I am one of those people with low GPA but want to apply for graduate school in US. I am really having trouble with standardized tests in my institution. It's not uncommon for me to receive low grade in final exams(finals normally account for 60% to 70% percent of grading of corresponding courses) and this has led to a number of courses with poor grades that is already enough to ruin my GPA. It is not that I didn't spend time in studying, in fact I learned those courses quite well (perhaps, in other words, I am not a good test taker). I was initially thinking I should get the right GPA I deserve and was very angry with myself especially when I saw many of my peers could confidently gain much higher GPA than I do even with only a little understanding of course materials plus simply memorizing lecture notes by force(yes, our exams makes this kind of preparation really an effective way to get grades like 3.7/4.0 for most core courses). It seems to me like my classmates can have 3.7/4.0 with ease, but I was more likely to get only 2.7/3.0/3.3 even if I was well versed in coursework and fully prepared for exams. I talked to my classmates for help but they told me they were too surprised by my situation and don't know what I should do at all. I tried various methods to make a difference like making sure my homework/class attendance parts of scoring rubric are going well, even the above mentioned exam preparation strategy, but still received little improvement.  I never successfully found a solution throughout my undergrad, and I really want to defend this shortcoming in my statement of purpose, but I have worries about this. MY QUESTION IS: If I go ahead to explain this in my SOP, would it sound like merely an attempt to find an excuse? If your advice is &quot;do it&quot;, is there anything I should not talk about regarding the reason I mentioned above(i.e. don'ts)? *. Some additional information, I am applying physics graduate program. I have first author publication in physics which I think could help me address that my knowledge mastery of related  maths and physics is not what my grade shows. But even so, my paper, of course, cannot address other poorly scored courses.
When applying to a PhD program in the US, how does the admissions process work? If an applicant is weak in a particular area, is it possible to offset that by being strong in a different area?  Note that this question originated from this . Please feel free to edit the question to improve it.
Which is grammatically correct?  I can only do so much in this time.  or  I can do only so much in this time. Strange nonexistent link in a specific user's Top Network Posts I discovered a strange, blank link in 's Top Network Posts:        The above link and screenshot are of the user's Unix &amp; Linux site profile, but this issue can be reproduced on any of the user's site profiles other than Meta Stack Exchange (as the blank post appears to be on this site, and posts from the same site are excluded).  The link seems to go to , which features a really negative question ID (close to the lowest value that can be represented by a 32-bit signed integer, specifically -(2^31) + 1005), and lacks the title in the URL that is present in all of the other links. It leads to a 404 error.  Going to the  seems to go to an actual answer on a question migrated to this site, which happens to have a score of 13 (as of the time this was asked).  Why is the question ID incorrect here? Based on the duplicates, it seems that this affects posts (both questions and answers) that were migrated from other sites: somehow, the question ID seems to be getting messed up.  Update: It looks like the above linked user has deleted their account on this site, so the issue cannot be reproduced on the profile I originally reported. It can, however, be reproduced on . The errant link in that profile is , and the errant question ID seems to also be close to the lowest possible 32-bit signed integer, -(2^31) + 3412. Explanation of finite population correction factor? I understand that when sampling from a finite population and our sample size is more than 5% of the population, we need to make a correction on the sample's mean and standard error using this formula:  $\hspace{10mm} FPC=\sqrt{\frac{N-n}{N-1}}$  Where $N$ is the population size and $n$ is the sample size.  I have 3 questions about this formula:   Why is the threshold set at 5%? How was the formula derived? Are there other online resources that comprehensively explain this formula besides  paper? Consistent, complete, and generalized description of the quantum harmonic oscillator Word to describe someone who goes to all the events in town! Outlook: scheduling recurring out-of-office? In Outlook, is there a way (or an add-on that can do it) to schedule a recurring out-of-office message?  I work 4 10's, so I'm out of the office every Monday, and it's a bit of a pain to have to reset my out-of-office message every single week. How can I access and process nested objects, arrays or JSON? What's this =! operator? How do you compare two folders and copy the difference to a third folder? You've got three folders:   folder current, which contains your current files folder old, which contains an older version of the same files folder difference, which is just an empty folder   How do you compare old with current and copy the files which are different (or entirely new) in current to difference?    I have searched all around and it seems like a simple thing to tackle, but I can't get it to work in my particular example. Most sources suggested the use of rsync so I ended up with the following command:  rsync -ac --compare-dest=../old/ new/ difference/   What this does however, is copies all the files from new to difference, even those which are the same as in old.  In case it helps (maybe the command is fine and the fault lies elsewhere), this is how I tested this:   I made the three folders. I made several text files with different contents in old. I copied the files from old to new. I changed the contents of some of the files in new and added a few additional files. I ran the above command and checked the results in difference.   I have been looking for a solution for the past couple of days and I'd really appreciate some help. It doesn't necessarily have to be using rsync, but I'd like to know what I'm doing wrong if possible. RedirectMatch and Query String Compare these two RedirectMatch's. The first doesn't work: RedirectMatch 302 ^/redirect\.php[?]page=(.+)$ http://somewhereelse.com/$1  Versus this, which will redirect to http://somewhereelse.com/?page=wherever: RedirectMatch 302 ^/redirect\.php([?]page=.+)?$ http://somewhereelse.com/$1  Does RedirectMatch only match the URI and not the query string? Apache's documentation is a bit vague in this area. What I'm trying to do is extract the page query parameter and redirect to another site using it. Is that possible with RedirectMatch or do I have to use RewriteCond + RewriteRule? vertical spacing in nested fraction I have complicated math expression:    Vertical spacing between text and fraction line is too small. I tried to define new \frac command (with amsmath package) with adjustable vertical spaces. As you can see, the result is not satisfying:    \documentclass[a4paper,fleqn,leqno]{article} \usepackage{polyglossia} \usepackage{color,pifont,fontspec} \usepackage[top=2.54cm,bottom=2.54cm,left=2.54cm,right=2.54cm]{geometry} \usepackage{tikz,tikz-3dplot,graphicx} \usepackage{mathtools,breqn,amsmath} \usepackage[fontsize=12]{scrextend} \usepackage{array,multirow} \usepackage{pgfplots} \DeclareMathSizes{12}{14}{14}{10} \newcommand{\myfrac}[3][0pt]{\genfrac{}{}{}{}{\raisebox{#1}{$#2$}}{\raisebox{-#1}{$#3$}}} \begin{document} \begin{dmath*}[breakdepth={0},style={\mathindent=0pt},spread={10pt}] {n=\myfrac[3pt]{\myfrac[3pt]{0,0625N+0,0215}{2}-0,043}{\myfrac[3pt]{\myfrac[3pt]{\scriptstyle 0,0625N+0,0215}{\scriptstyle 2}-0,043}{\myfrac[3pt]{\scriptstyle N}{\scriptstyle 2}-1}+0,0215}} \end{dmath*} \end{document}   How can I enlarge verticall spacing in whole fraction? Story about a future with races Can someone please explain how I can install  in the following ways?   By using the package manager? By downloading and installing a pre-built package? I am attempting to search jobs by tag on StackOverflow Careers. On SO, this is done using square brackets, but that is simply doing a keyword search, and I still get results that don't have the tag I am looking for.  For example, when I search for the keyword "android", I get this:        which is the same as when I search for the keyword "[android]":        Is there a format I can use to search jobs by tag? If not, I believe this would be a nice feature (seems intuitive for the Stack Exchange invite-only job site). Applying graduated renderer in PyQGIS? Just trying to run the following code already given in the pyqgis cookbook to create graduated colors symbology (as in example with 2 classes)  I define the source info for the shapefile but when I run execute the code within my test-plugin, it just adds the layer without classifiying. Just adds as usual, all polylines appear same.  Any solution or working code/method?  link to code in cookbook   from qgis.core import  (QgsVectorLayer, QgsMapLayerRegistry, QgsGraduatedSymbolRendererV2, QgsSymbolV2,QgsRendererRangeV2)  myVectorLayer = QgsVectorLayer('C:/my_test_shape_file.shp', 'test_shp_file', 'ogr')  myTargetField = 'target_field' myRangeList = [] myOpacity = 1  # Make our first symbol and range... myMin = 0.0 myMax = 50.0 myLabel = 'Group 1' myColour = QtGui.QColor('#ffee00') mySymbol1 = QgsSymbolV2.defaultSymbol(myVectorLayer.geometryType()) mySymbol1.setColor(myColour) mySymbol1.setAlpha(myOpacity) myRange1 = QgsRendererRangeV2(myMin, myMax, mySymbol1, myLabel) myRangeList.append(myRange1)  #now make another symbol and range... myMin = 50.1 myMax = 100 myLabel = 'Group 2' myColour = QtGui.QColor('#00eeff') mySymbol2 = QgsSymbolV2.defaultSymbol(myVectorLayer.geometryType()) mySymbol2.setColor(myColour) mySymbol2.setAlpha(myOpacity) myRange2 = QgsRendererRangeV2( myMin, myMax, mySymbol2, myLabel) myRangeList.append(myRange2)  myRenderer = QgsGraduatedSymbolRendererV2('', myRangeList) myRenderer.setMode(QgsGraduatedSymbolRendererV2.EqualInterval) myRenderer.setClassAttribute(myTargetField) myVectorLayer.setRendererV2(myRenderer) QgsMapLayerRegistry.instance().addMapLayer(myVectorLayer)      @Kelly's code works perfectly.   However I noticed that both the code (one I have typed in my first message and yours in the 2nd message) DO NOT work in QGIS v1.7.3 but WORKS in QGIS v1.8.0. I think this was a bug(?) that already resolved in v1.8.0  And one more question;  Do you have any sample code for (natural breaks, Jenks) classification of the "numeric_attribute_field" based on given number of classes (i.e. no of classes will be a variable in the code, say "n", and I will pass that from the plugin GUI i.e. n = spinBox.value() ) "DataBinding: 'index+NewsItem' does not contain a property with the name 'Link'", but property exists (Not a Typo) Update query cancelled by user Why is the cone measurable? Problem Denote by $\lambda_n$ the Lebesgue measure on $\mathbb {R}^n$. Let $h \in \mathbb {R}_{&gt;0}$. Let $A \subset \mathbb {R}^{n-1}$ be Lebesgue-measurable with finite measure. Define the cone $C(A,h)$ as the union of all straight lines connecting a point in $A \times\{0\}$ with the point $(0, h) \in \mathbb {R}^{n-1} \times \mathbb{R}$. Prove that $\lambda_n (C(A,h))=\frac{h}{n}\cdot \lambda_{n-1}(A)$. Where I struggle  Assuming that $C(A,h)$ is (Lebesgue-)measurable, this is a simple application of Fubini. How Fubini is used is all clear to me.  However, why is $C(A,h)$ measurable? It seems one could roughly argue as follows: As $A$ and $[0,h]$  are measurable so is $A \times [0,h]$. As $A \times [0,h]$ is measurable it is the union of a null set and a Borel set. $C(A,h)$ is the image of $A \times [0,h]$ under a certain diffeomorphism (c.f. ). Diffeomorphisms map null sets to null sets, and Borel sets to Borel sets. Hence, $C(A,h)$ is (as a finite union of measurable sets) measurable.  Unfortunately, I am not allowed to use the above properties of diffeomorphisms. What are other ways to prove the claim? Please only give a hint to set me thinking. "Would" & " Used to" I would like to work out the Fourier transform of the Gaussian function   $$f(x) = \exp \left(-n^2(x-m)^2 \right)$$  It seems likely that I will need to use differentiation and the shift rule at some point, but I can't seem to get the calculation to work. Does anyone have any advice?  By the way, I am using   $$\mbox{FT}(f)(k)=\int_{-\infty}^\infty f(x)e^{-ikx}\,\mathrm d x$$  as my definition of a Fourier transform. Many thanks.