Are there formal or informal hiring bans in some academic settings based on gender and/or nationality?

In early March 2015, an eMail by a female German professor apparently rejecting a male Indian applicant due to the 'rape problem' in India made news. (The issue is a bit more complex. There is some discussion whether the eMails were selectively quoted and the professor has since apologized.)

What bugs me however is the following paragraph (which may or may not be what the professor has written, and which seems to be ignored by the news media):

"Many female professors in Germany decided to no longer accept male Indian students for these reasons, and currently other European female association are joining."

Is this a thing in Academia? Has anyone heard about hiring bans, either formal or informal ones, based on sex/gender and/or nationality?

Switching to Lnguistics from Computer Science

I'm a computer science undergrad. I will be graduating in one year's time.

I will be graduating with (most likely) a little over an A - average in a 4 year BSc.

I would like to pursue a masters in Linguistics, (Focusing second language acquisition, not computational linguistics)

I study currently in a developing country, and would like to pursue a masters course in Europe preferably.

1. How likely is a masters program in linguistics in Europe to accept me into their programs?


2. What sort of financial aid can I expect in this scenario?


3. What should be my first steps, (ideally which I should take now) to achieve my aim?

Thank you in advance.

Live Lecture Technology

I am trying to come up with a method to live broadcast my lectures to parties connected to the internet. Up to now, I have been using FaceTime to transmit my work on a whiteboard. This method works, but the quality is lacking.

The crux is I do not want to record "my person," but rather what I write on some surface. This previously asked question (Device for writing a lecture with a stylus for video lecture recording) solves the problem for non-live transmission. That is, for the previously answered question, the individual records and subsequently uploads the lecture. I would like to do something similar, but live-transmit the lecture. Does anyone have a reasonable method by which they do this?

My ideal solution would be something like an interactive pen display (e.g., http://ift.tt/1xUKyEd) which could somehow be transmitted in real-time. The software side of this is where I get iffy. (Also, I am running a mac.)

Another solution could surely come from a document camera, but again the software leaves me dry.

To summarize: I am looking for a hardware/mac-based software solution to live transmit document-based lectures over the internet.

Do I have the legal right to demand information on plagiarism of my work from university?

A student of one Institute in Germany has word-to-word translated my thesis to English from another Russian and submitted it as her own in 2014. I informed the university providing them with my work in Russian and presentations of the work I made in 2013. Upon receiving my email University examinations first asked for a legal translation of my work. To which I replied that my work was written in Russian and that is a reason why it was stolen - for translation. And that the legal translation of even 1 page would cost a lot, let aside all the thesis. And since I was the victim in this case I suggested that their university that is responsible in preventing accepting plagiarised works has to either translate my work or ask one of professors speaking russian to confirm the match. Else I suggested them to look at numerous tables with hundreds of numbers and match them (providing pages).

2 months since then I still haven't received any update, I call the examination office, the woman re-directs me to her colleague. Who then tells me that: 1. Me not being a student of that university, I have no right for any information. 2. If there was any plagiarism, their system would recognise it. 3. I should ask the student who I claim has stolen my work on any information.

Yet the problem is: 1. Their european plagiarism system has no access to the database of university in Russia, and more over my thesis is in Russian, while she submitted translated english version. So plagiarism is untraceable by their system. Which they apparently ignore. 2. Asking me to talk to the person committing the plagiarism, who in the first place lied to me when stealing my work, and declined my request for her to come forward and recall work. It is the same as police would tell the assault victim to go and talk to the criminal. Yeah.. right..

Is there any legal way for me to get the answer on the plagiarism case from this university? Shouldn't it be university checking the translation of my thesis rather than requesting me to make official notary verified translation? After all it's their job to prevent plagiarism! And given their system has holes - i did part of the job for them already - identifying that the work is plagiarism and its up for them to check..

Yet they completely brush me off saying I am not involved and have no rights.

Would really appreciate help. Thank you very much in advance!

Does job experience matter for graduate school admission?

I was planning on applying to US colleges for masters and recently I got shortlisted for this job at an Indian startup (I don't think they have anything major out in the market). They are working on some Machine Learning (ML) product and I wish to pursue a masters in ML. Will this job experience help me with the admission process or should I just directly apply? My plan in life is to do a PhD and then join the industry.

Alternatives to Word/LaTeX

I wrote my undergrad thesis using Word. Overall I managed to get the job done, but as with all WYSIWYG editors, by the end I feel like I had created a bit of a mess. It didn't show, but I know it's there. Soon I'm going to start writing my postgrad thesis, and I'd like to use a tool that gives me more control over the single elements. The obvious choice seems to be LaTeX, but as I'm going to be writing a thesis about humanistic matters, I wouldn't be using all its advanced features. Also, it's something I don't know, and it would take me a while to learn how to use it properly.

But here's what I was thinking. I know HTML. I know CSS. (I used to be a web developer, as a matter of fact.) Is there any tool that relies on these instruments? Of course I could just do it normally and write a HTML file and be done with it, but I don't know if there are tools that help with bibliography, summaries, menu levels etc.

It seems to me that with HTML5 and all the technological advancements, this might be the way to go. I'd like to hear your opinions about this, and also if there are any other tools I'm not aware of, thanks.

What is the exact meaning of a deadline for conference paper submission?

If I see on an IEEE conference webpage that the deadline is set to the 30th of March (for example) what does that exactly mean? Does it mean the submission system will not accept any submission after 11:59pm on March 30th?