Why do I keep getting bad grades from the subjects that I'm very good at

But I take incredibly bad grades, just because of the calculation mistakes I do. It's not because I didn't solve the question or anything, it's just because of the calculation.

Boy that word "just" is dangerous, isn't it?

The unfortunate truth is that you are not good at practical economics, precicely "because of the calculation mistakes that you do".  You don't think those mistakes are important (hence "just"), but you don't get to decide what is and isn't important in your classes/research/work. The people who evaluate you get to decide what's important.

There are many disciplines where the primary goal is to get the right answer, not to demonstrate your "understanding". It doesn't matter whether you grok the theory if you can't actually execute on the fine details. If you didn't get the right answer, you didn't solve the question.

This does not mean that practical economics is less worthwhile than hihg-level mathematics, which cares less about arithmetic skills.  It only means that practical economics is different.  Math emphasizes different details that  you're more comfortable with and that other people would find boring and/or baffling.

  I can't change this

Of course you can.  You can do exactly what everyone else does to become good at anything uncomfortable: Put on your grownup pants and practice, fail, listen, practice, practice, fail, listen, practice, practice, practice.


Can computer science student do PhD under supervisor in mathematics?

The answer is Maybe...

I know quite a lot of person, which are currently involved in a PhD. Since it is about cloud security, it might be useful to have a supervisor knowing algebra, since cryptography is more in the domain of mathematics than of computer science.

Since you seem not to know what you should expect from your supervisor, you might want this person what she thinks about this.
Ask her something related to the following :

What is the role of a supervisor in this PhD ?
What do you expect from me ?
In which area would you think your expertise will help me in this PhD ? Will I not struggle on the computer science's side ?

It might help you understand what you will do, what she will help you with, etc...

Hope it helps.


How to obtain number of publications by year on a given subject?

ISI Journal Citation Reports
ISI Journal citation reports might give you some useful information (your university may have a subscription).
It allows you to browse citation reports by subject category (i.e., discipline).  It includes things like impact factor, total counted citations, total articles in the focal year.
You can then click "view journal summary list" which will give you an overview.
For example, here is sample output for psychology in the 2013 JCR:

Of course, this only includes articles in journals indexed by ISI.
Publish or Perish Software
More generally, you might want to check out Publish or Perish. It is free software for Windows and OSX that provides a way of searching Google Scholar particularly suited to bibliometric analysis.


Should I mention a magazine article written about my research in my CV?

I saw some researcher having "media coverage" or "general impact" columns in their CVs, see e.g. this example.

Other way to go (which I do) is to append to the respective publications "featured by [The Economist/Technology Review/2014 Highlights of [this journal]/John Smith's blog]".

IMHO as long you are not overdoing it, it should be a plus.


How can I validate a citation that is genuine in google scholar but as a *?

Why not just open the different articles, search for your name and see the citations for yourself? Usually, this is quickly done. If some of the articles are not available at your institution, it may be harder.


Mentioning student name changes in a letter of recommendation

Why not ask the student what they would prefer?  I can imagine situations (for example, if the student changed what gender they identify with) where they might not want the name change mentioned too much, or they might appreciate you explaining the circumstances.  You're writing the letter for student's benefit, after all.


How to avoid being plagiarised when suggesting an idea to a potential collaborator?

You are correct that it MIGHT be the case that another researcher uses your idea without acknowledging you. However, the chances are much higher that your idea is not even good enough that the other researcher wants to collaborate with you. Keep in mind that the other researcher is probably an expert in his field and might either think this idea is trivial or is not realizable due to problems you are not aware of now. I do not want to demotivate you, but in my experience "That is the best idea ever. I am going to steal it and get famous" is the least probable reaction.

So to answer your question about how to continue: Your main task is to convince the researcher that your idea is worth the effort. It is much better if you already have something to show, some preliminary results or a simulation that shows your idea might work out. That is the best point in time where you can contact another researcher and ask if you can collaborate to refine the work and publish it. If you fear that the other researcher might steal your idea, you could also publish your preliminary work at arXiv. Think about why you want to collaborate and why you can not realize it on your own.

I do not fully understand his work and I hope he can explain to me how my idea can be realized with his methods: Chances are very high that your idea does not work out. Try hard to understand his work first. If you have questions, you can try to ask, but do not expect that the other researcher will teach you all the basics just because you might have an idea.
I do not have the time to realize it and just want to share the idea: The other researcher probably has no time either. Sharing is great, but do not expect much from the collaboration.
I know how to realize it, but I do not have the equipment: That is a very reasonable cause, but then try to do some calculations or simulations that show that your idea might work.
I can only realize parts of the work. For example I can do the implementation of an algorithm, but I am not able to prove that it works for all corner cases: Very reasonable, nobody is an expert for everything. But then at least begin with your part and show how it works before contacting a potential collaborator.
I just want to have his name on my paper: Please don't!


Is it unusual for a math department not to have a mail/web server?

I've found out that the department (or the university?) is doing away with the server and instructing everyone to instead use the G Suite email and Google services that the general student body of the university uses.

It sounds like the university is outsourcing IT, which is normal.


Republishing an article on a second journal (with permission)

You can't do this and it's not because of copyright, but because journals generally don't accept unoriginal contributions. For example from Elsevier's policies and ethics page:

  Originality and plagiarism: The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works, and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others, that this has been appropriately cited or quoted.

Springer's publishing ethics page:

  Maintaining integrity of the research and its presentation can be achieved by following the rules of good scientific practice, which include ... The manuscript has not been published previously (partly or in full), unless the new work concerns an expansion of previous work (please provide transparency on the re-use of material to avoid the hint of text-recycling (‘self-plagiarism’)).


Does vixra hold copyright over any submission to it?

The answer seems to be: No.
See here: "viXra.org does not require that authors grant any specific license to viXra.org. Copyright is assumed to remain entirely with the authors of any articles submitted."


Put simply, plagiarism is fraud: it happens if you present material as if you had discovered it, when, in fact, you had not.

If you cite A, then you are certainly not committing plagiarism, because you are saying, in effect, "I did not discover this: A did." But what if it is not true that A discovered it? A might just have been quoting X, Y, and Z.

If you cite a paper by A, then you are claiming to have read it. If A's paper said, in effect, "X, Y, and Z report that ...", then you have a choice. You could read the papers by X, Y, and Z, and cite them, or you could legitimately cite "A, citing X, Y and Z".

In my opinion, if you have not even seen the papers by X, Y, and Z, you cannot legitimately cite them, but you can cite A's citation of them. You have to decide whether to rely on A's summary of the work of X, Y, and Z. If it is either tangential to your work, or so well known in your field that, in a sense, everyone knows it, then you do not need to trace the theory back to its origins. For example, if you are writing about the theory of gravity, it is not essential to cite Newton, I (1666), or whatever, but if your work seeks to overturn X's theory of blah, then you have to cite X's original work - and, dare I say, actually read it.

By way of a footnote: 'self-plagiarism' is something else entirely. It is recycling but in a bad way.

A further footnote: you cannot necessarily trust other authors' summaries of earlier work. I once found it necessary to translate a paper from its original French to make sure that it did say what other authors who cited it claimed it said: it did not!


Applying for different PhD positions in the same research group

It is okay to apply to both positions.  The student might even be at an advantage, having interests and skills in both areas.  I might try to contact both professors in advance, and ask if they would like the application structured as one or two applications.  If the student does submit two applications, I would recommend stating in the cover letter that they are applying to both, and would be excited to work in either position.


How do you determine if you don't have interest in research or merely don't have the discipline?

First of all, you completed a Ph.D. in mathematics-- I would hardly call that a "lack of success."

Secondly, I'm a big advocate for getting paid to do what you're good at.  And from an economic point of view, that's the best thing you can do for society.  If you want to tinker with math problems in your spare time or build up self-discipline and concentration skills, by all means, go for it.  Such things will sharpen your skills in every aspect of life.  But humans are pretty straightforward creatures: we tend to pursue and get better at what we're interested in, and we flounder when put in career paths that just don't match our personalities.  You're not a lazy or unintelligent person for not wanting to do math research.  You already tried the path when getting your Ph.D.  If it didn't fulfill you then, it's definitely not going to if you try to force yourself back into it.


Which license should be chosen in arXiv for a paper to be published in Elsevier?

How to add another Creative Commons license to an arXiv paper:

  We currently support three of the Creative Commons licenses. If you wish to use a different CC license, then select arXiv's non-exclusive license to distribute in the arXiv submission process and indicate the desired Creative Commons license in the actual article.

From the arXiv webpage about licenses.

How to indicate the desired Creative Commons license according to Elsevier:

  Elsevier requires authors posting their accepted manuscript to attach a non-commercial Creative Commons user license (CC-BY-NC-ND).  This is easy to do. On your accepted manuscript add the following to the title page, copyright information page, or header /footer: © YEAR. Licensed under the Creative Commons [insert license details and URL].

From Elsevier's sharing webpage.


Career path to professor with an engineering background in Germany

Your chances of becoming an academic researcher without a PhD are negligible. If you want to take this path, that is the first step. However, as far as I know long-term job prospects in German engineering faculties are not better than in other parts of academia (and maybe worse). Furthermore, many departments prefer if there PhD students have experience in the industry. You can certainly apply without such an experience, but competition is strong.

My advice is: Get an entry level job in the industry. If after two or three years you would still like to do research, apply for PhD positions at universities and research institutes. When you have your PhD, you can look for research positions in the industry or decide to stay in academia and start on the long hard road to a permanent position. If you then still want to become a professor (why would you? Usually you'd be a glorified manager and hardly do any research yourself.), you can do a habilitation. If you are extremely lucky (in addition to being very good, successful and a great networker), you'd might get a position as a professor someday. Chances for that are slim.


How to get title and pdf (and perhaps other metadata like author) from DOI

the Crossref REST API is public and doesn't have a license - all our metadata are available for reuse without restriction. That's because we believe that metadata are facts and facts cannot be owned or licensed. (The license CC 4 refers only to the documentation on how to use the API :-))

We have 105 million DOIs about 25% of those have full-text links that go to HTML or PDFs. I'm not sure of the exact queries you'll need but if you end up using it and need help you can open tickets there on GitHub.


Is there a professional virtue in independent research and reviews?

I am expanding my comments into an answer as requested by jakebeal.

It is a basic tenet of academia that the identity, geographical location, or institutional affiliation (or lack thereof) of a researcher should not matter when it comes to publishing their results; all that matters is that the results are of good quality and of interest to the research community. According to this ideal, academic research is an enterprise open to anyone, anywhere. So, yes, your goal of performing independent research is a noble one and certainly has value, both to the community and to your own professional prospects. However, it is important to stress that this value will be created primarily if and when you are able to create research that's good enough to be publishable in a peer-reviewed journal, and not before. If you are serious about being an independent researcher (or any kind of researcher, really), publishing your results should therefore be your goal.

In the comments you point out your belief that journals rarely publish the writings of independent researchers. I agree that that is very probably true, but one should be careful not to draw the wrong conclusion here. It is not so much that journals are snobbish and elitist and simply refuse to seriously consider papers from an author with no institutional affiliation (although, to be sure, one cannot entirely discount a small and mostly unintended psychological bias making it marginally more difficult for an independent researcher to get their work accepted). Rather, the main reason is that independent researchers face multiple obstacles to creating good work in the first place. Those obstacles include:

Independent researchers don't have a lot of contact with other researchers from the community who can tell them about the state of their field and give them ideas for good research problems to work on.
Independent researchers usually don't have anyone to criticize their ideas and give them feedback. Such feedback can be quite crucial to making progress in one's research.
Due to their lack of contact with their discipline, independent researchers often don't have a chance to become well-versed in the terminology of their field and in the cultural norms of how research in their field is typically presented. They may develop good research ideas but do so in an insular fashion using their own private language, terminology and presentation style, which makes it much harder for them to communicate their ideas to others.
Importantly, independent researchers are not paid by anyone to do research, which usually means that they have to spend most of their time and creative energy working a "normal" job. This puts them at a significant competitive disadvantage compared to non-independent researchers.

Let me now get to your question. Even if you never publish your results, I still think there is value for you to try to work on some research problems in your spare time. Aside from the fact that research can be a lot of fun, it will certainly develop your intellect and probably help you develop professional skills that will come in handy at one point or another, whether you continue to pursue a doctorate or end up in an industry job. However, as far as things that you can put on your resume are concerned, I don't think private research writings that you wrote for your own amusement but are not of good enough quality to be published in a journal, or at least as a conference poster or on a reasonably good quality online blog, will be of much value on a resume.


Doctoral Consortiums: When, How Many and Are they actually useful?

Having attended one of the doctoral consortiums you linked to as well as one you haven't, here's my perspective (as a student) on what doctoral consortiums provide a venue for:

A) Networking with peers and senior researchers in your field in a very targeted way.  A prolonged period of time ranging from 1-2 days is usually provided where you'll be closeted with other consortium students and senior researchers.  This gives you a set amount of time where not only will you have a bunch of students with you who are also interested in networking, but where senior people in the field who may not generally be approachable during a conference will be available and open to talking to you.  In addition, it also gives you a subset of people that you know will be at the conference that you can continue to network with during breaks and meals.

B) Getting an outside opinion on your research.  Doctoral consortiums will usually give you time to present your research so that the senior people in your field can give you feedback.  As a PhD student, sometimes it's difficult to get a perspective outside of what your advisor's agenda is.  Feedback during consortiums can help to provide new insights into how your work will be received in the larger research community, what people in the community perceive to be the strengths and weaknesses in your topic area, and how they think about what you're doing.

C) It gives you a place to practice presenting your research to a wider audience than just your advisor or your lab.  Even in a specific research area like human-computer interaction, which you linked to, there is a wide spread of topics that people will be doing research in.  Presenting at a doctoral consortium gives you a chance to really try to explain your research to a receptive audience that may have no background in what you're doing.  It's sort of like having a low stakes first shot at what you'll have to do when you eventually give job talks.

D) Depending on the conference, doctoral consortiums are arguably really nice for your CV because some of them are very selective and difficult to get into.

Not all doctoral consortiums are the same, but generally they are targeted for the point in your graduate career when you've picked your topic, done preliminary work or published a paper or two in that area, but before you're really entrenched in your planned research and can still change direction.

The idea is that by getting that outside feedback from senior researchers in the field, they'll be able to give you a nudge in the right direction if they foresee real problems with your topic/work in time for you to make corrections.

The general opinion that I've heard/witnessed has been that going to more than 2 is overkill and that at that point you won't be getting much out of them.  However, it's really good to get into at least one as a student.

A last point, since you mention funding, many doctoral consortiums provide some level of funding for students that have been accepted to ensure that they can attend.  In addition, they will often cover the registration fee for the conference that they're attached to.


Where to ask for more detail of a paper?

First, you should always try to find answers on details and your questions on a paper in the references of that paper. It's also easy to overlook the supplementary material of a paper, when available. If your questions/details are very fundamental and basic, it's likely these issues are resolved in those sources, otherwise it's unlikely it would have passed the review process of a good journal.

On average (even on researchgate (imo horrible to search this website)) you will not find many readers interested in a particular article, as not many read an individual article, and the likelihood that you meet at the same time/spot in the WWW is low. If the article has an higher citation count, your chances are better to discuss via googlegroups/stackexchange/boards a paper with other being interested, but also the chances that you missed or misunderstood something reading the paper.

Another option is looking into papers citing the particular paper, via google scholar you can even search only within such papers and using the right keywords.

One imho very unused option is looking into a related thesis to that paper. In depth explanations, technical setups, formulas are often described there in detail and often the thesis is freely available in the www or the server of the university. In Germany all PhD thesis are freely downloadable.

If your confusion and questions are not answered by those methods, you should contact the corresponding author of a paper via the given mail adress. But keep the length ouf your mail short and the questions clear, especially and even if you think some results are "suspicious/unfair". Here you can also ask if a thesis exists that gives more details than the paper. It's only your suspicion and maybe wrong. Rather ask how than why questions, especially under such a suspicion.

Personally, if I ask a corresponding author something I'm missing or not understanding after applying above methods before, it's how they did something (technical measurement, simulation details). Why questions are mostly all resolved by authors, journal editor and reviewers during planning, writing and reviewing a paper. The details of how are quite often missing, due to limited space/interest or to keep an advance. In the latter case, if no other researcher/group can reproduce specific results in a paper (this happens quite often), at some point the authors will/have to reveal some secrets, before being suspected of pseudo-science and I have experienced also several times that results/methods of paper have been doubted directly after presentation in the questions time at conferences by the audience. If you can meet an author of a paper which is important for your research on a conference, take the opportunity, asking someone direct critical questions in a talk or poster presentation will often reveal much faster, if something is made-up or the well thought out.


How detailed do I have to provide sources

When you first introduce the technical standard in your thesis, you should provide citations to any and all relevant documents.  By "any and all", I mean the set that you are making use of directly, but not previous versions, commentary, or ancillary documents.  Each reference should appear separately in your Bibliography.

After that, you do not need to provide additional citations even when you refer to that technical standard later in the same chapter, or in later chapters.  However, if you are quoting text from the standard, or otherwise you are analyzing/critiquing the standard in detail, then it would be helpful to your readers to provide citations to the specific reference and page numbers.  Sometimes, depending upon the standard, it is more appropriate to cite chapter, section, and subsection numbers.  You say that you are comparing different technical standards.  If so, then it would be very appropriate to provide chapter, section, and subsection numbers for the respective standard sections.  Somewhere on the page (e.g. footnotes) you could provide citation to the technical standard document(s) themselves.


expectations when applying for an adjunct position

In industry, hiring decisions are typically made very quickly.  When I was at Microsoft, if everyone on the interview loop liked a candidate, we tried to let them know before they even left the building that they should expect an offer.  We had to, because in industry, good candidates only stay on the market a few days before they get and accept good offers elsewhere.

But it's a completely different story in academia where hiring decisions often take months.  It's likely your application will have to be put to a faculty vote before they can make an appointment, even for an adjunct position, and often the votes are batched.  You say you applied in August, but Fall quarter probably didn't start until September.  And even after everyone's back for the start of the new academic year, it could be several weeks before their first department-wide faculty meetings.

Also, realistically, adjuncts are bottom of the heap at a university.  You're part-time hired help brought in as cheap labor to cover classes when they need you and ignored when they don't.  So deciding what to do with you is unlikely to be a high priority.

Bottom line is that what you're experiencing is pretty much what you should expect.  Sorry to deliver the bad news.


Short answer: Don't do it

Long answer: Breaching your contract would have legal consequences. It also will definitely not help you getting work anywhere else. Formally the fabled 'black lists' don't exist, but in general people talk to each other and someone simply breaking their contract is exceptional enough that news will spread fast. Furthermore at least in the place I was, the paperwork is often done by the universities HR-department and payment is handled through the same state agency, independent of which other institute you work at, so this will turn up as a red flag.

You can ask your boss to cancel a contract. What you want is called an "Auflösungsvertrag". However this needs to be agreed on by both sides, so you better have a good enough reason. For example as a boss, if you told me that you want to interrupt your studies to take care of a dying relative, I would gladly sign it, but if you told me you got a better offer somewhere else, I would still insist on you fulfilling the contract until I at least can find a replacement. And don't lie, as mentioned before, bad news travels fast.

Apart from this, if there is no other clause in your contract allowing you to give notice, it's best to just bear it for another six months. Document your hours, do your job diligently and wait for the time to be up. If you worked for the same boss for a year already, you knew what you were signing up for.


How is the H-Index of a journal related to its grouping in SJR?

They are different indices, measuring quite different things, and shouldn't be expected to be highly correlated.

The H-index is simply the number h of articles that have received at least h citations.
The Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) only considers documents published in the journal in the last three years, and weights them depending on the prestige of the journals the citing papers were published in. The idea is that a citation is "worth more" if it's from (what SJR determines to be) a highly prestigious journal. (Interestingly, the prestige factors are determined self-consistently, using an algorithm like Google's PageRank.)

  I found instances where a journal with low H-Index got grouped in Q2 and a journal with higher H-Index got grouped in Q4. How is this possible?

The H-index is strongly linked to the number of papers the journal publishes, see this answer. Hence, it's quite possible for a small selective journal to get a low H-index, but high SJR ranking. Conversely, a large journal with lower standards is likely to eventually publish enough highly cited papers to achieve a high H-index.

  Is this grouping of SJR well-defined?Is it more prestigious to publish in Q1 than in Q2?Is Q1 journal considered to be of higher value than Q2?

It's well-defined in the sense that there's an objective algorithm to calculate it, and it seems to do a decent job at capturing the trends in the fields I'm familiar with. A Q1 journal will generally be more prestigious than a Q3/Q4 one, but there might be exceptions, especially as any measure can be and will be gamed. However, if there's say one journal just above the Q1/Q2 cutoff, and one just below it, I wouldn't take Scimago's word for it. While it's useful as a rough guide, it ultimately, like most rankings, is no substitute for experience. Look where leaders in your field publish, where the papers you read are published, and discuss journal quality with colleagues or mentors.


Is there a financial motivation for organizing a summer school?

Whithin the universities that I've been affiliated outside the US, there is no financial gain in a math department organizing a summer school, as there is no tuition.

Usually, they should submit a proposal for a funding agency that will cover the costs of the project.

The reason for doing summer schools is for advertising the department and their graduate program outside their regional area. The department may also be interested in boasting a particular research project/area.

One can also squeeze a few activities in the project with a collaborator far away, so the project would also serve for other research activicies not publicly advertised, by paying for his/her visit.


Cost/Benefit of transfering from Masters to PhD mid-program

Whether it is "okay" to skip the Masters depends on your country and field. In US institutions in most scientific fields it is considered the norm to go directly from Bachelor's to PhD (of course many people get a MS along the way, too, but it's not necessary). In my experience, though, even in countries such as China where enrollment in a MS program is generally required to get accepted to a PhD program, once you get your terminal degree, nobody cares too much about what came beforehand.

Regarding whether it's worth your time, this depends on what kind of offer you're considering. Is the advisor strong in their field (regardless of the prestige of your institution overall)? Could you expect to publish two or more "good" publications ("good" is a relative bar, of course)?

In general, my feeling has always been that as a student, it is easy to "trade up," i.e. go to a MS program stronger than your BS program. Do a postdoc somewhere stronger than your PhD institution. However, once you leave the student/trainee portion of your career, in academia you are more likely to have to "trade down." The MIT and Stanford grads are enough to take most of the top faculty positions in any field in a given year. Therefore, if you want an academic career, you may put more emphasis on prestige.

If you aim for corporate work after graduation, then being at a "better" institution will probably open you up to a better network of alumni who could help you navigate to a good entry level job that fits your skills, setting you up better for future success.

Trading those away would be worthwhile if you really felt that this position was (a) likely to give you academic output that could compensate for the potential future networking loss, or (b) if you felt like this was the best offer you were going to get, or were unsure about the possibility of future offers (i.e. a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush).


What license should be chosen on arXiv for a paper to be published in Communications in Algebra at Taylor&Francis?

According to the publisher's rules, you can share your preprint "as much as you like". According to SHERPA/RoMEO, you can also share the post-refereed version. What you cannot share is the publisher's version, the one that will appear on the website (don't ask me why).

So the simplest and safest is probably the first option, grant arXiv a license to distribute your article. You can find more info here. Roughly speaking, with the CC licenses, you allow other people to take your article, redistribute it themselves, modify it and redistribute the modified version etc., possibly with some limitations (SA: they must use the same license when redistributing; NC: commercial use is prohibited). It appears possible that the CC licenses conflict with copyright transfers.

I've never tried, but if you check the last option ("none of the above licenses apply") then arXiv will probably refuse your preprint. The "public domain" option is also probably not possible for you, because that would mean you waive all your copyright-related rights, including transferring the copyright to the publisher – which they will probably require.


Adjunct position at Johns Hopkins Engineering

This answer is not specific to JHU and I have no experience there. But it might be useful background. An adjunct position is not a career and it is almost always poorly paid. Those people generally, who live off of such positions typically do "adjunct" for several institutions, have terrible overall teaching loads, and are still poorly paid.
The "ideal" adjunct for universities like JHU is someone who is already employed in industry (say), especially in research there, and who just wants a nighttime activity to keep them engaged a bit with academia and may love teaching. You would probably earn a small stipend per course, but, given that the salary of such a person is usually about double that of the full time faculty, it would probably not change your lifestyle. A retired person from industry who meets the qualifications and who wants to do something interesting, might find it worthwhile.
If you "sort of" fit that description it would be worth applying. If you are desperate for any (any) employment, then my might want to apply.
OTOH, some adjunct positions have union protections that the faculty doesn't have.
Whether it might lead to a permanent position depends on the institution and its rules. I think that at most you would get a small boost in a later application for a tenure-track position provided you fund a way to interact with other faculty. But it isn't really a path to such a position at that institution.


Wrong internship dates in my CV for graduate application

Correct the dates on your CV, then check the admissions website to see if there is any information about submitting corrections or amendments to your submitted application.  If there is not, email the corrected CV to the admissions office or department with a very brief line, along the lines of "Hello, I submitted my CV with my applications but later noticed I put the wrong year on one of my internships.  I've corrected it in this version.  Thank you for your time."   Include any relevant reference information to your application.

I honestly wouldn't expect it to get replied to, or possibly even noticed - admissions offices are very busy this time of year.  But this way if it does come up you can refer to your earlier email with the corrected version.

I also wouldn't fret about it over much.  It's remotely possible it could hurt you against an otherwise identically-qualified candidate who didn't make mistakes on their paperwork, assuming anyone even notices the discrepancy.  But even that seems like a very small detail against a good candidate.  The other thing I would suggest is that you proof read the whole thing carefully before you submit it with this correction; if you didn't proof read it well the first time and missed this mistake, it's possible you missed others too.

Good luck!


How does one organize their publication pipeline?

I too am in CS but I found the schedule of conferences to be fairly simple and I strive to submit to the same conferences each year.

First, identify the handful of conferences in your field that are both reputable and aligned with your research topics. Then you can form a mental model that is made up of (A) the deadlines and (B) the prestige.

For example, all of the conferences that I would submit to all  have deadlines that cluster around two times, Fall (August/September) and Spring (March/April). I can also group them into top-tier or second-tier. At that point, it is pretty easy to know where I am going to submit each piece of work based on whether it is Fall or Spring and whether it is suitable for the top-tier venues.

One side note. I have been given the advice to find 1-2 conferences that I can call "home." That way I can get close to the community, network, and they will become familiar with my work. I have been told to avoid shooting papers off to a dozen different conferences because they will be forgotten in those communities.


How to ‘fill the gap’ between the end of one’s grant and handing in one’s thesis

This is very normal to happen, you have three choices, which I would recommend the last two:

Extend and Hope The Supervisor Comes Through: Obviously you are extending your stay at the university, you can stay still and hope that your supervisor can find a funding somewhere, which is laying around, and then give it to you.
Find a Job and Write Your Thesis: Second choice is to go and find a job (postdoc or industry), since you are a German national, the world is your oyster. You do not need to waste time and energy for visa applications.

2.1 Benefit: You stack your experience, start earning based on years of education.

2.2. Drawback: You need to balance it out between your future job and writing your thesis.

A Big Fat Alert: The second option is the tricky one, not everyone can balance it out between a job and writing a thesis; and I know people who did fail their submission because they were too busy earning their living.

Combination of the first two: You can find a job at your university and then write the thesis at the same time.

Main Benefit: You can still discuss issues with your supervisor and be at the same environment until your submission.

Conclusion: You need to sit down and think about this very carefully, and then choose your option. Not the best scenario but it happens to many at the end of their third year period.


Reading list about the organisation of education in colleges in America

There should be a number of articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education on such topics.  If you are a subscriber (or probably if your library is a subscriber?) you can search by keyword on their web site.


What are examples of experiments or studies where pre-registration would not be feasible?

Examples are areas where a study takes advantage of a sudden, unexpected event. For example, there have been studies about human memory related to unexpected tragedies. There was an idea that lots of Americans remembered exactly where they were when they found out that President Kennedy was shot. After the Challenger disaster, a study was done where they asked people where they were when they found out, and then asked them different amounts of time later (e.g. a year, 5 years and then ten years out), and they found that despite people being very certain of their memories, many people had recollections which changed drastically in the intervening time. Similar studies were done later for the Columbia disaster and 9/11. See summary [here], and 10 year followup to 9/11 [here]. These would  be extremely hard to preregister without substantial ethical problems; I suspect that most journals and the public would frown on psychologists deliberately causing large-scale national catastrophes in order to preregister their studies.

The World Trade Center attack also provides also an example from another field: Right after 9/11 airplanes were grounded throughout the US. Multiple studies used this as an opportunity to study the impact of airplanes on the atmosphere. See here.

Editorial remark: The set of studies where preregistration is not feasible is a very tiny fraction of all studies, and the fact that such studies do exist should not in general be taken as an argument against broad requirements for preregistration.


Is "scribe" a pejorative or a neutral term?

In all of the academic usages with which I am familiar, scribe is almost entirely a neutral term.

  Every student must act as a scribe for at least one lecture this term.

The one exception to this requires further elaboration to indicate that what one is doing is merely "reproductive" instead of "synthetic":

  He slavishly acted a scribe copying down the professor's words without understanding them.

However, such usage is generally written and somewhat formal (see how far you have to go to put it into a negative context).


List of publications for funding applications

I would assume they mean the list of your published work as in journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters etc.


Is it possible to work from my parents' home on a postdoc?

Only your school and your department and your group can tell you what their expectations are. Ask them.

But face-to-face networking with others is hugely valuable both for your current tasks and for being aware of new opportunities,, and think carefully before you give that up. I've been working from home for about 5 years now (commercial, not academic), and it has definitely cost me in terms of career progress despite my making deliberate efforts to stay in the loop.


A potential supervisor said 'happy to supervise me for PhD', but I'm not in the minimum requirement. Is it guaranteed to be accepted? (UK)

Unlike some other countries, in the UK the supervisors do not have a lot of say in questions related to admissions and funding. Admissions are subject to university rules and these rules are rarely flexible, even if your potential supervisor really strongly supports your application. A student who does not meet minimal requirements is unlikely to be admitted for a program.

Most of the PhD programs in the UK are not funded from your supervisors' budget or their grant, but instead are funded through the Centers for Doctoral Training (which are funded from block grants to the University). Supervisors actually bid for a privilege of supervising a funded PhD student. To progress their career, academics in the UK must successfully supervise a certain number of PhD students. This means that academics are usually very happy to supervise any student who is successful in bringing in the funding. So even if your potential supervisor tells you that they are really happy to supervise you, don't assume that  they can and will go an extra mile to bend the university rules for you.


In a short letter, should I mention what I am going to be explaining in the next section, at the end of each section?

You want your reader to be able to figure out what's in the paper without reading through all the technical details, and then going through the trouble of synthesizing what you've written to figure out the what the paper means. If you want your paper to have any impact at all, you need to put an executive summary somewhere in it.

Whether you put all the details of the summary at the end of the introduction, or put a less detailed summary in the introduction, and expand on the details at the beginning of each section may depend on the author and/or the field. It may be that in your field, people expect summaries at the end/beginning of each section, and will look for them there.

But if you're careful about what you say and how you say it, you don't need to repeat details from the introduction at the beginnings of the section, so putting the summaries at the beginning/end of the sections shouldn't use much extra space.


What challenges to expect for admission to Masters/PhD in computer science and engineering after chemical engineering undergrad?

I assume that CSE = computer science engineering?

Like Kitty said, pursuing a Master's degree in a different area/field might be easier than a PhD, at least in terms of admissions. Many PhD programs like to see applicants with background in the subject so they can tackle the more advanced courses immediately. As such, they might be more reluctant to take a chance admitting a Chemical Engineering major for a PhD in AI compared to admitting one for the Master's degree. In addition, PhD cohorts tend to be much smaller than Master's level cohorts, which means Master's level admissions might be (relatively) less competitive compared to PhD level admissions. You might also want to check out the discussion here (slightly different, but still relevant).

Personally, I switched fields from undergraduate to graduate school, and I got admitted to most programs to which I applied. I think the biggest challenge is explaining why you want to make the switch. A question that came up during my interviews was why I was trying to switch fields at the graduate level instead of the undergraduate level (i.e., answering the "if you are interested in this field so much, why did you get a Bachelor's degree in something else" question). If you have a good answer to this, I think you'll be at least moderately successful.

Reviewers of your application might also want to see that you have the necessary intellectual skills for the degree, but if you did well in your chemical engineering major, you should be fine because the math, science, and writing skills should all be transferable. You mention that you had "difficulties" in the CSE classes, which you may need to explain, depending on what exactly those difficulties were.

Other than these, I think you'll just face the same challenges as everyone else applying in terms of making sure your recommendation letters are strong, standardized test scores (if applicable) are good, et cetera.


Are there standard example research papers for teaching methodology and experiments?

Qulatrics has a nice concise (and free) guide to doing marketing research. Not a journal article, but I give it to my students in my research methods course because it's practical and comprehensive but not overwhelming. In fact, they have a lot of useful resources here: http://www.qualtrics.com/university/researchsuite/research-resources/other-resources/ebook-downloads/


Do non-English papers/publications have value in a CV which is going to be sent to an English company/university?

In an academic mathematics context: it's not a question of English itself, neither of the paper itself nor of the journal, but of the reputation of the journal. At the very least, French, German, English, and Russian are languages in which there is a very well established mathematics literature. I think all the better mathematics journals accept submissions in English, French, and German, at least.

It is true that perhaps one's paper will have the widest readership these days if it is in English, although 40 years ago anyone learning mathematics had to learn to read French and German, perhaps more than English, because the previous 150 years' mathematics was written primarily in those languages.

It is nevertheless possible that a very provincial situation or person would have a prejudice about non-English (or non-whatever) research papers or journals, and there is little one can do to guard against this.

It may also be the case that there simply are very few high-reputation journals published in "minor" languages, and this may be tangled up with the difficulty of readership. I do regret that I never learned Russian well enough to read mathematics in it. Similarly, there are many important mathematical papers published in Japanese in Japan, and I cannot read them. I would not be surprised to learn that the same is true in China, but I cannot personally certify this.

But any reasonable scholar would certainly recognize the possibility that a good paper can be written in a language other than English. The question of its inaccessibility if written in a language not widely used in the subject at hand is different. Perhaps one could wonder about the wisdom of writing in a not-widely-read language, but, again, that's different from the science itself.


Overlapping sentences in methodology descriptions in separate journal articles - plagiarism?

I think the focus on self-plagiarism here is overwrought when it comes to describing a methodology that may be reused from paper to paper. You are going to cite the first place you wrote that sentence, and you shouldn't need to worry about changing the wording in the series of papers that use the same methodology.

Methodology descriptions should be clear and exactly the same when the underlying methodology is exactly the same from work to work. Any editor who used software to flag your words should see your self-reference/citation and give you a pass. "Self-plagiarism" of this sort is a bad label and no crime.

Edited to add: At most, you may need an prefatory clause to the effect "Following our prior methodology described in [1], the free parameters of the wawa model, p1, p2 and p3 are fitted to baryon masses and vacuum characteristics in the wawa limit." Or something similar. But that won't fool the detector software. You need to trust that an editor will understand this for what it is.


Is an institution or a supervisor necessary to make a submission?

In my area (CS), submitting a paper with no scientific affiliation is possible and happens quite regularly.
Many conferences nowadays use double-blind review, were names and affiliation of the authors are not known to the reviewers, so it should matter even less if you do not have the "right" affiliation.


As a current student, I find that the constant barrage of requests makes it very hard for me to keep up with the literature unless it is very pertinent to my staying afloat. Thus, reading should be tied to my staying afloat.

The most effective way seems to be a journal club with the advisor with the duty of presenting rotating between the advisees. As a side note, a journal club without the advisor falls apart rather quickly. There should be mechanisms to make sure that attendees actually read the papers as well as the presenter doing a good job with reviewing the prior literature. I've personally learned quite a lot in this format.

The other method would be to set up a system to share papers. Using an RSS feed is pretty effective along with using NCBI's email updates. Internally, Mendeley groups or Google+ work well.


Changed jobs. Email from last job is now dead and that is log in for my google scholar

The email is most likely not dead, you simply don't have access anymore. Ask your former employer to help you change the mail (by forwarding you the confirmation mail, for example).


How does one learn research methodology?

There is a strong need for learning research methodologies, and many postgraduate research courses require as prerequisite research methodology evidence.

The good news is that many institutions do offer specific courses in research methods; the better news is that many offer distance learning and there even some MOOC/Open learning options available. Below are some examples that I'm aware of (I'm sure there are many others):

Open Learning Initiative (Open)
City University London
University of Birmingham
University of Southampton
Saylor Academy (Open)
ACS

There are also a squillion books on research methods


What are the criteria for associate professor habilitation in Italy in mathematics?

First of all, information about the Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale procedure is available on https://abilitazione.miur.it/ , although in Italian only. There is an English version of that site, but it is a (sad) joke: it only contains outdated information from 2013. Unfortunately it seems impossible to find up-to-date information that is not in Italian. Anyway, here is an overview.

First thing, you need to figure out which 'branch' of academia (settore) you are applying for, because the requirements change depending on it. The branches for mathematics are:

01/A1 mathematical logic
01/A1-MAT/04 teaching/history of math
01/A2 geometry and algebra
01/A3 analysis
01/A3-MAT/06 probability and statistics
01/A4 mathematical physics
01/A5 numerical analysis
01/A6 optimization and operations research

A complete list of branches for each discipline, with their descriptions, is in the attachments at the end of http://attiministeriali.miur.it/anno-2015/ottobre/dm-30102015.aspx . Attachment D is a list in English.

For each branch, a committee (commissione) of five scholars (who where drawn at random among all eligible professors) evaluates all the applicants. The names of the members of this committee for each branch are published on https://abilitazione.miur.it/public/commissariSorteggiati_2018.php .

Then, the requirements are:

Passing certain thresholds (soglie) on 2 out of 3 of these indices: number of publications in the last 5 years, number of (Scopus or WoS) citations in the last 10 years, (Scopus or WoS) H-index restricted to the last 10 years. The thresholds for each branch and for the current version of the procedure are available on http://abilitazione.miur.it/public/documenti/2018/Tabelle_Valori_Soglia_ALLEGATI_DM_589_2018.pdf (in Italian; the right pane "II classe" is for habilitation to the associate professor role; the left pane "I classe" is for habilitation to full professor, where these intervals of 5 and 10 years are replaced by 10 and 15, respectively).
Having 3 out of 10 "titles" (titoli), which are the following fuzzily defined items:

Organization or participation as a speaker at scientific conferences in Italy or abroad
Direction or participation in the activities of a research group characterized by collaborations at national or international level
Responsibility for studies and scientific research entrusted by qualified public or private institutions
Scientific responsibility for international and national research projects, admitted to funding on the basis of competitive calls for peer review
Direction or participation in editorial committees of magazines, editorial series, encyclopedias and treaties of recognized prestige
Participation in the steering board and / or teaching assignments in  Phd programs [in Italy only] accredited by the Ministry
Teaching or research assignments (fellowships) at qualified universities or foreign or supranational research institutes
Prizes and awards for scientific activity, including affiliation to academies of recognized prestige in the sector
Results obtained in technology transfer in terms of participation in the creation of new businesses (spin-offs), development, use and marketing of patents
Specific professional experiences characterized by research activities related to the branch

These are not binary, i.e., it is not sufficient to have n>=1 conference talks to qualify for the first one, for instance. It is specified further what these criteria means in the context of each branch: this information is available on https://abilitazione.miur.it/public/pubblicacriteri_18.php . Even after reading these clarifications, it will not be immediately clear whether you qualify for one or not; it is up to the committee to decide if the documentation you have submitted is sufficient qualification to get one. To get an idea of how restrictively they are evaluated, it may help to check the past results and evaluations available on https://abilitazione.miur.it/public/pubblicarisultati_2018.php (and compare them to the submitted applications available on https://abilitazione.miur.it/public/pubblicacandidati_18.php).
Having your application evaluated positively by said committee: they get a chance to say no even if you have all the numbers and requirements.

One applies on the platform Loginmiur. You need an account there, which you get by sending information and a copy of your ID by e-mail to a certain address (instructions on that page). The application process is in Italian: there is an English version of the form, but in practice almost all text appears in Italian even if you select it.

The next deadline (and last published deadline) to apply is May 14, 2020. After that, new committees will be elected, possibly there will be adjustments to this system, and probably all the above links will be replaced by new ones. If you wish to go for the May deadline, I would recommend you to start your application immediately, because it may take some time to go through the bureaucracy (such as applying for this account). Also, you may have to submit corrections to Scopus, if needed, so that all your articles and citations are counted properly; the Scopus staff also take some time to process them.

Good luck! I understand that the procedure may look daunting for someone who does not speak Italian.

Everything I wrote above applies also to all other branches outside mathematics, with the exception of some branches, mostly liberal-art ones, that use a different method for requirement 1 (settori non bibliometrici).

One important note: habilitation does not guarantee you a job. It only grants you the right to apply for associate/full professor positions when a university has an opening for that role.
For an early-career researcher, the most common way to get a permanent job is via another kind of position, the tenure-track ricercatore di tipo B (RTD-B). You do not need a habilitation to apply for those; however, if you get a RTD-B position you will need to obtain habilitation within three years before your tenure evaluation. For this reason, often candidates who already have a habilitation are preferred. So it is a good idea to apply for habilitation as soon as you pass the thresholds in my point 1, if you plan to have a career in academia in Italy.


Do postdoc salaries or other academic position's salaries differ much between US and Canada?

This isn't really an answer, but rather a heads up about how a single average number won't help you decide about taking an offer in one place rather than the other.
First, and foremost, however, there are things more important about a career than your salary. If you make a lot of money but hate the job, then your life won't be very satisfying.
Next, the economies of the two countries are similar, but not identical, and the similarity and ties between the economies keeps personal income (overall) on a rough parity. Otherwise there would be a lot of pressure for academics to emigrate from one country to the other and that doesn't really happen. So salaries may be nominally higher, but so are prices of nearly everything.
Next, as the comments already made make clear, the variability between cities in the two places is probably more important than the variability between the two countries. If you have to live on the US average salary in, say, San Francisco, you will be starving, but in Lansing, MI you will be pretty well off. And whether SF or Lansing is better or worse for you depends a lot on what you like to do with your free time. Likewise Toronto.
While taxes may be nominally lower in the US, the higher taxes paid by Canadians (like Europeans) buys a lot of services that don't exist in the US. The big one is health care which is covered by taxes in some countries other than the US. And the US has been postponing infrastructure investment for so long that our roads/bridges are terrible. I don't know if that is the same in "The Great White North" though. Likewise the US spends far too little on elementary and secondary education. Low taxes in the US is why we can't have nice things here unless you are (very) rich.
Finally, the postdoc is only a way station, not a career. The salary will be "sufficient" even if not extravagant in most places. Certainly much more than what you earn as a TA. But the goal is to move through a postdoc to obtain a more permanent position. With that in mind, the salary is probably the last thing you should weigh in choosing where to postdoc. You want to go where your opportunities for moving to the next step are best.
Think about the life you lead, both the work life and everything else.


In an interdisciplinary context, is the argument of "imposter syndrome" really applicable?

Generally, it's hard to be an imposter in any field, interdisciplinary or not. (This includes English, despite what the following XKCD comic suggests.)

If a PhD program is interdisciplinary or encourages interdisciplinary work, then they will likely require PhD candidates to have at least one committee member who is an expert in each discipline. For example, a PhD candidate in English who focuses on connections between medieval art and literature might have two committee members in medieval English literature and a committee member in art history. Each committee member can verify that the parts of the dissertation dealing with their field and subfield and its methods (archival transcription, visual exegesis, close reading, etc.) work well. A good supervisor will ensure the candidate practices due diligence in matching their interests with their committee choices.

Is it technically possible that work will get through where neither the student nor the committee members understand the methodology of the project? Yes, if the supervisor isn't doing their job and the committee members, the student, the chair of the department, and the dean of the graduate school raise no flags. For even a minimal approval process, that is six people (a student, three committee members, a chair, a dean*) who all have to be incompetent or negligent about guiding a PhD candidate through the dissertation.

Less prepared candidates sometimes do get their degree, but usually the minimal expectation that you have someone from each subfield on your committee reduces the likelihood of that occurring. Furthermore, if somehow the department or the school didn't catch on that someone is graduating from a math program with (a) a bioinformatics specialty and (b) no biology or bioinformatics experts in the department or on the committee, the job market provides another degree of scrutiny, as committees look at not only candidates but also what their graduate programs are known for. (Where is your degree from? Is its reputation for interdisciplinary research well-known?) Journal editors provide even more scrutiny, as editors for credible journals are often familiar with the field(s) the publication will enter. None of these checks are foolproof, but they add friction at various stages of approval.

*In my experience, the dean officially approves of a dissertation, but pragmatically it's the person in the dean's office who actually reads the manuscript and checks it for formatting, signatures, and other elements. So, that person.


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

There are three typical scenarios that you will encounter with most computer-science-style conferences (including most IEEE conferences):

Submissions shut down at the exact time specified, and nothing late will be accepted.  This is most common in large top-notch conferences with extremely fierce competition.  If this is the case, a time-zone will almost always be specified as well.
Submissions shut down an arbitrary but relatively short time after the deadline, i.e., when the organizers get around to switching it off.  There is still likely to be little flexibility, but the conference is less high-stakes, and so they aren't worrying about precision.
Submissions will actually be due ~1 week later, after a universal extension is announced.  This is most common in smaller conferences that are more concerned with making sure they get enough submissions.  It can also be counter-productive, since a tradition of extensions means nobody takes the first deadline seriously.

If you see a time zone, you're probably in case #1; if multiple past editions show an extension, it's probably case #3; otherwise, it's likely case #2.


Author's email address in a published paper is not working

There's no particular "protocol"; just try to find some other way to contact them.

I would try:

Google the author's names.
Look for more recent publications by the same author(s); see if they list updated email addresses.
LinkedIn was a good idea.
If you have found the author's employer, see if you can find his contact info on their website; or contact someone else at the company and ask.
Some professional societies maintain a database with contact information for all members.  For instance, mathematics has the Combined Membership List.
Contact someone at the previous employer and ask if they have current contact info.


How should university employees address student breakups (and drama in general)?

In general I would say it isn't your responsibility as a professor/TA any more than it would be as a normal member of the public witnessing a potentially violent altercation.

If you supervise one of the students you could ask them, at another time, whether everything is okay, giving them them the opportunity to talk if they wish. Avoid getting too involved, you're there to assist the students with their studies and risking effecting the relationship - if your interference has embarrassed or upset the student they would be less likely to approach you for help with their studies (your primary purpose).


Can I use tools in beta version in my research?

At the end of the day, the main requirement is that you can trust the tools you're using. If you're using open-source software, then you may want to double-check that the algorithms are written correctly. If you're using proprietary software, then you may want to consider verifying results with other software for at least some samples.

Note that this is true with any open-source package. For my thesis work, I used a particular open-source analysis toolkit which was very popular in the community. They were regularly releasing updates as people investigated the software and found small glitches. During my regular use, I even helped uncover and report a moderately serious bug that would have resulted in bad output — and possibly erroneous conclusions — in a particular edge case. Always know the limits of your tools.


The most responsible course of action is to postpone your in-person outreach until it is safe to conduct it.  In-person outreach is very effective.  Get the funding agency's approval.

An alternative is to create asynchronous outreach content.  This is less effective, but can reach a wider audience.  For example, you can record YouTube videos of activities.  Disadvantages include difficulty getting your intended audience to watch the video.  Advantages over Zoom/synchronous include no need to schedule or register people, and the potential to do things over when they don't work.

Some people are running online competitions, but I don't know yet if they work.


Feeling like I wasted 6 months on a side project that won't benefit me

If you learned something --either in terms of programming, or in terms of life --then it wasn't wasted time.  Next time you're in a situation like this, you'll know to say "no" up front.

This may seem like a glib answer, but it isn't intended that way.  As long as you don't keep making the same mistakes over and over, you are moving forward in life.


Any way around letters of recommendation requirement?

Your "merits" consist of more than just your undergraduate grades. They also consist of your ability to work with others, your curiosity, your interest beyond just learning what's necessary for the test, etc. This is why we ask for letters of recommendation.

As for who exactly writes your letters, there is more leeway. I don't know about MBA programs, but in mathematics we would usually be equally happy to get letters that do not necessarily include your current supervisor. I would imagine that letters from former supervisors would be just as acceptable. The point, however, is that your supervisors can speak to your work ethic and abilities in ways nobody else can, and consequently provide important insight to the committee evaluating your application that cannot be obtained in any other way. In particular, co-workers likely have a different perspective on you than what a former supervisor sees in you.


What are the advantages and disadvantages of Preprints.org compared with arXiv?

You should generally use the service that most people in your field uses. In my subfield of physics people follow the daily postings on arXiv, so that's the natural choice for me. I imagine a preprint would be effectively invisible if posted elsewhere, except to someone who happens to be browsing my Google Scholar profile, ResearchGate profile or website. One could perhaps post to both arXiv and Preprints.org for wider dissemination, but that might confuse e.g. Google Scholar's citation counts so I'm not sure if it's a net benefit.

Advantages of Preprints.org

Much wider field coverage.
Can assign DOI to preprints. (Given that arXiv identifiers play essentially the same role, I personally don't think this is a large advantage, but some people seem to have a preference for DOIs.)
Has a comment system. (The closest thing on arXiv would be emailing the authors.)

Disadvantages of Preprints.org

No flexibility with license. All Preprints.org preprints are posted under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. This makes some sense as Preprints.org is designed with open access journals in mind, but really limits the set of journals the manuscript can be published in.
It's not clear to me how Preprints.org would handle misleading comments. One might prefer not to have those on the same page as the preprint.
It's run by MDPI, a publisher that's been rather controversial in the past. Although they claim that Preprints.org is run on a not-for-profit basis, it remains fully funded by MDPI, which may or may not be a sustainable and lasting investment. (Compare e.g. the discontinued Nature Precedings.) In contrast, arXiv is operated by Cornell University (which at least I consider a more respectable entity), and has proven to have lasting power.

Unknowns

One can volunteer to screen preprints on Preprints.org. Is that more or less robust than the screening by arXiv moderators?


(1) Should I work for a professor in experiment(from my school) (particle physics or condensed matter) from May 2021 - August 2022? I am willing to volunteer with no pay.

(2) Should I work for a professor in theory (from my school) from May 2021 - August 2022?

(3) Should I ask a mathematics professor (from my school) for informal mentorship from May 2021 - August 2022?

It may not matter whether you want to volunteer without pay or not, for two reasons.
First, it may be illegal or at least against policy. There are often laws and rules to protect workers which may include a minimum wage. Students are sometimes an exception, but you are not a student. There are fields where there are job openings and funds to pay post-graduate employees, for example this is common in my own field of neuroscience and in biology more generally (though often people hired for these sorts of jobs already worked as a student in the places they are hired); I do not think the sort of physics you are talking about is one of those, but it's also not my area and others may know better.
Second, mentorship of someone at the undergrad level is a lot of work with little concrete reward. Many professors are willing to put this time and effort in, but they may feel a responsibility to reserve those efforts for students at their institution. It may be difficult to justify spending time on someone not a student when many students are looking for a spot.
I think your opportunities, if they exist, will be rare enough that you need to consider all of them and not narrow it down to one of these three categories.

(4) Can I apply for an REU or is that too late?

I don't know much about REUs but as far as what I do know they require you to be a student pursuing a degree. If you aren't a student anymore you are probably out of luck. They are also highly competitive from what I know.

You want to do research in a highly competitive field without a lot of financial backing. You have very specific and narrow plans, which might help with your motivation but may also close a lot of opportunities for you. I suspect your best bet will be to pursue a masters degree and get some research experience in the process, but this may be expensive. I think you've made an error by not pursuing research earlier if research is what you wanted to do; gathering some experience in research and getting good recommendation letters from advisors would be much more valuable in a grad school application than improved grades in courses by avoiding research entirely. Unfortunately, not much to do about what's in the past.


As a grad student how to approach a possible breakthrough research?

As a good researcher always be cautious with "breakthroughs". I would explain that you think it is a good idea worth pursuing. Coming off too strong may put new professors off. Unfortunately I have witnessed many times people believe they have come across breakthroughs when they are nothing of the sort. I think partly because unlike how science is portrayed in the media, "most" excellent science is a long grind, through years of experiments, thought, collaboration and trial and error. The road is often long and winding, and to approach someone well versed in the field with a "breakthrough" may be hubris. But, if it is a strong idea and worth pursuing with good reasoning/logic/science behind it, I cant see a problem convincing anybody in your field the importance of what you propose! Good luck!


Given that the 20 or so days covers holiday periods there might be a simple answer. The professor might be traveling. Might even be sick, given the pandemic. You can follow up if you like, but keep it polite. If you have access to the department email address, you could ask them if there is a reason that they might not be replying.
Don't jump to conclusions, but follow up with other options that you have.


Using first person or third person in papers?

@earthling's accepted answer -- to use the passive voice -- is perhaps the convention in certain disciplines, but it is crucial to note that the active voice is the convention in others. Using the passive voice will make a paper sound daft and amateurishly pompous in certain communities.

My preference is very much for the active voice, first person (plural in almost all cases). This is also the most prevalent convention in my community (applied CS).

The strongest argument (and it is a very strong one!) against passive voice is that it removes all responsibility from the doer: it leaves ambiguity as to who did what, which is crucial for proper attribution in scientific writing.

For example:

  The methods of Franklin et. al. were taken. The software was implemented in Java.

Who implemented the methods? The authors of the current paper or Franklin and his pals? Who should be contacted if there's errors in the software? Who's to credit and who's to blame?

Even aside from ambiguity, in the hands of a deceptive author, the passive voice could be used to subtly claim credit for others' work.

  The methods of Franklin et. al. were taken. These methods were extended to incorporate the inputs previously described.

... the authors make it sound a bit like they did the extending, but maybe they didn't?

The second argument against the omnipresent passive voice is more subjective: that for many people (including me), it sucks to read, it sucks all humanity from the writing, any modesty it provides is entirely false, and it just generally sounds pompous.

So if using the active voice, which person to use? Again this is convention, but talking about yourself in the third person is again considered silly in many communities (although mandatory in some journals!). Also using the third-person can introduce the same ambiguities regarding what was your work and what was the work of others:

  The methods of Franklin et. al. were taken. The authors extended these methods to incorporate the inputs previously described.

Leaving convention aside, first person is the only voice with a clear objective argument in favour of it: it avoids ambiguity as to who did what!

All arguments for passive voice refer to subjective matters of style or (false) modesty. (Aside from which, I feel that first person active voice is a more natural style!)

However, you should follow the convention of the venue you are submitting the paper to!

See these letters to Nature, for more on the debate.
(The second author sounds ridiculously pompous to me.)


How can I make an informed decision on whether to do a PhD in engineering or not?

Does your uni have guidance councilors? Probably you can easily get an appointment. Maybe they will be glib about it, but it can be helpful data.

At least two aspects: What job can you get that you could not get now? And is it worth while spending at least 4 years, maybe more, getting the degree to get that job? If you want to be an academic then PhD is probably indicated. If you want to be in industry then consider going no farther than the master's degree. Or stopping at the bachelor's.

Carefully scope out what it will cost you to get the PhD. Not just your university fees. But to live for that time. Scope out what scholarships you can get. NOTE! You must apply for most such scholarships. You do NOT get automatically considered for the bulk of them. Ask the support staff in your uni and the uni you are considering going to what scholarships exist and how to apply. Find out what it costs to live in the city you are considering. Find out if the uni will give you work while you are a grad student. Or if you can maybe get contract work in the industry relevant to your study subject.

Send out a few resumes to potential employers. Maybe the offered starting salary will turn your head. And at worst, you may get some interviews that will be good practice. And polishing your resume is good practice also. Tune it to the potential employer.

The difference between what you could earn in 4 years, and the payments you would need to make, will be substantial. And you will then be 4 years ahead for the rest of your job life.

Many academic areas have some equivalent of "Physics Today" which is the one for my area. Such magazines give stuff that is along the lines of "proff so-and-so has just finished big-name-project blah-de-blah, isn't it pretty?" And they have a ton of adverts for various things somewhat related to the subject.

But importantly, once per year they have lists of PhD students who recently graduated, and where they went.  So, what you should do is have a look at where grads from a school you are interested in eventually went. And if those destinations seem good to you, great, go ahead. If they bore you or worse, look elsewhere. One of my cohort in PhD went to work at the Science Center, and now spends his time teaching high school students about static electricity. After a PhD in particle physics. Sigh.

You may need to ask the librarian at your university what the correct magazine is to check, and how to find it. And you may be able to get lots of back issues on-line, free or nearly free.


Do I have to be concerned about self-plagiarism in a short accessible methods description?

My personal belief is that it's fine to duplicate the text with a reference to the original methods paper and a statement that this is a short summary of that work. Unfortunately, you will find people in the world who think you should be drawn and quartered for doing this, so your best bet is to write two different descriptions lest you get "caught" by a pedant. Worries about self-plagiarism for methodology sections, in my opinion, are vastly overblown, but not everyone agrees with me, so you have to be careful who you work ends up in front of. You never know who is going to run your papers through plagiarism detection software and reject your work because of one paragraph.


I have two papers in an up-coming conference. Is it appropriate to cite one in another?

This is acceptable, and fairly common. You cite as usual, and the citation itself would be identical to a standard citation with the exception that the date and page numbers would be replaced by the phrase "in press".

From the American Historical Association's "Professional Standards" page:

  The AHA suggests the following lexicon.

  "In Press": the manuscript is fully copyedited and out of the author's hands. It is in the final stages of the production process.
  "Forthcoming": a completed manuscript has been accepted by a press or journal.
  "Under contract to . . .": a press and an author have signed a contract for a book in progress, but the final manuscript has not yet been submitted.
  "Submitted" or "under consideration": the book or article has been submitted to a press or journal, but there is as yet no contract or agreement to publish.


How to prevent a coauthor from stealing the article?

In this age, it seems highly unlikely that there is absolutely no permanent record of their communication and collaboration: how did they collaborate in writing the paper? Did they exchange drafts via e-mail, for instance?

So, if this happens, you simply show the evidence to the editors and to the direct superiors of prof. B. End of story.


Correct identification of scientific journal?

Journal of Surgical Research
Volume 133, Issue 1, June 2006, Pages 46–54


Should I acknowledge institutions where I did internships on unrelated works?

Be honest in your acknowledgments. Just don't add someone or some institute name just because you want to show your link with them. If they did help in any shape or form, well thank the institute and the exact people involve in your discussions. Something like the following:

  I would like to thank Mr/Mrs X, from the institute Y, for their insightful/encouraging discussion on J,K, and Z.


How intensive is the process of interviewing people for faculty openings?

Edit: This answer applies only to the US.

For me, the typical case seemed to be:

Day 1: Fly in mid-afternoon. Meet your faculty host and 3-4 faculty members for dinner where you have informal discussions about research, the university, or anything else.
Day 2: This is the main day. The day lasts from about 8am until about 6pm. You give your 1 hour talk, interview with about 6 different members of the faculty (sometimes more if the meetings are in groups), have lunch, meet with graduate students, meet with the dean, and meet with the chair.  After 6pm, you usually get taken to dinner with 3-4 more members of the faculty.
Day 3: Sometimes you'll have breakfast with your host, sometimes not.  Then you fly out.

It also wasn't so different for research labs.  Just replace "faculty member" with "research scientist."

I'd say that these visits aren't any longer than a prospective Ph.D. visit, but much more intensive.  Also, Ph.D. students usually visit after being admitted, whereas faculty members visit to interview.


MSc project in ML/Computer Vision - substantial achievement

What would be a valid/substantial achievement in a Masters project (~30 pages, 4 months) in Computer Vision/Deep Learning?

Whatever satisfies the people who actually certify the master's project in question.  In my department, that would be the student's advisor (and, as a formality, the department's director of graduate studies).  In other departments, that would be a committee.

Different departments and even different individual faculty, even in the same subsubfield, apply different standards for what is "valid" or "substantial", just as different publication venues (and different individual reviewers), even in the same subsubfield, apply different standards for what is "publishable".

In particular, departments necessarily set standards that are realistic for the actual population of students that they admit.  Baseline expectations at MIT may be wildly unrealistic at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.

Different departments (and even different faculty) also have different philosophies about what the proper goal of a master's project should be.  Should it be a body of publishable research?  (Or more strictly, should it be a publication at a top-tier international conference like IMCL or NeurIPS, or at least a significant chunk thereof?)  Or is it sufficient to produce a useful piece of software, say for an industry client, or a well-written expository survey?  Or is it sufficient to attempt publishable research and settle for a useful implementation or survey?

  Obviously it is not enough to just take an existing model (e.g. Mask R-CNN or similar), find/hack a dataset by yourself, add a layer or two out-of-the-box and finetune the model to it.

No, that is not obvious.  In some departments, that would be considered a valid Master's project.  In my opinion, it wouldn't be a very good Master's project, but my opinion only matters for students in my department.


Is it possible to get admission to masters for theoretical physics with a bachelors in electronics engineering?

Absolutely. On a Masters course you will meet people from a wide range of backgrounds. In fact, one of my physics students has just been accepted onto a Masters course in computer science.

Having said that, you may struggle to get onto a good course if your grades are not strong. Since you will have a lot of catching up to do, those running the Masters programme will need to be persuaded that you're hard working with good potential. You will also probably need to demonstrate that you've already made an effort to study theoretical physics (e.g. discussing in some detail the topics that interest you in your application).


Applying for a faculty job without history of external grants

While having a history of external grants is helpful, it is not mandatory. I was in a similar position as you were, and managed to secure several offers. What you need to do is have good answers prepared for these two things:

Why Not?: In my case, as with yours, I was in a research institute, which meant things were supported by large grants that were well beyond my "pay grade" to pursue, and where the priorities for postdocs were producing research and doing the things that kept funders happy, rather than chasing new funding. People were very understanding of these sorts of positions.

How Will This Change?: Given you don't have a track record of getting external funding, you need to be able to articulate how you will go about getting one. Having a clear idea of what mechanisms you'll target, how you'll frame your research that way, etc.

Basically, you need to frame not having grants as a deliberate, strategic choice in your old position that will change in your new one as you become an independent researcher.


May I use my graduate school's letterhead right after graduating, when applying to jobs?

No you may not. The use of an official letterhead implies not only a current affiliation with the university, but it some countries and contexts also implies that the correspondence is for official purposes. Each university has it's own rules and policies, but I would be shocked if your university would consider this acceptable, and both universities that I have attended have specific guidance to not do this. In general, you do not have the right to use that letterhead simply because you attended the university, and using it in that fashion is inappropriate because you are representing yourself as having a professional position that you don't have.


My colleague is monetizing our contributions and not compensating us

Since you published your idea in a paper, you must accept that someones else implements and uses it. Don't ever expect much credit here, outside of academia.

It would be different if they used your source or a patent (but either of which would probably belong to your university; but most universities have a procedure for compensation then to encourage you).

Of course you could talk to them, and it would be appropriate if they paid you some compensation e.g. in form of a consulting fee. Then you may be willing to share further ideas early with them.


How to deal with classes that I must cancel due to conference travel?

I do it like this:

Try to let a colleague* take over. This almost always works with 'standard' classes (intro to statistics, this kind of stuff)
Plan the classes in such a way that the students are busy with something else in this week (e.g., data collection), so that a plenary meeting is not necessary.
Cancel - but if I would cancel more than one meeting of a course, I would probably get problems with my department.

* we don't really have the concept of a TA here, you are either teaching (then, you are a colleague) or not - so 'colleague' also can include graduate students that might be referred to as TA in other systems

(context: Europe/Netherlands; social sciences)


What is the best way to collaborate with a professor whose current work one is extending?

What should my best course of action to collaborate with him? (He is a very high profile professor)

Your best course of action is to email him, explain the work you've been doing, and politely suggest exploring the possibility of a collaboration. However, you need to seriously work on your mindset before writing the email, because right now I feel like the reasons you are interested in the collaboration are not good reasons - you seem to be interested in the reputational benefit of having him as a coauthor and in the fact that if he is a coauthor then he can't be the referee for the paper; in other words, your collaboration offer will not be based on a genuine interest in the intellectual contribution this "high profile" professor can make to the work, and therefore I would say it is not being made in good faith. If I were the professor and got wind of what your motives are (and it may not be so easy for you to hide them, even if you try to phrase the email dishonestly, which in any case I would not recommend doing), I would not only refuse to work with you but would also develop a poor opinion of you that could be long-lasting and would be hard for you to correct.

To summarize, you are putting the cart before the horse here. You should contact the professor if and only if you are genuinely and in good faith interested in an intellectual collaboration rather than a mere formal coauthorship. Even then, keep in mind the professor may refuse your offer, because he is busy or for any number of other reasons (or for no reason at all). Your offer should be phrased in a tactful way that leaves your dignity (and any potential interaction you may have with the professor in the future) intact in the event that he is not interested in your offer. Good luck!


How should I interpret a suggestion to "synthesize" two sections of a paper?

Synthesize in this context means to merge the sections into a coherent whole. So the reviewer is probably suggesting that these two sections would make more sense structurally (from their perspective) if they were combined.

Beyond this, it is not possible for us to understand the exact purpose of the reviewer's suggestion, as we do not have access to the article you wrote, nor the rest of the review(s). In general, suggestions or comments in any review are best understood in context -- what is this reviewer's understanding of the paper? What is their likely background? What did they think of the paper overall; which sections did they like and dislike? Based on the answers to these questions you may get a better idea of why they are suggesting merging the sections, and how you might go about doing it effectively (or alternatively, how to respond to the reviewer if you disagree).


Asking a foreign professor to be your thesis co-advisor

Since you clarified that the "official topic" is research and career progression, I would just let it come up naturally. After you have clarified your general interest in the topic and in doing a PhD., there is an ideal spot for something like:

"But of course, before I can do that, I need to finish my master's here by writing a thesis. I think it would be useful if that already was in the same area. Professor X told me that he might be willing to be the official supervisor of this thesis as long as I can find a co-supervisor that matches the specific field better. He suggested asking you, so would you be interested?"

You could do this in the meeting or already in the email setting up the date, though for the latter you should take care that it doesn't get to long, the details are what the meeting is for.


Is it a problem if I publish my thesis bearing the same title of a journal article I published previously?

No.
Your copyright should not be an issue, provided that you either are the sole owner of the copyright, or that you have provable permission of the owner/contributors to use the same name.
But on that note, names aren't easily copyrighted. There are thousands of papers, books, magazine articles, and other such that include the same kind of name as each other, and I would bet that there are one or two sharing your paper's exact name.
If anything or anyone happens to do research of their own and says anything about it, which I personally doubt will happen, but hey... Just prove that you are the owner of the document, or allowed by other contributors to use it.


Under what circumstances it is appropriate to add a team as a co-author, and how should I do so?

It's not immediately evident in your question but I gather that you are asking about how to cite other people's work. Or possibly previous work to which you partly contributed.

Referencing previous work serves the purpose of giving robust information to your reader to locate said work, not to attribute credit.

In that very aspect of your academic work, don't be creative. What's relevant is the citation style imposed by the journal or conference you are publishing in, or your institution's guidelines for theses, or at the very least, the standard citation style that you chose for that particular document you are writing.

See similar questions having the same answer:

How to cite papers where the names are sorted?

Style in citing two authors in the same sentence


How does it affect the treatment of a mathematician's results, if that mathematician was a Nazi?

I think there is no academic issue here.

  The problem with Vahlen, as you may have guessed by the title, is that he was about as much of a Nazi as a person could be. He was in the SA, the SS, accused brilliant Jews of plagiarizing Aryans, helped the Third Reich expunge Jews from the scientific community, etc. He even supported the Nazi party before its infamous rise to popularity.

I looked into Theodor Vahlen, and I agree that he was a morally reprehensible individual.  But this is irrelevant to a discussion of his work: he proved the theorems that he proved whether he was good, bad, or whatever.  As is well known, the Unabomber is a published mathematician.  His six papers have eight citations on MathSciNet, three of which came long after his capture, e.g. see here.  (Though I do not know for sure that the author of this paper was aware that the T.J. Kaczynski whose work is cited is the Unabomber, it seems likely: the author is an American, and among Americans this name is well known to say the least.)

  I was wondering what the likelihood is that his results were neglected due to this political misfortune. I was also wondering if people know of similar instances, particularly in mathematics. It seems like whenever I look up the politics of a respectable mathematician, they are either nonexistent, or equally respectable. I don't know if we tend to discredit people like this, or if people like this tend to not produce good results, or what.

In my opinion this is unlikely.  There are very famous mathematicians who were, to lesser or greater extents, participaters in the Nazi movement.  Perhaps Ludwig Bieberbach and Oswald Teichmuller are the two leading examples: these are household names in mathematics, and that they were intimately (and reprehensibly) involved in the Nazi movement is also very well known.  (For that matter, I am not convinced that Vahlen's work is so little known.  It is described in the wikipedia article linked to above, for instance.)

In my personal opinion, it is worth knowing when a mathematician (or other academic) has done reprehensible things in their personal life.  Some years ago I compiled a list of "greatest mathematicians" on MathOverflow: I limited myself to choosing at most one mathematician born in a given year, but in some cases I included "honorable mentions."  When I got to Teichmuller, I did not want to use the word "honorable" to describe him, so I wrote "dis/honorable mention."  That was a personal decision (and by the way, I am partially of Jewish descent, so it is really not for me to forgive or forget such things).  But I included him on the list anyway: that he was a terrible person does not influence his mathematics one way or another.

  I'd like to just use a big-ol' script V for the Vahlen matrices (which I have not seen in any papers thus far) and move on,

There is no problem with this.

  but I don't want even an iota of a suspicion of being sympathetic to this man's priorities.

We don't endorse the life of Teichmuller when we talk about Teichmuller space or Bieberbach when we talk about Bieberbach's Conjecture.  We credit them with their work, as we must.

  It would also be hilarious to just use a swastika, but that joke might not be funny to some people (understandably).

I am not laughing at all.  Please do not do this.

Finally, you can read much more about mathematics in Nazi Germany from this book.  Again, I think it is good to know these things.