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Teaching Assistantships and research
I'm working as a TA now, and I've found that I'm spending an inordinate amount of time on my TA-ship. Is this normal? Furthermore, is this expected? I'm worried that my research career will suffer because of my lack of research productivity.

Can you quantify the "inordinate amount of time" ?

You should give more information about your situation. How many courses are you TA'ing? How much time are you spending on your TA assignment per week? How often do you have to TA (one semester, every semester, one quarter per year, etc.)? Are you TAing for your professor, or for someone else in the department?

This is for a single course, and "an inordinate amount of time" is ~eight hours a week. TAing for some random professor in the department.

That is not an inordinate amount of time.

I suppose it depends on the factors that are causing you to spend more time teaching than you think you should. You should talk to (1) the other TAs and (2) the course leader/director. Find out what is expected and what others are doing.
If you are a relatively new graduate student, then I think it's normal to spend more time teaching and preparing for your teaching. As you start teaching the same courses repeatedly, the time you have to spend in preparation will decrease.
If you think of the time you are teaching as working on a craft that you will use for the rest of your career, then it is time well spent.

In Canada, TA's usually have a contract that specifies how many hours they should be working per week / TA term.  If you are going way over that you could talk to the course coordinator.
Your supervisor may also get upset if you are spending a large proportion away from you research project, which his / her grant is paying you to work on.  This is especially true if you are approaching your reclassification exam -- assuming you are going that route.

That's interesting... we have no such thing (that I know of) in my university, and I'd wager in the entire US. That's a new one to me.

@eykanal: Wow I'm surprised.  TA's are usually unionised here as well.

@GWW Wow! TAs are unionized?

That's it, I'm moving to Canada.

@DNA: Yep, here are some examples: http://cupe3902.org/ and http://www.gtaunion.com/gta/ .  They usually require the number of hours a course will require, compensation, and such to be listed.

Union rules at my (US) university officially limit TAs to 20 hours of work per week.

@eykanal My US university (CU Boulder) has "50% RA/TAships", which means that we're expected to spend 20 hours at most on RA/TAships (and spend the other 20 hours in a standard work week studying).

I know what you feel like. When I was a fresh TA, I spent an "inordinate" amount of time with my TA-ship. I came to understand that both my research and my teaching assignments did have equal priority and I couldn't neglect one and give preference to the other.
There were always weeks when my teaching load was more manageable and I could progress my research and vice versa.
Of course, how the dynamics of your advisor affect this have a major implication on what "inordinate" would mean.
Here was my experience as a TA the first time I did it:

Taught two sections of a lab, each requiring about 2 hours of lecture (4hrs total), 5 hours of preparation (5 hours total), 1 office hour each (2 hours total) and 2 hours grading each (3-4 hours total as I graded the same thing for both sections)
Graded 200 homework assignments a week for a course what was out of my specialization (8-10 hours a week)
Total TA time per week ~ 25.

I also had to do research and that time commitment was highly variable!
I hope that generally gives you perspective.
Some background about me:

Been in grad school since Fall 2006.
Pursuing a PhD in mechanical engineering.
International student.

Depending on the course, you may have to invest up to two days of your working week to TA. If the course involves homework assignment, you will have to prepare them, grade them, and give them feedback for every mistake they do (they are learning). Be extremely careful when such tasks are requested, they are a potential career killer. I don't know if there are legal requirement to respect on this regard, but you are not going to have any friend if the professor has to grade two hundred students tests a week instead of delegating the task to his minions (postdocs)


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What types of industry positions favor PhD over a masters?
I'm coming from a biomedical engineering background, and I'm noticing that almost all job postings ask for either an MS or a PhD, and from speaking with my friends with masters it seems that masters are often favored, because they demand less pay. In fact, the only positions that specifically seek out PhDs seem to be research positions in industry.
Based on that, I'm curious to see if this exists beyond just engineering. Are there any non-research industry positions that actively seek to hire PhDs over masters students?

High-tech engineering companies, for one. A friend of mine works at a small system-on-a-chip designer company, and they supply highly specialized chip designs to other businesses which utilize embedded systems -- think leading automotive, aerospace, consumer electronics OEMs. The company is small and every engineering employee has at least a MSc, most of them have PhDs or higher (that would be associate professors and professors).
Another example is automotive R&D -- mechanical engineering. Companies are financing new development of new methodologies in product development -- particularly structural optimization, design automation, manufacturing process simulations. Virtual prototyping is the name of the game for top manufacturers currently, and the demand for highly-skilled experts is great, even in these uncertain economic times.
In the country where I study, PhD projects are financed jointly by interested private companies as well as research organizations, and the companies have a vested interest to receive not only the direct results from the research, but also trained individuals that can integrate the research outcomes into their product development or manufacturing process.
Obviously YMMV by country and research field. PhDs in in mostly theoretical projects might have harder time finding a good position after graduating, while hands-on graduates whose projects were conducted in collaboration with industrial partners are much more likely to secure a senior technical position even before their dissertation.

What is "higher" than a PhD?

@vocaro post-doc of course :).

@vocaro or, in some countries, habilitation.

I am currently employed in the biotech industry. Hopefully this is helpful but it may all just be obvious:
Concerning research industry positions, jobs are generally classified as PhD (scientist) or non-PhD (research assistant/associate). For scientists positions, sometimes someone without a PhD will be considered if they have significant experience - e.g. Masters plus 5-8 years, Bachelors plus 10+ years. However, PhDs are generally favored over non-PhDs for outside hires. For research asst/assoc positions, non-PhDs are favored over PhD holders, and many companies have policies that prohibit hiring PhDs.
Concerning non-research industry positions, holding a PhD will give you an edge over BS/MS holders, but you have to compete with other specialized degrees. For business developement and upper management positions, you'd have to compete with MBA holders (along with internal hires from research/scientific management). For legal positions, you'd compete with JDs and certified patent agents. For project management, there are certifications as well.
If you were to hold MBA/JD/additional certification AND a PhD, you would be extremely marketable for these types of positions. It's a lot of work to add something like that on after finishing a PhD program, but companies often love to have PhDs on staff in those types of positions - but generally you need to have the other qualifications as well.
Edit: Also, the best people to talk to are professors from your current/old department who are on any company's board of directors. They will know exactly what kind of people a company wants to hire, and will be able to tell you how to target your job search, or what kind of experience/credentials matter most.

I think that the only positions where it makes sense to hire a PhD over a master's degree holder are those which require a lot of analytical skills, plus the ability to be "laterally" flexible. That is, you want to hire someone who can do many different tasks over time, rather than just lead one project or group. These occupations would include quantitative analysis, but would also include more non-traditional jobs such as a journal editor or a consultant.
From an industrial perspective, though, for anything outside of research, it's probably more economical and practical to hire someone with direct or relevant experience at the master's level and train them to do the job you need them to do.

PhD is all about getting qualifications for becoming a scientist/researcher. You learn how to do the research independently, how to present your work, you meet people who might be helpful in your further career, and incidentally you get some hands-on experience in an obscure area of science. These are "hard" skills you get along the way. This means that the only type of work PhD is required for, or gives you a real benefit, is a job of a researcher, either in academia or in the industry.
Occasionally you might be lucky to work on something truly useful and job will be a natural extension of your PhD. But since getting a PhD degree is really a learning process, the topics are necessarily moderately ambitious and niche - you have the rest of your scientific career to "make an impact".
Outside the research the only thing PhD gives you is a bit of "prestige". This might be a hindrance, or, at best, make no difference when you search for a job. But in a long term you'll likely find that the ceiling is a bit higher. The good thing is that any job you end up doing will be good - the title automatically "filters out" positions that you would later find unsuitable.

From what I've heard, some companies prefer hiring PhDs over Masters not because of their additional knowledge because people who have done a PhD will in general be more mature and reliable. Some companies also count having a PhD as work experience which will reflect on your salary.
To answer your question, I'm not aware of any specific positions for which this is done, but depending on what the actual job is, recruiters may prefer candidates with a PhD (even if it's not in exactly what the work is going to be) for the reason mentioned above.

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Is it mandatory to declare conflicts of interest?
I know some journals require authors to declare conflicts of interests as a matter of policy; even if there is no CoI, a section title Conflict of Interests is still included which declares that there were no conflicts.
However, I notice that for some journals this is not the case. For example, this paper in the Journal of Organic Chemistry does not appear to have a CoI section.
Is declaration of conflicts of interest considered optional for scholarly publications? Is it possible to ascertain whether CoIs exist for a paper like this, where nothing is indicated?

I see the sentence "The authors declare no competing financial interest." at the end of that paper. Do you not see that?  The publisher's guidelines say, "During manuscript submission, ACS journal authors are required to disclose the nature of any competing and/or relevant financial interest... If no conflict of interest is declared, the following statement will be published in the article: "The authors declare no competing financial interest.""

@ff524 Ah, yes, I must've missed it. I had tried searching for "conflict" but I guess I should have tried "interest" as well.

I'm fairly confident that most scholarly journals require that you disclose conflicts of interest. If the publisher or journal doesn't discretely mention it, it wouldn't hurt to include it in the manuscript anyway.

This is very much field dependent.  I'm not aware of any mathematics or computer science journal that requires authors to disclose conflicts of interest.  (On the other hand, prospective referees are expected to disclose any conflicts of interest when invited by the editor.)

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What sources of funding do faculty in Computer Science dept. in US universities have other than NSF?
I made the question a bit more specific (location:US, discipline: CS) as I'm interested in answers pertaining to those details, but I can make it completely generic if the community so suggests...
By funding, I mean grants awarded to faculty as PI/co-PI for supporting Research Assistant-ships, travel to conferences, equipment acquirement etc.
My motivation behind the question, if its relevant, is whether I can use the NSF website as an exclusive source for looking up whether a particular faculty can support more students - if there are other sources of grants, doing just that would not paint a complete picture! As to my reasons for looking up faculty funding, its just so that I can answer emails from prospective applicants to the PhD program which ask "Do u know if Prof. X in your dept. has funding for new students" with a one-liner - look it up on the NSF page!

I think it depends on the nature of your research and its potential applications.  Alternative funding sources include NASA, Dept. of Energy, Dept. of Defense, Natl. Inst. of Health, etc.

This question is based on the fundamentally flawed premise that publicly available award recipient information includes a detailed budget.  Just because someone received a million dollars from a funding agency doesn't mean that they have funding for students available.

Off the top of my head, I can think of American CS faculty who have been supported by grants, contracts, or gifts from each of the following:

US funding agencies: DARPA, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, National Instutites of Health, Department of Homeland Security, Office of Naval Research, Army Research Office, Department of Education, NASA, ...
Foreign funding agencies (usually in concert with NSF, for international collaborations): Deutsche Forshungsgemeinschaft (Germany), Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France), Israeli Science Foundation, Danish National Research Foundation, ...
Private foundations: Sloan, Packard, Simons, Fulbright, Guggenheim, ...
Industry: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco, Boeing, Adobe, NVidia, ...

Industry: Yahoo, SRC

@JeffE - Interesting list! Do the other grant agencies (the government ones especially) publish their list of annual award recipients?

I don't know, but I'd be surprised if they didn't; Congress likes to see where its money goes.  A quick Google search pulls up an Award Search page for DOE Office of Science.  I assume other federal grant agencies have something similar, especially since they almost all use the same backend system (shudder) to manage grants.

Federal agencies, in particular, probably do publish most of their awardees (and, if they don't, you could probably use an FOIA request for non-classified stuff,) but I wouldn't be surprised if some private companies working on proprietary projects or government organizations working on classified projects withhold that information.

Just to elaborate on what's been said: I worked under a professor whose lab was funded almost entirely by Google, and only a small amount by the University and the NSF itself. If you're seeing if a professor has the budget for you, see if their lab has a web page that lists funding. In any case, don't assume that university/NSF funding represents 100% of the pie.


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Willingness to share ideas that could turn into a paper
Is there any research/study/survey that looked at researchers' willingness to publicly share ideas that could potentially turn into a paper?

I downvoted because I don't think this is an answerable question. I do not know what you mean by "looked at researchers' willingness". I cannot think of which field you imagine such a study might have been carried out in. I cannot tell what sort of answer would satisfy you. Frankly, it feels like your real question is "hey, let's chat about willingness to share ideas" and the first clause is tacked on solely to make this look like a question suitable for this Q&A site (which is not a discussion forum).

@TomChurch Did you see the question tag? Only looking for references.

@TomChurch regarding your first interrogation on willingness, see https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=willingness

I'd love to have a special SE site for finding references for academic papers

Yes, this very question is research by you in this matter :) .

I don't think that somebody should expect people here on Acedemia.SE to perform literature search for them (regardless of their motivation for a question), hence the feedback you've received so far. Having said that, I have briefly looked at the topic and have selected the following references that might be of your interest. The caveats are as follows: 1) the references below are intended to be used mainly not as primary sources, but as containers of more relevant references; 2) scope of the studies referenced below ranges from some specific context to more general knowledge sharing;

Keyes, Jessica. Identifying the Barriers to Knowledge Sharing in Knowledge Intensive Organizations. ProQuest, 2008.
Wang, Sheng, and Raymond A. Noe. "To Share or Not to Share: Is That the Question?" Human Resource Management Review 20.2 (2010): 115-131.
Pilerot, Ola. "A practice theoretical exploration of information sharing and trust in a dispersed community of design scholars" Information Research 18.4 (2013): 18-4.
Wang, Sheng, and Raymond A. Noe. "Knowledge sharing: A review and directions for future research" Human Resource Management Review 20.2 (2010): 115-131.

Thanks! Yes sorry admission questions are much more interesting. Surprisingly there is a reference-request tag with over 100 questions.

This is a better answer to this question that I thought was possible -- really excellent.

@FranckDernoncourt: You're welcome! In my opinion, the reference-request tag should be used either for help with finding some unique references on rare topics, or, at least, when one have tried everything, exhausted all options and came up with nothing and stuck.

@TomChurch: Your kind words are greatly appreciated.


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How can US faculty verify medical absences?
I recently received a memo stating that I am not allowed to ask for doctor's notes when students are absent from class, as this is allegedly a violation of privacy rights.
If this is the case, then how can a faculty member legitimately verify that a student who claims to have missed an exam or other activity as a result of illness was, in fact, sick as claimed? Couldn't students abuse such a policy to postpone an assessment for which they feel unprepared?

Typically there is an "office of student affairs" or similarly named office that can verify student absences.

I would think the issue at hand here is that you cannot ask for specifics about their medical absence, but you can get a note or something else that verifies the time of the appointment but not the reason.  So you can't verify that they had acute appendicitis, just that some doctor says they had a medical appointment at an indicated time.  Were you told that even that wasn't allowed, or was it just disallowed to get specifics?

Although an information-controlled version of such excuses can often be arranged, I've just given up on it, and am willing, and tell the students up front, that if they think they have a good excuse for missing an exam/class/whatever, ... "fine". Sure, kids could use this to postpone things... but maybe that's not so terrible, if the real goal is to have them eventually know/understand/do some things. My term-long schedule is meant to be reasonable, practical, but is not sacred, after all.

@zibadawatimmy Students may wish to keep the identity of their medical provider private from their instructors. (If the note comes from a psychiatry practice, or an oncologist, that's kind of a giveaway.) At my university, student handbook specifically say that students should provide documentation only to the office of student affairs, and to refer faculty to that office.

@ff524 That would seem to be a common policy, from what my googling reveals.  You could probably make that into an answer.  I'd up-vote it, at least.

Couldn't students abuse such a policy to postpone an assessment for
  which they feel unprepared?

Yes. My experience teaching the first semester at a community college is that granted an open-door absence policy, the majority of my students were skipping all the tests, circulating the real test among themselves, and then taking a makeup together on a later date. (Assuming I could get them all in one place.) This was more than double my scheduling/test-making/test-grading labor, and also delaying the assessment/feedback cycle by a week or more for each test.
In my second semester I ended that policy. The policy since has been: Nothing is excused for any reason. No excuses or notes need be given to me. One low test score is dropped (and likewise for any other assignments). This is an enormous time-saver (both in test-giving and excuse-verification), and allows me to immediately hand back corrections and feedback in the next class meeting.

Theoretically a student could have legitimate medical reasons for missing two exams.  How would you handle that?

@NateEldredge if he's like me, handle it on a case by case basis, for example, permitting the makeup (if it can be done before the test is handed back), increasing the weight of the other tests or final (easier if there are more tests so that a test doesn't end up worth more than the final), or offering a paper in lieu of the test (in classes where that makes sense). IME this happens more for university business (athletics, etc) than for medical, but since instituting this style of policy, I've magically gotten less double missed tests which makes accommodating them easier.

Yes, in principle I'd do the same as guifa above. In practice it's never been an issue; e.g., I can go so far as to give an incomplete, ask the student to contact me when available to make up the work, and then I'll never hear from them again, or they'll decide to file for a retroactive medical withdrawal instead. Obviously YMMV.

I don't know about the US, but in the UK and Australia it is standard practice to request a doctor's certificate (same as for sick leave from employment, e.g., https://www.fairwork.gov.au/leave/sick-and-carers-leave/paid-sick-and-carers-leave/notice-and-medical-certificates). This is not the same as obtaining medical records. Typically these are checked by administrative staff to verify the doctor actually administered it, since students have been known to forge them.

can confirm this is usually the case in the UK, to the point where it is a nice little side business for GPs (a doctor note always cost £30 at my previous GP)...

As stated in multiple comments, ask the Division of Student Affairs, the Dean of Students, or similar organization, to verify the student absence for you.
Having this intermediate will save you from violating your student's privacy, and also relieve you from the burden of assessing whenever a medical certificate is genuine or not.

You shouldn't.  There are several reasons besides privacy why you should not ask for doctor's notes.

It implies you think students are dishonest.  If you act as though you expect students to be honest, that teaches them that honest behavior is correct behavior.
It encourages students to come to class when sick, which makes more people get sick.
It wastes medical resources.
I have had students send me pictures of their injuries I would rather not have seen because they thought I wanted evidence.

Finally, I suspect students who feign illness to postpone an exam will not do well on the make-up exam either.

"It implies you think students are dishonest." - I'd say exactly that is the duty of whoever conducts the exam. Exams aren't about trust, or else the questions could just be handed out as homework problems. Likewise, I do not see how acting like expecting students to be honest would encourage honest behaviour. Personally, I always felt let down by lecturers who did not enforce the rules that were in place; from an honest student's point of view, it means that honesty is not honored and instead, the dishonest students get all the advantages and no sanctions from their cheating. ...

... Additionally, "I suspect students who feign illness to postpone an exam will not do well on the make-up exam either" is unfortunately not guaranteed to work out as expected. Like this, it carries the bad taste of thinking that "this student does not deserve the degree and should not pass, but I won't be the one to fail them, hopefully, someone else will take that upon themselves".

Totally disagree with this answer, though I respect your good nature. It is 100% certain that some students are dishonest. I know of examples of fake sick notes from the past year. I think you owe it to your honest students to make some effort to keep things fair.


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What is the typical time period after which an incoming grad student is expected to start publishing?
An incoming graduate student is typically required to help out as a TA, take courses both related to their research and required by the program, as well as to start reading up on the research topics in his field. Unless he has worked in the same research area prior to joining grad school, it is unlikely he would get any publishable results very soon after joining grad school.
To avoid being depressed by this apparent lack of results in the first few semesters, it would be helpful to know what the adviser/admissions committee expects out of him in that time, and by when he would be expected to start having publishable results?
I'm interested in the answers related to Theoretical CS, but as always, I believe it would be applicable to any grad  student as well - so it should not be specific to this field.

This wil vary significantly according to advisor, but I'd say a typical plan is:

Years 1-2: coursework, begin research
Summer of year 2: Small research publications (in my field, 2-4 page conference proceedings, small steps)
Year 3: Get some real research done, more small papers
Year 4+: ~1/2 paper a year, ish

However, the variance may be too great for this to be meaningful. I have a friend who published 17 papers during his 6 year graduate student tenure, and I have a number of friends who published zero peer-reviewed papers during my grad school tenure. Take the numbers with a grain of salt.

Ummm...I understand that unless you have some published results, the grad committee/adviser would not be letting you graduate with a Ph.D (understandably!) - so, isn't no publications a deal-breaker for getting a Ph.D?

@shan23 - Actually, no. In my program, a publication was not a pre-requisite for graduation. (Oddly enough, many other students in my lab were from another graduate program in the same university, where a publication was required... confusing indeed!)

@shan23: As always there's wide variation by field/country/institution, but in many places a PhD student isn't expected to have any publications prior to the thesis itself, and since it can easily take 2+ years for a paper to go from submission to publication, there's no expectation that any of the thesis has actually been published by the time of graduation.

Most (top-20 US) computer science PhD programs have a de facto publication requirement for PhD students.  In my group (in theoretical computer science), students don't even propose a thesis until they've published at least two papers on the topic.

+1 for "It depends" and +1 more for "the variance may be too great for this to be meaningful".

In France, the PhD is funded for 3 years generally. In our university (Paris-Sud university), PhD students meet a committee composed of the adviser, the head of the lab and the head of the doctoral school each year. In TCS, if you have not published (or have a paper close to be published - that is submitted) during the second year; this yields a big red flag. So, it means that it is expected that some results are ready for publication during the third semester of the thesis (even in a small workshop).
Edit : PhD students are doing a 6 months internship before entering the PhD, with their PhD advisor mostly, so in fact the research is done on 3,5 years, and often 4 without much troubles.

Do posters count as published results? Also, some (or many, depending on the field) workshops do not publish proceedings - would that still be considered as a publication?

publication = serious proceedings and a serious PC.  For instance, a workshop as SWAT will probably be considered OK. We do not count posters as publication except in the case of conferences where all papers have the same number of pages in the proc., but some are presented as posters, other as talks.

The French (and European systems generally) assume a master's already in hand; therefore, French PhD students enter around Year 3 of the outline provided by @shan23 in his question.

@aeismail This is indeed an important thing to know!

I should also mention I should have said it was eykanal's outline, not shan23's. Sorry for the mix-up.

@aeismail : What if the applicant is considering a change in his research area (going from Master's to PhD)? He'd still need the time to get up to speed - or is that not allowed in European systems in general?

@shan23: PhD students in Europe generally do not take courses; they can change fields, but that's considered on an individual basis. In general, though, Sylvain's points are valid. (Although it does bring to mind certain points that are again subject to international differences.)

To add to Sylvain's comment: Very few theoretical computer science conferences have poster sessions, so that's not a real option anyway.


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How many grants it is possible to have simultaneously?
It is feasible to assume that you cannot have more than one grant, since getting a grant means that you are paid for a research project and you cannot work on too many projects at once. So answer should be one. Nevertheless there should be some researchers that have more than one grant. How common is that? Is this field related?

“getting a grant means that you are paid for a research project” — for some types of grant, yes… but not all

@F'x I am not very familiar with all types of grants, could you give example, so I can reformulate the question? I am mathematician/econometrician, and I rarely see other type of grants, if we exclude the grants which fund travel to conferences, etc.

@mpiktas Grants can fund equipment.  In experimental sciences, equipment can be very expensive (with extremes such as LHC, ITER, ISS).

Also note that, as suggested in David's answer below, grants will never go entirely to a single individual. There are many people committing time and effort to completing the grant research.

@eykanal there are some (few) grants/fellowships that go entirely to one individual: some sabbatical fellowships, in particular

There are also grants that do not cover salary or equipment but travel expenses/networking/establishing collaborations.

At my institution, most researchers have more than one grant.  It is extremely common over a wide range of disciplines, at least in the USA.
Often, one is required to include the "level of effort" in each grant proposal; i.e., the percentage of one's time that will be spent on that project.  That number is never 100%; more often, it may be 10-50%.
In many fields, the "principal investigator" on the grant may do only a small part of the actual research, with the bulk being done by students and post-docs.  This part is very field-dependent.  In some fields, full professors at top universities are expected to have very many grants simultaneously, or at least some very large grants that involve a lot more than the full time of a single person.

Here's one example: the National Science Foundation in the US funds academic researchers. Usually the researchers draws some amount of summer salary from the grant (the rest - most of the grant money - goes to student support and travel). But you can be supported by different grants for different fractions of your summer. It's not impossible to have four active grants, each paying 0.5 months of your summer salary.

You would have to check the conditions of the grants to be sure. This answer is based on my experience with some European grants. Especially for "personal" grants that pay your full salary, it is often not allowed to have multiple of such grants simultaneously. In addition it there are often conditions to ensure you are not being paid twice (from different grants) for the same thing.
The situation in Europe is different from the US in the sense that university employees are paid all year round, not only during the teaching semester. So they don't have to source additional income in summer.

Nevertheless, in my area (chemistry/Europe) you meet situations with e.g. one person having two half-time contracts belonging to different grants.


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Advice for a PhD... who is aiming for industry
In recent years there has been much talk of difficulties in the academic job market, and of many PhDs transitioning out of academia into the private sector. From what I've observed, it seems that those PhDs that did get private jobs experienced pay and hours much better than what they would have gotten as academic post-docs. Of course, academic freedom, and opportunity to publish or teach are often not as good, but those are somewhat subjective factors.
However most PhD programs aren't really suited to this sort of thing. They are designed (sometimes explicitly) for producing future professors. There is emphasis on teaching, academic research (ie. stuff that you can publish and bring in the cites), writing grants (to agencies like the NSF), and all sorts of academic-y things. These skills don't really seem like they would sound very attractive to a private sector employer, who I assume have, contrary to academia, some regard for making money and less for things I've listed.
Of course there are two main things the PhD has that a company concerned with profit rather than publications would want:

Specialized domain knowledge
General reasoning and analytical skills

Everything else you could get from non-PhDs cheaper. These, luckily, are things that PhD is designed to teach anyhow. However, there are often many soft skills I see in job ads, which seem relevant, like:

Computer skills
Proficiency with programming languages
Experience with frameworks and libraries of commercial use (.NET, phone apps, web administration, ecommerce)
"Works well with others"
"Good communicator"
"Can assume leadership role"
"Can supervise team of junior workers on project"

These are things that, if you want to learn while doing a PhD, sometimes you need to go out of your way to do so. And even if you acquire a skill, how do you convince the employer that you actually have it, as opposed to just saying you do?
So suppose you were a PhD student, but your goal upon graduation was not to start at a postdoc and aim for a college professorship, but do get a job in the private sector. This can be an industrial R&D job very similar to your PhD research, or it can be a supervisory role in an area related to your expertise (eg. fish biologist works at fishery), or it can be unrelated except for using the same skills (eg. physicist working in finance). What would you do differently during your PhD from your faculty-bound peers?
Does it make sense to sort of "flavor" your PhD work with things relevant to the private sector, so you can go into your job search having developed these tangential skills more than the average PhD would? Or is it better to just focus on research, and hope that employers will appreciate your academic success, and see your potential if you applied yourself to their business instead?
Someone will inevitably ask for what field, let's say biomedical -> biotech, software development, finance or healthcare. However, I encourage you to answer in a general way, that would apply to many disciplines; I think such an answer would be more useful.

See Tuning the PhD journey for Industry jobs

Also see What skills can I get during a PhD to be competitive on the job market against non-PhD holders?

@ff524 first question sounds like the same thing, but the accepted answer is not what I'm looking for at all (I want to know how and whether to invest in developing specific skills). Second one is asking about competing with non-PhDs, I want to compete with other PhDs (who also want the same industry job).

There are other answers besides for the accepted answer. Also, if you want better answers to that question (if it is asking the same thing), you can invest in a bounty on it to attract more attention. If you're not asking the same thing, you should [edit] your post to focus specifically on the aspect of the PhD -> industry transition not addressed in that question, instead of the rather broad title "Advice for a PhD… who is aiming for industry".

The best thing to do would be to go for a few interviews during you PhD to see what are the industry requirements, so when you will finish your PhD you can have some background knowledge of these requirements.  Concerning computer science, they would ask you about some projects made in different programming languages.

Why bother getting a PhD if you just want to work in industry? The level of specialized knowledge involved outside of academic research is much lower, and "general reasoning and analytic skills" is vague (and not what the second list you describe, which sounds like the job skills for the manager of a team of a software engineers, focuses on).

In general, the optimal thing for a PhD student aiming for the private sector is to quit the PhD as soon as he or she can get a relevant job.  There are exceptions if the private sector job involves actual research, and some private sector jobs require the specialized knowledge of an MS or MA degree.
Beyond the basics and the necessary theoretical knowledge, the soft skills and the relevant technical skills are much more easily picked up while working in industry, since you get daily practice in the specifically relevant skills.  In addition, one generally gets paid much better in the private sector than as a PhD student.

I disagree. You say that "In general, the optimal thing for a PhD student aiming for the private sector is to quit the PhD as soon as he or she can get a relevant job." If someone get a relevant job in the present, in the future after PhD it will also get a relevant job.

I disagree with sentiment, there is a job market for pH.d's outside of academia. Many financial firms would jump at the chance to hire mathematical PhD for financial analysing.

This is too anecdotal for me to make it an answer, but I had a student who had done enough research to make a dissertation and had decided he wanted to go into industry. I talked to friends who do hiring in the field he wanted to work in, and they thought that having a completed Ph. D on his resume rather than an abandoned one would be be more valuable than getting into the field a year earlier, because it would show he could stick with a lengthy self-directed task. He spent a lot of the year he was writing polishing his coding skills and making industry contacts, and he got a good job.

MikeyMike - at the cost of several years and $100K in earnings.  Repmat - not really - most jobs will tend to prefer a MS with a specific concentration in the relevant areas of math - the exception being the small minority of jobs expecting actual original research.

@MikeyMike: Sure, but you're sacrificing several years (and the earnings you'd have during that time) for something that's completely useless to your future job. It's nice to get the title, but what's the point in having gone through a PhD program if you're just going to be writing code or being a middle-manager for the duration?

My opinion is that this is defintly possible! I work at a institute (ntnu.edu/ipk) that is very much connected to the industry. There are different course groups, but some groups have as much as 3-4 case companies for each phd student. Thats means that the student is actually doing a lot of research on the company.
I think if you want to wprk in the industry, you should go for a phd program where they plan to cooperatw with companies. This is either clear in the phd description or the supervisors should know something about this.
You could also talk extra to supervisors that have strong industry contacts. My exoerience is that its big differences about how much professors and groups focus to cooperate with industry.
Anyway, research with a company is mandatory in a phd if you really want to work in the industry later. Maybe thats also what you need to motivate yourself through your phd.


text:
How to cite a lab manual?
While looking for information on how to perform a particular basic lab technique, I found the lab manual from another university's undergraduate lab course. This lab manual illustrates the technique very well, with concise description, useful tips on fine points of the procedure and nice, helpful pictures of how the procedure should be performed.
In my research notes, I try to cite relevant material in a format resembling usual citation styles of well-known journals, both to build a habit and because it happens to be a good way to keep track of precisely what information I based my decisions on.
However, this lab manual does not have a DOI or ISBN and the PDF itself does not provide enough information to uniquely identify it in a traditional fashion. By looking at the URL it was posted under, I can deduce a fair bit regarding exactly what course this document pertains to (in my particular case, it seems to be the 2013/2014 version of the lab manual of the Bi204 course at Boston University, hosted here). What is the best way to cite it, to ensure that future readers of my notebook will be able to follow the citation without being hopelessly confused about which document I am talking about?

In theory, I can keep searching for other, more "formal" texts such as journal publications, then cite those. However, I don't want to do this. Firstly, I would be doing extra work to find what I already have discovered. Second, the manual is exceptionally well written and it will be hard to find other sources which provide the same information just as clearly. Third, I would like to give credit to the person who was actually the most helpful to me in my own reasoning.
I could just cite the reference given by the lab manual, but many of the issues I raise for the previous point apply.
I could cite the URL, but what if a year later the web page changes drastically, and the version of the notebook I used disappears?

I would like to, to the extent that is reasonably possible, provide the means for locating this lab manual to anyone reading my notes in the far future, even if the original author removes the manual from the web page I found it at. And I would like to provide this information in a style that conforms to established citation practices of scientific writing. How can I do this?

The "about" page of the course you linked to has the contact information for the creator of the course. Perhaps you could contact her and ask how she'd like the materials to be cited? Maybe she'd put it on figshare or something where it would be more permanent and get a DOI

@ff524 I already did that, actually. I'll report back here with any developments.

With this and similar time-dependent resources which probably have some sort of expiry date, it's worth checking whether an appropriate version of the resource is indexed by the Wayback Machine. This makes it easier to find it again in the future and, if needed, to justify to outsiders the provenance of the resource.

BibTeX knows how to deal with this, using the entry type @manual:
@manual{abc,
    organization = {University of Neverland},
    author = {John Doe},
    title = {Manual for ABC123},
    year = {2012},
}

If you don't know the author because it is not listed in the document, you can omit the field. The name of the university will be used instead.

In principle, this should be cited as if it were a book. Remember that ISBN's and URL's aren't a normal part of bibliographic references, so the fact that it did not go through a "standard" publishing process doesn't really matter:

Author, T. Laboratory Manual for Course X. City: University, Year.

or whatever the comparable formatting for your style guide is. (Note, write the name of the university, rather than indicating a "university press.")

Although this does not address the question of how to cite a lab manual, I did find out how to cite this particular lab manual. The author has informed me that there is in fact an ISBN, 978-0-7380-6200-6 (though I don't think it is listed in all the major databases), and the correct way to cite it would be:

O'Connor, Clare M.  (2013) Investigations in Molecular Cell Biology. Hayden-McNeill Publishing Co., Plymouth MI.

I suppose the moral of the story is that asking the author can indeed be productive for questions about how to attribute a source.


text:
What to do if undergraduate research has stalled for a long time?
So I'm pretty much working on my own project with guidance from two supervisors. Since it's my own project (and it's exploratory research), the two supervisors don't need to pressure me to get results. So - I got into a lot of dead ends in my current undergrad research project, and while I've definitely learned a lot in my current research, I highly doubt it can lead to a publication by now, especially since my supervisors are unfamiliar with the technical details of my model, and the objective of the research is such that there aren't many people in the nation I can contact who are familiar with what my supervisors want to do. I've already contacted a number of people who might be familiar with it, but most of my emails have gone without reply.
At this point, I only have a month left before I leave for graduate school, and I'm not sure how I should conclude my research with my supervisors. I've already written up a report (which could perhaps be analogized to a senior thesis, and which could be helpful for the future) - I've shown the report to one of my supervisors. At this point, what should I do? Should I show them what I've done? Should I feel guilty? I've actually been out of contact with one of my supervisors for several months.

The title doesn't seem to match the content of the question.

"Should I feel guilty?" — NO.

It's not uncommon for email contacts to go unanswered.  It's better to speak to these people in person about what you've done if possible... otherwise, phone conversation is the next best thing... Very few people will read too much into an email from a random contact.

You say you have learnt a lot, so you need not feel guilty. You do not think your work is publication-worthy yourself, and you also are leaving for grad school - so the only solution is to move on.
Make a neat report explaining your work. Even if it is not publishable, you could include it in your resume as a "technical report." From the tone of your question, this seems to be the only way out.

+1 Undergraduate research is more about the learning experience than results. It gives you the basic tools you need to go onto graduate research (and it also helps you to make sure you like research).

One potential idea is to submit the work and get your degree and head off to grad school. Keep the work that you have done in a bottom drawer for a few months or a year. Then pull it out again and reassess whether it is any good or not. If it is good, then polish it up and submit it somewhere. If it is not good, then you've lost nothing.
It's not uncommon to do unpublishable work at the undergraduate level. Don't worry about it and don't be hard on yourself.

Strike "at the undergraduate level". It's not uncommon to do unpublishable work, period.

@JeffE: Yeah. Today, for example.

To me it sounds like you don't really communicate with your supervisors — that is key to research, even with an independent project. Especially with undergrad research, your supervisor is there to help guide you on your project. With graduate school so close, make sure you conclude with a good meeting with your supervisors.
Also, take this as a learning experience for two things:
1. Research doesn't always work...in fact, it fails more often than it works. If the answers were apparent and easy, it wouldn't be research.
2. Communication with your supervisor/advisor is KEY!

Find a different supervisor. Maybe a very bored grad student. If that doesn't work work on a different aspect of the project until you hit another deadend.
However, it sounds like you've tried both so there is always finding a new supervisor and a new project when you do finally go to grad school.


text:
How should I style my German doctoral title in English documents?
I hold a Dr. rer. nat. title from the computer science institute at a German university. I am now writing a job application that I will send to a German organization, but since it has many international employees and the advertisement itself was in English, I decided to write the application in English (assuming that some of the decision makers may not speak German well).
My biggest problem in the translation is my title. In the German original, I use Dr. rumtscho in the CV header and a couple of other places. However, all translated versions I considered have drawbacks:

keep it as Dr. rumtscho. This is idiomatic in German, but I think it's totally strange in English and may make people think that I forgot to pay attention to the header when translating.
Style myself as rumstcho, PhD. While I refer to my title as "PhD" in informal conversation in English, I believe it is officially not permissible to "translate" the title.
Style myself as rumtscho, Dr. rer. nat. This looks weird both in English and in German, and for people unfamiliar with the "there is no traditional doctor title for computer scientists, so we just reuse one" attitude of German universities, they may think I come from a biology or chemistry background.

Which option is likely to be best received? Is the answer different when preparing English-language official documents to be read by Germans and by native English speakers?

It's weird to have any title in your header in the US.

@AzorAhai--hehim hehe, this is practically the only place in my life I use the title, please don't take that small joy away from me :) but seriously, I think it is a good idea to have the title visible somewhere on the job application outside of the education area of the CV, and if I move it somewhere else like the cover letter signature, the problem is the same.

I suppose you are applying to jobs where a doctoral degree is required or at least it’s very uncommon not to have one. In this case, I feel that using the title is at best pointless and at worst comes of as arrogant. In my applications (in Germany), I never used my doctoral title next to my name anywhere.

"I think it is a good idea to have the title visible somewhere on the job application outside of the education area of the CV" Probably it won't matter.

@Wrzlprmft Is it not common to use full titles (with several designations if applicable) in formal contexts in German academia? That is the impression I got from most of the web pages of professors that I have seen.

@MassimoOrtolano Thank you for the suggestion. I chose Academia on purpose, because I got the title from an academic institution, and I would love to know how the academic world deals with this situation. That it's for a job is just a bit of context, I hope that I can use the same rules on all official documents where naming the title is appropriate.

@GoodDeeds: Web pages and applications have considerably different target audiences. The former includes students, journalists, bureaucrats, etc., who may not know things like that professors very likely also have a doctoral degree (and it doesn’t really matter if they don’t), may be impressed by the degree, etc. An application within academia is quite a different thing, in particular if the position requires a doctoral degree. It will primarily read by people who also have a doctoral degree. Also, I rarely see designations like rer. nat. on professors’ webpages.

@AzorAhai--hehim If you have a doctoral degree in Germany it's very common to be addressed as "Dr. John Doe" in public life (e.g. mail)

@user And that includes CV headers? I bring it up because the OP was asking for English standards. The standard in NA would be no title at all (unsure about UK)

@GoodDeeds It depends on the field. Engineers tends to like them, mathematicians and physicists are less eager to have their complete title mentioned everywhere. Given that virtually everybody holds a doctoral degree and most a professor, it doesn't matter among professors anyway. YMMV.

Since nobody seems to have commented on this: you say you think Dr. [name] is "totally strange in English". I disagree wholeheartedly: it's absolutely fine in English and I didn't even bat an eye at it. (I know your question has other aspects.)

@GregMartin, outside of academia, mostly only medical doctors and doctors of divinity are addressed as "Dr. So-and-so". To address a STEM Ph.D. as "Dr. X" would seem very pretentious almost anywhere but in a lecture hall. On the other hand, I think a CV/resume is a perfectly reasonable place to include your full titles, even if seeking an industrial rather than academic position.

I would expect English speakers who are on the selection committee for a position at a German institution to be at least somewhat familiar (and probably very familiar) with German practice in this area, even if their German is otherwise lacking. So I'd tend to use the German conventions if the English ones can't be made to fit, even if the document is otherwise in English.

Don't overthink it. Both "Dr." and "Dr.rer.nat." would be OK, "PhD" would be inaccurate. The key information is the line in your CV where you point out that you have completed your doctoral degree.
(As relevant context: I am a native German speaker and have experiences in Germany both as a selection committee member and as a successful applicant.)

This. Also my English-language CV which I've also used for applications in Germany (and which contains grades from Germany) has the title/name line cbeleites (with full first name, though) and the doctoral degree in the educaton section. My doctoral degree stays Dr. rer. nat. wherever I go (looking into my CV I actually did not specify that, I give the thesis title, university and mark - but of course the certificates say so) and my Diplom stays Diplom as well. The postdoc jobs I've encountered in Germany actually did not formally require a doctorate - equivalent research experience was OK

... was OK as well (I've actually been at such positions for several years without being PhD/Dr. rer. nat.). (The hard/formal requirements I've met have been the other way round: doctorate not older than x.)

Exactly. Holding a Dr. doesn't imply holding a PhD. Holding a PhD, you might be allowed to call yourself a Dr. in Germany depending mostly on where you graduated.

Dr. rer. nat. applied to computer science is no weirder than PhD applied to engineering.

In English, "Dr." means you completed your PhD.
In English, anyone who has completed a PhD is entitled to be called "Doctor", regardless of the subject that they'd completed their degree in. Whether that degree is in IT, Physics, English Literature, or Underwater Basket Weaving, if you've completed a PhD, you're entitled to be called "Doctor". Then, when you list your degree on your resume or CV, you specify what your PhD was in.
Judging by the Wikipedia page about the Dr.rer.nat degree, it's basically equivalent to a PhD in science, so the same rule would apply.
In spoken language, you'd often be referred to as "Doctor [Surname]" as a formal title, unless you've got a higher-ranking title to be referred to as instead (e.g. "Professor [Surname]", or a title of nobility like "Sir [Given Name]" or "Lord [Surname], Baron of [Place]").
You can also be entitled to be referred to as "Doctor [Surname]" if you've completed a medical degree and become a licensed medical doctor, even though their degrees are "only" equivalent to a Master's Degree, but that wouldn't apply in your case. If there's any confusion whether someone's a medical doctor or a PhD graduate, you can just ask them.

Hi, I'm not sure how this answers my situation, it seems that you are just describing the common spoken-language usage in English-speaking countries, which I already know. The problems here: 1) I didn't complete a PhD, I completed a Dr.rer.nat, and 2) this is an official written document, and I have not seen people use the "Dr. rumtscho" style in one of those. I wanted to know how a native German reader will react to that style, as opposed to their reaction to one of the other styles.

PhD and Dr.rer.nat are the same thing in English, judging by the wikipedia page on the latter. Like I said, it doesn't matter whether you complete a PhD in English Literature or Theoretical Physics, either way you're still just referred to as "Doctor".

I would say that English speakers (at least American English) take "Dr." to mean that you've completed either a PhD at a US university or some other non-professional degree with roughly equivalent requirements, i.e. 5+ years of graduate study including a dissertation. (Or that you're a medical doctor.) Of course the US perspective might not apply in Germany; I couldn't say.

It is typical to refer to people having some kind of doctorate as "Dr FirstName LastName" in British academia. Note that there is no dot after the "Dr", American usage may wary. For example, look at the staff list of my department here:
https://www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/science/compsci/
A Dr rer nat is a perfectly fine doctorate, and in fact, the kind of doctorate several people in the list above have.
Writing FirstName LastName, PhD is what one would do to clarify that the doctorate is in fact a PhD; or just if it is a PhD and more convenient to have it after the name (maybe the person is also  a Sir and one wants to express both, etc).

"Writing FirstName LastName, PhD is what you would do to clarify that the doctorate is in fact a PhD" but the doctorate is not a PhD. The doctorate is a Dr. rer. nat.. Calling yourself a PhD in Germany when you are a Dr. rer. nat. might get you a fine (see second paragraph of section "Ph.D. in Deutschland" here and the referenced source).

@wimi Well, if one doesnt have a PhD one should not clarify that one has one, right? I'll replace the "you" with "one" to make clear that this does not refer to the OP, but to a generic person.

Just to add to Arno's reply:
Academic titles are not controlled by law in the UK. It is generally considered that those holding a substantive doctoral degree are entitled to be called Dr, and that non-surgical medical practitioners are called Dr by courtesy, but this is custom, not law. The National Health Service, for example, refuses to accord genuine doctors their title :)
Thus, as Arno says, "Dr rumtscho" is perfectly idiomatic and normal.
HOWEVER, it is also, in British academia, customary not to use titles in CV headers - the headline of a CV should just be your name. At some point in your CV, you list your qualifications, and that's where you say "Dr. rer. nat." So you have to decide whether you're doing a British-style application, or a German-style application translated into English:)
Having said that, there's a member of staff in my (British) university who insists their students write to them as "Dr. Dr. blah". As you can imagine, this flags them as insecure and pretentious.

My brother (who has a doctorate in medicine, with postnominal letters DM) is listed as "Dr" on his NHS hospital website, along with many other doctors. Not sure whether he is one of the "genuine doctors" you mention.

In clinical settings in the U.K. allowing people who aren’t registered medical practitioners to use the title Dr risks misleading patients and others into thinking that person is medically qualified. This has patient safety and legal risks - eg potentially falling foul of The Medical Act 1983 (https://www.gmc-uk.org/registration-and-licensing/the-medical-register/a-guide-to-the-medical-register/unregistered-medical-practice).

rumtscho, Dr. rer. nat. (CS)
Does that work for you? If you were to move to the US, or some other English speaking countries, Dr. rumtscho would probably be enough. But if you remain in Germany/Austria... then it might be best to keep it formal and as awarded. Especially so if you are writing to a German organization. The English speakers will just have to deal with it.
Hmm. Maybe
rumtscho, Dr. rer. nat. (Computerwissenschaften)

More likely (Informatik)

@JeffE, maybe. Not knowing the popular usage, I just used the literal translation (via google translate). But something like that, as appropriate.

This looks wrong to me, I’ve never seen Dr. or Dr. rer. nat. after the name.

@PieterNaaijkens I have also never seen these after the name, but the only style that is commonly seen in English (rumtscho, PhD) is illegal, so I will have to use something uncommon/wrong looking.

No. Dr. always precedes the last name in German writing (vorangestellter Titel), unlike e.g. a Diplom or Magister (if you're in Austria, even those may go first).

@henning--reinstateMonica, but the styling is specifically intended for English speakers. I'm only responding to that. It is awkward because of the differences in the cultures.

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


text:
How do I not get impatient when other people ask me to describe my research?
I mean, I really should be glad when they ask me this question. But inevitably, different people will ask me the same question many different times (over many different interviews), understandably so, and response fatigue does start to set in. I just wonder how other people can manage to be so patient when I ask them the same exact question (that they've probably answered hundreds of times by now).
I guess one of the things that has always driven me (despite an initially subpar educational background) was that I was always extremely averse to any form of redundant stimuli or repetitiveness. This helped carry me from a crappy middle school into UChicago/Brown. But I do need to get used to it a bit more as my role changes.

Your job, as an academic, is twofold:

Do amazing research.
Write it up and convey your results to other people.

It sounds like you view (2) to apply only to others who are already in your field and are completely familiar with everything you've done. You will find that, in the entirety of your field, there are probably just a few dozen people who are intimately familiar with every details of your field, and only a few hundred who are really familiar with what you do. Everyone else — academic, layperson, village idiot — will require an explanation, and you should do them the favor of explaining it to them.
To more directly answer your question, you should always have two answers ready to the question "what do you do?":

An elevator pitch, as described elsewhere. This should take ~15-30 seconds to say and would give a very high-level overview of your work.
A more in-depth explanation, which would take about 3-5 minutes, which conveys what you do in more detail. Generally speaking, less time than that and you can't convey any useful information, more time than that and you're giving too many details. After your in-depth explanation, either the person will say, "oh", and move on, or they'll ask questions and you can have an intellectual discussion.

(Note: the following point is somewhat debatable.) I've found for myself that it helps to visualize the person you're talking to as paying your salary; if you're on a publicly-funded research grant (i.e., any governmental grant), their taxes are funding your research. It gives some perspective.

One downvote for village-idiot. Not everyone has to be an academic.

@Alexandros - That's why I included "layperson".

One upvote for village idiot. It made me chuckle.

You should have an elevator pitch version of your research i.e. a description of your work that you can concisely explain to an incoming grad student within the time taken to ride a few floors in an elevator. I know that can be pretty hard to think up on the spot, which is why I'm suggesting you have the basic points at the top of your mind. With time, you can reel it off without even thinking for it!
As to why I emphasized on why you should do it, there can be enormous benefits of having such a version ready (say your adviser introduces you to someone with whom you'd like to work with in future in the hallway one morning, and he asks the same question out of courtesy - it might really look bad on both you and your adviser if you start hemming and hawing!) for when you really need it. Also, it would keep you grounded to what you started working on while deep inside the technicalities of a paper...

Well, if repetition does annoy you: I usually hear this question as "What kind of research did you do recently?" If you research evolves a bit, this will help to avoid too much repetition. Also it helps to keep you explanations fresh and if you like your recent results you may probably like to share your enthusiasm...

I have been in the same situation - having to explain the same thing over and over again, usually in interviews and such... The way I dealt with it was to explain it in a fresh way every time. So, on one occasion I may focus on the "fun" part of that work, while another time I may focus on the discovery part of it, while yet another time I may focus on the teamwork that was needed... The interviewer may give me a clue (body language, vernacular, etc) as to what type of answer may work best for their media/platform, so I tune into that. If it is a younger audience, I will try to make the answer more fun and attractive, while if it is for a serious, older audience, my answer will focus on serious matters more. Say a project I worked on was both famous and earned a lot of money - in a show for teens I may talk about fun part of it and perhaps someone famous I met, while in the other, serious show I may throw in figures and profits and such and perhaps even the whole industry a bit, to make it interesting for their audience.
This also gives a benefit to the listener who may have seen/heard/read more than one of my interviews and would not be bored by repetition (although some repetition is to be expected).


text:
What is the effect of background music in educational videos on the learning outcome?
Is there any research/study/survey/... that looked at the effect of background music in educational videos on the learning outcome?
I am aware of (1) but they focus on educational virtual environments.

(1) Fassbender, Eric, Deborah Richards, Ayse Bilgin, William Forde Thompson, and Wolfgang Heiden. "VirSchool: The effect of background music and immersive display systems on memory for facts learned in an educational virtual environment." Computers & Education 58, no. 1 (2012): 490-500. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=4113404139067026741&hl=en&as_sdt=0,22

I wonder if the instructor's speaking rhythm aligns with the music, and if that affects learning and retention.  (in contrast, I'll bet misalignment of rhythm results in subpar results)

For reference, one my background playlists for work/lesson/study was this song: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/moonlit-shore/id442778638?i=442778658

See Moreno, Roxana, and Richard E. Mayer. "A coherence effect in multimedia learning: The case for minimizing irrelevant sounds in the design of multimedia instructional messages." Journal of Educational psychology 92.1 (2000): 117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.92.1.117

The authors tested the recommendation that adding bells and whistles (in the form of background music and/or sounds) would improve the quality of a multimedia instructional message. In 2 studies, students received an animation and concurrent narration intended to explain the formation of lightning (Experiment 1) or the operation of hydraulic braking systems (Experiment 2). For some students, the authors added background music (Group NM), sounds (Group NS), both (Group NSM), or neither (Group N). On tests of retention and transfer, Group NSM performed worse than Group N; groups receiving music performed worse than groups not receiving music; and groups receiving sounds performed worse (only in Experiment 2) than groups not receiving sounds. Results were consistent with the idea that auditory adjuncts can overload the learner's auditory working memory, as predicted by a cognitive theory of multimedia learning.

When I was a student I used to study listening high-volume background hard rock music and simultaneously watching B-movies on a silenced TV. Is there any experiment covering this type of twisted behaviour? :-)

Wait, that isn't normal?

@Hurkyl You can read the paper to find out all the details. Free PDF available here.

Primarily Distraction
On a meta level, impression of low video quality.
That's from adding useless distracting content alone. Even if background music would be helpful in some way, it is quite possible that the user explicitly dislikes the chosen style.
Music that the user is closely used to can be of advantage, but that is unrelated; It would be typically louder and also conflict with background music.
A helpful effect of high beats per minute music may be increased dopamine levels, aiding concentration.
(Loosely related: Even worse are multi-second introduction sections with logo and music - it just wastes my time, right at the start. Makes a very negative first impression, even if it is an advertisement.)


text:
Why does the paper award jury have access to the author names in some blinded publication venues, prior to deciding to whom the award should go to?
Quite often, in publication venues where the author names are not visible to the reviewers and where some paper award is given, the authors are not blinded to the individuals who decide to whom the paper award should go to. Why?
Assume that the award decision is made prior to publications or conference presentations, which is quite common, so no event such as presentations breaks the authors' anonymity.

I only know of one conference where this is done, the Gordon Bell Prize, and the Best Paper and Best Student Paper prizes. The are all judged, unblinded, after all the candidate talks have been presented at the Supercomputing conference because the quality of each talk plays into the jurors' opinions about the work. The papers themselves are examined first, double-blind by completely different review panels earlier in the year in order to decide whether to accept them to the confernce or not.
For conference papers, this makes a lot of sense because the talk is a part of the criteria for the award. I ignored your suggestion about the timing of the award, because this is the only case I know of that both reviews the paper and gives a prize. If you're interested in a case where the talk is irrelevant, please update your question with specifics.

Thanks, I am indeed interested in a case where the talk is not taken into account to give the award.

@FranckDernoncourt, your original post makes it sound like you know of a case. Can you list it? The only case I know of includes the talk in the criteria.


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Does announcing the submission of a paper on social networks violate the double-blind review?
I sometimes see researchers who announce the submission of a paper to a conference on social networks, often tagging the post with the conference name and year, and from time to time mentioning the format and the topic of the paper. Does that violate the double-blind review, as through these networks reviewers can see the names of some submitting authors?
Example:

Frankly, I personally found the double-blind review pseudo-secrecy a bit overwrought and counterproductive. Sometimes you can easily guess who the authors are. When you don't: once one of my postdocs submitted a paper and was so thorough in hiding our identity, that the reviewers rejected the paper because it was not referring to 2-3 of our own papers (we had referred to 2 of the most relevant papers), and basically accused us of not giving proper credit (to ourselves), and to have jumped on the bandwagon of the research of - ourselves. We didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Sometimes I can easily guess who a particular reviewer is, too.

In the example case, I'd say no. These Twitter posts fail to connect the Twitter user name (which isn't necessarily traceable to a specific human publicly, anyway) to the NAACL2016 submission. There is no title or submission numbers here and only one reference to a sub-specialty ("morphology") and a length ("long"). It'd be hard for a reviewer to break the blinding based just on that.
Also, the whole point of double-blind review is to reduce the (hopefully) unconscious bias against underrepresented groups through connecting names to gender, race, national origin, etc, and the unconscious bias in favor of well-represented, well-known luminaries in the field. A reviewer who breaks the blinding on purpose is working against this purpose and should be summarily dropped by the Program Chair from the Program Committee if discovered.  Unless you think you're a big name with a mediocre paper, it's rarely going to be worth trying to use alternative means to make it easy to unblind the paper. Everyone seems to agree that enough Googling is enough for any bright reviewer to unblind almost any paper they want (even though they shouldn't be trying).
I don't think there's much of a concern in cases like this. I'd be more concerned if someone with a lot of followers and an open Twitter pseudonym tweeted that they had just submitted paper "1234!" to NAACL2016.


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Is it appropriate to ask a job candidate if we can record their interview?
I am part of a faculty search committee. One round of our process is Skype interviews of top candidates. Not all of our committee will be able to attend each interview (even remotely).
Would it be appropriate to ask candidates if we can record their Skype interview to share among the committee? My concern is that candidates might not feel free to say no if they're uncomfortable being recorded.
In case it matters, this is in the United States.

It just seems a bad idea overall. Will the absent committee members even have time to watch recorded interviews? It's also a privacy issue.

There may be more issues than you raise here. Some people will say yes and feel intimidated. Some people will say no out of general principles. Some people will say yes and regret it later. Some people will say yes initially but decide otherwise in the middle of the interview.
I suggest that before you implement such a process you game it out thoroughly, developing a lot of what-if scenarios and how you will respond to them. I think an essential element, possibly with legal ramifications (though I don't know), is that you don't disadvantage anyone for giving either answer or for declining to give a reason.
Another possible issue is that some candidates may not be as candid as they would otherwise if they are being recorded. It isn't a case of being devious or calculating, just being cautious. Can my words come back to haunt me?
You will also need to decide what to do with the tapes and when to delete them and how to assure the candidate that you will do so, especially if requested. In particular, who will have access to the tapes and for how long?
Finally, if you develop a policy with a lot of nuances, you should publish it, probably online, and let the candidate have access to it prior to an interview.
But, overall, I'd suggest that in the case you mention of not everyone being available, that you make it possible for a follow up interview rather than taping. There are probably other issues here that I haven't considered.

Of course it is understood that you'll be disadvantaged if you say no, no matter what the policy says. Otherwise there is never a good reason to say yes. Even if (hopefully) declining the recording simply means that you'll have to undergo more interviews with other committee members, this is still a disadvantage.

Buffy gives an excellent, and pretty comprehensive answer. I have one consideration to add:
What message does it send to the candidate about your institution, that your entire committee is not available (even remotely) to attend the interview?
Perhaps it tells the candidate that the position is not terribly important to you.
Or that your institution is not organized enough to interview the right number of candidates, or include the right people on the committee.
If I'm a candidate for a job, there are rituals I'm used to encountering. If you disrupt the rituals, even with what seems like "good reason" on your end, it's possible you will inadvertently discourage the better candidates.

Almost always at least 10 candidates are given a Skype interview; interviewing 30 is common; I have heard of interviewing 80.  The point of the Skype interview is to give as many candidates as possible to make an impression on the committee.  Real interviews for a small number are held later and taken more seriously.  The position is important, but, with those numbers, no particular candidate is.  Frankly, it would be impossible to schedule all of the search committee for 15 hours of interviews.

This could be in the context of a position that gets 500 or even 1000 applicants.  If you were an applicant, would you rather the committee just had an in depth interview with 4 or 5 candidates, or would you prefer the chance of a preliminary round of interviews with 30 after which 3 or 4 are selected for an in depth interview?

@AlexanderWoo That sounds to me like the problem is that the committee can't figure out how to delegate and divide responsibilities.  If you're just doing these as a filter you don't need the entire committee in on it in the first place.  All you need is enough of the committee there to make a basic decision on whether someone is qualified to move on to the next round or not.  You don't need the full committee until you need the full committee.

@Alexander: Although I believe you that someone skyped with 80 people for a position, I do not believe that it was a good idea.  If I were an applicant, I would rather that I and everyone else only be interviewed for positions for which we were seriously considered.

@AlexanderWoo Interviewing 80 people for a position is a waste of time for 79 applicants and for all of the interview panel. With a large number of applicants, you just raise the triage bar until you have an acceptably small number to interview. The number interviewed should ideally be constant, whether you have 10 applicants or 1000.

When you have a lot of applicants, raising the triage bar is meaningless - the difference between the best looking applicant and the 50th best looking applicant will be just noise.  Maybe the right thing to do is to randomly throw all but 100 applications in the trash and evaluate just those 100.  (But let me make it clear that I don't advocate interviewing 80, and I also agree there's no need for every preliminary interview to be looked at by every committee member.)

I am taking aback by the accusations. These are hour long interviews for serious candidates. My colleagues and I have teaching schedules that are is disjoint as possible so students can take all of our classes. We also have different committee assignments and research responsibilities.  There are times that all four of us will be available, but I don't assume the times that are most convenient for us will work for the candidate. The reasons for recording interviews would be to treat each candidate as equally as possible and so we can pay attention to them rather than taking notes.

@EllenSpertus, I meant to consider your question from a purely practical perspective. I am certainly not concluding that you guys are inefficient, or have prioritized poorly; #1, I don't have enough evidence to draw such a conclusion, and #2 my opinion doesn't matter. My question (and it is only that) is whether your candidates might draw such a conclusion. Many factors will influence how they perceive you, and this is only one. I urge you to consider it, and draw your own conclusions. I don't accuse.

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How do I address a colleague in an 3-way email with a student?
In my department, professors go by their first names with students and each other. My colleagues in some other departments go by their title and last name. To convey their preference, when referring to such a colleague in conversation with a student, I will use the professor's name and title (e.g., "You should ask Prof. Walker.").
If I am on a 3-way email involving such a professor and a student we are jointly advising, do I address the professor by their first name, title, or not at all?

I have always heard people in this situation called by the name the addressee would use. Mom says "Go ask Dad," not "Go ask Jim." So if in your department, it's proper for the student to call them Professor Walker, that's what I would use.

Would you know how to address that professor if the 3 of you were having an in-person conversation together?  Honestly I think this is personal preference/situational, and you can always do something like address the professor by first name but mention to the student privately how to address "Prof Walker".

This answer is a bit meta, I guess. I would probably use a form of address that would seem comfortable to the student, since you are jointly teaching him/her. It would seem to make things like reply-all in an email more comfortable for the student. I'm sure your colleague will understand. If you are being a bit formal with the colleague you can echo that with the student. Ms. James and Prof. Smythe.
However, some places are first name only and always. Then it would be different.
One option, of course, is just to ask each person how they would like to be addressed and go with that. You will want to give your own preference as well when you ask.
Just note that whatever you do, you will be either emphasizing or de-emphasizing the authority structure. Either could be appropriate depending on other factors.

At our liberal arts college, students are always called by first names.

When I was teaching I was always "Buffy" to doctoral students and "Prof. Buffy" otherwise. Mostly this was student choice and it was hard to get even the doctoral students to use given names. Some undergraduates used informal titles only in person, such as Doc, or Prof. but never given names. But it was asymmetric. Students were mostly called by given name unless they were in trouble.


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Obligation to tell journal of flaws in paper previously reviewed?
The blog Retraction Watch posted an interesting question the other day about reviewing the same paper twice, rejecting it both times, and then later finding out it was published in a different journal. The reason for rejection was that the author(s) failed to mention previous work using the same dataset; seemingly a case of very similar publications (or piecemeal publication, or borderline plagiarism, however you want to describe it).
So what is an appropriate course of action for the reviewer in this circumstance?

Note: The original blog post has a pole with a few options, I see no reason to explicitly constrain responses to that particular set of possibilities.

Now that the paper has been published, your role is not that of a reviewer anymore, but is the same as any reader. Anyone might read the paper and draw the same conclusions as you.
As such, you can act just as any reader would act, without having to disclose your earlier role as a reviewer. It seems to me that you then have a choice of three options:

Write to the authors
Write a comment to their paper
Write to the editor, mentioning your doubts about the adequacy of references to the existing literature (including previous studies by the authors)

In your particular case, the only additional information that you (as a former reviewer) have is that the authors have been journal-shopping for their paper, and do not want to make the necessary modifications to it. This means that solution #1 is probably not going to be productive, because the authors acted in bad faith. So, you're left with #2 and #3.
If you choose to write a public comment, you definitely cannot say that you were a reviewer for a previous version of the journal. On the other hand, if you write to the editor, I think you could reasonably give him that information (“I was a reviewer of this particular paper for another journal”), because (i) it may change his point of view of the author's honesty, (ii) he will treat it as confidential information.

I would suggest contacting the editors of the journal where it was published and pointing out the problem. However, the problem of salami slicing (to chose one expression) publications are not necessarily grounds for retraction so not much may happen. What will at least be achieved by such a contact is to make editors aware of the behaviour, which may be a very small victory in the battle against such publications.
In cases like this it also pays to look at cases brought up by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). I found one case on An attempt to publish data already published elsewhere which may be interesting to read. Each individual case must be weighed against these COPE cases and evaluated separately. In the linked case, retraction of both papers was in fact the resolution. It may be useful to point the editors towards the COPE site and any COPE case that might be applicable.
I handled a case where someone published a paper in what they thought was in-house "publication" ("" indicating the didn't see it as published). The submitted paper was more or less a copy of the other with another years worth of data added. The problem was that the in-house publication had an ISSN number and had to be counted as a real publication. We rejected the paper much to the dismay of the first author. The point is that some people try to publish and from pressure or ignorance end up in these bad situations.