104
votes
Examples of harmless mistakes (on purpose) in submitted papers
You're not the first one to come up with this idea.
In case it's not obvious, I recommend against doing this:
Having stupid mistakes in your submission makes you look stupid.
It wastes the reviewer'...
- 48.2k
88
votes
Why has the time spent studying declined so sharply in the United States over the the past few decades?
First, it is important to deploy your scientific skepticism in assessing this claim. The source, after all, is the American Enterprise Institute, which is a political "think tank" that is explicitly ...
- 187k
80
votes
Accepted
Is this statistic about how many Latinos/Hispanics have a PhD in the USA correct?
This information came from a tweet I shared to express my excitement for finishing my PhD and, in the process, increase by 1 the number of underrepresented minorities in the US with a doctoral degree. ...
66
votes
Why has the time spent studying declined so sharply in the United States over the the past few decades?
In 1961, one could easily get a good job paying a reasonable salary with the possibility of continued promotions without going to college. This is much less true in 2003, so many people are going to ...
66
votes
Is this statistic about how many Latinos/Hispanics have a PhD in the USA correct?
The US Census Bureau gathers data on educational attainment of people living in the US, broken down by race, sex, age, and other categories. They specifically include "Hispanic origin" (though they ...
- 132k
49
votes
Accepted
Who said that one should change one’s direction of research every seven years?
I think I found it! Richard Hamming, mathematician and Turing Award recipient said it in a 1986 seminar at Bell Labs. The talk was titled "You and Your Research", and a transcript is ...
- 24.5k
48
votes
Accepted
Is it a good idea to respond at all if a person I never heard of is asking for a reference letter?
It has become fairly common in the last few years for hackers and spammers to conduct phishing attempts by emailing university staff/faculty and pretending to be students, while asking for letters of ...
- 3,847
45
votes
Why has the time spent studying declined so sharply in the United States over the the past few decades?
As much as I'd like to leave this as a comment, I just can't. So here's a semi-rant but very informative piece of an American student's experience, and why we don't spend as much time studying as we ...
- 1,251
44
votes
Examples of harmless mistakes (on purpose) in submitted papers
This is a terrible idea. Just a couple of days ago, I reviewed a paper with a lot of confusing descriptions and elaborate mathematics. It was not clear that the explanatory sections were going to be ...
- 20.3k
35
votes
Grading by assigning points to exercises
If good students who understand the topic well are getting bad grades because they don't do all the problems, you should think very carefully about whether you've made the exam too long.
If this is ...
- 3,717
35
votes
Accepted
Is it okay to ask references for their opinions on other faculty candidates?
In Academia, you do not disclose who has applied for a job unless you have the candidate's permission. Since academics work in teams on long-term projects, sometimes they have to keep their job ...
- 98.3k
35
votes
Accepted
Is there any research showing a correlation between wealth and academic performance?
In the US, the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 selected a "nationally representative cohort" of 10th grade (~16 year old) students in 2002 and followed up on them in 2012 to see how far ...
- 64.8k
30
votes
Health aspects of White board vs black board
The only type of board that doesn't affect the air in the classroom is a digital whiteboard (aka a smartboard). If you're using an actual white board or black board be sure that your room is well ...
- 894
27
votes
How much revenue do academic authors make on their published books?
I co-authored a research monograph in a rather specialized area of applied mathematics. I have received about $300 in royalties over several years. I think this is typical.
For most authors, the ...
- 35.9k
27
votes
Accepted
Clarifications on American graduate school for an European student
The rationale is because graduate programs in the US are generally structured assuming the incoming student does not have a masters, and got a bachelors in the US, which can sometimes involve an ...
- 21.7k
25
votes
Why has the time spent studying declined so sharply in the United States over the the past few decades?
I'm surprised nobody seems to actually be examining the paper itself. I expect most here are academics, and this is a study after all. I did this and already found potential issues. I'm sure as you ...
- 806
25
votes
Are open access papers read by a larger readership than paywalled papers?
This answers is not exactly what you ask for — you ask for readership, but most of the research has focused on citations. The two are, of course, related, and the answer seems to be a pretty clear yes....
- 5,296
23
votes
How much revenue do academic authors make on their published books?
It varies, but often, nothing. I have three experiences with academic books:
As a postdoc, I was signed up with Springer to write a book together with my advisor. According to the terms of the ...
- 5,976
23
votes
How many professors are children of professors?
I've noticed this too. There is a longstanding literature (mostly in sociology) about social mobility that looks at parents' and children's occupations. Beller and Hout (2006) report that father-to-...
- 6,768
23
votes
Accepted
Global number of publications over time
I found an archived version of the 2018 STM Report, which is now available directly from STM again. Among other statistics, it has this plot of the scientific output from 1975-2018 and four different ...
- 24.5k
23
votes
Is it okay to ask references for their opinions on other faculty candidates?
Stick with the reference you were given
Are you going to track down ancillary references for all the candidates? You want to be as fair as possible in your faculty hiring. Getting extra references ...
- 7,451
21
votes
How much does it cost to make a MOOC universally accessible, as defined by the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990?
The question asks for studies or research, and I don't know of any, but I do have some first-hand experience.
Meeting the Section 508* requirements for Web pages used in such a course is effectively ...
- 26.9k
21
votes
Examples of harmless mistakes (on purpose) in submitted papers
This interesting strategy has been identified in a programming context, where it has been dubbed "the duck technique" (see this post on the Coding Horror blog):
This started as a piece of Interplay ...
- 64.2k
18
votes
Accepted
Thanking professor with dinner delivery
I would avoid giving food-- especially a full meal-- to a professor, unless you know them very well. This is because you may not know their tastes or dietary requirements; for instance, unwittingly ...
18
votes
Is this statistic about how many Latinos/Hispanics have a PhD in the USA correct?
So, I did a run using Census data, but a few clarifications (which some people have pointed out, but just to bring it all together): Census asks separate questions about a person's race (e.g., white, ...
- 181
17
votes
How often can the reviewers correctly guess the identity of the authors when the review is double-blind?
Conferences in programming languages are moving toward double-blind reviewing, and since the idea is debated, people are collecting some evidence, including actual peer-reviewed papers.
In particular,...
- 1,859
17
votes
Accepted
Where can I find hard data on students' reasons for being students?
This is an active area of inquiry in US academia, as market research for admissions departments and also as part of the larger investigation into student "success". Our dean likes to remind us that ...
- 3,677
17
votes
Is it a good idea to respond at all if a person I never heard of is asking for a reference letter?
It doesn't really matter whether you ignore the request or reply with a negative response. You do not know this person, they may or may not have any actual relation to a course you didn't give. I ...
- 8,148
17
votes
Interactive papers
There was such a journal for machine learning:
https://distill.pub/about/. But it was put on indefinite hiatus due to burnout of the editorial team.
Format problem
Perhaps most generally you have the ...
- 271
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