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1500 questions
49
votes
16 answers
Why would a student go to a lecture at all if everything was in the book already?
Why would a student go to a lecture at all if everything was in the
book already? The lectures make sense if and only if the lecturer
tells more than in the book(s) and in more detail (or at least, in a
better/more clear way). [not my…
Troway Jestman
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49
votes
8 answers
Good practices for organizing notes
As a PhD student I generate a lot of pages with calculations, ideas and lecture notes.
Most of them are useful only for a short amount of time, but some may be important for much longer (when writing a paper, or when having new ideas to continue a…
Piotr Migdal
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49
votes
6 answers
Is a "big ego" necessary for a tenure-track faculty position?
I have worked in a few high profile research institutes for my PhD and postdoc, and find myself a little intimidated by the "strong opinions" and arguments that seem to crop up at the principal investigator level. My personality is somewhat more…
concerned_postdoc
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49
votes
7 answers
How to manage theorist's "labbook"?
Question:
Are there any guidelines, sources, or examples of good practices for maintaining theorist's research notebook?
Motivation and context:
Maintaining a lab notebook is a much advised (if not a vital) tool for doing research. Many do that…
walkmanyi
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49
votes
13 answers
If I receive written permission to use content from a paper without citing, is it plagiarism?
Let's say I find an article online. I contact the writer of this article and, without expecting anything in return, they agree to give me full, unrestricted rights to use any portion of their article, including directly using quotes from the…
Jon
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49
votes
4 answers
I wrote the code based on a paper's methodology; are there any legal problems with making it open source?
I coded the methodology based on the paper "Free Water Elimination and Mapping from Diffusion MRI" and I am curious if I am legally bound to take permission from the authors or the journal in making the code open source on Github?
user57865
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49
votes
3 answers
My partner posted our code on Github and I am now being investigated for cheating. What to do?
Last year I took a class where we had to work with a partner on programming assignments. Apparently someone's solution from this year has a 50% match with our solution from last year. I did not share my code with anyone but I would not be…
user56301
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49
votes
7 answers
What's the point of maintaining a CV after tenure?
Once you have tenure, presumably you're never going to have to search for a job again. However almost all professors have a CV on their website, and fairly recent ones. Why? They already made it.
user41631
49
votes
2 answers
Is it ok to put old papers on the arXiv?
In my field (I am a condensed-matter theoretical physicist) it is such a normal thing to put papers on the arXiv, that people sometimes look at other people's arXiv list of papers instead of their publication record to get to know what they do,…
Ric1
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49
votes
6 answers
How to publish a paper that does not seem to be within the scope of any journal?
I have written a paper on applying a mathematical theory to a linguistic problem. I privately submitted it to several renowned professors (some of them very famous indeed) in the field of linguistics, semantics and so on. They made some suggestions…
Javier Arias
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49
votes
10 answers
Is education in Europe really this cheap?
Is tuition in Europe really US$300 or €200 a year? That is one tenth the cost of the tuition in the developing country university where I took my bachelor's and master's.
Is it really true that some developed country universities charge that much to…
BCLC
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49
votes
2 answers
What to do after I was named as co-author on a paper, without my consent?
A few years ago, I found a conference paper, of which I was a co-author, being re-published as an article in a (not highly ranked) journal. It was a textbook example of plagiarism, copy-pasting whole sections and using figures from our paper, which…
Alex
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49
votes
10 answers
How true is the stereotype that PhD graduates are overqualified?
I am a Masters student, and I think this is the only place in the whole internet that do not hold stereotyped negative attitude towards PhD recipients. From time to time,however, these sort of quotes scare me:
Having a Ph.D can close some doors for…
motiur
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49
votes
8 answers
Strategies to remember papers that you read
What strategies do you use to remember papers that you read?
I usually take notes, but when after a while I look at the notes, I don't remember most of the details. So I have to go back to the original paper and read many sections once again.
Are…
CentAu
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49
votes
11 answers
How to prevent cheating on take-home exams
For certain undergrad classes, I assign a take-home exam, rather than the more familiar in-class exam. When I distribute the exam, I remind the students that this is an individual exam, and that they may not work in groups, and then I add "Believe…
Koldito
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