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Should a teacher help if the student does not ask for it?
Alice is teaching a class and one student is clearly not understanding the material very well. Should she approach the student (e.g. ask to meet after class, write an email, or during class itself if it's not a lecture) and offer to help?
The argument for "yes" is that although the student might not ask for help, he or she wants to pass the course, so the teacher's intervention is appropriate. Some students also come from conservative cultures, are afraid to be seen as a fool, or are simply shy.
The argument for "no" is that it's possible the student wants to puzzle it out himself/herself. Instead, Alice should just make herself available for consultation. If the student does not make use of all the resources at his or her disposal, it's not her fault.
Is there any evidence that one style of teaching or the other is preferable?

As written, this question has potential to be quite interesting, but isn't clear to me.  I need some examples.  What form of help are you imagining?  Waiting for a student to come to office hours vs. tracking him or her down in the library or computer lab, or what?

@aparente001 waiting for the student to come to office hours is taking the "no" approach. "Yes" might be something like, talking to the student after class, during tutorials or by email - where the teacher makes the first move.

So the first move basically amounts to an offer to help?  Nothing that anyone could remotely interpret as pushy, pestering, or god forbid, stalking? // Is a tutorial a once a week class where students ask questions about the homework, and work some practice problems at the blackboard?

@aparente001 yes to 1 & 3, although in my experience tutorials are specialized classes that explicitly deal with how to solve the homework (in contrast to lectures, which cover the material in a general sense). As for 2, I suppose it depends on the student, who knows how he/she will interpret the move.

To me it's unclear, whether you are referring to solely learning problems or other (more personal problems) as well. To me the answer depends strongly on this difference.

@OBu learning problems only - will edit the question.

I would recommend taking out the political piece, as it doesn’t seem to be useful to the question.

I think the question as it stands now is on topic and should remain open.  The answer might appear obvious to some, but clearly it is not obvious to everyone.

Part of teaching is figuring out if what you want to teach is actually understood. This is something you should be doing continuously. As part of that you automatically find the students that struggle more than others, and that typically offers natural moments in which you can discuss what that student can do to improve things. So I don't see how someone can teach effectively without answering "yes" to your question.

I agree.  As a teaching assistant (grader), if I saw in the homeworks that a student was floundering, I would write a note, e.g. "Please come and see me in office hours." In office hours, I would get to know the student as a whole person a little bit and try to get an idea what the source of the difficulty was, so as to be able to advise the student, e.g. perhaps s/he had skipped over a prereq; perhaps there was a language barrier; perhaps the student was taking too heavy a course load; perhaps the student had misunderstood their degree requirements, etc.

Also, as a student, I remember taking Data Structures with Pascal having taken my Pascal course at a community college that hadn't gone very in depth.  Some of the questions I asked in class resulted in an aha moment for the instructor who suddenly realized that there were some basic facts about Pascal that, if I learned them, would make things fall into place for me.  Once he realize this, he was then able to steer me in the right direction.

When I am teaching excel, I often find when walking around that I can see an error in the student's spreadsheet and I just say quietly as I walk by "You should check cell A3".
What happens next is either they sort it themselves or they then ask for help...
As I am available in that workshop, some students will ask before I walk by, others as above and some keep quiet either because they get it or just don't want to ask...

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Did my instructor somehow pass the buck to me?
When I was TAing a course, some students came to meet me to talk about marking issues. Earlier, the instructor had said that if students cannot reach an agreement with TAs they should talk to the instructor. Thus when I saw some students disputing marks, I referred them to the instructor. However, the instructor later sent me an email saying he couldn't decide the marks as the TAs made the marking scheme. In my view, he somehow refused to fulfill his duty and passed the buck to me.

Possible duplicate of What to do about "grade grubbers?"

Rapidturtle, email is good for lots of things. But not for everything.  If the communication is not working well via email, then visit the instructor in his or her office hours, or stop by the professor's office and ask if s/he has a minute to talk, or request an appointment by email (e.g. "Can I stop by this afternoon to talk about a grading issue?").  The conversation may last less than five minutes -- that's okay.

Basically, the TAship is a way to cover the cost of your graduate studies.  Be efficient.  Avoid major conflicts.  You will only be working for a particular professor for 3 1/2 months and then you'll move on to another TA assignment.  Just try to work things out the best you can with the professor, knowing that you won't be working for this person long term.

There is no unanswered question here.  This is a rant, not a question.

Generally, unless the mark is extremely, obviously wrong, the professor should support the decision made by the TA. However, this means that when there is a grading dispute you cannot resolve with the student, you need to refer the student to the professor, but also talk to the professor yourself, explaining your marking scheme and reasoning behind the grade. Then the professor is equipped to explain to the student why they got the mark they deserve. You cannot expect the professor to moderate a dispute unless they actually have the grading scheme and your side of the story.
Also, you shouldn't immediately pass the student on. Let them present their case to you first, and explain to them why you assigned the grade you did. Nine times out of ten, the student is happy with that. You should only refer the one out of ten who refuse to see reason to your professor.

I did meet an aggressive student who disagreed with my decision and refused to talk to the professor. I had no idea what to do then.

@Rapidturtle In that case I suggest just calmly repeating "I have explained my reasoning, and you have not provided any reason for me to change your grade. If you are unhappy, you can go speak to the professor." If the student persists without offering anything new, say "This conversation does not fell productive right now. You're welcome back when you have calmed down, but right now I'd like you to leave my office."

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Who writes the recommendation letters for returning student PhD applicants after a big hiatus?
The answers to previous questions indicate it's possible to apply for and complete a PhD even at age 65+ (example, another example).
If these applicants did undergraduate studies at a conventional age of 20+, by age 65+, their undergraduate supervisors are probably retired or deceased. Who writes the recommendation letters then (especially if the applicant's job did not involve research)?
If the answer to this question is also applicable to all students whose supervisors are retired or deceased (e.g. a campus shooting kills all of a student's supervisors), I'll edit the question to include the broader scope.

I applied to grad school after working and my boss wrote me a letter of recommendation. Is there a particular reason you think the answer wouldn't be "coworkers, colleagues, bosses, and anyone else competent to evaluate the person's work"? Is there some aspect you expect to be different between 65+ year olds and 35 year olds?

@StellaBiderman don't graduate schools usually require at least one academic reference?

It don't know. I do think it seems silly to expect someone's undergraduate professors to write them meaningful letters of recommendation 10 years later, let alone 30. Presumably the PhD applicant has a relevant career, and has met and worked with academics and PhD-holders in their career capacity. I also suspect that 65+ year old applicants are sufficiently outside the norm that the usual rules don't apply.

@StellaBiderman that requires the applicant to know people who can comment on the applicant's research ability however. Even if the applicant knows some academics or PhD holders, if the career does not involve research, they might not be familiar with the applicant's research ability.

Are you asking out of curiosity, or what?  // There's going to be some variation among individuals in how the person would approach this. // Sometimes in this situation it helps to take one or two courses as a non-matriculated student, and ask the instructor(s) for a current recommendation. // If your former professors are gone or won't remember you, you can send an unofficial transcript to a department administrator, explaining the problem, and asking for a somewhat generic LOR.

I am not aware of a specific rule requiring academic references. It may be more a matter of common sense. If an applicant has recently completed a lower degree, the committee may expect to hear from professors who saw the applicant's work.
I was admitted to a PhD program over 25 years after my master's degree was awarded. What I had done in the last quarter of a century was far more relevant than my last academic experience.
I got references from my manager, my prior manager, and a chief technology officer. The last person was less familiar with the details of my work, but had a PhD and connections to the department where I was applying.

Did you work in research during the 25 years? If not, do you know what happens if the applicant did not work in research?

@Allure My work was not specifically labeled "research", and resulted in trade secret information and patents, not published papers. On the other hand, several of the projects were at least as substantial and difficult as my dissertation research.

This is a useful but limited answer, since it covers one possible path.  I'm kind of thinking the question is too broad and too hypothetical.

@aparente001 I'm inclined to agree. I can say "This set of references worked given my situation". I can't say anything, for example, about what would happen for someone with a similar gap who was not in a demanding technical position in their proposed field of study.


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Is endowing a professorship less effective in a lower-ranked university than in a higher-ranked one?
This is a follow-up question to What does it take for a lower-ranked university to compete with a top-ranked one?.
Wolfgang Bangerth's answer says that "Faculty will generally only go to places where there are also good students, and the best students go where they can historically expect to get an excellent education." Does this mean that if I want to endow a professorial chair, and I want the endowed professor to produce world-class research, I should do so at a top-ranked university instead of a lower-ranked one? The argument being that, to produce world-class research, one presumably needs top faculty, top students, and money. The endowment covers the money aspect, but there's still faculty & students, and if those gravitate towards top universities then it would presumably also make more sense to endow a chair at a top university.
If the answer is "yes", top universities such as Harvard and Oxford already have billions of dollars in endowment. Is there any way out of this rich-get-richer situation? (I'll ask this as a separate question if it is unrelated to the present one).

Why not just setup a foundation to award grants? Seems more efficient than funding a single professor.

Could you edit your title to make it clear what the comparison is?

@aparente001 comparison? What do you mean?

Thanks for responding to my comment.  The title says "less effective."  When I see a comparison with "less than" or "more than," I like to be sure what the thing is being compared to.

@aparente001 does it make more sense now?

@StrongBad I'd rather not do that because I want to free the professor from having to write funding proposals. I'm hoping to offer the endowed professor a lifelong salary plus enough money to do whatever he or she wants academically. C.f. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/103525/donating-money-to-scientific-research-after-my-death

@Allure - Thanks.  Does the new title match what you're asking?

Conjecture: a productive researcher wouldn't necessarily need a special endowed professorship to be motivated to go to, e.g., an Ivy League university.  To go somewhere lower ranked, perhaps the endowed position would help balance things out. (?)

@aparente001 looks fine, I don't see much of a difference between the two phrasings.

It's just that when we want to make a comparison, and say that A is less (adjective) than B, it can be confusing to the reader if we omit "than B," and just say, "A is less (adjective)."  The reader is left wondering, "less (adjective) than what?".  Does that make things clearer?

"I want the endowed professor to produce world-class research"  It's better to fund average research than best-in-the-world research from a cost/benefit ratio perspective.

Does this mean that if I want to endow a professorial chair, and I
  want the endowed professor to produce world-class research, I should
  do so at a top-ranked university instead of a lower-ranked one?

First, "rank" is a tricky thing. It may not be that a top-ranked school is "The best place for X research...", especially if you are talking about niche topics. To use an example, arguably the two of the best places for mathematical biology in the U.S. are the University of Tennessee and Ohio State, neither one of which are what most people would consider a "top-ranked university".

The argument being that, to produce world-class research, one
  presumably needs top faculty, top students, and money.

In my example above, both those institutions have all of those things, along with a steady stream of top postdocs.
The existence of an endowed position can help recruit those top people. For example, my own position has considerably more hard money than is typical in my field. This is a luxury that I have to consider when thinking about moving to "better" institutions - they reduce my quality of life.
There's also the question of context - if you want to endow a Aspen Tree Conservation, my guess is the University of Colorado is a better bet than Harvard. See also many things that are done at Land Grant schools in the U.s.
There's an additional argument for endowing a chair at a "lesser" university - the "Big Fish in a Small Pond" concept. An endowed chair at Harvard is one among many such positions, and may not be able to command resources, operate with impunity, etc. that someone at a lower ranked institution could. That can definitely impact someone's effectiveness.
I think the appropriate answer for "Where should I endow a chair" (besides, clearly, me) is "Where is the best research on what I care about taking place". That's very hard to summarize with something as crude as a rank.

As an endowed faculty member at a lesser university in the Western U.S., I would say that there is a sweet spot for "making a difference" by establishing an endowed position.   I agree with much of what has been written.  You want to find a university with a historically active and productive research program in the technical area or discipline that you want to support at a less well-funded university.  Reputation is important.
Putting money into a program that has no reputation is pretty much a waste, because one endowed position isn't going to change anything for all the reasons stated by others.
Some rather unproductive research universities have true areas of excellence, either by fate of geography or history.  Support those areas of excellence.  Your investment in these programs will have much more impact that a similar investment at at top-tier university with a multi-billion dollar endowment.

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What can/should be done about journals that spam potential contributors?
I'm a very early stage researcher and my first two conference papers could have been better, but that doesn't stop new journals spamming me with offers to publish my work. This morning I received two emails from:

Journal of Communication and Computer (http://www.davidpublishing.com/)
International Journal of Advanced Computer Science (http://ijpg.org/index.php/IJACSci)

Now this is clearly spam, they know nothing about my research area or they wouldn't be asking me, and my first reaction is to not waste my time reformatting work that I've already done. But am I missing something here?
Personally I feel that publishing in these general purpose repositories dilutes the (our!) publishing model and makes it harder to find related research.
So what is, if anything, being done about this?

I agree with you that there is a serious problem with these spam "journals", but I think this question would need some refocusing to be productive here (right now, it is very much discussion/complaint oriented).  Incidentally, the offer is presumably to publish a longer journal version of your conference paper.  That does have some value and is fairly standard in computer science, although these would be terrible places to publish the journal version.

Yeah I was struggling to make this into a question rather than a rant. I'm genuinely interested to know if there is something we, as a community, are doing about this though.

Are you familiar with Beall's list (http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/)?  He is an academic librarian who compiles a list of predatory publishers.  Of course there's always a little debate about how to place the publishers near the borderline, but I see this list as a really valuable service.  Sadly, there are so many of these publishers that nobody could make a truly complete list.

Wowzors. That is a long list. Thanks. I'll add the ones that I've been contacted by to the list.

So what is, if anything, being done about this?

Ignore them.
No, you are not missing anything.  These journals are scams, not serious scientific literature.
If you plan to publish a longer version of your conference paper, send it to one of the journals that your paper cites, or at least to a journal where you recognize a significant fraction of the editorial board.
Sadly, trying to "doing something about" these scammers is as futile as "doing something about" fake email quota warnings, diploma mills, exiled Nigerian princes, international email lotteries, and three-card monte.  Set up your mail program to blacklist their emails if you can, but then move on with your life.

If you don't regard these journals as worth publishing in, then chances are no-one else will either. If you think you have unpublished work that people would be interested in reading, but isn't worth submitting for whatever reason, arXiv seems a good place to put it. There are lots of conference proceedings on there.


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How to evaluate the quality of a conference that has a high ERA ranking, but whose organizer has a lot of negative reviews online?
In Australia we follow something known as the ERA ranking, when submitting papers to journals and conferences. My lab stresses publication in venues which are graded as only A or A(star), as per this system ( ERA-A increases possibilities of funding). In the area of biomedical engineering there is a specific conference which I found is ranked as ERA-A. Not a lot of international biomedical conferences are ERA A-ranked.
The problem is I found a lot of negative reviews about the conference organizers online and therefore am skeptical about sending my paper there. Yet, I also know that an ERA-A rank publication very early in my doctoral program can make a good impact on the committee, when my doctoral assessment review comes up later this year. Moreover, this will release some pressure/tension in terms of the doctoral review and I could go on to work on larger targets without worrying about the doctoral assessment ( since it would be considered good progress if I can show an ERA-A paper in the first year of my program).
However much I try, I have failed to understand how this conference gets a top australian rank, when there are so many negative things said online about these conference organizers. One possibility, is that this particular conference is the only one which may be famous. The other is a lot australian academics might have been ranking it as ERA-A. But if so, why only Australia? What does the rest of the world say? The third possibility is that the online reviews are dubious claims made to malign the organisation.
How to evaluate the quality of a conference like this?

This question appears to attract a lot of unsubstantiated answers, probably from the same people who created the websites mentioned in the post. I am therefore going to generalize it following this answer and delete the answers that don't provide any useful information about conferences with these characteristics.

You shouldn't take the ERA rankings too seriously.  Ranking ten of thousands of journals was an enormous job, and they did amazingly well given the size of the task.  However, in the process they made a few questionable judgment calls and every once in a while an outright mistake.
For example, in my field of mathematics, the list of A-rated journals looks rather good overall, but there are a few surprises and at least one journal I am convinced doesn't remotely deserve an A (Fuzzy Sets and Systems).
I'd recommend asking your advisor or other faculty members for their opinion about the IASTED biomedical engineering conference (rather than relying on opinions from random people on the internet).  If they are familiar with it, then they should have an opinion about whether the ERA A rating is well deserved.  If they aren't familiar with it, then that is itself a bad sign.  Not being familiar with a C journal in your specialty is understandable, but not being familiar with a genuine A journal would be more surprising.
You can also investigate it yourself.  Have they published any papers you've read or seen cited?  Can you find any papers in their proceedings that impress or excite you?  If so, then at least your paper would be in good company.  If not, then that's another bad sign.

After taking a look at some of the feedback online, I would say your third possibility is correct.  The websites speaking against IASTED sound as if they were all created by the same person/people, and they appear to be using keyword spamming to defame IASTED conferences.  Actually, the malicious websites I saw were attacking not only IASTED, but the IEEE, WORLDCOMP, and several other major conferences.
The BioMed series is in its eleventh year, and is technically cosponsored by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.  In fact, the IEEE EMB has been involved in many of the past iterations as well.  Just a quick look at the information from last year’s conference (http://www.iasted.org/conferences/pastinfo-791.html) shows established speakers from credible universities, including the chair, Prof. Aldo Boccaccini.  I have colleagues who have worked on IASTED conferences, and they will attest to the double-blind peer review and plagiarism checks in place.
I would trust the ERA rating; agencies like this are very careful as to which conferences they will endorse.  Hope that helps!

I agree that a lot of these websites look like they're written by the same person/people, so they can't be considered independent evidence.  However, it's not clear to me that they are necessarily malicious (in the sense of deliberately spreading false information).  I know nothing specific about IASTED or WORLDCOMP, but there are indeed a lot of junk conferences out there.  The IEEE complaints raise a genuine issue: the IEEE makes money by hosting proceedings from some very questionable conferences (in addition to many good ones), and it's reasonable to complain about that.


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Is it legal and ethical to post my notes of a conference I am attending on my website?
I'm due to attend a conference soon, and plan to take notes on the talks I attend. My note-taking software of choice (org-mode) can easily export to HTML. Is it legal to post my notes on my website? Is it ethical?

Aside from whether it's legal or ethical, I'd strongly recommend asking each speaker whether they mind if you post your notes (for example, by a quick e-mail).  If you upset or offend the speaker, then that's a problem even if you have the right to do it.  If the speaker if OK with posting the notes, then I'd recommend including a few sentences explaining that they are your personal notes and that the speaker is not necessarily responsible for any errors or lack of clarity.

Strongly seconding @AnonymousMathematician's comment and the answer of Omen... That is, whether or not it is "legal", asking permission, and making a disclaimer, is clearly necessary. Without both of those, in the U.S., anyway, there could be in-principle legal issues... but, more importantly, professional issues if you inadvertently acquire a reputation as "jerk", etc.

I am surprised about some of the answers here. In my field (applied computer science), something presented in a conference can pretty much by definition not be considered "private". I have never heard of anybody complaining about public notes. In fact, there is one Assistant Prof. from TU Delft who is pretty well-known (postively!) for live-blogging from major conferences: http://www.felienne.com/archives/category/liveblogging

@xLeitix: I think one difference is that CS conferences are actual publication venues (so everything presented is part of a publication, namely the corresponding conference paper; if someone advertises your paper further, so much the better).  I don't see how anyone could object in that case.  It gets much more awkward if someone is speaking about work in progress or hasn't finished a paper yet.  Then they could be upset if someone else writes up notes and puts them online.  This scenario occurs more often in other fields than in CS.

@AnonymousMathematician Sure, but even in conference-talks-are-not-publications fields, I am wondering why you are giving a talk if you don't want people to know about your work (even if it is work in progress). Not saying it is wrong, only that I am thoroughly surprised by the notion.

I'd guess most people wouldn't mind (and it might not be rational to mind), but some might.  It's probably not about keeping the work secret, but rather how it's presented.  For example, the notes may be sketchy or misleading and give a worse account of the material than the talk did or than the upcoming paper will.  Once the paper is out, potentially misleading notes may still be annoying but are much less of an issue.  In the meantime, it could be viewed as scooping the authors with an inferior exposition of their upcoming paper.

Mathematics has a someone quirky but strong cultural distinction between informal and formal.  Formal things are expected to be totally correct and proven and it's embarrassing if they're wrong.  The act of putting something in writing is often seen as moving it from informal to formal, and hence has the potential to be embarrassing to the speaker.  That is the key issue isn't public/private but formal/informal.

This may be field-specific, my answer refers to public (in a way that attendees do not need any security clearance or something) computer science conferences:
I do not see any issues with posting these notes. In this day and age, commenting on whatever talk is currently being held live from within the talk on Twitter and Co. is becoming commonplace.
I have been to several conferences whose organizers specifically recommended a particular Twitter tag so the comments from the audience members could be quickly found online, and once, there was even a projector set up that would display any comments posted tagged with the conference tag throughout the run of the conference. Likewise, photos from the conference presentations have sometimes been posted by the conference organizers and others.
One of the nice features of this is that attribution comes almost for free - the conference tag already points out the event, and the time at which live comments are posted indicates what talk is currently being held. To make sure, you can always include a small note about the paper number or title, but that's already sufficient to unambiguously identify the paper and the authors based on the conference schedule.
Lastly, even though you may want to express certain opinions about the talks, in most cases it is generally good to be respectful toward the authors. Nothing is won by publicly humiliating them in any way; if you have objections against their presentations, make them specific and tangible. Also, make sure you are aware whether you are referring to an actual shortcoming of the underlying research, or just to a presentation issue due to limited presentation time. If you think the issues are serious, you might even try and contact the author for a clarification, and then integrate that additional knowledge when writing or updating your note. The only time at a conference when I saw participants write somewhat respectless Tweets on a talk (and thought they were rather appropriate) was when a business person literally flooded the audience with buzzwords (yes, in a buzzword bingo-enabling way) and thus delivered zero useful contents. That is definitely an absolute exception in conference talks.

In the recent past, I have been to several conferences that have expressly asked those live tweeting conferences not to post specifics about the talks - like a picture of a results slide, or a particular effect estimate.

@Fomite: Interesting, and this may very well be field-dependent. In the year since writing this answer, I have been to various other conferences, and the trend I have observed was that conference organizers increasingly encourage attendees to tweet about talks they are listening to, and to include photos. And a few conferences try to publish full recordings as "video lectures" of all talks, in which case everything said and shown is accessible worldwide, anyway.

See here: http://www.nature.com/news/conference-tweeting-rule-frustrates-ecologists-1.18207 I've also seen a hesitance at some medical conferences for preliminary work.

@Fomite: Sure, I don't doubt that this hesitance exists. I just find it rather bizarre and a bit damaging to the dissemination of research, for reasons pointed out by another user in a comment. Also, I wonder how asking a presenter is supposed to work, as tweeting about a talk is a spontaneous action that "lives" based on being done live. Before the talk, you don't know yet you are going to tweet about it, and ...

... afterwards, it is too late/the opportunity has passed. Conferences related to my field increasingly point out a specific hashtag (e.g. this, or this), and this is usually understood as an invitation to report live from within the talks one is attending. See, for instance, this collection of photos from such a conference, which certainly show specifics.

ESA asked presenters to disclose ahead of time whether or not they were okay with it - essentially affirmative consent for tweeting. Which I get - because some conference organizer somewhere has decided to create a hashtag doesn't actually mean everyone wants in.

The question of whether it is legal and ethical to take notes intersects with a number of different areas, each of which needs to be considered:

Expectation of Privacy: Are you going to be exposing the speaker to a level of publicity inappropriate with their reasonable expectation of privacy?
Copyright: Are you going to be violating copyright on the speaker's intellectual property?
Non-Disclosure Agreements: Are you going to be violating a non-disclosure agreement that you or your institution has signed? Such agreements are most likely to be the case when commercial secrets or non-filed patentable material is involved.
Security classification, arms control treaties, export restrictions: Certain data and technologies are subject to special regulation due to their potential to be used for harm.

For a typical open-registration scientific conference, you have no need to worry about non-disclosure agreements or controlled information. If you are in a situation where those are applicable, you will most certainly be told in no uncertain terms, and will probably have had to sign specific paperwork to take responsibility for this fact.
These issues, though, are the ones that can cause real trouble if you screw them up.  No open-registration scientific conference should ever have them apply, however.
That leaves copyright and privacy.  Copyright isn't a problem if you're taking notes: that's your highly lossy paraphrasing of their material, and as long as you don't try to pass it off as your own work, it's both legal and ethical.  If you were recording audio or video, that would be a different question, as well as potentially problematic for privacy.
As for privacy: if somebody has signed up to present their work in an unrestricted meeting, there is no expectation of privacy for the work. As for the person themselves, scientists are semi-public figures: as long as you are commenting on the public and professional aspects of the person, that is certainly acceptable (i.e., it's OK to talk about a scandal about a retraction, but at least ethically problematic to talk about rumors that they were raised by drug-addicted wolves).
Beyond that, it's common courtesy to make sure you get names and attributions right, as well as keeping you from embarrassing yourself.  But your personal notes aren't a record with any special standing, and as long as you keep from actively slandering the speakers you should be fine.  You still might cause trouble for a speaker who screws up and inappropriately discloses nuclear weapons secrets on pre-patent IP, but that's more their problem than yours...

I'm not a legal expert, but regardless - it is ethical from first principles. You're a researcher, and your duty - as well as part of the purpose of the conference - is to expand human knowledge and understanding. The publication of your notes (with due attribution of claims, mentioning of speakers etc.) directly promotes that purpose.
If it's illegal, then that's bad law. Try to get this law repealed in your country; try to get people to circumvent it en masse; or try to find a legal loophole to allow you to publish your notes.

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Recommending venues and organizations in a paper
Some co-authors and I are currently writing a position paper that aims to introduce Community A to a set of problems in Community B, in which collaboration between Communities A and B is likely to be helpful.  This paper is intended for submission to a peer-reviewed special issue that has invited such position papers.
There are already some meeting series that are intended to help foster such collaborations, but they are not very widely known.  In our concluding recommendations, we are thinking of including a list of them (perhaps as a table), as an aid for readers who are motivated by our paper to seek out A/B collaborations.
Is such "advertisement" appropriate for a peer-reviewed publication, particularly given that some of the authors are involved in organization of some of the meetings?

The question will in the end be up to the journal chief editor(s) to decide. I am assuming the publishing is through a journal although it is not explicitly stated.

@PeterJansson Yes, it's for a journal, as implied by "special issue". However, while ultimately an editor might step in to dictate a choice, I'm more interested in whether it would be perceived as reasonable or unseemly by a reader.

As far as the journal is concerned, this would be a thing to ask your editorial contact at the journal.
As far as the readers are concerned, I'd ask myself: what's most useful to the reader? I'd have thought that pointing to an online resource elsewhere, is more useful than a list within the article itself. In an article, the list is frozen in time, and quickly outdated, with no option of maintenance. As a linked external online resource, then there would be the option of updates and maintenance - and even if you don't expect to have the resource yourself to maintain it, someone else might take over the upkeep.
Now, you would need to be careful in how you present that online resource, so that it didn't look like spamming (it will help considerably if the resource is not seen as promoting a particular business or university). Precedent is your friend: have a look through recent articles in your target journal, and discuss with your editorial contact at the journal, to find a presentation that will be acceptable to all.

In acknowledgements you can put pretty much anything, as long as it is not too long.
However, if it is anything lengthy (e.g. more than 3 recommendations) I would strongly encourage to put it in a different form than a research paper. Eg. a column in this journal (if it is a applicable), or (in acknowledgements) a link to a website listing opportunities.


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How to handle grading a quiz question which had no correct answer due to a mistake?
I recently gave a 3 question quiz worth 3 points. I made a typo on one question that led to none of the multiple choice questions being correct. What is the best way to handle this? Give everyone credit for that question? Curve the quiz one point upwards? Remove that question from the grade?

What is the difference between giving everyone 1 credit and curving up the quiz by 1 point ?

I have experienced your situation and found no good solution. However, it taught me a lesson: all of the subsequent MCQ I wrote contained, for each question, an answer "None of the other answers".

Out of curiosity: What typo changes a question or answer so badly that the correct answer cannot be identified any more? The last typo I made was writing "Netwerk" instead of "Netzwerk", and none of my students had any problems understanding what I meant...

Often in multiple choice tests the difference between the right and wrong answers will be quite subtle to force the test taker to think harder about which one is correct. A typo like putting a decimal point in the wrong place, or writing the wrong units could easilly leave the right answer no more plausible than the wrong ones.

I would give everyone credit. It ameliorates any issues with people complaining they spent time on that question to the detriment of the others (like removing would). If all your quizzes are worth three points, it keeps that consistent too.
My answer might be different for something higher-stakes, but earn good will by just scoring it for everyone.
Curving (if you mean adding 1 to each score) doesn't make any sense, since those that randomly got it "correct" would get an extra point for no reason.

Yes, my quizzes are very low stakes, so that makes perfect sense.

To further emphasize your last sentence: no one got it correct. Even if someone chose the answer that was originally intended to be marked correct, OP has identified that through their typo, this answer was not correct, either.

@BryanKrause Well yes, that was my point. Added some scare quotes to clarify.


text:
What should I think after a very positive reply to cold mail?
Recently, I started sending cold mails to profs for upcoming PhD applications. Two of them replied instantly right after my mail:

Thank you for contacting me, I am planning taking graduate students and I have these two xx and yy projects fits your background very well. I strongly encourage you to apply our program and you can write my name as your choice of PI.

I definetly know that doesn't mean I am already accepted or anything, but at least really encouraged me since now I feel like I have a better chance for admission than I thought at the beginning.
Problem is, they haven't asked for an interview or anyhing. One of them even asked me to apply for his theorist collaborators too (I'm working experimental and it's on my CV) to make sure I have a better chance for admission. I replied them both that it would be great to work under their investigation and projects they offer are the best topics I could wish for. (That's not a lie actually, both them are quite on point by my side.)
Now I really feel that something is missing. Should I take any action afterwards? I'm open for all kinds of advice.

What country is this for?

In many places, the system is that applications are reviewed by a committee of department faculty, not only by the PI.  An interview may or may not be part of the process at all.

I don't understand what you want to know. They encouraged you to apply.

" Thank you for contacting me, I am planning taking graduate students and I have these two xx and yy projects fits your background very well. I strongly encourage you to apply our program and you can write my name as your choice of PI."

As the professor's response indicates, the next action for you is to apply for the Ph.D. program and name this professor as your choice of PI. If there's no place on the application form to do that, then put it in your Statement of Purpose.

This is country dependent. Field dependent in some places also.

Certainly, but the professors themselves have told the OP what to do next.

PI's have a limited amount of influence, in many cases, in the application process or acceptance decisions.  The action they're suggesting you take is to actually apply for admission to the graduate programs at their schools.  Aside from hiring you into a role that has nothing to do with your being a student, this is really all that they can do.
If you apply, should you get in, you will likely be subject to all the same factors involved in any graduate student being accepted into any lab.  They don't owe you a slot in their lab, though they may be well predisposed to bringing in a student whose research interests align with theirs.

PI's have a limited amount of influence, in many cases - Even when I'm on the admissions committee and I get emails like this, if I give an encouraging reply doesn't mean I will push for admission.  I need to look at the complete application, and compare with other applicants that year, before deciding on my rankings.


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Pressure from supervisor to use the software he is developing
I am currently a PhD student in a computational lab. My supervisor manages a program that is relevant to our field and which is supposed to be better and faster. Our group is mainly focused on application. (No PhD students are here to code. There was one but they left.) Personally, my research project focuses on using "new tools", the software is vaguely mentioned, but it is not the main focus.
I tried to use this software, but after nearly one year of testing, the conclusion is clear: it is not adapted for my project.
My supervisor does not accept that. When I explain the problems to him, I basically get a long monologue of why this is normal, and that research takes time. Also, sometimes he asks me to fix the code myself.
Because I am worried about the quality of my PhD, I started to do work on my own with another open-source software. I got interesting results which I started to write about. He now wants to introduce his software in the paper, basically changing the entire story.
Unfortunately, he seems to be a better diplomat than a scientist, and it is really hard to discuss with him.
Now the question: If I work in a group which develops and represents software X, can I publish without using this software (if the paper could be done using it, naturally)?

If you do not know how to code, how do you know that the open source software does what it claims to do, and whether or not it is suitable for your analysis?

@Louic I don't have a CS degree. I have some experience with code. I understand the theory (mathematics) and until proved otherwise I assume it is well implemented in the software I want to use. Ultimately I compare my results to experimental data. If we had to read the source code of each functionality for each program, no one would ever be done with their PhD. Most of these programs have good reputation and have more than one million lines of code

I understand that not everybody has a CS degree, neither do I. But it sometimes makes sense to use (or adapt) a program that is well known and managed by your group. If the open source program is suitable for the job and that you know how each parameter influences the result you should be fine. But during my time at university I have seen plenty of examples where software is used to "fit" experimental data, but the underlying model or parameters are inappropriate, leading to invalid or useless results (with a perfect fit). I just wanted to highlight this possible other side of the story.

A side note: My mental health and overall mood are way more important than anything even my PhD. You need to try your best to do what is right regardless other considerations. Give the software other tries, but don't make using it a matter of life or death.

Did you brought your own funding, or are you funded from your supervisor's grant?

If you are sole author of a paper, then yes, you can organize it as you wish and use tools you feel appropriate. If you have co-authors then you need to agree.
But the other, unasked, question is whether it is wise to ignore a supervisor who has some influence over your future, both for finishing and thereafter. It is a question of finesse that you need to work out.
One thing your supervisor is correct about, is that things take time. But he should not make you suffer for the time it takes to improve his software.
I do suggest that you try to help him as much as reasonable with developing the software, and you may be in a good position to do so if you have alternate (and better) results with other software. If he is wise (perhaps questionable), then he should welcome that.
But, look to your own interests. You need to finish and develop your career. Outright refusal to work with him on this will probably be a negative.

Thank you for your answer. This software was released in the early 2000s and has around 500 000 lines of code. If I accept to spend months fixing the code (I am not a CS student), I am not even sure this will help my project at all: My supervisor told me the problem is coming from the code but previous students have a totally different opinion. What I can be sure of, is that I will find myself in an endless loop of "code fixing".

Learn the diplomacy side of things from him. Even if he is more diplomat than scientist and his software is really not relevant to you,  he has valuable skills that you can learn. Learn to say "no" without saying it, if you want that PhD

For better or worse, the advisor might consider the software they co-developed as a significant part of their research group's output.
In that context, it is entirely plausible to them that PhD students use this program, and -- as part of their work -- help improving it.
Having a student just dabble with other software is unlikely to result in a thesis that fits the experience and interests of the adviser.
One possible route could be to understand how/why the other software is better and to see how one could use this to improve the software developed by the lab.
If you feel strongly that you simply want to use other software, this research group is likely not be a good fit for you.

Thank you for your answer. "it is entirely plausible to them that PhD students use this program, and -- as part of their work -- help improving it.". He should have been honest about it in the project proposal (I might have refused the position) and gotten a CS student instead. Also, I am sure that's not how he sold the project to get the external funding he received for this PhD.

Unless the funding proposal was to support a specific, named, PhD student on a project of the student's choice, the proposal will in fact have been based on the track record of the professor, including his software. The only situation in which you can claim you were misled is if you brought your own PhD funding

Your main focus should be on getting results. If tool A can help you get results that you can’t get using tool B, then there is no question that the scientifically correct thing to do is to use tool A. It is literally your duty as a scientist to use the tool that you think is the correct one that’s adapted to your project and that will maximize the scientific value of your work. To bend to your advisor’s will on this seems to largely defeat the purpose of doing a PhD in the first place. Even if it leads you to a marginally more successful academic career, it will turn you into a cynical academic who believes that everything academics do is motivated by self-interest and pandering to people in positions of power rather than a desire to do good science.
However, it is also the case that…
a legitimate secondary goal is to keep your advisor happy. We live in the real world, not a Socratic utopia. In the real world, you are doing your work within the confines of academia, where it is expected that you will not just pursue scientific Truth but also show the ability to work as part of a team, and the humility and tact to defer to the wisdom and experience of your superiors (even on some occasions when they may not be quite as wise as they think they are).
The conclusion is that, in pursuit of this secondary goal, it would not be a betrayal of your principles to spend at least a modest amount of time doing things your advisor wants you to do even if you don’t want to do them or they seem pointless.* So I’d suggest that, in addition to using the scientifically correct tool you’ve identified, you also learn to work with your advisor’s software and try to incorporate some use of it into your thesis and/or papers, to the extent that that can be justified as supporting the science you are doing, even if only marginally so.
* Assuming your advisor isn’t asking you to do something that’s outright fraudulent or crackpotty, that is.
Finally, keep in mind that…
another legitimate secondary goal of a PhD is to learn useful skills. You may not think that your PhD should involve coding, but if you look at it a different way, your advisor is actually giving you a valuable opportunity to acquire some extremely useful and marketable coding skills. When I meet people from industry they tell me things like that software engineers are so much in demand these days that they “can write their own paychecks” (literally a phrase I heard from a senior HR manager at a large Silicon Valley company). So don’t underestimate the value of acquiring coding skills even if they don’t have a direct relevance to (your own personal vision of) what your PhD is about, or if acquiring these skills requires you to get out of your comfort zone. Indeed, it is precisely the things that take us out of our comfort zones that help us develop and grow as academics, researchers, or future [fill in the blank]’s.

As someone who has seen this arrangement (although with less pushy supervisors) from multiple points of view... Yes, you are not obliged to use the software. Go and publish on your own, learn to be an independent researcher!
That is not to say you have to be at odds with your supervisor about this issue should you choose to use something else. You say he is a good diplomat - learn from that! One example of good diplomacy would be getting a carte blanche for using any other software tools for your project by explaining how it would help developing his own software. Be more detailed and helpful with your feedback: if open-source project X worked but not your lab's own thing, why is that? What were the main obstacles and how could you or him improve on that? Could you directly borrow from these external projects?
I would give you a cautionary tale, however.
Having a holistic vision about the product is important. I have been working for about 5 years on a project (product A) which was meant to be a modern replacement for the industry standard thing going for upwards of $2000 per license. We have replicated the entire core functionality and added a couple of features of our own. The problem? No one has an idea of how to market it and the entirety of the development team was pretty much uninterested in doing so. It is used as a free alternative in courses in a couple of affiliated universities and that is it. Now the team has fallen apart and one of the members is working on what he deems a better UX replacement for the product A. It does have some nice touches, but is a huge mess architecturally and massively lacking features compared to the old one: I would expect it to grind to a complete halt in some 3-5 years if he decides to follow this path. But it got a lot more traction because he now has a vision of the product and pitches it more actively to prospective users.
The moral of the story? You might get good results, but they will be buried and forgotten unless they are either absolutely outstanding - which many of us not-so-secretly wish for - or you "sell" them well. Until you convince your supervisor of the value of your work, they will be a hindrance instead of helping you to realize your potential. Turning your assets into liabilities is one easy way to get nowhere at all.

The problem is that the supervisor is using OP as the target of their sales pitch instead of being a scientist about it. In your particular case, I would branch out and get to know people in industry that do marketing. If you have the product, you will have no problem getting marketing for it with the right group. No need to do it yourself.

@MadPhysicist Yes, but this happens quite a lot in general with research (cf. people at the conferences "it is more of a comment than a question ... why don't you use our approach?"). And yes, my perspective is biased, admittedly - the history repeats itself, and no further than past autumn we have presented another product at the exhibition. It was felt like teenage sex talk: everyone is convinced how great it is, but no one has a clue about how to actually approach it. The startup culture is nonexistent here. We tried (and are still trying). Thanks for the advice though.

For OP's thesis the future of the software beyond his thesis is irrelevant. I know several software that grew successful in scientific community without earning any money. Some are open source projects with academic contributors all over the world.

@usr1234567 For the thesis per se, yes. There is still possible value in networking, but this is not the only option out there - just one to consider. And yes, I perhaps didn't phrase it cautiously enough: the goal was not necessarily to make money, just to grow the project (at least for the example I've given in the post). One still needs resources to keep going; open source sometimes works, but mature projects tend to end up needing a core team as the users start expecting support instead of "just fork it and do it yourself". It was also aimed at people with no programming skills, after all.

You might want to try to understand why your supervisor prefers that you use his code. Is it because developing this code is part of the grant you're funded from (as mentioned in another answer)? One reason that hasn't been mentioned yet is:
It's much easier for your supervisor to check the correctness of your work (configuration files, etc) if you use software that they're familiar with.
One reason that the supervisor might prefer that you use his software is that he understands it well and can therefore adequately check the correctness of your methodology. A PI is often held responsible for the research that comes out of their lab (especially if they are funding you through a grant) and it is also their responsibility to train in you correct practices. It might be difficult for them to do this if you are using software that they are not familiar with.
I don't require my students to use only software that I'm familiar with, but I strongly suggest it, since I can provide them with help and examples of working configurations. In some cases, they have wanted to use different codes and I have allowed it with sufficient justification (the code they want to use has features the code I use doesn't have). In these cases, I ask them to explain to me how the code works and sometimes I read the documentation to ensure what they are doing is correct. Beginning students sometimes don't have as good of an understanding of what can go wrong with calculations as I do and I am better able to spot problems even if I don't know the software well. Honestly, I don't always trust my beginning students to set up the calculations correctly because there are so many ways to make mistakes. This is my job as their supervisor.
One idea to get your supervisor to accept you using the new code might be to run some test cases (maybe simple toy models) demonstrating that the software you are using provides similar results to his software. You could also show what is hard to do with his software that you'd like to do, but is easier to do with the software you found.

There a are two questions:

Regarding your paper:
You should stick to the facts which software was used to produce the
results. You can explain that both would lead to the same result and
explain different approaches, run-times etc. If the results are
different, you can discuss these differences. You also can mention the
software from your advisor in the introduction as similar products.
But you should not stretch the truth - for whatever reason.
Regarding your PhD thesis:
With the given situation, I don't think you will graduate under your
advisor with a different software then the one he develops. Either you
find another advisor or figure a way to get used to it and the way
your advisor works. Talk to other lab members how they handle the
situation. Probably you are going to suffer. Decide whether it is better
to through away your last year of work and find a new advisor, or stick for the upcoming years with
an advisor you have difficulties to work with.


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Do universities check if the PDF of Letter of Recommendation has been edited?
I am applying for masters and I would like to know this as my professor has completely altered the phrasing of my paragraphs and also made a spelling mistake. I had to correct them, so the metadata shows that it was modified. Do they really check all of that, as it is otherwise a genuine letter?
Edit 1: I think I need to give more context. So in my university, the students are supposed to write their own letters of recommendation and approach the professor for signatures (they sign it if the mentioned skills and facts are true to their knowledge), as opposed to the professor writing the letter. I had sent my draft with good paragraph phrasing and devoid of spelling mistakes, and I got it back with the paragraphs jammed together (hence, the disruption of phrasing) and one spelling mistake. I have been having this ethical dilemma since my college is quite bad at communicating in general and if I need to get this corrected, I might not even be able to reach out to them as I am not a student at the university anymore (I graduated this year). I had to go through a lot of hassle just to obtain this letter and I don't want to commit any kind of fraud in any way.
Edit 2 : The letter has a spelling mistake where I have been addressed as the Proctor, when in actuality, it's my professor who's the proctor: I am the proctee.
Also, would a spelling mistake in the letter of recommendation affect my chances of admission in any way? Please do give me some insight on this, if anyone has any idea.
Edit 3: I would like to update that I have approached the professor to get this corrected, if possible. I will not be submitting the LoR that I made changes to. I really appreciate each and everyone who has given me frank and sound counsel regarding this ethical dilemma of mine. Thank you.

Is the letter from your professor a letter of recommendation?

If it is a  letter of recommendation, you are not supposed to see it.

@Nobody you are correct about "should" but that is not how things are always organised. Sometimes (e.g. at my university) it is the prospective student who needs to hand in the letters of recommendation.

"as my professor has completely altered the phasing of my paragraphs" - the professor can write the letter of recommendation however they like and you are not meant to modify that. For sure you didn't "have to correct them".

@MaartenBuis, this is for an European university, the students are supposed to upload the letter of recommendations. In my university, the professors tell the students to draft the letter of recommendation and they sign it if they find the details to be correct.

@Christian Hennig In my university, the professors tell the students to draft the letter of recommendation and they sign it if they find the details to be correct.

I would upload the original letter with spelling mistakes if I were you. It's your professor's typo, not yours. If the typos must be corrected, then I would ask the professor to re-write the letter.

@MaartenBuis Yes, I do understand. I meant the OP is not supposed to alter the letter.

It's your professor's letter, not your letter, so of course they want to phrase things the way they see as best. "In my university, the professors tell the students to draft the letter of recommendation and they sign it if they find the details to be correct." The word "draft" means precisely that they expect to make modifications to your draft. "I had to correct them" No, you didn't.

If you modify a professor's letter in any way you will have committed academic misconduct. You will have possibly also committed the crime of fraud as you have misrepresented the words of another to your own benefit. Don't go there.

The reasonable course of action in case of inaccuracies and typos in the letter is to contact the letter writer and ask them to fix the issues.

Okay, I understand it is a fraudulent action. And if you are wondering that I was going to alter the contents of the letter, I wasn't. The said professor was my proctor and in the letter where I had addressed myself as his proctee, he had changed the word back to proctor. Obviously, as the student, I cannot be adressed as the proctor. Hence, I have been having this ethical dilemma.

Altering any document after someone signed it is unethical.

If an institute accepts letters of recommendation from the candidate themselves, instead of requesting them from the recommending professor, then they really don't give a damn about these letters of recommendations, who wrote them or what's in them.

Amazingly, this is not the first time I've heard of this practice.

The truth is that no one would probably check if the letter was modified.
The moral is that any self-respecting institute should solicit letters directly from the references, and not accept letters appended to the application by the candidate (who can clearly forge such a letter).

I don’t know if anybody would literally check the PDF’s internals, but I knew a student who got booted out of MIT 50 years ago in the middle of their first semester. Apparently admissions sent a confirmatory letter to the source of the recommendation, and got a response saying that s/he had not written that recommendation.

Do not submit this letter! You were asked to draft one, to help your professor, but it is their name and not yours that is at the bottom. You have no right to change what they have written, but they have every right to change what you had suggested. Whether or not the university will or even can check this is irrelevant: you are committing fraud and putting words into your professor's mouth. Please don't do this. It is deeply unethical and, if discovered, it can seriously harm your career and future.
Just undo your changes, and submit the letter exactly as the professor gave it to you. It is the professor's recommendation that the university is interested in, not yours.

I do not think there is sufficient information in the question to determine if it is fraud or not.

@AnonymousPhysicist the OP has written "In my university, the professors tell the students to draft the letter of recommendation and they sign it if they find the details to be correct." in a comment and "my professor has completely altered the phasing[sic] of my paragraphs [...] I had to correct them". So the professor asked for a draft letter fo recommendation, edited it to fit what they wanted to say, gave it back to the OP and the OP changed it back to what was in the original draft. That seems pretty clear fraud to me, what am I missing?

@AnonymousPhysicist, perhaps not by the (local) legal definition, but certainly by the common understanding of the word.

"edited it to fit what they wanted to say" is your opinion, not what the question actually says.

@AnonymousPhysicist I... honestly don't see how else "my professor has completely altered the phasing[sic] of my paragraphs [...] I had to correct them" can be interpreted. The professor changed the phrasing so the letter they signed can actually represent what they want to say, and the OP is changing it, thereby putting the professors signature on a text that the professor has not approved.

As I said, it can be interpreted as insufficient information.

It is particularly ambiguous what "them" refers to.

Okay, I understand it is a fraudulent action. And if you are wondering that I was going to alter the contents of the letter, I wasn't. The said professor was my proctor and in the letter where I had addressed myself as his proctee, he had changed the word back to proctor. Obviously, as the student, I cannot be adressed as the proctor. Hence, I have been having this ethical dilemma.

Since the professor already signed it, it seems really sketchy to edit it (you don’t just edit documents someone has already signed), even to correct a typo. I would not do so. If the typo bothered me enough I’d ask the prof for a redo.

@ArtemisNymeriaStark if all you are changing is the one word from proctor to proctee (which is not a word, as far as I know), then please edit your question and clarify. You are saying that you changed phrasing and order of things which are far more significant changes. Even that one word change is not OK, you should leave a signed letter exactly as you received it, but in any case, your question describes far more significant changes so if this isn't the case, please edit and clarify.

Note that the specific typo mentioned, referring to the student as the proctor instead of the proctee in a letter of recommendation to a university, may also fall under the category of fraud, since ‘proctor’ is in some places a protected title. So I would say under no circumstances should they submit the letter as received from the professor. The fact that it’s the professor’s typo does not absolve the submitter from legal responsibility if the content is fraudulent.

This generalizes to most other situations in which you are asked to draft something for someone else's signature.

@terdon Stack Exchange has a question for everything?: Word for "One who is proctored"  Though it didn't get much in the way of results... funny enough proctee did come up from one person... but it's just about the only Google result for the word + meaning!

It is not uncommon for someone to write a draft for their own recommendation letter, although it felt really really weird the first time I had to do it for myself (which is why I never ask this of people I am supposed to write a letter of recommendation for).
That being said, your professor is then free to use this input however they like and change paragraphs as you said. You are never ever supposed to alter the letter after! By all means leave in the typo too. It just screams "busy professor" (although to be honest, if you have a good relationship you can ask if they want you to leave the typo in - otherwise you are typically supposed to pretend that you didn't see the letter even though you uploaded it and obviously read it because you were curious - we are all human after all).

Echoing other answers and comments: I don't think anyone ever checks whether a PDF letter has been altered. Anyway, the original letter-writer might have done it themselves.
On the other hand, you really should not alter the letter after it's been signed by your letter-writer, even to correct mis-spellings, etc. It's not so much whether or not it's "fraudulent", since you're not trying to deceive anyone in a serious way, it's just at the least "inappropriate" to alter a signed document, even if you don't profit by that alteration.

This. Independent of whether this particular case is "fraud" or otherwise illegal in your jurisdiction, there is a very strong societal consensus that "altering a signed document" is wrong. And in those edge cases where it isn't (hint: this is not one of them), you modify the document in a way that makes it abundantly clear that you modified it.

You do not need to make any changes, submit it as you received it
No university is going to negatively judge you because of formatting errors or spelling errors made by someone else in a recommendation letter. It's unlikely that they will notice that you have edited the letter, but if they do then it is very likely to be perceived negatively, so don't take a foolish risk for no benefit.

Beyond the letter in question which you should not submit in its edited form, it’s important that you learn not to alter documents that someone else has already signed. Beyond ethical implications, while I’m not a lawyer, I imagine there could be serious legal implications for you were you to do this in the wrong situation. So it’s important to understand why this is not ok and stop doing it.


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Professor wants to use required class project for research
In one of my required undergraduate courses, my professor has given a mandatory assignment. He has indicated that he will use our code from the assignment for his research. He has not mentioned attributing it, nor asked our permission to use the code.
I'm not opposed to him using the code for his research, but I want to guarantee that if he does, I will be attributed. Is there a good way to go about this? Furthermore, is it acceptable for a professor to use student code from required class projects for research?
(there was a similar question here but did not apply, since it dealt with commercial uses, and another here but did not include the fact that the course was required for the major.)

Have you asked your professor about (1) in what way, specifically, he plans to use the code, and (2) whether and how the authors of the code will be attributed? Seems like you should do that first. I don't think we can answer the question without knowing exactly what kind of "use" of the code is involved.

In addition to @ff524's questions, what country is this in?

For example, the way the professors "use the code" written by students in this paper is very different from the situation with that other question you mentioned.

@PatriciaShanahan Should that matter?

@PatriciaShanahan: United states

@ff524  emailing professor those questions now. Hopefully he'll respond.

@ff524 already alluded to this, but it is very important if "use in research" refers to utilizing your code to solve his research problem or if "use in research" means research into how students attempt to solve a particular problem - in the first case, you have issues of attribution, copyright, etc; in the second case, you have issues of human subjects research.

@BryanKrause The teacher did not originally explicitly say in class how he would use it. A student asked if he should get rid of blanks in inputs during a help section, and the teacher said he'd be using it in research, and would appreciate that. But hopefully the email clears it up.

@BryanKrause's comment is the sort of thing I was thinking about when I asked about country. Intellectual property and human subjects research rules and customs can vary.

@alvarpq That sounds exceptionally concerning to me - not only has the instructor not clarified the terms in which the code will be used, but didn't even seem to intend to mention the code would be used for something besides being graded as part of an assignment until the issue came up obliquely in a Q&A session. Either that makes this very much worse (i.e., the professor knows nothing about the ethics of this sort of thing or doesn't care) or there is some significant misunderstanding and he doesn't actually intend to use the code at all.

@CaptainEmacs yes, the country matters. Different countries have different human study ethical requirements. In the US, all most all human studies technically require approval/oversight from some form of an Institutional Research Board.

There may be course policies or institution policies allowing it at your school, but you should be at least cited/credited/acknowledged in that professor's research.
I've personally had my research and work used in a professors publications and she has always at least acknowledged me in her publications.
(My case may differ from yours, in that the research I was involved in was done on a student-employee basis. I'm not sure how that might change the dynamic.)
I would certainly at least send an email so that there is some sort of recoverable proof, asking if your work will be cited/attributed to yourself. Don't fall victim to the old "your reward is the experience" thing. While valid and applicable in some situations, not so when it's your intellectual property.


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Slightly incorrect info in the recommendation letter
Recently, when my coach submitted his recommendation letter, it mentioned that I was captain since junior year. However, I was nominated during spring time of my sophomore year, so I put down varsity captain since sophomore year. Is this a cause for concern?

Does this answer your question? Will these "errors" in my advisor's letter raise red flags when I apply for academic faculty positions?. Not a perfect match, but still could be answering the essence. Also, see several other relevant question under the [tag:recommendation-letter].

This question is probably a duplicate. However, based on previous answers from others, the answer is no, it will be fine.

Nobody will care about the marginal difference, and neither should you: This isn't going to make a difference in your application. Feel free to move your brain onto more fruitful topics :-)


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Applying for a physics Master's in a European university with intention to do Ph.D. in the same group?
I intend to apply to European Master's programs in theoretical physics, and I've got my bachelor's degree in my country Thailand.
I also would like to continue my Ph.D. on my master's thesis subject, with the same professor, of course after finishing the Master's.
How could I make sure before applying for masters which of the professors would certainly accept their own Master's students to be their Ph.D. students, as well? Under which conditions?

How could I make sure before applying for masters which of the professors would certainly accept their own masters students to be their phd student,as well?

There's no way you can guarantee this. A master's thesis is also a kind of probation period in which a professor assesses the student's qualities or how the student fits within their research group. If, at the end of the master's thesis, a professor thinks that a student is not a good fit for the group, for whatever reason, they will very likely not accept the student for a PhD. In general, you cannot know in advance whether you will meet a professor's expectations, even if you are a good student.
Likewise, during your master's thesis you will also assess the professor, and maybe at the end of your thesis you will decide that you no longer want to do your PhD under the guidance of that professor, as many stories on this site recount.
In addition to the above, a professor might decide to abandon a certain line of research, depending on funding, ideas etc. and your master's thesis is not guaranteed to have a future. Finally, in some countries, PhD admissions are managed by a central committee and a professor might not have much saying in the admission. Even if you prove valuable during your master's thesis, a committee might select candidates who better fulfil other criteria.

Thanks a lot ! Could  you name the countries?

@Yalda I don't have a list of countries where the admission is managed centrally, but certainly this is done at least in my country, Italy.


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Change of field between PhD and Postdoc
I am currently writing my PhD Thesis in Computational Engineering applied to Civil Engineering. My background includes an MSc in Civil Engineering, an MSc in Computational Engineering, and a BSc in theoretical mathematics and physics. As part of my PhD, I am working intensively with weather data. I was wondering if that PhD could lead to a Postdoc within atmospheres studies of other planets, i.e., that postdoc wouldn't be in Civil Engineering, but rather in an Astrophysics department. Any thoughts?

It certainly is possible, since most folks would be more interested in what skills you have that could be applied to their projects. The main hurdle is getting them to look over your resume closely enough and not just stop on the words "Civil Engineering". Some of that can be managed by going to a conference or two on planetary sciences and meeting people.

This can only be answered by someone hiring for a postdoc. You have to fulfill their needs.

A friend of mine once told me that (in his opinion) the first piece of work you did after you got your degree was the most important marker for continuing to be productive.  He changed fields (in mathematics) to do his. So do try to parlay your experience to get a position in a new field you are excited about

Firstly, the topic you mentioned about studying the weather on other planets is extremely interesting. I used to listen to a weekly podcast, a decade ago where the speaker will talk about changing weather on planets. It was amazing.
Secondly, coming to your question; it is absolutely possible. It is dependent on two things, the acceptability criterion of the principal investigator of the project and the competition. You need to tune your resume for this purpose, communicate efficiently with the committee and effectively highlight your current work on weather data. Attend a related conference and talk to the potential PostDoc.
Finally, it won't be easy and you might need to push hard and maybe push for long. Luck could play a factor. You might have already spent many years coming this far in your studies; so you might look for stable opportunities.
Best wishes!

Out of curiosity, could you share the name of the podcast?

Sorry, I was a teenager at that time. Do not remember. Was 15 years ago.


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How to find out if a preprint has been already published
I found a preprint from 2012 in the internet, how can I know if this preprint is now published or not?

(Added after @Wolpertinger's suggestion) Does the preprint itself include a link to the final paper? Arxiv abstract pages have a "journal ref" field where the author can include such a link, and some publishers mandate that a journal link must be added to preprints after publications.
Search on literature databases (Google Scholar, Scopus, etc.) for a paper with the same title.
Maybe the title has changed? Search for publications by the same authors to double-check. Has another paper with the same authors appeared in the years immediately following the preprint's date? Author changes are less frequent than title changes, in my experience, and most of the times authors are added, not removed.
If everything fails, try a full-web search for a sentence or two that appear in the paper.

If all these attempts fail, you may safely assume that it hasn't been published. If you want to be 120% sure, send an e-mail to one of the authors.
That said, note that a preprint still counts as "previous literature", and you should cite it exactly as you would cite a published paper. However, be a little more wary about blindly trusting the results contained in it: there may be a reason this hasn't been published, in the end.

If it's in computer science, the go-to source in step 1 would be DBLP.

+1. Might be worth adding a step "zero", that is to check whether the preprint features a link to the published article. On arxiv, for example, authors can add such a link upon publication.

@Wolpertinger Done, thanks!

be a little more wary about blindly trusting the results I'd say be a lot more wary—I'm aware of preprints on arXiv which are fatally flawed, yet the only hint a casual reader would get is that they haven't been published in a peer-reviewed journal after many years. That said, I'm also aware of a non-trivial and useful result that only appears in a preprint, and has been excluded from the peer-reviewed version, even though it is perfectly correct.


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Professor stopped replying to my e-mails about lab positions
I emailed a professor about a potential lab position in the summer about two weeks ago. He replied a very nice e-mail the next morning saying that he is interested and has open positions. He asked for some information (transcript, CV). I sent those to him that same day and we exchanged a few e-mails. After that he just went ghost... I sent a follow-up e-mail after one week, still no response. Now it has been two weeks and I'm debating whether I should send him another e-mail.
Is this kind of situation normal? What's the best action in this case? I've had tons of experiences of professors not replying e-mails, but this is new to me... I definitely don't want to sound annoying by sending multiple follow-up e-mails. Any help would be appreciated!

What kind of position is it? Unpaid RA? Work-study? Lab manager? Summer only internship? These could all play a factor. Also, how did you phrase the email you sent to the professor? Some context could give us more to work with.

Also see https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/54744/what-does-it-mean-if-a-professor-does-not-respond-to-an-email-about-research-in?rq=1

Many professors regularly receive 2-3 such email requests every day. The likeliest reason for the professor ignoring your email is that they thought your CV wasn’t impressive enough and decided to not follow up with the hope that you’ll get the hint.
That may not be the only reason though. Could be that they’re traveling (especially if it’s summer), could be that your subsequent emails went to spam, could be that other interns were selected, could be that they forgot.
If you want to get someone’s attention I suggest avoiding mass generic emails (they’re obvious and I ignore them). Try to show interest in the work. Perhaps send your thoughts about a specific project you’d like to be a part of. You’re competing for someone’s time: try to show why you’re worth it.

Hi thanks for answering!!! This is not like a competition for a summer job; it's more like an independent undergrad project which would carry on to next semester as part of the coursework. I'm taking his research class next semester, so it's not like he can ignore me forever... And we did exchange e-mails after I sent my CV, and he basically said yes. It's more like someone suddenly stopped talking in the middle of a conversation, which is why it really confuses me.

When you write lab position in the summer it might be misleading to some... Could be just traveling then. Try emailing them a summary of what you plan on doing then


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US postdoc application with one-page research statement (no cover letter!) [psychology/linguistics]
For a one-year postdoc position (extendable up to three years) in psychology/linguistics in the US, I'm asked to submit a cv, two published works, and a one-page research statement (so, no cover letter).
I am wondering if I should understand this research statement as a short "cover letter"-type of writing, including past experiences, future plans, and why these plans fit in this department, or should I only describe my plan for the research project that I would like to carry on during that time?  Should I be really precise as to what and how I want to conduct research during that year?
Thank you!

Concerning your question about past experiences vs. just future plans: Why not both? Focus on your plans for the new project, but use it as an hook to mention the other stuff, e.g (maybe not all at once):

"In my time at [Place to apply at] I am planning to work on X. This continues my work on X' I did together with Name et al. at Place B."
"I am planning to solve the problem of Y, using the techniques I learned while working on Z during my PhD at Place C."
"After the conclusion of the project on X at [Place to apply at], there will be future opportunities to continue this collaboration into the direction of X."
and so on...

This turns your past experiences and far future plans into context. It also provides continuity and leaves the impression that you choose the department because it fits your plans instead of blindly applying everywhere. You will probably not be able to mention everything this way and you'll have to skip the details for brevity, but if people are interested in the details of past things they can then look them up in the CV.

I might agree with most of this if it weren't a single page statement. And your second bullet is a bit presumptuous.

The best answer to this comes from the institution itself and it is really impossible to know exactly what they expect. But your CV should cover your past work and general position.
In the absence of any other information, I would think it best to focus on what you want to accomplish in the first year and an idea about how you will attack the issues. So, yes, pretty precise, but not pedantic. As always, write for the expected readers. If you know who you will be working with, it is probably them.


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Is it okay to paraphrase other authors' literature reviews?
I am currently writing a literature review for my bachelor thesis and I am not sure if what I am currently doing is acceptable.
My approach right now is to look at about 10 different literature reviews(from different papers) regarding the same topic and take one or two sentences or sometimes a paragraph from each of the literature reviews and put it in my thesis. Afterward, I synthesize the sentences I've collected from other authors' literature reviews and form a new paragraph. Lastly, I paraphrase the new paragraph and cites the original contributors behind the sentences.
Is this considered plagiarism?

It might, depending on how much you’ve paraphrased.

If you have to ask.... and besides, this sounds like a terrible way to do a literature review.  If you're only taking a sentence or two from each paper you're going to have an uneven and confusing treatment of the topics.  Start with a proper outline of what you think the key points that need to be covered are, then cite the papers that support those. This will end up with much better results than picking and choosing bits of different papers and changing the wording so you have plausible deniability if you're accused of plagiarism.

Though it is a subtle difference, it seems that you might be rewriting sentences in your own words rather than paraphrasing authors’ ideas. It is difficult to assess your work without specific examples, but it sounds like it is bordering on plagiarism. Others may or not consider this plagiarism, but either way it is bad practice.
Since it is certainly easier to accidentally plagiarize using your method, I recommend taking notes on the pieces you are reading (rather than taking direct quotes/sentences) and paraphrasing your own work. Not only will this lead to a greater understanding and coherence of writing, it will also negate (most) plagiarism concerns.
And as always, cite, cite, cite.

Thank you for the answer. I am not sure if this is going to make any difference, but what If my method is only used for the definition of terms ?

For definitions of terms, you should always use direct quotations with quotation marks plus citation. Then there is no issue of paraphrasing or plagiarism.

You should take the list of references from those literature reviews you found, read those papers / articles / sources then write your own review that is up to date and is "tuned" to your work.
This means you won't have to paraphrase or plagiarize anybody else.

@Tripartio worked for me when I did mine, books (even books on interlibrary loans), articles, papers - many papers by Judge, Ricardo (famous names in the field), so how is it not practical?

I'm sorry; I misunderstood your answer. I have deleted my comment.

No. By all means look at other authors' literature reviews to check which literature YOU YOURSELF need to review, but you absolutely have to review it yourself.
Other authors will not necessarily be focussing on the exact issues that you are focussing on, so what they say may bear no relation to your own specific interest.
A literature review is not just something that boring old professors insist, for some strange reason, on demanding of students. It is how you find out about the subject that you wish to research. You don't want to copy anybody else's work, but you do need to know what might be a good starting point for your own work.


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If I want to become a professor, do universities care what field my PhD. is in or just that I have a PhD?
I'm a self taught developer who was worked in the IT management field for a while. My academic background is an MBA and I currently teach classes on database development at a community college.
I want to be a Professor one day, and had been considering what to do for my PhD. Ideally, I'd like to teach either in the CS field or the business field as that's where the cross-section of my work is.
I've applied to jobs to teach at local Universities and Colleges in my state recently and I've had the feedback that I need a PhD preferably in field X.
Due to life commitments the only options to me that are realistic would be to do a part-time online doctorate in education (EdD) since they are cheap. I can then go publish research in my field or even get a post-graduate certificate in CS or Business to validate my knowledge.
My question is, is this even worth-while? While it may be a harder path for me to get my foot in the door, do Universities require me to have a PhD in my field or do they just need me to have a Doctorate of some variety and then validate my knowledge in that field (either via publications, post-grad certs, or even teaching classes in that field etc)
I already read through a similar question: Is it possible to become a professor in a field where you don't have a PhD degree? but it was very much focused on overlapping fields (e.g. finance and math)

Have a look at job postings in your field.  Typically they have wording like "Minimum qualifications: earned PhD in fields X, Y, or a closely related field."  You can assume that they mean it.

Some topics permit non-PhD professors, such as the arts, if "equivalent" achievements can be demonstrated (this definitely used to be the case in Germany). In technical topics, suitable positions will be harder to find; one problem is that there is a specific style of academic thinking that the PhD is supposed to convey/guarantee.

@NateEldredge - many say "applicants expected to hold a PhD" or "Applicants expected to hold a PhD in X or related field" - related is often poorly defined. But, my question is more about if exceptions are possible even if its harder

When "equivalent achievements" are mentioned for professorship positions in Germany, then they nowadays typically refer to the habilitation (a second "dissertation" written after the normal PhD thesis) not the PhD. In standard academic fields there was a brief period in the 70s where the growth of the universities was so large that nonPhD people could get a professorship, but those times are long gone.

In my very humble opinion, with a doctorate in education your chances of becoming a professor of CS or business are very close to zero, not necessarily because you will lack the formal prerequisites in order to be considered for the job (although that might be true as well for some positions), but simply because the EdD will not teach you the large amount of basic knowledge and skills relevant to doing research in, and eventually becoming a professor of, CS or business. Your premise that you can somehow catch up on your own after getting the degree is, quite simply, a pipe dream.

@NateEldredge Do not look at the advertisements, look at the recent hires.  Usually the person who is actually hired far exceeds the minimum qualifications.

The "exception" in a field like CS would be if Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg decided they wanted to go back and teach.

@AnonymousPhysicist: I think Nate's point was to highlight that having a PhD in one of a small number of fields  is already part of the minimum qualifications.

Not true.  I've landed two different MFA tenure-track jobs with a BA.  The odds are not at all zero.  Gotta find the right school and hopefully have a great connection.

Do you want to do research, or just teach? I've had some excellent lecturers who weren't professors.

Generally, you're going to need a PhD in a field very close to the one you want to teach in. Many programs make this information available to applicants, and indicate that they are looking for a PhD in field X, Y or Z. This is because these are the subjects where the information and experience that you gain during the course of a PhD are directly relevant to your ability to then teach the subject you are applying for. Simply getting a PhD isn't going to make you much more competitive for a position, unless your PhD shows that you have gained skills directly relevant to the position.
You mentioned the possibility of doing research or getting other certification of your skills, depending on where you want to be a professor, these could be a better option for you. If you can find a university willing to support your research, and get it published, this definitely shows that you have developed relevant skills for teaching in that field. Added to the fact that you have taught at a community college (indicating that you have some ability to perform a CS teaching job), and you have a much more competitive application than you started with.

Let me offer some perspective from a small "u" university, i.e, primarily undergraduate with a small number of graduate programs, none at the doctoral level. We had several faculty migrate from math to CS when we started to offer a CS major. But, we had two people come to CS, one from philosophy and one from french literature, the latter an external hire. Both were making an academic transition to CS, but, to the best of my knowledge, neither attained a graduate degree, e.g., a masters, in CS. That was some years ago now. We have hired recently (last year), and it was expressly stated that applicants must have a Ph.D in either pure or applied mathematics. So, even at this level, the requirements have tightened up quite a bit. There may still be four-year colleges that would accept a candidate such as yourself, but they are probably getting rather scarce.

As someone soon to go into the post-doc phase and getting to know the job market: you need a lot more than a Ph.D. Sure, you don't need a Ph.D. in the subject to get a position there... but you need research. You need mounds of research to get an academic position, even a position at a 4-year college these days. If you don't have research in the field or an adjacent field, I am not sure if you'd even get an interview (in the US). And if you're going to be doing that much research in the field, a Ph.D. should be almost free!
And note what I mentioned too: the job market is a post-doc before professorship. Going straight to a tenure-track position is pretty rare these days. So you will likely need a research position (usually not a teaching postdoc) before the tenure-track position.
Given these as the priorities, I think it's pretty safe to say that a degree in education probably won't help much here. Whether it's right or wrong, people are looking for experts in the subject, not necessarily experts in teaching. And I think you'll find it much harder to publish CS research without background or guidance.
Then again, odd things happen every once in awhile, and you could be the odd one to make it work. I wouldn't count on it.