Recently, my state has declared graduate students as employees giving them the right to unionize. The students in the Engineering School are very well compensated. The benefits that we get are   Minimum stipend of 29k$ (which was increased ~3 years ago).  Top tier health insurance plan fully paid for by the University and Engineering School Deans that largely respect student needs and actively address current issues Plethora of funding for student lead activities  Free services like legal council, psychiatrist, campus clinique, campus shuttle buses, etc. TA opportunities are always available for those that need them.    Additionally, my department has a very high standard set forth for us. We have nice offices, the Chair actively addresses our concerns and complaints, funds for student activities and community building, computational resources, and more. The quality of life for students in my department (Applied Math) is quite high.   Lately, we've had outside people dropping by to advise us to join a union. The humanities students are largely in support of this movement since they are not compensated as well as the engineering students. In my point of view, there are very few reasons why I can see joining a union will benefit the Applied Math graduate students. Given how well we, the graduate students in my department, are currently treated, what are the advantages and disadvantages of unionization?   Edit: There is a similar question , however, does not specifically address STEM students.   I am a naive graduate student and will like to be better informed about the advantages and repercussions of joining a union. Whenever administrative University personnel have approached us to dissuade the effort, their tone has been extremely diplomatic and ambiguous about why they are advising against unionizing.  A brief summary of the responses is as follows.   Advantages of unionizing   Security of current benefits Bargaining power to timely address current, new, and growing needs of the entire bargaining unit  Guaranteed minimum pay  Improving circumstances of students in other schools who are not as well compensated Human resources like representation for students facing abuse, harassment, or other adversities from their advisors  Disadvantages of unionizing    Partisan representation  Clarifying the distinction between student and employee (though some may argue that this is an advantage) Paying dues (though contracts usually negotiate higher stipends to offset this amount) Deterioration of student/administrative relationship    Additional STEM specific points that I'd like to add are   Advantages   Incentives to address issues such as a single student having to monitor experiments running for 8+ hours For international students, alleviating fears of not being able to find an advisor which prevents them for settling to the 1st person that says yes regardless of their interest  Some departments in the Engineering school offer things like funds for all students in their 3rd year to purchase a new laptop. Adapting this or similar policies universally would be appreciated. Guaranteed funding beyond X years as set forth by the School, especially when the average is just slightly below X.   Disadvantages    As funds are rerouted into increased stipends, there may be    Decreased support for professional development (conferences, workshops, etc.) Decreased supplemental resources (rented compute nodes and hours, new lab equipment, etc.) Fewer graduate student and postdoc hires     Thank you all for your comments; it is all very much insightful. I'll continue to look out for new responses.
The graduate students at my university (a relatively large state school in the US) are considering joining a union. To help decide whether to sign a union card in support of joining the union, I'm interested in more information about how unions have helped graduate students at other universities. What are some improvements to graduate life gained by graduate students at other universities upon joining a union?  I'm also interested in information about how unions have hurt graduate students at other universities. What are some detriments to graduate life caused by graduate students joining a union?  I'm primarily interested in student-body-wide benefits/detriments, instead of student-specific or faculty/administrator-specific claims (e.g. "my advisor treated me better with the union behind me" or "my students have stopped working since they joined a union" is not what I'm looking for).
Proof for alternative definition of the derivative I read somewhere recently that you can define the derivative as follows:  $$f'(x) = \lim_{h, k \to 0^+} \frac{f(x +h) - f(x - k)}{h + k}$$   I have been trying to prove this for about 2 hours, and can't seem to get it done. How should I proceed?  Edit: Assume $f$ is differentiable for all $x \in (x - \delta, x + \delta)$ for some $\delta &gt; 0$. Show that if $f(z)$ is an entire function such that it takes real values on the lines $Im(z)=0$ and $Im(z)=a$ (for some $a \in \mathbb{R}_{\neq 0})$, then $f$ is periodic with period $2 i a$.    So here is my thought process: First of all by reflection principle $f(\bar{z})=\overline{f(z)}$ so if our function $f$ is given in the strip $0 \leq Im(z) \leq a$, then its values on $-a \leq Im(z) \leq a$ follow by reflection principle. Then by imposing $f(z)=f(z+2 ia)$ we can intuitively see that this will define an entire function by looking at how the strips $na \leq Im(z) \leq 2na$ seamlessly stack on top of each other. Is this logical? And how would one prove this analytically? Rack Mount Servers - Build them or Buy them? This is the  for "Should I build coomputing hardware myself?" questions.   I have put together countless PCs, but never a large server. The geek in me says build it, but the realist in me says let the manufacturer handle it when there is a problem. Ignoring the time penalty involved with the initial assembly time of a built one, which is a better solution? Have you ever run into a problem with a home build server that would have been solved easier/quicker/cheaper by going with a manufacturer? Are there any features that manufacturers give that aren't easily attainable with a home built server? While trying to create a custom business rule using Apex I got the error:  INVALID_ID_FIELD, SaveAsActivity is not allowed with whatId that is not supported as a task whatId.  ...and found out that it was caused by the method setSaveAsActivity on my code, that was like:  msg.setSaveAsActivity(true); // "msg" is a SingleEmailMessage   What am I doing wrong here? Pass by Reference / Value in C++ I would like to clarify the differences between by value and by reference.  I drew a picture     So, for passing by value,  a copy of an identical object is created with a different reference, and the local variable is assigned the new reference, so to point to the new copy  How to understand the words: " If the function modifies that value, the modifications appear also within the scope of the calling function for both passing by value and by reference "  Thanks! Define a linear operator $T:C[0,1] \to C[0,1]$ as follows: $$Tf(x) = f(x) + \int_0^x f(u)du$$ It is easy to show that $T$ is a bounded linear operator. The statement also (1) claims that $T$ is one-to-one and onto, and (2) asks to compute $T^{-1}$. (Hence $T$ is an isomorphism due to a corollary of Open Mapping Theorem)  I need help to prove $T$ is onto: given any $g \in C[0,1]$, how to decompose it into a sum between a continuous $f$ and its antiderivative. I have trouble decomposing $g(x)=|x|$, not to mention bizarre functions like Weierstrass function. It seems impossible.  Thanks in advance for help! What is an "AppImage"? How do I install it? I just read . It talks about downloading an AppImage.     Yes, Linux; the Linux packages is distributed as an .appimage for 32-bit and 64-bit distributions, and should run across all major Linux distributions without any issues. The team currently have no plan to provide a native .deb (or .rpm) installer.   What are AppImages? How do they differ from snaps? How can I dual boot Windows and Ubuntu? I currently have Windows 7 on my computer and I want to install Ubuntu alongside Windows safely.  Could someone please provide clear instructions? Are PDO prepared statements sufficient to prevent SQL injection? Let's say I have code like this:  $dbh = new PDO("blahblah");  $stmt = $dbh-&gt;prepare('SELECT * FROM users where username = :username'); $stmt-&gt;execute( array(':username' =&gt; $_REQUEST['username']) );   The PDO documentation says:     The parameters to prepared statements don't need to be quoted; the driver handles it for you.   Is that truly all I need to do to avoid SQL injections?  Is it really that easy?  You can assume MySQL if it makes a difference.  Also, I'm really only curious about the use of prepared statements against SQL injection.  In this context, I don't care about XSS or other possible vulnerabilities. I am on SharePoint 2013 and do not have access to Designer, as a preface.  I am trying to create a list view that filters items by whether or not they were added in the last hour.  I had done this earlier, only with items that were added in the current week, by creating two columns, 'Week Start' and 'Week End', and filtering by Created falling between those two.  Simple enough.  However, filtering list views does not allow for complex functions, nor does the [Today] function recognize time, causing an issue.  Is there any workaround for this?  Thanks. Calculating $\lim_{n\to\infty}\sqrt[n]{2^n-n^2}$ Before I met her I had a poor opinion of her.   As person had a poor opinion before a particular time in past (before He met her) so I think there should be had had.   There are some more example like this:   Before I went to the university, I worked/had worked as a carpenter for 5 years. Before I opened the door, I put/had put the key in the lock. Before I opened the door, I looked/had looked carefully into the barn for snipers.   In all these sentence, for me, it should be perfect tense.  I asked that question on another platform where I was told that if sequence of past event is obvious and sentences uses "before"and "after", we often use past tense. Which means we should use past tense in all these sentences. But I have another sentence "The train had left before I reached the station." If I follow above mentioned rule there should be "left" instead of "had left". But I am damn sure this sentence is correct with "had left".   Am I correct?  Thank you What are instructions on how to download videos from YouTube?    Notice: Terms of Service Violation  Please be aware that by following any of the answers below, you will be violating YouTube's . In particular, from Section 5.B.:     Content is provided to you AS IS. You may access Content for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the Service and as permitted under these Terms of Service. You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content. You shall not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, or otherwise exploit any Content for any other purposes without the prior written consent of YouTube or the respective licensors of the Content. YouTube and its licensors reserve all rights not expressly granted in and to the Service and the Content. I was just wondering about that because it would influence how I deal with closed questions, e.g. whether they need to be improved (tagging, formatting, code samples) after closing, or if some should be deleted altogether.  However, I'm not asking for answers to these questions, I just want to know if Google (and/or other search engines) list closed questions in their search results. (I hope they don't.) Probability of complete coupon set in $K$ boxes where a box has $N$ distinct coupons? Say there is a contest to collect a full set of $M$ coupons.  Each box of product has $N$ distinct coupons of the $M$ possible coupons in it, selected uniformly without replacement from the $M$ possible coupons, the same $N$ in number for all boxes.  I'm interested in the probability that after opening $K$ boxes of product I have at least one complete set of the $M$ coupons.  My attempt has been to take the probability of a coupon not being in a box, use that to determine the probability of that coupon not being in any of the $K$ boxes, and then... I get flummoxed, and don't think this is the correct approach.  I searched the site for coupon collector problems, there are a couple that deal with similar situations (multiple in a box), but with the box having coupons selected with replacement, so duplication in a box is possible.  Right now I'm using a CAS to get probability of sums of hypergeometric samples having all bins covered to check my ideas, but that's utterly impractical for other than tiny cases.   Is this not as trivial as I think it is, or is there a direct way to calculate this? Contacting prospective advisors before graduate school applications - courtesy or annoyance? Last year, rather late during the MSc application cycle (after one round of funding was allocated - tardiness due to an abrupt change in my life situation), I emailed two professors from two schools that I most wanted to go to. I had perused their webpages and decided these professors had the specific research interests closest to my own.  My reason for contacting them before finishing my applications for their respective schools was that the applications included a large section for specific research questions that I wanted to investigate. So, I emailed these professors asking a bit about their work, because their webpages of course featured surface-level stuff.  One professor was very receptive and invited me to Skype with her so she could better explain herself and I could ask her questions. With her support, I was able to write an application that met her standards quite quickly.  The other professor told me - paraphrasing, of course - that he was too far into the process of choosing a new student for his research group to spend time helping me finish the application.  Let me be clear that the latter professor didn't say any harsh words and I have nothing bad to say about him. That said, the purpose of my question is to decide whether it's better for me as a prospective MSc student to email professors ahead of time like this. Was the latter's rejection likely due to my tardiness rather my emailing him? The more receptive professor made the point that she always wanted to have prospective MSc students write their own research proposals and get her approval before submitting the application. Is this common? If so, then I guess reaching out beforehand is a good thing to do, but earlier in the application cycle?  Thank you. How can I test whether a command's output is an empty string while not   interfering with buffering?  Example:  command | ??? if [ $? = 0 ] &amp;&amp; [ -n "$output_from_command"]; then    ...   I want the output from the code above to be the same as when running command. I was trying to remove all the lines of a file except the last line but the following command did not work, although file.txt is not empty.  $cat file.txt |tail -1 &gt; file.txt  $cat file.txt   Why is it so? How to play MP3 files using Rhythmbox? Is there a way to show statistic info?