and bad teachers. However, when I was in charge of one year of our engineering program, I tried to move teachers from the lectures where they were poorly graded. It's not easy, but it's do-able. Luckily, it seems uncommon to be globally bad at teaching, so I was always able to find a place for everyone.

It's good to hear people do tend to grow up after all, at least in some respects :)


text:
Attending university as an adult freshman
After graduating high-school, I did not attend a university and instead decided to enter the work force. Eight years hence, I would like to pursue a university degree but I am not entirely sure which credentials are important for an adult freshman. Are my high-school transcripts still relevant almost a decade after the fact? Do universities consider professional experience in their admissions process (I have 6 years professional experience related to my intended field of study)? Do I have a shot at competitive university even though my academic history is essentially nothing? With sufficient review, I expect I can achieve high standardized testing scores, but I wonder if that will be enough to compensate for such a huge gap in my academic career.
The crux of my question is: how should an adult freshmen prepare before applying to a competitive university?

I'm not sure this is on-topic, as this is more of a "college advice" question than an "academic research" question. See our FAQ for more on this. However, seeing how highly it's voted after just a few hours, let's discuss it in meta.

Depends on which country: In Sweden, this is not  uncommon at all. In the US, I heard first-hand from a student expression that it is a bias towards people not following the normal path, with regards to funding and scholarship possibilities.

I would say definitely - it's worth a try. I am studying at a university that usually ends up high in rankings (although it dropped quite a bit now because of student feedback), the oldest person in my course is about 9 years older than the rest of us. He spent around 5 years after school working (he had already worked there during school) and then two years ago took some additional courses at an adults' school and applied here. What should I say, they happily took him and he's constantly getting the best grades in the year.
As you mention that you have professional experience related to the subject, I think you may find it interesting that his years of work were completely unrelated to the subject he is studying now. I think that's a good factor as well.
I think in such a situation I would put much more stress on what I have done since school rather than what I achieved at school. With such a long gap, what happened at school should be practically irrelevant unless you can demonstrate what strengths you have taken from school that you still maintain today. This should go by the same reasons for which certificates such as IELTS or TOEFL are not accepted more than two years after getting them.
Finally I should add that this is a UK university. Procedures in the USA may of course be very different and so may your chances - but in any case it's worth a shot. It can't get much worse than having your application rejected can it?

Universities take all sorts of information into consideration when they take in undergraduates (or postgradautes). Essays, recommendations, your CV (your experience) all matter.  For a mature student, your high school record will normally matter somewhat, but it will almost certainly not be weighted as highly as it would for a person with no other experience or evidence of their quality of work.
Different universities have different strategies and requirements, and you should check into those of the one you are interested in.  For example, when I was working in Chicago I took night classes from one of the local universities, I think it was Northwestern although the classes were at Roosevelt.  At the time at least, they would let anyone sign up for up to four undergraduate classes, no questions asked.  Then after four classes you were called in to consider really registering for your degree, and that was done almost entirely on the basis of your four classes.  I actually already had a degree, but I remember being incredibly impressed with the system, it seemed immensely sensible and fair.

My answer is going to be anecdotal. One of my good friends in university right now is a senior (graduating next semester). He was a professional musician and learnt a trade as an apprentice for many years (I think about 7 years). Then he went to community college for 2 years and transferred to my current university as a sophomore. He has distinguished himself very well and has been an undergraduate research assistant for the last 3 semesters. In fact, now he wants a PhD and is doing all that he can to get into the best school that he can.
Therefore, anecdotally, I can tell you that prepare the best you can ; perhaps by even going to community college (its cheap !) and taking relevant courses and then either applying as a freshman or sophomore to the university you really want to go to. I think that (as others have pointed out), your experiences will serve you in good stead.
PS: This is in context to the USA

+1 for "community college for 2 years". This is a good way to prove that you 'have what it takes' to succeed in university, and gives you a transcript more recent than high school.

It varies from college to college. Some make a point of being "returning student" friendly while others don't. Your best bet is likely to look into the ones you are interested and call up the admissions office. You might be surprised. One of my former colleges made a huge point of being returning student friendly, and it was a great idea because they were often amongst the best students in the class because they knew the importance of hard work and study.

Ask the university.
I went to college for one year after high school, then enrolled in a different university several years later (which I completed; both in the U.S.).  My second university used my high school transcript and test scores from when I was in high school (I had to pay an extra fee to retrieve my old scores), as well as my transcript from my previous year of college (even though only one class actually counted for anything).  They did not consider any professional experience.


text:
How do open science practices affect tenure and promotion decisions?
Does engaging in open science practices (e.g., reproducibility, data sharing, study preregistration, open access publication) affect tenure and promotion decisions for academic scientists? One can imagine that these would be viewed favorability and scientists would be rewarded for being open. At the same time, however, open science seems to be a movement driven by younger scientists and openness may have no bearing on promotions or even be seen as a distraction from the core production of research. Is there any evidence of the effect of open science on individual career success?


text:
How does one denote that a cell value is not available / doesn't make sense in a table?
I have a table that compares the performance of different systems according to different error measures:
System   | Error 1 | change | Error 2 | ...
--------------------------------------| ...
Baseline | 0.6     | -      | ...
A        | 0.1     | -0.5   | ...
B        | 0.3     | -0.3   | ...
C        | 0.7     |  0.1   | ...
D        | 0.6     |  0.0   | ...

I currently chose - to denote that the value does not make sense. Of course, I can subtract the error of the baseline system from itself and get 0. But I don't think that makes sense.
Should I put - in that cell? Or -- or --- (I write the document with LaTeX) or eventually something different like N/A? Or make the cell black?

This question appears to be off-topic because it is about visualizing information and table formatting, not specific to academia.

@StephanKolassa but many academic fields have very specific style guides that aren't necessarily about the best way to visualize things.

Related to: How to display a division by zero in a grid?

Questions about formatting of statistics are off-topic on Academia.SE.

If it is self-evident (remember to look at your table from the perspective of a reader) I would just leave the cell empty. Less clutter is better. When not, I would tend towards --. More importantly I would add a footnote to the table explaining what -- means. I think the footnote is in that case more important than the difference between -, --, and ---.

I cannot find any mention of what to do with missing data in the APA style, MLA style, or Chicago style, but according to this website on AMA style says:

Missing data and blank space in the table field (ie, and empty cell) may create ambiguity and should be avoided . . . . An ellipsis
  (. . .) may be used to indicate no data are available [or applicable]. (p87)


text:
Does the order of citation ([Kir10, HZK09] or vice versa) matter?
I am currently writing my bachelor's thesis in Computer Science. When I have a sentence
It was shown in [Kir10, HZK09] that ...

does it make a difference if I write
It was shown in [HZK09, Kir10] that ...

instead?

I've just took a look at 3 PhD thesis of my institute: All 3 of them are sorted by year, then by  name. However, the bachelor's thesis I looked at had no obvious order.

Some styles require multiple citations to be in alphabetical or numerical order.  For example, APA style requires that citations be in the same order as they appear in the references list (that would be alphabetical order.)  Other styles (e.g. the Council of Science Editors) require that they be given in chronological order.
You need to check with the style guide for the style that you're following to see what is expected. If you're writing a journal or conference proceedings article, the instructions to authors should tell you what is required.  If you're writing a thesis or dissertation, there are likely to be institutional policies that specify a particular style.
In LaTeX there is a package called "citesort" that will sort your citations.  There is also a "sort" option for the natbib package that does this job.

Conversely some styles require the reference list to be in the order of appearance in the paper  (Eg IEEE)

There are two different questions here:  1.  What order do the references appear in the reference list (IEEE has them appear in the order in which they first appear in the paper) and 2. What order do citations within the paper take.  e.g. (Jones 1979; Smith 1978) or (Smith 1978; Jones 1979.) The original poster was asking about the order in multiple citations rather than the ordering of the reference list itself.   LaTeX and associated packages have the ability to deal with both issues.

If the citations are sorted in the "expected order", nobody will notice.
If they are in the opposite order, people may assume that they were intentionally put in that order as an indication that the first one is more relevant than the later one. At least some people will, like me.
Look at the papers and books you read in your own field, and see what conventions they follow.

As was correctly pointed out by several other answers, various styleguides require a specific ordering.
Brief rant: In my opinion, this is extremely unfortunate, and I cannot avoid the feeling that the only reason for such requirements is that editors feel that's an aspect where they can show with little effort (both alphabetical and chronological ordering can be checked automatically!) that they do provide and enforce clear styleguide rules.
What I would like to add to the other answers is the explicit statement that, if there is no fixed rule imposed by anyone, you can intentionally use the effect described in Oswald Veblen's answer. In that case, do order your citations in a way that makes most sense with respect to their contents, for instance, by listing the most literal example of a claim first.
After all, there is no reason to actually follow an ordering scheme by year, or by author name, unless you are required to do so. It conveys no useful information:

The earliest or the most recent publication is by no means automatically the most significant one.
Ordering by author name or paper title is even more arbitrary.
Ordering the same way as the bibliography has two aspects:

The bibliography might be sorted based on the order of first references to each entry. In that case, the ordering in a multi-citation is essentially irrelevant, as the bibliography will always adapt to that. This helps finding bibliography entries when reading a paper without the help of any technology that prevents manually searching for bibliography items, and also, it is only reliable for as long as each bibliography entry is referenced only once.
The bibliography might be sorted based on another criterion inherent to each bibliography item, such as year, title, or author name. In this case, references in a multi-citation are probably scattered throughout the bibliography, anyway, and using the same ordering for the references still conveys no useful information, as described above.


text:
Should I mention the target audience in the abstract of a paper?
I am currently writing a paper which gives an overview over semantic segmentation. My target audience are people who are not experts, but who need semantic segmentation or who want to get into this field. The aim of the paper is to provide starting points. This means I give a very brief idea and I mention papers which introduce the idea in detail.
Should I mention my target audience / the aim of the paper in the abstract? Should it be in the introduction? Should it be in the paper at all?
Are there other ways to give readers this information (e.g. I've noticed some keywords in the titles of papers)?

I've certainly seen this in the abstract of surveys in math and physics, and I think it is helpful information to give, though I don't have any experience with your field.

@Kimball Could you tell me one publicly available paper so that I can have a look how to formulate this?

Here are a couple that I could quickly find: http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.3347 and http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.4046 (the latter one states the intended audience in the title!)

I have seen surveys without abstracts but instead with introductions (e.g. http://people.math.gatech.edu/~etnyre/preprints/papers/legsur.pdf). I think typically the abstracts/introductions of these kind of works (in my field pure mathematics) almost always have some language suggesting the necessary background required to read the work and read similarly to the foreward of lecture notes/books.

Should I mention my target audience / the aim of the paper in the
  abstract? Should it be in the introduction? Should it be in the paper
  at all?

In my experience you should mention the target audience / the aim of the paper in the both the abstract and the introduction, if possible. If you have to go with one of the two then mention it in the introduction, probably in the penultimate paragraph, where you move from explaining what has been done before to explaining what the paper will do.
I think that mentioning the the target audience / the aim of the paper is important as papers are often rejected due to misunderstandings, for instance where they are directed at practitioners, but evaluated by reviewers based on other "quality" criteria. Accordingly, you should be very careful to set up the criteria that you want to be evaluated on. As one academic in my field once told me "you need to be very clear about the stick you want them to beat you with".
There are different ways you can do this sort of subtle scoping and expectation setting. It really depends on the field and venue you are targeting. Sometimes you can just start with "The paper aims to...". If that is too clunky, or you need to state things more subtly, you could use something like:

To address the research gaps previously outlined (e.g., x,y,z), this paper therefore aims to...
"As the aim of the paper is to provide a foundation overview of..., it mimics prior exemplars in this area (e.g., x) to (do) x, y and z".

The benefit of doing something like the second one is that the linking to templates will let reviewers (not all of whom may understand your type of intended contribution) see that it i) has been done before (which reviewers often value), and ii) give them something to compare your paper against to determine its quality.

What you are describing is called Review Article (sometimes: survey article) and a common type of publication. This keyword should suffice to find some similar papers from your field. There is also a review-articles tag on this site.
Some journals go one step further and distinguish between regular reviews for readers who want to update their knowledge on a given field and introductory reviews for readers who wish to learn about a field from scratch. The latter can have all sorts of names.
Having your review labeled review article (or similar) should suffice to clarify the nature of the article for most readers. Additionally your abstract will not contain key phrases such as we study or we find, but rather we review or we give an overview. If your paper is aimed at a specific group of newcomers (e.g., semantic segmentation from a physicist’s point of view), then it may be indeed worth mentioning them in the abstract.
Note that some journals do not accept unsolicited review articles for peer review, but ask you to discuss your plans before you start writing. If you have a special target audience, you should discuss this with the journal at this point.


text:
What is "paper bidding"?
I am currently preparing for the submission of my first paper to an academic conference and I've just seen this table of important dates:

What is "paper bidding"? Why is that before the submission deadline?

In conferences with paper bidding, reviewers get to indicate their preference for each paper (i.e. "I'm interested in reviewing this one, not interested in reviewing that one").
The bids are typically based on the abstract (which is why many conferences have an "abstract submission deadline" before the submission deadline). That way, by the time the papers are submitted, they can be distributed to reviewers immediately.

In my community, paper bidding typically happens after full paper submission and is based on full texts rather than abstracts. (that is, one of the implications is that every PC member is able to see every submission)

Thank you. I thought it was like that, but I was confused because the abstract submission deadline is 2015-01-31. I guess they just forgot to extend the paper bidding deadline, too.


text:
Why should we give the number of pages on arXiv?
In https://arxiv.org/help/prep I found

Indicate number of pages and number of figures. If desired, include Tex flavor or related comments. Do not bother to put "uuencoded" or "gzipped tar file" even if you submitted it this way.

I wonder why this is considered to be helpful. And what are pages anyway? The number of PDF pages? The number of "content" pages (= PDF pages - title page (if any) - blank pages - reference pages - appendix)?

I think this is just because people casually browsing the arXIv like to know roughly how long the paper is before they click the link. (Maybe they are interested enough to read a 15-page paper but not a 50-page one.)

To provide basic error checking.

I agree the number of pages is important and useful, for the reason explained by Anonymous above. However, "number of figures" has always baffled and bemused me. Certain math textbook series still have the habit of touting the number of figures on the inside cover page as if that's one of the most important things about the book. Why not highlight the "number of theorems" instead? I'm guessing this is a relic from long gone days in which producing a graphic figure for a textbook took hard work and was considered an impressive achievement, so publishers mentioned this to impress the readers.

@DanRomik Having written a book about Geometry and Topology I would still say making figures is much work. I think it might give you an impression of the book. So a book with 100 pages but only 10 graphics might give a different impression than 70 pages and 30 graphics. Depending on what you look for, that might be good or bad.

However, I don't think all of this should really matter when it comes to usual internet speeds (for Germany at least) and usual sizes of arxiv papers. Then I'm faster just downloading the PDF and having a look myself than looking at those numbers and thinking about what this means for me.

@moose having written a book about longest increasing subsequences, I would totally agree with you. :-) However, as much as figures take a lot of work to create, I still don't think the number of figures is an especially important parameter of a book (for 98% of books at least), and certainly not the most important parameter after the number of pages. For most books this is a nearly information-less statistic and communicating it in such a prominent way is a waste of cognitive capacity.

@DanRomik I remember seeing a Springer GTM as an undergrad (now I forget which) that say "with 1 figure."  Naturally I tried to find this figure as it must be so important to merit singular mention, but I sadly could not.  When the 2nd ed came out, it omitted any mention of figures.

@MartinThoma: I can imagine that the number of pages could matter at places with slow internet connections, so such concerns are entirely out of place, event today.

@Ambicion When you have a slow connection, the file size matters, not the number of pages. The file size can be determined automatically.

Page length is one of the most basic things you can know about a document, and one of the few useful numerical measurements of a piece of writing.  I personally find it helpful as an indicator of how "serious" something is.  (This holds for novels as well as papers.)  If I see one set of notes on a topic that are 8 pages long versus another set that are 56 pages, I have a good sense that the latter set is much more detailed than the former.  Similarly, a 6-page paper entitled "Bounded gaps between primes" (a famously hard problem, very unlikely to be solved in so short a work) gives a very different impression than a 54-page paper with the same title.
While page length is not equated with how deep or interesting something is (and of course depends on format), it can be at least suggestive.  As a corollary, I also take page lengths into account when evaluating job candidates to get a sense of how productive they are.
Regarding the definition, I think it's safe to interpret page length as the number of pdf pages, as this is what most people will immediately see when they open the pdf.  That said, if it's a book, it's perfectly fine to put something like 286+xvii pages, but I doubt people will care much either way.  Remember, this is just a preprint server.

With "format" I guess you mean IEEEtran vs article which makes about 2.5x the difference? Or do you mean A5 vs A4 (vs the american ones) which makes again a big difference?

@moose Format includes all of those differences and others, and no reasonable formatting choice will turn a 6-page paper into a 60-page one.  (BTW, I'm in pure math and we almost never use IEEEtran-like formats, and I've never seen anyone use A5.  It's rare that I see more than a 50% difference in length because of format choice, and I don't think I've ever seen more than 2x.)

I recently worked in pattern recognition and computer vision. There, IEEEtran (or at least two column designs) seem to be used quite often. On one of my documents, I tried it. When I switched from IEEEtran to article, without changing anything else, I got from 4 pages to 10 pages (no empty pages or something similar).


text:
How can I show which data I'm using in my paper?
I've just started reading papers about speech recognition and algorithms on medium sized graphs (~800,000 nodes and 4,400,000 edges with some connected text data). I think a problem of these papers is quite often, that it is difficult to check the experimental results. It is difficult to check them because of two reasons:

The source code that was used to generate the results is not (publicly) available
The data is either not at all available or it is not clear which version of the data was used

When I start writing papers, I would like to make it easier to check the results.
The first problem is easy to solve: I can simply provide the source code (e.g. on GitHub or my personal web space).
The second problem seems to be much harder to solve. The data is often quite big (speech recognition: several GB; graphs: about 2GB). This is too much to upload it on my personal webspace / GitHub.
How can I show which data I'm using in my paper? (Currently I give a link to the data source and note the data when I've downloaded it. Additionally, I note the date/version of the source if possible.)
Are there projects that try to solve this issue? (e.g. by providing space for important / interesting projects like dblp, a version history and good download speeds)

If you have a few bucks to spend, you could buy some Google drive or DropBox hosting and have a publicly-available link to a few GB of data.  The DropBox public folder and the Google Drive both support public links, to my recollection.  Drive is a little cheaper to buy data on, but I find Dropbox a little more user-friendly.  Others might have services they prefer instead.

Recently (at least) two platforms have appeared which offer web space for sharing scientific data. They provide Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) for uploaded datasets which can be used to refer to the data easily.

Figshare seems to be the more prominent option. All data is shared under CC0 license. There is a 1 GB limit for private data and no limit for public data.
Zenodo is part of a European research project. You can specify any license you prefer for your dataset. Currently they have a 2 GB limit per file but you can upload as many files as necessary. For larger files, you need to contact the administrators.

@dgraziotin Good to know! Feel free to suggest edits to my answer.

Both the problems you state are significant, and (I think) very problematic to the further progression of computer science as an actual science. I work in services / software engineering, and quite honestly, reproducibility of results is very, very bad in my work as well as in the work of others.
I will comment on both of your issues, starting with the second one:

The data is either not at all available or it is not clear which version of the data was used

In many cases, this is actually the easier-to-solve issue. I would assume your department has IT resources (e.g., a department web space) that you can use for such purposes. Additionally, there are other, more field-specific, repositories that you can upload data to (for instance, there is the UCI machine learning data set repository or the Grid workload traces archive). Making data available to the public is really only an issue if you are not allowed to do so because of commercial interests of your data provider. For instance, I have access to real traces of executions of business processes of a big german logistics provider, which I am not allowed to give out. This clearly limits the usefulness of these traces to me.
The second problem

The source code that was used to generate the results is not (publicly) available

is sort of tricky in practice. Clearly, throwing your code to Github is easy, but this hardly solves the issue of reproducibility. You will still need to include pretty detailed usage instructions and documentation to make this code of any use to another researcher. This may seem trivial for a naive 1000 Lines-of-Code implementation of an algorithm, but, for instance, my current research prototype approaches 25.000 lines of Java code plus a bit of XML and Groovy. Just putting this up on a repository is not enough, if we consider that a paper can only be considered reproducible if it is possible to do so in reasonable time. An additional problem in my field is that often prototypes are built for a specific execution environment. For instance, my department has a small OpenStack based private cloud, and many demonstrators that our students build realistically only run in this environment without drastic modifications.
I am currently in the transition between a postdoc and a more independent research position, and one of my personal goals is to make all work that I and my students publish easier to reproduce. However, so far we are only making baby steps, but at least we are trying :D

One way around the build issue might be to specify a required barebones platform (e.g., a cloud instance) and then provide a build script and an execution script that will pull code and required files from your repositories and 3rd-party sources.  Secondly, if your project can work on a Vagrant Box, I have seen this highly recommended by some people I know who worry more about this than I do.


text:
How should I cite 3 images that were used to compose a new image?
I used three images from Wikipedia to compose them to a new image. All other images (not that many) are created by myself.
How should I cite them?
The images are:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Computer-aj_aj_ashton_01.svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Server-multiple.svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Server_by_mimooh.svg

I currently use the following text below the description (within the caption):

The image of a desktop computer on the top left is from
                \url{https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Computer-aj_aj_ashton_01.svg}
                and was created by an unknown artist,
                the server image on the top right is from
                \url{https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Server-multiple.svg} and
  was created by RRZEicons and
                the images that was used three times for classification workers is from
                \url{https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Server_by_mimooh.svg} and
  was created by Mimooh.

This kind of images are not worth such a long explanation. Just replace them with something that you can use without any explanations or references. (E.g., symbol font or clip art with a permissive license.)

Are you using your new image in a paper or other surrounding document, or just distributing it by itself?

The first image is sourced to OpenClipArt.org, which releases images into the public domain specifically to simplify your life in cases like this.  OpenClipArt specifically releases under the Creative Commons Zero license to enable this.  For such images, as well as anything else in the public domain (e.g., most images published by the US Government), there is no requirement for specific attribution.
It is courteous to add a discrete note on the sourcing, and it would be dishonest for you to claim to be the artist, but the a major part of the reason that people build public domain image repositories is to let people build them into diagrams and other images without dealing with the attribution problem that you face. Since there are lots of these sorts of server diagram images on OpenClipArt.org, I would strongly suggest that you see if you can replace your current images with public domain images.
If you don't do this, then for the attribution-required images the figure caption should include the website references, just as you would reference a paper that you reproduced an image from.  For example, you may phrase it: "Server images adapted from [cite1,cite2]" where the citations give the appropriate online document citation, just as you would if you were citing any other webpage.  This is kind of a pain, and easy to lose track of if you reuse the images in other contexts, which is why I strongly recommend using non-attribution licensed images whenever possible.

What are some non-attribution licenses?

Creative Commons Zero is one example. Public domain is another example. Much of what is published by the US government is also available without a requirement for attribution.

I discovered on "Announcing (and explaining) our new 2.0 licenses" why they discontinued the non-attribution option: «Our web stats indicate that 97-98% of you choose Attribution, so we decided to drop Attribution as a choice from our license menu … Important to remember: Attribution can always be disavowed upon licensor request, and pseudonymous and anonymous authorship are always options for a licensor, as before.» So, if you want non-attribution now, they suggest being pseudonymous or anonymous.

For small, relatively generic images like this, it is not typically necessary to cite the full sources directly in the image caption.  Rather, you could include a note in the references section of your paper, saying "Figure 1 makes use of these images from Wikimedia Commons..." and then list the URLs and whatever other attribution info is needed.  If you wanted, you could also include a brief note in the image caption saying "See references section for image credits".  Giving due credit to the creators of these images is the stand-up thing to do, but in practice, it is extremely unlikely that anyone will ever know or care whether you properly cited them in a case like this.
(Of course, I'm not a lawyer and my opinion counts for nothing legally.  This is just my impression of common practice among academics who make use of internet images in their own diagrams, slide presentations, etc.)


text:
Why are some papers copy-protected?
Once in a while I stumble over copy-protected files like this. When I try to copy the title "MetaCost: a general method for making classifiers cost-sensitive" I just get garbage:
✁✄✂✆☎✞✝✠✟☛✡☞✂✍✌✠✎
✏✑✁✓✒✔✁✓✕✆☎✗✖✘✁✍✂✆✙✔✟✛✚✢✜✣✟✞✕✤☎✗✥✛✦✧✒✔★✩✝✪✖✫☎✬✡✭✡✭✦✫✮✯✁✓✕✆✡✰✝✠✟☛✡☞✂✲✱☞✳✴✁✓✒✔✡✭✦✵✂✆✦✫✶☛✁
Why do people do that?

It might not be copy-protected. If you look at the title bar the original file was called copy.dvi, which means that they compiled it with LaTeX (and not with pdfLaTeX for instance). If they didn't pay attention to the workflow, they might have lost the underlying text. Probably this question is better suited to TeX.SE, if asked on a different premise.

Sure that this is copy protection and not just some sloppy preparation (e.g. bad encoding)? I had a similar thing with a CV.

I have no problem copying the file to my own computer and then open it. What do you mean by get garbage?

@scaaahu He's referring to copy-pasting the text.

@MassimoOrtolano I was aware that it might have been created with TeX, but I thought this was done on purpose. Hm. I'm not sure what to do now. I think I'll just post it in the tex.SE chat and see if they think it could be by accident. If so, moving it to tex.SE would be best (in that case I'd adjust the title to something like "How do PDFs get 'copy-protected'?" - but feel free to suggest a better title.)

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is not a question about academia but TeX

@BrianTompsett-汤莱恩: One of the top users of tex.SE thinks it is a deliberate action (source), not a mistake. This means it is not about TeX, as I am not asking how to do it.

It is a TeX issue. See http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~aty/bibliog/latex/LaTeXtoPDF.html

@BrianTompsett-汤莱恩 Where do you get from that link that it is a TeX issue?

@MassimoOrtolano The font glyphs have not been fully included in the PDF; looks like one of the normal issues with making pdf from latex that I have experience in the past. Not something that should be debated in academia.

@BrianTompsett-汤莱恩 Those are not the font glyphs. The font glyphs are what is shown on the page, not what you get when copying the text.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's not about Academia, but is about PDFs (not necessarily TeX).

@MassimoOrtolano It's missing the glyph-to-character encoding (it uses a non-standard encoding). Not necessarily a TeX issue, but definitely a PDF issue (one that I see fairly often with old PDFs). see e.g. PDF Font encoding — why can't I copy text from a PDF? and If PDF copy+paste gives garbage text — what is wrong with the PDF source code?

@MassimoOrtolano I doubt it's intended to avoid plagiarism. I see it often in old PDFs, created in an era when small file sizes were important (because this slightly reduces the file size). (One of the SO answers I linked to says: "Distiller produces such files when "Smallest File Size" preset is used.")

It's easy enough to render the PDF to a high-res image and then OCR it though. Or just type it out. It wouldn't be a barrier against any half-way determined plagiarism.


text:
How and where should images be cited?
I am currently working on a paper where we use one image from another paper. How and where should I denote that?
Currently, we have the image source only in the caption like this:
\caption{Comparison of a \gls{CNN} for classification (top)
         and a \gls{FCN} which creates a heat map (bottom).
         \cite{long2014fully}}

See also: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/19845/using-ieee-citation-style-how-should-i-cite-a-figure-that-was-based-on-one-in

This is certainly not correct; the citation has to be a part of a sentence. It really depends on what you cite -- the image itself (i.e., you "printscreen" it) which may be a copyright infringement, or the data used in the image?

I should note that it is exactly the same figure in my case.

Well, in that case you either have the copyright holder's permission (and then you probably just say something like image taken from \cite{abc} or you violate the copyright and in that case you ... well ... shouldn't do it.

@yo' citation does not have to be part of a sentence. In that case putting it after the punctuation is correct for most footnote citation styles. Really, this serves to indicate though, this question can not be answered without reference for the Style Manual (or at least the venue) for what ever document is being produced.

@Oxinabox You believe that most venues have strict style manuals? In my life, I have rarely seen any style manuals.

@yo' They do not, that's why I said "or at least the venue". If moose told us the venue, then someone could answer by knowing the "unwritten rules".
Trust me I have been digging through ACM SIG rules today. Bits are in the style guide, bits are in the FAQ, bits are in the TEX class comments, bits are in the examples. But a lot I had to check by reading papers from the conference last year... and they were not entirely consistent.
My point being we need something to work from. It is hard enough when you know the venue.

This is part of a university course. It's called a "Seminar" in German. I have no idea how that would be translated into English / if this is common in English speaking countries at all. The document will quite sure not be published. The purpose of a "Seminar" is to get knowledge about a new topic and exchange the knowledge between the students who participate in it.

@Oxinabox Most venues do not list style manuals because they do not care enough, meaning you should do as you wish. The worst thing that can happen is that they correct you or ask for a correction.

@moose: You should clarify it is not for publication, it has implications.

Also see I'd like to use a figure from a paper, what's the best way to do this?

The right thing to do when plan to include an image from another article is to first ask for the permission from the corresponding author of the article. If approved, you may include the image and cite them along with the lines after the caption

Included with permission from [citeno].

General citation would only allow you to refer information in literature. Any form of replication whether it is an image or even a set of sentences of text is not permitted without acknowledgement from the authors of the published material to be referred. The exception is for quotes and equations (with appropriate citations). That doesn't forbid you to use the text at all. It means that you ought to rephrase the information referred in you own words.

Any form of replication whether it is an image or even a sentence of text is not permitted without acknowledgement from the authors of the published material to be referred. - You're talking about copyright law here, aren't you? I guess at least for texts the situation is different in Germany. Parts of a text may be copied, as long as it's clear which parts got copied and as long as the copying is not "too much" (see §51 UrhG)

Suggestion accepted. Edit made. But on copyright, all materials published are implicitly copyrighted even if not formally done so.

This is plain wrong. Very rarely it is the corresponding author who holds the image copyright. More likely it is the publisher. We were solving this issue with one guy in my community, and we ended up with him giving me the plot data and not the image, to avoid this issue.

Actually not all publishers hold copyrights for the images like IEEE.


text:
When someone says a paper is published "in Nature", does that mean it's published in *Nature*?
Oftentimes, researchers talk about a paper that's been published "in Nature" (typically to establish its notoriety).  However, I would like to clarify exactly what this means.
Along with Nature, the Nature Publishing Group publishes a wide range of journals, including journals with the word "Nature" in the title, such as Nature Biotechnology, Nature Cell Biology, and so on.  Other journals published by Nature Publishing Group do not include the word "Nature" in the title, such as Heredity, Molecular Systems Biology, and so on.  (See the journal index.)  With this in mind, it does not seem clear to me exactly what it means to have published "in Nature".

Question: When someone says they've published "in Nature", does this literally mean they have published in the journal entitled Nature?

listen carefully - do they say in Nature, or by Nature? The latter being a clue that what they're really saying is: 'by Nature Publishing Group, but not in the journal "Nature"'

I have never heard of someone referring to one of the Nature sub-journals as just "Nature". I think most people would consider this dishonest.

The answer to your question is probably "Yes and No" or, more properly, it depends on who is telling you this and why.
If the individual wants you to find his or her research, then "in Nature" might mean in Nature. However, if someone wants you to find research, why aren't they giving you a full citation?
Usually someone would say their work is published "in Nature" to make themselves sound important (sometimes rightfully so). In this case, I doubt that the individual would make a distinction between Nature and the derivative journals, most of which also have high impact factors. The person is more likely to be vague if the field-specific NPG journal in which the work is published has a much lower impact factor than Nature.
In the field of chemistry, Nature Chemistry is relatively new, 4 years old. Since NChem is so new, most folks I talk to distinguish whether they mean Nature or NChem. NChem's newness leaves it with a lower impact factor (20.524 for 2011, the first year it qualified for one) vs. Nature (36.280 in 2011).

I found this Q&A linked from another and wanted to comment that the second part of this answer in my experience is very wrong. "In Nature" is not a synonym for "in a Nature/npg journal" and if you use the former to mean the latter you will probably embarrass yourself. It would be like claiming you are a World Cup champion when you really mean you collect cups from all over the world.

Good question - I was wondering about this the other day, when reading a mainstream news article.  I just searched today's news for "published in Nature" with Google and find 35 uses.  Without exception, an NPG journal work that wasn't in their one journal named Nature is never referred to as in Nature in any of them.  Media included Phys.org, globenewswire, Science Daily, healio(made difficult: no citation and Nature article was a month old- Boo, Healio!!), medicalxpress, eurekalert,... MIT Technology Review Podcast.   PS:

... So I agree with Krause and I intend to edit accordingly.  (PS: It would be nice if there was a blocklist of 4th rate news sources that just re-report stuff without adding anything of value (except ads-that benefit them).  I'm guessing some of the Media I visited/listed was that.). I'm thinking it should say that using "in Nature" to refer to something in a Nature journal, but not in the journal Nature, is both incorrect and misleading.  It seems abnormal to use the term differently.

I've never heard a neuroscientist say they published in Nature, if it was in Nature Neuroscience.

This Nature guide to authors uses the phrase "Nature and the Nature research journals."  Also, the editorial policies website states

The Nature journals' editorial policies concerning publication of
  primary scientific research can be found on the pages listed below.
  The policies described are those of Nature and the journals with
  "Nature" in their titles.

This implies that when the Nature Publishing Group uses the word "Nature" in italics, they are referring to the journal Nature and not to their other journals.  If they want to refer to any of their journals, they use the phrase "Nature journal" (without italics).


text:
What proportion of papers submitted to Nature are actually sent for review?
From Nature's "Getting Published with Nature" guidelines:

Nature has space to publish only 8% or so of the 200 papers submitted each week, hence its selection criteria are rigorous. Many submissions are declined without being sent for review.

This leads me to the question:

Question: What proportion of the papers submitted to Nature actually get sent for review?

It'd be nice to know if, in general, the "biggest hurdle" in getting a paper published in Nature would be simply getting it to the reviewers.

Also, what are the reasons to reject a submission before reviewing?

@seteropere that is a completely different question, which you should ask separately!

Related, but does not directly answer your question: see this post by Philip Ball and the paper it is based on. (Also, this one)

Edited: I found a better answer to the question, the original indicative answer is left below.
Here, we have a statement from December 2006 regarding the number of submissions, rate of editor rejections and ultimate acceptance number. While slightly outdated, the acceptance rate of Nature journal does not seem to fluctuate widely between 2006 and 2012 (always around 7-8% of submitted articles), hence I believe the number is significant and valid:

Nature receives approximately 10,000 papers every year and our editors reject about 60% of them without review. ... ... In the end we publish about 7% of our submissions.

From that we have, that in 2006 about 40% of submissions were sent out for peer-review.

The original indicative answer:
Not a precise answer, but can be indicative also for Nature journal itself: here is a statistics of a decade 2002-2012 of publishing in Nature Materials in numbers, various stats are presented. Specifically this graph shows that the ratio of peer-reviewed vs. submitted manuscripts is floating around 13%. Out of peer-reviewed, about 60% get accepted. This shows that their first filter, the editorial decision whether to review at all, is extremely aggressive and in fact is the filter in the publishing process.
According to a note here, Nature Neuroscience sends about 30-35% papers for peer-review.

It would seem that the editor would have to be very familiar with you and the significance of your work ahead of time to get published in Nature.

@DouglasS.Stones: I found an answer for Nature journal itself. See my edited answer.

These data are a bit more recent and specifically from Nature Microbiology, one of the newer NPG journals.

We sent out slightly over 20% of submitted manuscripts for review and our acceptance rate was 9%. Of those 126 manuscripts accepted, 86% were published after 2 rounds of review or fewer, while 14% needed to be seen by at least 1 referee a third time.

noting this, it looks like the largest of the hurdles is indeed getting sent out for peer review.
source: https://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol2016259

I don't really think a non-Nature journal from NPG really gives much insight into Nature itself.


text:
Should CV include special note about published 'cover articles'?
I just published an article and, when I saw the journal, I was surprised to discover that they put my article on the cover.
My question is, should I update my CV to make special note of the fact that my article was not just published but is the cover story in a particular journal?

I did. Rather one should... the answers to this question are probably helpful: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1280/when-should-i-stop-including-talks-on-my-cv?rq=1. Early in your career this might be useful. Later in your career, not so.

I also say yes. In some respect this is the equivalent of an award for excellence, after all the paper was picked out for one reason or another.

Yes, you should indicate a cover article just like you might an invited article. Putting (Cover article) or a similar designation would be entirely appropriate.

A cover article is noteworthy, but not all noteworthy material goes on all CVs. I include a note about cover articles on my CV iff I am also including citation counts. I only include this extra information if the CV is for something that is trying to evaluate the "impact" of my research.


text:
Where can I find descriptions of arXiv categories?
I've recently gone through the arXiv categories (quite randomly) and found a couple where I'm not too sure what they are about. Is anywhere a description of the categories?
For example, I'm not too sure what the following are about / what I should expect to be in them:

Learning
Computers and Society

The ones I've stated in my question as examples.

@Matinking I am a Computer Science student in the end of my masters degree with specialization in machine learning. Still "learning" as a category seems pretty vague to me. It could be (1) machine learning (2) learning in the sense of instructing people how to use computers (3) some kind of playground where you can submit papers just to try out arxiv (4) studying (to understand) the process of human learning (5) something I can't think of because I'm not familiar with.

From the arxiv.org home page, click on detailed description for the discipline that you need (everything except physics has one). For instance, the one for computer science reads:

LG - Machine Learning [...]
Covers machine learning and computational (PAC) learning. Roughly includes material in ACM Subject Class I.2.6.
CY - Computers and Society [...]
Covers impact of computers on society, computer ethics, information technology and public policy, legal aspects of computing, computers and education. Roughly includes material in ACM Subject Classes K.0, K.2, K.3, K.4, K.5, and K.7.

The "detailed information"-page for Mathematics does also not contain any further information on the subject classes. But explanations are here (when you click on Mathematics directly.


text:
Should the first letter of the axis label be uppercase?
Suppose you have a diagram in a bachelor's thesis (which is written in English) with one axis
"mean stroke count"
and the other
"standard deviation"
Should the first letter of "mean" and "standard" be uppercase?

This question appears to be off-topic because it is about typesetting conventions, not academia.

From a general survey of style books, yes, at least the first alphabet should be capitalized:

American Medical Association Manual of Style: Title format (e.g. Average Consumption Index, %)
Chicago Manual of Style: Sentence format (e.g. Average consumption index, %)
Scientific Style and Format (Cambridge): Sentence format

An easy way to see this: axis labels are akin to the row and column titles in a table. If those titles are generally capitalized (which is the norm), then the axis title should also follow. So, I'd recommend at least follow the sentence style capitalization rule. This is not to say lower case titles are absolutely wrong, but I am sure they will raise more eyebrows in a bad way.

There's no fixed rule that applies here. You should check if the style guide the publisher to whom you are submitting the paper has a guideline. If not, feel free to use whichever convention you'd like, but be consistent throughout a given paper. Don't change from one to the other haphazardly.
In the case of a school document (thesis, etc.), your university probably has a recommended style guide; follow those guidelines instead.

Does a bachelor's thesis even have a publisher?

@Floris: It doesn't really matter that it's a bachelor's thesis.

My point was that there most likely is no "publisher's style guide", as the question is not about a paper being submitted for publication. But that was how you phrased your answer. You gave a good answer to a slightly different question.

@Floris: Fair enough; I've edited the answer to handle the situation here.


text:
How to find / understand research in other languages when you don't know that language?
I'm starting to do some research in Asia, however, I don't know the local language. I do have some contacts, all of whom speak English, but I'm worried about finding earlier research which was published in the local language. For example, if I don't speak Thai and I am doing research in Thailand, how can I find existing research which was published in Thai (with the intent of contacting the researcher or finding a translator to translate it into English)?
This might be a futile exercise, and I might need to remove the question but in case anyone out there has a creative idea, I would love to hear it.

Quick clarification needed: do you mean doing research in Thailand (as in, you're in Bangkok), or research on Thailand (from somewhere else in the world)?

For example, research on leadership in Thailand which was written in Thai (so it's likely written IN Thailand as well, but that's not my issue).

I would ask a colleague who does speak Thai, and ask them if there are any relevant Thai publications you need to be aware of. Of course, this colleague needs to be in the same field you are interested in. If they don't know of any relevant literature, this might indicate that you are not missing any relevant research.
In addition, when you are looking for papers yourself, I would Google translate the titles of the papers, and if they seem interesting, I would ask a native speaking colleague to translate the abstract. If it still is interesting, then you ask your colleague to read the paper together with you.

The answer depends also on the fact that you will work on your subject for only a few months or for a very long period of time. Ultimately, in the second case, you will have to learn additional languages.
In sciences and economical/social sciences we are not very used to that, but it is rather common in humanities. For instance, my wife works in Egyptology, and she had to learn (at least for reading) German and Italian in addition to French (mother tongue), English (that we all learn at school) and 3 or 4 ancient languages in order to be able to read the literature of the field.

Excellent point. The research I'm doing is fairly short term in nature so I'd like to avoid investing the time to understand the local language.

Accessing research in a language that you don't speak is pain. If something seems interesting, just ask the author for any related material he/she may have in English. That should help you in a lot of cases. Otherwise, go listen to him/her at English-speaking conferences.

Good idea but how to even find the author if I don't understand their language? It seems I really am limited to only reading research in the languages I understand quite well.

Only thing I can suggest you right now is to use google translation services; for instance you can add to your browser some "add-on" that automtically translates from Thai to English. Good luck

In my experience, Google Translate is very, very bad...especially with languages quite dissimilar to English. French to English is good enough that it's easy to get the basic meaning but with other more remote languages, the meaning is simply not even close.

in my experience, no translation at all is worst than a bad translation. I am native spanish speaker and can speak fluently english, french and german among others, and sometimes I am used to understand in new languages like swedish just 10% of the words, and sometimes just with that information you can get some sense about what is all the thing about; we are not machines, sometimes some information is better than nothing

mother tongue, sorry