• dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 hours ago

    the context is all there … Faith is a graduate student working on their masters thesis, in the thesis paper they included tables that they presumably color-coded (maybe different columns had different colors), and they used multiple colors such that it was “rainbow colored”.

    Apparently the thesis advisor did not like the presence of color and advises using APA guidelines on how to style & format the tables: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/tables-figures/tables

    • taiyang@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Interestingly your link doesn’t mention use of color or lack there of. It does say elsewhere that you shouldn’t do it for decoration, though.

      That said, things like this are more dictated by the journal you publish to and a thesis has to imitate that. Solution? Graduate and start a journal that requires beautiful color tables, lol

      • dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 hours ago

        yeah, I think the email is probably fake and made for internet points / humor

        I have heard horror stories about how specific formatting has to be for a thesis or dissertation, though - and often those rules are very specific to a particular university or even department. So it’s also possible for rules like that to be local and not from a universal standard like the APA guide.

        • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
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          2 hours ago

          yeah, I think the email is probably fake and made for internet points / humor

          Eh, you’d be surprised at how far some people will go to criticize women in STEM fields. It’s not everyone, and I doubt it’s even a majority, but there’s enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if this is true.

          Or maybe the OOP is a mathematical Lisa Frank. Idk

          • dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            59 minutes ago

            no denying that people criticize women in STEM (as a woman in STEM myself), but there are series of “dear Faith” email posts that collectively seem a bit unlikely in their tone and situation, which is what makes me think it’s more likely they’re fake than real

            that said, this particular email seems more plausible than the other one about plagiarism.