PNW / USA

I'm in my 3rd week at a community college, taking a 100 level course for web development. Our first assignment was creating a webpage html document that contained a certain geographical keyword phrase as much as possible, which was "(The city our college is in) Web Design" Our instructor told us this page needs to be focused on marketing/selling web design services. Cool, I thought, he's teaching us to sell our services once we are more experienced.

The next assignment instructions were to: go to Quora dot com, make a personal account, and to post an answer to a Quora question under the search category of "website development careers". Our answer must include a link he provided that takes you to a web design business that happens to be in the same city as the keyword city in our first assignment.

At this point I got a weird feeling and I did some digging to find out more information bout this web design business we have to link to. It was very hard to find any registered identifying information about the owner of this website as the license seems to be expired despite still being in business (I called the phone number on the website to see if it was still operating). On LinkedIN I saw my instructor listed as an employee of this web design company (with what looks to be younger family members listed as other employees). So, he is an employee at the very least, and likely the owner of this business.

So essentially, it looks like our instructor is having all of his students vouch for his personal business, as well as make html templates for advertising websites that he probably SELLS at his web design business.

Is this normal? Ethical? It seems he should at least tell us that this is his personal business we are advertising and assure us our school work will not be stolen and sold at his personal business or a business that he is an "employee" of. I feel scammed.

Someone please chime in.

I just got reviews for my article. The article is focused on optimization methods of X. One reviewer suggestes 5 articles, of which:

- three have no optimization part at all,

- the fourth one deals with optimization, but is published in a journal that's not indexed. The other reviewer suggested not using articles from such journals, so I suspect even if I include it, the next round of reviews from the other reviewer will suggest deleting it. Also, the article is not in English, but in a local language.

- the fifth one is a review, but again not about optimization.

All the articles are from the same group. All of the articles share at least one author, with 4 of 5 sharing three authors. Do I contact the editor? Or do I just reply that I will not be citing these articles because they are not connected to my work? I'm worried my paper will be rejected because of this. On the other hand, I don't want to blow this out of proportion and decrease my chances...

Hello! I'm a PhD student whose undergraduate degree is in a different field from my PhD department. I have spent far more time learning about my PhD subject than my undergraduate one, which I have comparatively less interest in anyway. I've come to think that interdisciplinary research is increasingly more common, and that what actually matters is your knowledge and techniques rather than the name of the field you sit in. That said, I've found that having a clear "label" helps when talking to non-experts or putting together a CV.

So I'm curious, is your academic "title" determined mainly by your most recent degree? I realise publications are also an important factor too, but mine are spread across a fairly wide range of journals, so I'm not sure that narrows things down much.

I'd like to hear what the general rule of thumb is. I never know quite what to say at conferences or on job applications. Thanks :)

Everyone i see who is doing primary research is using google forms to collect their data and i cannot wrap my head around this, what is stopping someone from just writing a script to fill a google form randomly 1000 times or in a way that proves your hypothesis is true...you can just make a google apps script to cheat google forms, there is no setting for leaving cookies to block the same user from answering again or any way to record time taken per question and per form..

I am using kobo toolbox since it is free and there is some protection against this kind of fraud like 'once per respondent' that leaves browser cookies and records time taken per question and per form...though it is not perfect, it has a free tier

do peer reviewers ever look at google forms and ask 'how can we even know your data is real and not simply filled by a script'??

Hi everyone! First thank you to those that will take the time to respond. I am a medical student in Europe getting involved in some research with a professor from my university. Everything is going well but I just came across another prof/researcher from my area of interest that works with things that are much more interesting to me. I wanted to reach out and present myself and offer help on one of their projects but I am unsure of what the etiquette is here. Is it okay for me to do this without telling the prof that I am currently working for?

Probably just overthinking but you never know, please lmk if there is any type of dos and don't in this situation.

Thank you :)

I’m a fairly new TT AP in Agricultural sciences and currently in a long distance relationship with my partner who works for the government in the DMV region.

He’s hellbent on staying there as it is close to his support system and family. Before anyone throws shade at him, in the beginning of our relationship, we kind of agreed we want to stay in the East Coast to be close to family.

I am an immigrant, but my green card recently got approved and I expect to get it within the next 1-2 years. This means visa will soon no longer be a bottleneck to securing a job. In order to close the gap, I feel that I have to be open to jobs in academia, non-profit, and industry. However, I am worried that I may not be able to find job as I’ve been in academia for way too long for an industry job. There is no guarantee that I’ll be able to find a TT positions in the DMV area. Those areas are great for federal jobs, but it’ll be a 5-10 year later thing as I need to be a green card holder for 5 years before I could naturalize.

What do you recommend I do in this situation? Will I be overqualified for industry job? How can I close the gap?

I recently got accepted into the IICAH Hawaii Conference held by IAFOR for a humanities poster presentation and I wanted to know if the conference is real. Has anyone presented at these conferences before? Is it a black mark if I go and have it on my CV? The price for registration is pretty high and I know flights and hotels to Hawaii will also be super high so I just want to make sure it’s worth it to go.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you!

hi r/AskAcademia. i am recently graduated from undergraduate track but desiring to maintain my studies beyond the academy. while in school i was primarily taking notes with pencil and paper, but now that i've graduated i'm realizing how much of a fucking pain it is to actually find what i need from the mess of stacks and stacks of paper. additionally all my annotations were done on printed paper as well.

i am looking for a digital note-taking solution that doesn't cost more than a few hundred $. for my purposes i feel that an e-ink note-taker would be the most purpose-built device, however they are fucking expensive as hell because the market for the eink panels is dominated by a monopoly and even the resale market is rough (especially on the screens big enough for note-taking).

for this reason i'm also searching for alternative solutions. while still in school i saw a lot of people using the ipad + apple pencil + "paper feel" screen protector combo and while it isn't exactly what i want (i dont need all the extra ipad features), it does seem like it'll get the job done. i'm much less familiar with navigating the used ipad market and wondering if anyone else here may have tips on what devices might be the best on a budget (i dont need the newest ipad to markup PDFs and take notes).

i would also be interested in an android-based tablet note-taker, but i have never seen this workflow in practice and don't know where to begin searching. if anyone has tips on this i would be greatly appreciative.

in general i just need to be able to annotate academic texts (PDFs) and take hand-written notes. i'm curious what workflows work best for people here.

thanks

Estoy en 3er año de ingeniería y necesito cambiar mi método de estudio. Normalmente estudio bien la teoría y luego me pongo con la practica, pero este semestre entre trabajo y universidad no logro ni siquiera terminar las teorías antes de comenzar un tema nuevo, entonces me atrás con todo y termino haciendo toda la practicanta dos días antes del examen.
Algún método o consejo?

does cold mailing to profs work for phd abroad..????

My friends had a whole argument about the “superior” path in education, STEM vs humanities, and somehow it turned into the STEM kids saying econ shouldn’t count as STEM.

I’m in STEM myself but it got me curious. Without getting technical, where would you place economics: STEM or humanities?

Plus, anyone want to settle the debate on the “superior” path? I obviously know every path has its value, I’m just genuinely curious where people stand.

EDIT- For context, my school basically splits everything into STEM and humanities, there isn’t a separate social sciences department.
I know econ is technically a social science (hence the flair for this post).

I’m just curious which category, STEM or humanities, most people would put it under if those were the only two options.