Getting over fears of having no power

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emax10000
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24 Jun 2017, 9:35 am

So when it comes to my experiences in grad school and afterwards, I often fear that I don't know what options I have to stop someone coming after me. As a recent example, I am trying to get my account from grad school active so I can run codes with it. In order to do that, the computing services department at the University where I got the PhD needs to set it up again. It might end up that they negligently erased all the algorithms on my computing workspace on their work station. That would mean that while I have the data sets themselves, I wouldn't have the algorithms needed in order to recreate the thesis results. I wonder if the University could then say, since these results are not reproducible since you don;t have all the algorithms since we destroyed them, we will now revoke your PhD. Or perhaps even deliberately destroy my algorithms since they could do it unexpectedly and then revoke my PhD since it would mean that technically I have results that re not reproducible. I often get fears because I don't know what would happen if a University were to do that and how easy it would be for them to get away with it.



fifasy
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24 Jun 2017, 11:14 am

Isn't that why people back everything up on pen drives?

It's possible that could happen.

I always think back everything that's on a computer up on a separate pen drive or hard drive, just in case. You can also back things up on the internet by writing them in an email to yourself, perhaps.



emax10000
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24 Jun 2017, 11:37 am

fifasy wrote:
Isn't that why people back everything up on pen drives?

It's possible that could happen.

I always think back everything that's on a computer up on a separate pen drive or hard drive, just in case. You can also back things up on the internet by writing them in an email to yourself, perhaps.

I backed up the data files. The code was left on the university data site since neither I nor anyone I was working with figured they would actually wipe it out. So I take it you also think losing the degree and being considered a fraud due to the algorithms being gone is possible even though when writing the thesis no fraud was committed?



fifasy
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24 Jun 2017, 3:32 pm

I don't know. I can't understand exactly the situation you're describing.



kraftiekortie
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24 Jun 2017, 6:48 pm

Why would they want to take away your PhD?

This is extremely rare. And it's only done when plagiarism within a thesis/dissertation is discovered and proven.

You argued for your thesis in front of live people, too.

If you backed up your files, you should have access to them.

Methinks you might be thinking "worst case scenario."