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1500 questions
192
votes
11 answers

How to deal with a student who most likely has a mental condition, and keeps arguing with me in class?

I am a TA for an introductory computer programming course at a university in the US. There is one student in particular who, during lecture, will argue with me about every point I make, which eats up a lot of lecture time and becomes un-enlightening…
homersimpson
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191
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15 answers

May a man attend a workshop entitled “Young women in [domain]”?

The Max Planck Institute for Mathematics at the University of Bonn hosts workshops such as 'Young Women in Harmonic Analysis', 'Young Women in Geometry' and 'Young Women in Mathematical Physics' biannually, I think. I am very interested in attending…
Jason Born
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191
votes
18 answers

What to do with a student coming to class in revealing clothing, to the degree that it disrupts the teaching environment?

Since semester started, a female student has been attending classes scantily clad or wearing clothes that are too revealing, like a sport bra without shirt on top, booty shorts, semitransparent silk blouses without a bra, or even a bikini (this…
user31319
190
votes
15 answers

How can I convince graduate students in China to not copy/paste from the Internet into their research papers?

I'm posting from an anonymous account, for reasons that will be obvious. I'm an associate professor in China at one of the top 10 universities in China, and have been working in China for a number of years. Most research in our lab is respectable…
AssociateProfessorInChina
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186
votes
6 answers

Is it possible to recover after a career setback such as this?

My husband got a math PhD in 2009, and could not get a research post-doc in his chosen field. We had young children at that point, and he spent two years as a lecturer, applied for hundreds of jobs, and finally took a tenure-track job at a teaching…
guestwife
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185
votes
1 answer

What does the typical workflow of a journal look like? How should I interpret a particular submission status?

What steps does a manuscript typically go through from submission to publication (or rejection) in a typical journal? How are these steps referred to, in particular by editorial systems, and how long do they each typically take? Note that this…
Wrzlprmft
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185
votes
13 answers

Grades are too high for the department - what should I do?

I recently taught an undergraduate seminar course, in which each student has to read a research paper, summarize it and present it to the class. In the first lesson I explained to the students the components of the grade: attendance, summary…
Erel Segal-Halevi
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176
votes
21 answers

How do you come to terms with the fact that you might never be among the best in your research community?

I am currently a PhD student advised by a new (and awesome, in my opinion) theoretical computer scientist in the field of optimization. This was my dream ever since I took a class on convex optimization a few years ago during my MS. However, I…
user42273
176
votes
11 answers

My research paper filed as a patent in China by my Chinese supervisor without me as inventor

I completed my PhD 3 years ago from a university in the UK. Today I was looking for some papers in google scholar. I found a patent in China. The patent was written in Chinese however, all diagrams/figures and equations were exactly same as one of…
PRO88
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175
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14 answers

Why do many talented scientists write horrible software?

I am a software engineer and I have been working with people with academic backgrounds for several years. Many times, I've noticed that (even otherwise brilliant scientists) produce code of extremely low quality (unless their background was…
Thanatos
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173
votes
12 answers

Why are papers without code but with results accepted?

I just started reading some papers (Computer Science, specifically Computer Vision) and thought "now let's look at the source code" and was quite astonished that most of the papers don't have any source code implementing the described methods to…
Sam Stoelinga
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172
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13 answers

Quoting a typo: Do I really have to do "sic", or can I just fix the sentence?

I've got an upcoming work in which I quote a couple sentences from a scholar's book. There's an unambiguous typo in it; the author just switched a few words around. Do I really have to quote him verbatim, adding "sic" to point out the error? Or…
TAM
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171
votes
7 answers

Is it acceptable to publish student names with the label 'stupid question', on a publicly-visible website?

While I was browsing faculty websites, I came across this page (new link: http://www.pdmi.ras.ru/~iaroslav/teaching.php?screen_check=done&Width=360&Height=640). Near the bottom there is a section called Top 6 Most Stupid Questions & Remarks That…
SomeOne
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170
votes
10 answers

I realize I made a huge mistake in my thesis and am not sure what to do. I'm defending very soon (days away). What should I do?

I realize there is a somewhat similar question posted, but my question is different in that I found a pretty big mistake in my thesis. It's such a big problem, it changes my results. I almost wish I hadn't noticed, and been so careful to go back and…
Gellen
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170
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13 answers

Religious supervisor wants to thank god in the acknowledgements

My PhD supervisor and I are co-authoring a paper. We have an excellent relation, and he is both a well-regarded scientist in its field and a deeply religious person. In our co-authored paper, he wants to include, for the first time in his career, a…
user31319
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