Contract signing session etiquette for student coaches

I agree with earthling's answer and want to add to it.

Since you have ten of them signing the same contract, there is nothing wrong with first explaining the contract to them as a group. Then, they can ask questions and benefit from the questions each of them asks. Tell them that they have until X date and Y time to sign the contract, that they have to sign it in front of you, and that they should feel free to ask you additional questions in private in case they did not want to ask a sensitive question at the group setting.

Since these ten people will be presumably working together at the same job, there is nothing unethical about them all knowing that they have exactly the same contract.


It depends on what courses you end up taking as part of your physics minor. Mathematical physics leans heavily on Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and electrodynamics.

I don't know how many credits you have available for your minor and what the requirements are in your university to take those courses. At the very least, make sure that you have taken both classical mechanics and quantum mechanics. Your math background in real and complex analysis will put you in great shape to learn the formalisms of the other theories.

Good luck!


Demonstrating capacity for independent work in light of parasitic co-authorship

Assuming that you're not already too close to the 7-year maximum of post-doctoral experience for the ERC starting grant, I think the usual approach would be to work (and publish during) at least one postdoc contract in a lab other than your Ph.D. supervisor's before applying for the grant.


Should I prepare for the GRE if my gpa isn't yet high enough for Epidemiology graduate school?

I went through graduate school in Epidemiology at a major school of Public Health, and am now the epidemiologist on a number of multidisciplinary admission committees.

Improve Your GPA First

There's no subject-specific test for the GRE for Epidemiology (which isn't surprising, as it's not really a discipline with good undergraduate representation), and the general feeling in the field is the GRE is a supplemental piece of information - a way to maybe push an edge case into "Admit", or to provide context for schools where it's known that the GPA doesn't mean much. My program has gone so far as to seriously consider phasing it out entirely.

GPA cutoffs are also often a function of the Graduate School, or another administrative group where there isn't much room for nuance. If you don't meet the GPA requirements, you're sitting squarely in the "Do Not Pass Go" category. I wouldn't bother investing any time or money studying for the GRE until you're past that line.


Are open-book exams generally a superior way to test understanding on practical courses?

You might find this article on a computer science class valuable (1). The tl;dr is that sections allowed student-prep notes showed no overall improvement, but mostly because many students didn't bother to create good student-prep notes. Good notes = good grades.

A quick browse of a review/ meta-analysis article on the topic (2), indicates that open-note exams can decrease student anxiety, and that student-prepared notes tend to produce larger improvements than open-book exams.

As an instructor, I've found students often spend energy only where they feel it is needed. I would recommend providing sample exam questions (as a group activity in class?) that gives students a good idea of what will be required and what sorts of notes would be helpful. This will help them expend the energy in preparation instead of frantic in-exam page-flipping.

Thanks for wanting to trigger deep learning in students!

Duncan, D.G. (2007). Student performance shows slight improvement when open notes are used during information system exams. Journal of Information Technology Education, 6, 361–370.
Larwin, Karen H., Jennifer Gorman, and David A. Larwin. "Assessing the Impact of Testing Aids on Post-Secondary Student Performance: A Meta-Analytic Investigation." Educational Psychology Review 25.3 (2013): 429-443.


How can I justify having only two publications when applying for postdoc jobs in physics/chemistry?

I do not understand why you find "weird" putting manuscripts in preparation in your CV. In my field, it is perfectly normal and accepted, and I guess in all academia.

This is the best way to explain what you did in the last years. It won't be strange at all, especially if you have talks on those results already, as you imply in a comment. These things happen; sometimes papers take a long time to prepare, and a selection committee should be aware of this fact.

It would look much weirder, in my view, if you don't list them and write a long statement in the cover letter about the lack of publications. As they said in ancient Rome, "he who excuses himself unsolicited, accuses himself".


Can a *reviewer* ask for the status of the paper that is reviewing?

In my opinion, it is ok to ask politely about anything to the editors, as long as you can (and do) explain sensibly why you ask, and as long as you don't demand it. Such requests shall be at worst considered odd or unusual.

In this case, I think it is in the best interest of everyone involved for you to let know the editor about your timing issue (and the sooner the better). The most probable outcome is that the editor will still wait for the second reviewer, because otherwise the authors could think answering your demands should be enough to get their paper accepted, and they could get pissed off if other demands arrive later from the second referee. Even if there is no such misunderstanding, they could prefer to dive in their paper to correct it once rather than twice.

However, letting the editor know might prompt her or him to push a bit the second reviewer, possibly speeding up the process a bit. He or she might also decide to go with your sole report. In any case, once the editor have all relevant info on her or his hand, he or she can choose the most appropriate course of action.


What could be a possible next step after a bachelors in Economics and Business Administration?

I can think of a couple of options off the top of my head:

Apply for a Masters in CS anyway and see how you go, you might get credit for your experience.
perhaps do a postgraduate certificate/diploma in CS (if available) and use that as a stepping stone to the Masters degree that you desire.
Perhaps consider a MBA that has a strong focus on CS (as a major).

It would also depend if you are intending to pursue your proposed Masters by coursework, research or as a mix of the two.


How to react to a student proselytising during office hours?

You address this by stating directly

  "I would prefer not to discuss this topic during office hours. Can I help you with any questions you have on the homework?"

If the issue persists, I would speak with the professor and perhaps also your dean of students (or something similar).


How to clarify that supervisor writing a reference is not related to me even though we have the same last name?

There is a very easy solution. Your supervisor can simply write something like

  To whom it may concern,

  It is a pleasure to write in recommendation of John Smith (no relation). John is...etc., etc.

  Sincerely,
  Professor Tom Smith


How to cite when writing a paragraph in my history paper that is composed entirely of historical facts?

In addition to Pete's answer, I also want to mention that well-known historical facts generally do not require a citation.

For instance:

  The American Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865.

This is well-known enough to be assumed as "general knowledge." On the other hand,

  The average Pennsylvania farmer in the 18th century did not leave an estate worth 400 pounds, as de Crèvecoeur reports in his Letters from an American Farmer [citation needed].

is sufficiently obscure that it cannot get the same treatment.


Dates on degrees don’t make sense – will people care?

Different countries have different conventions around the résumé / CV, and you might want very different versions of your résumé for applying for jobs in academia or industry. That said, at a general level readers are interested in the flow (are there gaps which are unaccounted for?) and the skills trained. I would put the dates of study and a note about the date of award so that if an HR department does cross-checks, it won't flag spurious discrepancies:

  2015–2017 studied M.Foo, University of Bar
  2012–2015 studied B.Foo, University of Quux (degree awarded 2019)


Should I appeal my paper's rejection in PRL?

Remember that editors often have to reject papers even if all reviews are positive. The reviewers only see the paper at hand, the editor sees all papers submitted, and all papers with only positive reviews are often still way too many to be all accepted. So by necessity, the editor also needs to reject papers with all positive reviews. Passing the hurdle of getting all positive reviews is often a necessary but not sufficient condition to be published, your paper also need to be better than a large portion of other papers that also passed that hurdle.

Bottom line: fighting editor decisions is usually not worth it, especially if you have another accept ready.


Can one's PhD work be an extension of their Masters research?

Seeing your question, I guess this can vary from field to field, but the practice I've seen (engineering, neuroscience, and psychology) is that the PhD work often is an extension of the masters research. The masters work explores one facet of the research problem, and the PhD thesis explores two or three more. This is often a practical matter, as sometimes the masters is one step towards the eventual granting of a PhD.


I feel like I forgot my simple mathematical knowledge

As a grad student in computer engineering, I have a similar problem when I switch between projects that use different programming languages. I might spend months working in a high-level language like Python, only to switch to a project using a low-level language like C, or a project whose language I'm unfamiliar with, like MATLAB.

As I see it, there are two issues here:

1. Documentation -- setting a project aside is unavoidable at some point. As @Bemte pointed out, the trick is to document your work well enough where you can pick the train of thought back up days, weeks, or months later. This takes time and effort to do well (something I'm still learning). Suffice to say -- your documentation should include everything that you need to familiar with the work in a reasonable amount of time. That might include:

Detailed notes of the conversations you had, proofs you were working on, etc.
Papers you were reading
Textbook chapters that are important
And so on.

2. Patience -- you said it's been a couple of months since you had looked at your work. I can say for sure that if I went 2 or 3 months without looking at my code, it would be like reading gibberish, and it would take me a couple of weeks minimum to get back up to full productivity. I may be reading too far into your words, but it sounds to me that you need to be patient with yourself. High-level mathematics is not a subject that you learn overnight; and any psychologist will tell you that it takes time to enter the flow. Be patient with yourself.

I'll add this quick caveat: if you're concerned that you're still forgetting information even after you've been working on it continuously for weeks/months, that may be a sign of a more significant neurological or mental health problem. In that case, consult with (medical) experts. (Update: see @aparente001's excellent answer on how to best do this here.)

But otherwise, it's likely just a matter of being human -- we all forget things after a while :)


Found two errors in submitted manuscript

I agree with @Alexey B. and believe that, unless the typo has a very negative effect on the logical foundations of your paper, it will not cause the rejection of your paper.

Also, usually, you can contact the support staff of your journal and ask them if they can help you fix the issue. I made a rather similar mistake in a chart in one of my papers and for that, I contacted the support staff of the journal (published by Elsevier). After discussing the matter with them, they asked for the correct version of the chart, asked the editor of the journal if a modification is allowed and modified my submission.


PhD student funding from another professor?

This might be highly dependent on your personal situation and there might be more implications. Please note that the other professor might have additional requirements or wants to see additional topics in your thesis.

I would try to address this issue openly and talk to your supervisor. Express clearly that you have the goal of finishing your dissertation in the next two years and discuss whether this is possible with his offer. Ask him whether this project is really not related to your dissertation and how much effort and time it will take. If you realize that this is not a viable option for you and if there is no other acceptable solution, explain in a friendly manner that you consider alternatives.

Trying to hide everything from your supervisor and suddenly vanishing is definitely not the way to go as this might burn bridges.


What should I do if I found a citation error in a published paper?

Small errors that do not affect the results or conclusions of the paper are normally handled through publication of a correction (or erratum). This is handled by the journal editor, who will be in contact with the authors for confirmation that they agree as to it being an error, and provide for the exact correction to be published.
The journal that published paper should have a policy on corrections, check it out! Physical Review Letters’s editorial policies and practices state, for example:

Errata.— The Errata section contains notices regarding errors or omissions in papers previously published. Besides the standard Erratum, several special categories of documents may appear in this section. In the online journal, each of these documents involve bidirectional links between the original article and the document in the Errata section. The category of the corrective document is indicated in its title and in the link from the original article.
The standard Erratum is a statement by the authors of the original paper that briefly describes the correction(s) and, where appropriate, any effects on the conclusions of the paper.

Thus, what you should do is:

Make double sure it is actually an error.

Then ask someone else to double check it again. Preferably someone more senior, i.e. with some experience of academic publication.

Write to the corresponding author, pointing out the error. Be nice, and make real sure not to assume to worst.
You say “this is a pretty big mistake and suggests they haven't actually read the paper they referenced”: depending on context, it could actually be something minor like a copy-paste mistake (pasting the wrong reference, when they meant another paper)

If you do not obtain a response, or they respond but don't intend to correct the error, then consider contacting the editor.

I can understand why, as an undergrad, you would consider contacting the editor directly without writing to the authors first. However, as long as you remain professional in your correspondence with them, I think it's best to contact the authors first. It's more polite, and they may actually be able to provide you with some explanation you haven't thought of. Contacting the editor before the authors is somewhat overdoing it…


Will stating a theorem in two papers result in text overlap flag on arXiv?

No. Source: personal experience.

The overlap thing is looking for significant amounts of overlap (many many papers will contain some overlap). I don't know what the cut-off is, but one theorem statement is below it.


What are some formal methods in measuring socio-economic impact or broader impact of research topic or individual research papers?

There are interdisciplinary researchers who study such questions.  It's labeled with various names: "Sociology of Science", "Science, Technology, and Society" (STS), and similar. You should look at journals in those fields.  For example, Science and Public Policy has these articles:

"Opportunities for impact: Statistical analysis of the National Science Foundation’s broader impacts criterion"
"The state of the art in societal impact assessment for security research"
"Introduction: Future pathways for science policy and research assessment: Metrics vs peer review, quality vs impact"


Biochemistry/Computer Science BS applying for top 10 Computer Science PhD

In navigating my own applications over the years, I'm led to believe that the most important thing they want to know about you is are you going to be a good researcher. That you have publications in a technical field helps you a lot, it demonstrates you know the process one must go through in pursuing original work.

I will say that going straight to a PhD at a top 10 university in the field is somewhat of a leap without having much CS background, they won't have much evidence that your research interests are well-developed and that you are really serious about sticking with studying computer science at that level for 5+ years. But if they like what they see from your research and undergraduate coursework and recommendation letters (VERY IMPORTANT), then they will often just have you take a handful of pre-requisite courses at the beginning to get you caught up to where they think a beginning PhD student should be, e.g. taking some upper-level undergraduate classes that give you a good breadth of CS knowledge.

You would have a much better shot at getting into a Masters program in CS coming from your position, if you are willing to fund it yourself or take out loans. Oftentimes your PhD funding comes from a member of the faculty and so they need adequate convincing that you're worth the money.

My advice would be: apply to a few top 10 PhD programs you think you'd be a good fit for, apply to a few middle-tier PhD programs to give you some options, and then apply to a few MS programs if you think you'd be willing to go that route. You'll probably get an MS acceptance somewhere, you have a good shot at getting into a middle tier school, and you never know! They may just really like your application bundle and you might land a golden seat at a top 10.

And if you don't like the results, spend a year or two doing things to improve your application (CS research, online classes, work through problems in well-known textbooks, get a MS degree, read A LOT of papers and develop very specific research interests, etc.)


Is recommendation letter a completely professional thing or keeping good personal relation with the writer required?

If you did well during your PhD (and did not have a fight with your supervisor afterwards), your supervisor should write a good recommendation letter. Recommendation letters are professional and you do not need to keep a good personal relation. It happens often that people have to ask for recommendation letters some time after moving on to somewhere else.

The only advantage of being still there could be that it would make it easier to remind your supervisor if he takes too long to write the letter.


How to motivate an undergrad class to do research when its not a course requirement?

I would say, as a teacher, you can allot a project as a mandatory part of course. This project should count towards the final evaluation of the course. You need to do a bit of design and planning about the project and research idea that you want to implement. Then you may divide the work among students based on their strengths and weaknesses. You may assign one group to the whole project and assign individual modules to the students or you may create many groups and each group an individual module. Once this phase of project is over, you will be able to assess the students by their research caliber and motivate the good students for further work, which may be another project with more intensity. In addition to this, you can motivate them to go to better universities and industries for project work. This will really broaden their outlook. They will start looking beyond getting some CGPA and grabbing a job. I hope I could give you some idea :P


Is it ethical/acceptable to give a lighter penalty to students who admit to cheating?

TL; DR: We adjust the penalty.

I sit on my department's Academic Misconduct Committee so unfortunately I see a lot of these cases. The University policy has created two similarly sounding, but different terms: academic misconduct and poor academic practice, with academic misconduct being much more severe than poor academic practice. Every student suspected of having engaged in poor academic practice is called into a meeting with the Academic Misconduct Committee. This committee looks at the evidence supporting academic misconduct/poor practice and hears the student's case which generally includes what training they have had about good academic practice, how the incident happened, and any evidence of extenuating circumstances (e.g., death in the family).

Based on this process we can come to one of 3 decisions:

not poor academic practice,
poor academic practice,
academic misconduct.

If we decide that they did not engage in poor academic practice, the incident is essentially purged from the system. If the student is called in again in the future, we do not nominally know that they had been called in before. If we decide that it was poor academic practice, the students are warned and it is documented. We are not allowed to apply formal penalties in the case of poor academic practice. If they are called in again we know from the documentation and are unlikely to give them the benefit of the doubt a second time.

If we decide that academic misconduct has occurred we can apply one of a number of different penalties to the work: no reduction of the mark, remark the work with the offending material removed or reduce the mark commensurate with the misconduct (anywhere from a 5% penalty to a 0 for the piece of work). A second incident of academic misconduct results in the penalty being decided on by a university panel and starts with a zero for the class and can go as high as a zero for the year. In this way there is a big difference between poor academic practice and academic misconduct with no reduction in the mark since poor academic practice does not count as a first offense.

Within this framework the committee is faced with how to handle the students who admit the issue and the ones who deny the issue. Those who argue they didn't cheat and have no explanation as to how their assignment matches another's work are almost always found guilty of academic misconduct since they are not willing to help us create a case for poor academic practice. More often than not they receive a 0 since we have no evidence that mitigates the penalty. For students who admit what they did, we often consider poor academic practice as an outcome since they describe what they did and realize it was wrong. Sometimes the offense is too blatant to let off without a reduction, but generally saying what you did wrong and how you will not let it happen again reduces the penalty.


How to spend the last months of a CS postdoc usefully before leaving academia?

Perhaps your advisor has one or more students that could benefit from more mentoring than the advisor can supply?

Helping young graduate students learning to do research and write papers would be worth doing in its own right. If you are going on to an industry career mentoring junior programmers would be a valuable skill. It would be a different sort of experience to put on your resume when job hunting, not just more of the same.


The worth of scientific work is in the content, not in who wrote it. Therefore, I think publishing under a pseudonym is not necessarily unethical. In the example the OP presented the author was prevented from publishing if he used his own name. If the research was sound and reproducible, I would be fine with this. In practice I would like to know who wrote the paper.


What if I am not the right fit in a certain lab as a postdoc?

I presume that your postdoc advisor is the one that was directly responsible for your hiring. In such cases, she is presumably well aware of your skill set and former training, Presuming that she has not intentionally set you up to fail (a reasonable assumption, given her investment of time and money in you, and the potential damage to her reputation and your career), you should look on this as an opportunity to demonstrate that your PhD is well-earned. After all, the goal of a PhD is to certify that you are capable of learning a new discipline and making a demonstrable contribution to the state of knowledge in the field. Being put into a project outside your "comfort zone" is a perfect way to accomplish this.


Why do universities place a weight on GRE/TOEFL scores?

GRE/TOEFL scores are used in a number of different ways (some of which are alluded to above)

GRE scores are sometimes used as a university-level filter (if your GRE score is < X, then you'll need a strong support letter from your department to get admitted)
TOEFL scores are used as a filter for giving people TA funding (if your TOEFL score is too low, you can't be assigned to be a TA, and if it's lower, you can't even get RA funding)
More informally, the GRE/TOEFL scores are used as a "do you even care' filter: for a CS program, a quantitative score less than 600 might be considered to be a warning that the candidate doesn't even care enough to prep for it.

But for Ph.D programs, the GRE/TOEFL are either used as a high-bar disqualification filters to prune applications (in top schools), or as low-bar disqualification filters to prune the non-serious applications.


Why is it unethical to share the contents of an exam with students who haven't taken it yet?

Why do you think that cheating, or more generally any breach of academic integrity, has to be of direct and immediate detriment to each involved person? The basic idea, to my understanding, of academic integrity is that by violating it, the system as a whole suffers, which is clearly not the same as there are direct negative consequences for each involved individual.

In your example, cheating on a test* can easily be very positive for the individual that is cheating (assuming (s)he is not caught, and also ignoring that (s)he probably did not learn what (s)he was supposed to learn, which may lead to trouble down the road). Of course, for the academic system in total, cheating students are pretty bad, as they severely undermine the value of examinations.

Similar arguments can also be made for other cases of academic honesty - as a young researcher, it may be quite positive for me to build a great career on manipulated data and forged experiments, but for science as a whole this would clearly be terrible.

This of course leads to the question what incentives rational individuals have to not act against academic honesty. Those fall into two basic categories: fear of repercussion and ethics. Both categories are easy to understand. Clearly, it may work out great for me to cheat on tests and forge my data, but it may also easily be discovered and backfire on me - and if it happens, the consequences are typically dire enough that overall it is not worth the risk for most. Further, as academics we are nurtured in the thought that academic honesty is the foundation of science. Hence, many (most?) academics would not want to violate academic honesty for personal advantage even if they knew for sure that they would not get caught. It is simply our understanding that the entire system is based on academic honesty.

*By the way, your scenario would not ubiquitously be considered cheating. For instance, in my old alma mater in central Europe, sharing test questions with the next year of students is completely normal and a widely accepted practice among faculty and students. Goes to show that what is considered ethical also differs among regions and institutions.


Are Visiting Assistant Professor salaries negotiable?

You can certainly try to politely negotiate salary, but I wouldn't count on getting much if anything at all.

At my institution, my experience has been that the administration simply won't negotiate on salary.  For a VAP, the department is simply looking for someone who can handle teaching load for a year or two.  There are typically many qualified applicants with enough teaching experience, and because the position is temporary there just isn't any point in paying more than necessary.


How can I best determine if a masters program is of high quality?

There are several things you could try

Read student reviews online - sites like GradCafe offer
interesting discussions that will give you an idea how well the programs are run and how much faculty members are willing to go the extra mile to help their students get jobs after they graduate.
Look at USNews ranking as a loose reference. In my opinion (as a mathematician) those rankings do not fully reflect how good an institution is, but a department ranked #1 is quite likely to be better than one ranked #100. Bear in mind that US News won't give you the full picture, though, you could run into a fantastic professor at an institution that only gets a decent ranking.
Speak to the academic advisor in your department

Last but not least, your choice very much depends if you want to stay in the academia. If you're going into industry, reputation and the alumni network might be factors to consider. Otherwise, browse through the faculty directories and see if there's any potential match of research interests. For example, if you want to learn analysis, you're better off going to UCLA than to Harvard.

Good luck!


How can I better equip myself early on for pure mathematics research?

Arguably, doing a PHD is supposed to be exactly the preparation you speak of. It is the first time in your education when you are most certainly expected to transform from the mere consumption of Mathematics to also producing new results; the general idea, however, is not that you simply start doing so, but rather that you have an advisor who guides this process. I mention this because you'll do well to remember that your advisor has this responsibility towards you, as you have the responsibility to invest time and effort to make the transformation, which is not an easy one for most people.

That said, here is my list of tips:

You may find yourself under a lot of stress to produce results. Unless (maybe even if!) you are an absolute one in a billion genius, the results may take quite a while to come, months, maybe years. Prepare yourself mentally for this fact. Although, I am afraid, I was told the same thing in advance, took it serious, and I still was absolutely unprepared for the reality of it.
"Having a new idea" is what you rarely learn in undergrad courses, where most people puzzle together theorem statements from the lecture to prove exercise results. This is not a bad thing, you will need this skill to make your ideas work, and you will also need this skill to get into new fields where new ideas are needed. However, having an idea is different and how exactly you come to have ideas, noone can tell you. I have known many different mathematicians and their minds all work in different ways. However, there is one thing they all have in common: They have their best ideas when they are relaxed and at ease. Find ways and time to be relaxed and ponder about Mathematics without feeling stressed out. How exactly you do that will be up to you.
Work with other people whenever you can. Collaboration is extremely powerful both to keep you engaged with a problem and to overcome obstacles.
Be enthusiastic or have the ability to get enthusiastic about your research topic. Without that, you are unlikely to muster the mental endurance required to actually do research in it.
At the beginning of your PHD, you must listen very carefully to your advisor. Towards the end of it, you must make sure that your advisor is listening very carefully to you.
Make concrete examples. I explained this at length in a Math.SE answer. This should work even in very pure fields, even though "concrete" may mean something else for you than for others. The important part will be that it is concrete for you, i.e. that it enriches your intuition.
Find a good balance between intuition and rigor. Relying too heavily on either will get you stuck. I believe that the more experience you have, the more you can rely on your intuition; but for someone starting out in Mathematics, I believe it is healthy to go with a 50/50 approach here.

While it is not my tip, I would like to include this excellent suggestion from the comments:

  Keep a notebook of ideas that might result in fruitful explorations. Review it periodically. These are the ideas that you don't have time to develop now, but might lead to something when current projects come to fruition.


Can we use a book figure/illustration in a review article and cite the source without getting permissions?

You cannot publish somebody else's copyrighted material in your own documents without a license.  Typically, the copyright is held not by the authors but by the publisher, e.g., CRC Press.

For most large publishers (including CRC Press, which appears to be owned by Taylor & Francis), they have a standard procedure for obtaining permissions for republication, e.g., to include a figure as part of a review article as you wish to do. Depending on the particulars, sometimes it will cost money and sometimes it will be free.  In any case, sending email will generally be pointless because they will expect you to go through the standard permissions process instead.

In this case, if you go to the CRC Press permissions page, it leads you to a general copyright licensing service, which has a "pay per use" system for obtaining, among other things, a license to:

  Republish an article, book excerpt or other content in your own books, journals, newsletters and other materials

Finally, note that it is sometimes worth checking whether an alternate free version exists.  For example, authors may have also previously included similar material in a US government report or other item where you can freely use the material (always with appropriate attribution, of course).


This seems less like an academic question than a question of contract law.  Nevertheless, for what it's worth, if you are refusing to pay the amount claimed, then presumably the onus will be on the education-provider to sue you for the money, and establish in court that it is a valid debt.  You will have an opportunity to argue that they failed to provide you with the contracted service and that the substituted service was sub-standard.  Whether or not you have a good case will depend on the details of the matter, the specifics of your agreement with the provider, and the commercial laws of the jurisdiction in which this occurred.

If necessary and affordable, you should seek legal advice (from real commercial lawyers - not random guys on academia.SE).


Is it normal for students to ask for a lot of reference letters?

My solution as a student and my preferred solution as a prof who might get a lot of requests from a student would just be a heads up that a number of requests will be coming in the future months.

That lets the writer know that it is good to keep copies on file, or even prepare a template file for this student so that it takes little time or effort to send out the next letter. Some professors will write a general letter to send everywhere and some will tailor it for a given institution. As the prof, I would probably do a bit of both, depending on whether I had a relationship with the receiving institution and on whether the student is specially qualified for a position.

Don't make every request a surprise with a short deadline. That could be annoying.


Climbing the ∞ university well - Theoretical Physics

We get this question a lot.

I don't think elite Ph.D. programs look at master's programs as a positive, per se.  For instance, if you aren't as sharp (or diligent or whatever the metric), I don't think they trade that off with your experience.  IOW, they don't trade capability for experience.  If anything on the experience level, they prefer "fresh meat".
All that said, if you think you are of the caliber that you SHOULD have gotten in, but didn't (e.g. because of grades), than fine.  There is a natural breakpoint with the masters.  I have seen one good friend (sharp as heck, but was at a so so Canadian Ph.D. school move to JHU, doing theoretical physics).

It ended up being a win win.  JHU got someone who was towards the top of his grad school class.  But note, this is very different from experience trumping skill.  More like he really should have been at JHU all along and then things got corrected.  So I would look at yourself and how you compare to the average person in the grad school classes at your target universities.  It's probably not all about brains, but really...brains (particularly mathematical aptitude) is a big part of the equation for theoretical physics.

P.s.

(1)  I am trying to be truthful and analytical to help you.  Versus telling you something that makes you feel good, but is not most insightful.

(2)  In general, "elite" programs (Julliard, Harvard physics, Goldman, McKinsey, NFL) tend to value "horsepower" over experience. One can argue if this is rational or not for them (probably it is), but in any case, it is how they behave.  Note that vast portions of the business world actually don't make the tradeoff as strongly or even make it the opposite.  All that said, in academia, really you are better off going to the best brand (people will hate on me for saying it...but it's the dirty insight).  School tends to be much more about head of the class, than the working world is.

(3)  You might also think about other areas of science where your skills could have more relative advantage...not everyone needs to be a theoretical physicist.

(4)  I checked on some of your physics questions.  Very detailed questions and I want to give you an attaboy/gurl for the effort you took into making sense of tensors.  Good drive.


Does grading based on a curve make cheating unfair?

Would cheating still be considered unfair if we drop the concept of grading according to a curve? (which we should)

Of course!

Let's assume that without cheating 10% of students get As. Therefore, students who earned As are a small group. Having an A might help getting funding, or finding an internship or a job. Now let's say that with cheating, 50% (no normalizing) of students get As, now an A is no longer that valuable because a lot of people have them. Therefore, the value of As that honest students earned has diminished.


Could a paper that's just a title and abstract be listed as a publication in CV?

Congratulations on presenting a paper in one of the most important conferences of your field. That is certainly something to be proud of, but the correct place to list the achievement would be under a heading such as "Conference talks" or "Presentations" as others suggest. A title and abstract cannot under any reasonable definition be considered a publication, and personally if I were looking at your CV and saw it listed as a publication (and looked it up to see what it contained, which I often do in such situations), I would get a pretty negative impression of someone who is trying to dishonestly pad their CV with dubious achievements.


On-campus interview: Faculty exit interview

Sounds like a panel.  Probably pretty important.  If you looked good during the day, they will want to confirm.  If questionable, gives them a chance to probe specifics.  If meeting is cancelled or senior members don't show, you can guess it's a ding.


How prestigious are the meetings of the Optical Society of America (OSA)?

AFAIK for disciplines related to the Optical Society of America (which is a well-recognized organization), the most prestigious things are journals - either by it (for example, JOSA A, JOSA B, Optics Express) or not (e.g. general physics or general science journals). When it comes to conference, its importance is related only to speakers/participants (so there is no general rule).

In any case, a poster presentation is never prestigious, be it by OSA or not (usually almost everything gets accepted).

I would ask that not every field have well-defined tiers for conferences. For example in mine, there isn't. And if you care for prestige - if you can't tell the difference - the chances are people seeing you CV won't be able to tell the difference either.

Usually review of abstracts (especially if no feedback is given) is to decide which things are suitable for talks (the best), posters (almost all others), and which - neither (they make no sense, are on another topic, of very poor quality or are OK but there is limited space for posters for some reason).


How to interest a researcher in a topic (social science)?

It would be a fairly difficult process.

Firstly, you would need to convince someone that you aren't a crank and are worth listening to. Once they listen to you, you'll have to convince them that your work is of such import that they should stop working on their current projects—you can assume that everyone is at full capacity already, and that adding your project to their task will decrease their involvement elsewhere—to research on your topic. Most academics are academically motivated by the love of their field, the possibility of getting one or more respected publications, and the prospect of getting a grant, not necessarily in that order. You can only appeal to the first two, and likely only the first one. That's not a very strong argument.

You also stated in your opening question "I believe this thesis could be tested quantitatively by a trained social scientist...". The implication here is that you are not such an individual. (I'm not speaking of degrees, I'm simply speaking in terms of experience in performing academic-level research and analytics.) In that case, are you certain your research thus far is valid? Your entire thesis could be based on faulty statistics, poor sampling, a misunderstanding of some fundamental concept, etc.

Long story short, you have an uphill battle ahead of you.


You haven't mentioned any alternatives to Number Theory.  Hmm.  Maybe it would be reassuring for you to have a small list in your hip pocket of possible areas.

If you don't have to decide right away, then I would suggest that you hold off on deciding, and meantime start remedying these gaps as soon as possible.  Without panic, but without any shilly-shallying.  Obviously, don't work on them all at once, but do start somewhere, and make a tentative map through this subject matter -- in what order, what books will you use, what topics could be skipped or skimmed over, which ones will you do in a class, which as self-study, and which in an independent study.

Even if you end up working on something other than Number Theory, this study will be helpful for you in the long run, either directly or indirectly.

If it feels daunting, think one step at a time, or Rome wasn't built in a day, or some similar phrase that helps you.

In the U.S., one is generally not expected to hit the ground already doing research, right from the first semester.  It's okay to take some time and get the solid foundation one needs.

Do you have an advisor, potential advisor, temporary advisor, or mentor of some sort?  If not, look around for one, and if necessary ask the department to assign you one temporarily.


Should I disclose invisible disabilities to my supervisors during my PhD?

I have no problem disclosing specific situations I sruggle with (e.g. that I can be distracted easily, that I often misunderstand people etc), but do not want to put a label on the actual diagnoses as it does not describe how these disabilities affect me specifically and there can be a lot of misunderstanding around these diagnoses.

This is key. It sounds like you are fine with going into detail on your symptoms (and therefore your need for accommodations), but you're not comfortable disclosing the exact diagnosis. Given that your advisor is not your medical professional, they don't need to know the diagnosis.

So, if there is a need to, you can tell them your issues, but don't tell them the diagnosis. Be polite, firm, and center the conversation on your genuine need for accommodations.

  "You've asked me about my medical issues and my need for accommodations. I'm not always comfortable discussing this, but it's important for you to know that the main symptoms cause me to be easily distracted, occasionally misunderstand people, X, Y, Z..."

If your advisor presses you for the "name" of the medical condition, you can say

  "The precise diagnosis isn't really relevant - what's important here is I have genuine medical issues that need accommodations. Thank you for helping me do my best work."

The last sentence here reframes the conversation to the advisor's role of helping you to achieve success, rather than on their morbid curiosity about your specific diagnosis.


Seeking TT position with criminal record (DUI)

Nobody will care.

A drug-related crime (of which a DUI is one example) from your teenage years is just not at all relevant to your professional qualifications and your ability to do your job.  If it were more recent, or if it were a more relevant crime (e.g., a violent offense), then it might be a different story.

As noted in the comments, though, don't try to hide it if somebody asks about it.  You don't need to bring it up, but if somebody else does, just tell the honest truth and you won't raise any red flags.

Oh, and in the future make sure you have some sympathy for the students who are making the same mistakes that you did.


Can I ask a postdocter candidate to write a recommendation letter for applying to graduate school

Yes. Especially, a postdoc that has worked closely with you, and may have a different perspective than your professor. Whereas the professor may be involved in broader planning and thinking, the postdoc may have spent many hours with the student in the lab, analysing data, etc. Therefore, letters from professor and postdoc could complement each other and work very well.


I think in the end it will be a personal choice based on what you want in your career on where you may do your PhD. Based on some of the queries you had in the comparison between a US PhD or a European one, hopefully the following will be of help.

This link is a good page that shows the difference between the system in Europe and the US for PhD. The main reasons from it why a US PhD would be longer is;

  The main difference between doing a PhD in the US and most other countries is the coursework component. In the US, there is usually a requirement that PhD student complete at least 2 years of coursework before they start their independent research. This means that a PhD in the US will take longer to complete.

So yes there is a chance that you will be repeating coursework that you have done in your masters, but there is also the possibility that you may be able to get a wavier for coursework already completed.

I know (in Ireland at least, my home country) there is now a move in some universities towards a structured PhD that will include some coursework in year 1.

As per Piotr's comment it is typical that a PhD in Europe is pursed after Master's, while in US it contains Master's. In some cases in Europe it may be possible to go straight from a bachelor degree to a PhD. I know in my own case when starting out my advisor wondered if I would like to apply to complete a PhD instead of a Masters (in History). My sister also went straight from her bachelor to her PhD program (in mircobiology). Both these cases were in Ireland where you normally would have to have a first in your bachelor degree to be able to pursue a PhD directly afterward.

The page also details some other differences, such as how the committees are slightly different in both systems.

The Coimbra Group, an association of long-established European multidisciplinary universities have produced a Survey on PhD Programme Structures and Administration in Europe and North America that has some insightful information as well.


would it sound weird to ask for a professor to be as a permanent reviewer of a journal or conference?

It doesn't seem odd at all. You can simply ask a "good" reviewer if they are willing to review again in the future. I suspect many will say yes and some will fail to respond.
When you ask, you can also ask for subjects/topics that most interest them. This would ease the work of the program committee in the future, as they would be a bit less likely to send requests that are unlikely to be fulfilled.
Another approach, used by some CS folks is to put up a page with received papers, perhaps just titles, and send out a broad appeal to previous reviewers (and others, perhaps) asking if they are interested in any of the papers.


I'm not sure where you heard that you should only cite "credible" sources. Credibility is a judgement call, best avoided. You should always cite things that you have found and used, even if they were ill formed when found. The ideas are those of others that you have developed further. But the idea didn't originate with you, so you are open to charges of plagiarism if you don't cite. The likelihood of a formal charge may be slim, but other academics might doubt you if you cut corners.
That doesn't, however, mean that you have to accept the veracity of the things you cite. In fact, you can, and in some cases should, discuss the doubts you have or the ill state in which you found a resource that you use.
I'll note that in mathematics, we sometimes have to cite papers that contain serious errors so that we can correct those errors. But our work is still based on the work of the earlier mathematicians, even if we correct it.


For full-time faculty, the question doesn't really apply well because faculty aren't paid hourly or daily.  In the departments I've been involved with, the policy is that faculty handle their own classes and minor illnesses.  That is, if I need to cancel class one day then what that means for the class is up to me.  Maybe I have a TA teach it, or I offer a recorded lecture to fill in time, or even just cancel the class and adjust material accordingly.

What it comes down to is whether I can meet the obligations for the class while handling my illness.  For major illnesses where that isn't true, the department would schedule someone else to teach and I would look at my short-term disability benefits, which are commonly available in large US universities.  The unfortunate exception is an adjunct faculty member, who simply teaches contract-to-contract, and may not even have benefits through the university.


Can you present an image without knowing who originally created it?

Best Case Scenario: As one commented, you can use reverse image search on Google; or just use other search engines and see who created it. If you find it, then you can use the link to the original artist as a reference.

Worst Case Scenario: The good thing is that there is a link for it! So if you couldn't find the graphical artist (the worst case scenario) add the picture and its reference (its related link) in the slide's footnote. To be on the safe side, use the popular link (one of the links on the first page).


How does one maintain academic contacts?

To build and maintain a network of professional relationships, one should develop, maintain, and express genuine interest in other people and their work. Introducing oneself at conferences is a good start, as is recording and updating contact information, and setting up a system to remind yourself to reach out to people regularly. (There are various tools for this, ranging from a spreadsheet, to social network services, to CRM software. If you use gmail, you may want to try "contactually" for the mechanical part. )

Sending your contacts updates on your work is useful. And these should be targeted... it's ok to use a broadcast medium like twitter to announce new work to the world, but avoid sending out mass-email -- instead target those people who are likely to be most interested, and include a brief personal note that puts the new work in the context of their interests.

Most important, keep track of what others in your network are doing -- new publications, new projects, working papers, promotions, etc. (Social networks can be useful for this in some fields for tracking people directly, tracking working papers in your discipline, and disciplinary news can be quite useful, google scholar can also help alert you to new publications from people in your network. ) And when someone in your network is starting something of interest, re-connect -- with congratulations, a useful comment, and possibly some information on your own work (if it really is of interest with respect to their new project).


Declining an offer to present a poster instead of a paper

I don't think  you actually need a reason to decline. Saving the work for submission elsewhere is perfectly reasonable in any case. All you need to reply is "No, thank you".

Posters are good for preliminary work and for students wanting some exposure and an opportunity to meet other researchers, of course.

But the work is  yours and you don't need to explain why you prefer to withhold it at this time.


Applying Late to Mathematics Graduate School

There's an easy way out of this dilemma: talk to your professors now, tell them that you intend to apply to graduate programs in another year, and that you hope they will be willing to write recommendations.  The professors can then draft a letter right away, or at least notes for a letter, while their memories of you are still fresh.  When the time comes for you to apply, they can update their draft to discuss any additional accomplishments you have achieved in the intervening year, and send it in.
I don't think that a two-year gap between undergrad and grad school is likely to make a big difference in admissions, especially if you describe it as your plan all along.  You just want to avoid giving the impression of "I went to go work in industry but immediately discovered I hated it / got fired / etc, so now I'm applying to grad school because I can't think of anything else to do with my life". If it were five or ten years, there might be some impact, but that's not the case here.


Best practices to teach while wearing a mask

I grew up in Canada and was a PhD student and lecturer in England, before moving to Japan from 2013-2016. Before 2013, like most Westerners I did not wear a mask during flu season, and couldn't imagine wearing one while teaching. When I arrived in Japan in 2013, there was no COVID-19 or SARS-2003 going on, but people everywhere were wearing masks: On day 1 people were wearing masks at the airport when I landed, at the convenience store where I asked for directions when I was lost, and in the audience when I gave my first talk at Kyoto University.

"My main concern is my voice may be muffled"

Don't worry: People have been teaching with masks for decades in East Asia (I witnessed it myself for 3 years in Japan and know from my colleagues that it was nothing new).
My advice for best practices:

First try to get used to wearing a mask. If you're like me, I had never worn one before 2013 and wasn't used to it right away. But it's like wearing glasses: it's a bit annoying to see the side arms of the glasses at first but after wearing them everyday for years you don't notice that anymore. Maybe wear a mask when you go out to the store, between now and Fall 2020, so that when you start teaching you are not uncomfortable.
Get a mask that's comfortable for you to be speaking loud for long periods of time. When teaching we often have to project our voice so that people can hear us in the back, which means we speak louder than normal, and might be moving our jaw more than normal. A lose mask that falls off or moves around if you move your jaw bones too much, might be a bad idea. You can try various masks before Fall 2020 to find which one you'll be comfortable in. This is the type I use and it's the type they were wearing all the time in Japan:

(source: homedics.com)
I got 50 of them for $30 in Canada with inflated COVID prices (they were cheaper before). I don't find myself needing to speak louder, and my voice is pretty much the same as without a mask (if you stick with this classic mask instead of trying to use an N95 or some t-shirt fabric turned into a mask, I think you'll be fine and don't need a visor).

The first comment pointed out that if you use a microphone between your mouth and mask your letter "p" can sound bad. I agree and I never wear a microphone when teaching, and in fact I ask the conference chair to turn down my microphone when I'm giving recorded talks at conferences, because early in my career people told me I was too loud. For centuries we didn't have microphones and lecturers like Richard Feynman didn't use one in lectures like the one in this link, so getting used to projecting your voice is part of teaching (even at conferences they don't always have microphones). If you do still prefer wearing microphones for some reason, I think you are teaching at a rather huge lecture hall where the students will be more than 1 meter away from you, so you are likely not to need a mask. Your question says "Assuming that social distancing will not be possible while I'm teaching at the white board" which makes me assume you're in a small enough room that you don't need a microphone.

If you absolutely must record your lecture, notice that the microphone in Ilya Kuprov's 900+ youtube lectures is nowhere near his mouth/mask. You can use a body-microphone or put it on a microphone stand somewhere.


My Professor isn't submitting my reference letter

My sympathies. Some people are ... to put it politely... procrastinators. The bad effects this can have on other people make me think to give such people a more judgemental label, but I'll not do it right now.
As a comment suggests: call them on the phone... send another email... and be prepared to ask someone else to write the letter.


How should I behave when my undergraduate research marks reduce without any reason in the evaluation process?

One of the first things I tell my graduate students is:

  Let me know when there's a problem, not a crisis.

If you talk to your advisor now and let her know about the developing situation, she might be able to intervene and help you before the end of the process.

If you do nothing, and just hope for the best, you may find yourself in a situation where your advisor can't really help. (For example, if you are officially assigned a bad grade, it may be too late for her to do anything.


Can the future career damage associated with staying in the same lab between PhD. and postdoc be offset by massive high-impact productivity?

Massive productivity trumps essentially all considerations. If you're at one of the best universities around, then nobody can be mad at you for not wanting to step down on the ladder either. In other words, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

What I would worry about, both if I were in your place and if I were your PhD/postdoc adviser, is to make sure you develop a profile of your own over time, distinct from that of your adviser. That will mean starting to collaborate with others, writing papers with others and without your adviser, and/or applying for funding under your own name. As long as you make sure that it is clearly visible by the end of your postdoc that you're an independent researcher with your own ideas and identity, you will be fine.


Getting a letter of recommendation from a socially controversial PhD advisor

While there is always risk in such things, if his professional credentials are good and the other comments don't reflect badly on that, I'd suggest asking for the recommendation and not otherwise mentioning it in cover letters and such. Treat it as a purely professional relationship, which it should be.
As you note it is odd to not have a recommendation from one's advisor. And I'm assuming that your judgement is that his letter would be professional. If you have a way to find out anything about what he has written for others, it would be a benefit. A department head might, possibly, give you some guidance. But that is another judgement call - whether to ask.
Of course, you can't control the reactions of others, but you can, if asked, disassociate yourself from his views. Just say that you don't hold those views in any interview or such.
I'll note that in math and cs there have been a number of similar situations where a person is widely respected professionally, but whose views on some issues have been shunned and the people condemned. It doesn't reflect on their technical work, not should it reflect badly on you or your work.

See the case of William Shockley, and that of Robert Lee Moore.
And, of course, many people hold appalling views of things, that may be known to others, but not to their students.


The impact factor is not the right measure. The impact factor counts the average number of citations a paper receives in the two years after publication. But in most papers, most of the references given are for papers (substantially) older than two years, and consequently they don't count for the impact factor of the journals cited. That means that the average impact factor over all journals is not equal to the average number of citations.

Second, as others have pointed out, the distribution is heavily skewed. That's true for papers in general, but also for papers by the same researcher. To take just my own papers (see this google scholar page), there are a couple with over a thousand citations, but #10 on the list is already below 100 citations and there is quite a long tail of papers with far fewer citations than they have references themselves.


Can leaked nude pictures damage one's academic career?

I think you can generally trust faculty to be adults when it comes to graduate admissions and a tenure track job.

The biggest problem I would see is when you teach (future undergraduate) students. I'm not sure how you would want to deal with them.

I would say that university administrators tend to be adversity shy and could be a problem.

I would instead look to see if a lawyer might help you DMCA the sites hosting the images as well as file either a legal complaint or restraining order against you ex.  This latter bit is best asked on Law Stack Exchange.

University registrars and faculty are used to students having to change their name due to a variety of circumstances. You should be able to get new transcripts and letters issued under your new name without issue. But the abuser can also link images to your new name unless you can prevent him or he loses interest; so a name change is not a foolproof solution.


Germany undergrad: is it possible to switch from medicine to biology?

In the German system, there are many courses of study that cannot accommodate as many students as who would like to enroll. This is also the reason for what you called a bifurcation -- without doing that early, i.e., at the beginning of the studies, the university would have problems allocating the needed resources.
Many universities have both restricted courses of study and courses that are completely open for anyone with a high school degree to enroll.
Note that Medicine is a full course of study taking at least 6 years. It's not a typical undergrad course of study. It should certainly be possible to study for a M.Sc degree in a related discipline afterwards, though. But that is rarely necessary - your niece could jump into research in an area related to her doctoral studies during the MD degree, if desired (many MDs have their doctoral thesis done before even getting their MD degree).
Switching from biology to medicine will be difficult due to the access restriction to the medicine course of study, at the very least without first finishing the complete biology course of study.


Can one determine whether somebody's work may have been plagiarized?

It depends on how identical their abstracts are. If nearly every sentence has the same concept with the same ideas, you should do further research on the details of the other person's abstract...like when it was published.


Is there a difference between a Research Report and a Report?

As JeffE said, there are differences everywhere about which report is which - potentially confusing the issue.

Having said that, this resource from Purdue University "Purposes and Types of Reports which has further links to examples and guidelines.  But, they do state:

  •There is no universally agreed-upon format.

  •You should follow the format for your course or your company.


How to intervene in a course that is failing to meet expectations?

You might have a good case if this course is manifestly not meeting the department's stated requirements or failing to cover the prerequisites for further courses.  However, it's not clear from what you've written whether either of these is the case.  The methodology for selecting the readings sounds unusual, but not obviously unreasonable, and seeing this sort of cross section of the field could be a really valuable experience.  You complain that the readings are narrow and technical, rather than foundational or significant, and that might be true.  On the other hand, the professor presumably feels this is a better use of time than the way the course used to be taught.  The fact that the readings are less comfortable and harder to get a handle on could be seen as evidence that this version of the course is what the students need, even if it's not what they want.

  The students are extremely upset, and feel like we are losing out on an important educational experience.

This seems to be the crux of the matter: you wish you could have taken the previous version of the course instead.  That's a perfectly legitimate desire, and it's worth making it clear to the department in some way (student evaluations, comments to faculty afterwards, etc.).  However, that is not the sort of complaint that will lead to any short-term action.  Faculty have considerable freedom in crafting courses, and departments are generally reluctant to intervene unless there are serious problems.  It's not enough if you just don't enjoy a course or feel that a different course would have been more useful.

So I'd recommend setting aside the issue of regret over not getting to take the previous version.  You can register your unhappiness about that later.  In the meantime, it's worth formally complaining only if you have objective evidence of something wrong with this course in its own right, and not just in comparison with what could have been.


Applying to PhD programs in mathematics: would a letter of recommendation from my department chair at the community college be of any advantage?

I agree, the letter from your current department is likely to be more meaningful than a letter from someone who barely remembers you. The people reading your file will immediately recognize you as a "non-traditional" applicant (i.e., not straight out of undergrad), and will not be surprised that the letters in your file do not follow the pattern of traditional applicants.

While many employer letters are utterly dispensable in graduate admissions, it's a different story when the employer is a math department, "even" at a CC. Chances are that some of your target departments (at least those that combine pure and applied math) are struggling to staff their remedial courses. Slightly cynically speaking, they will be happy to have an instructor with faculty-level experience and TA-level salary (in addition to research prospects).


Can you obtain detailed date information on publications when using Google Scholar?

Sometimes.

There is no way to search by more specific date ranges but an exact date might be available for a particular paper. For example, this paper shows a publication date of 2014/4/26 but this paper only shows the year, 2015, but no month or day.

Otherwise, if Google Scholar doesn't show the date, you can follow the link to the publisher's website which might have it. For example, IEEE lists that second paper as having a conference date of "Sept. 29 2015-Oct. 1 2015."


How can I determine whether a student has written an excellent paper themselves, or hired someone else to do it?

Are there any techniques I could use to determine whether an essay that I suspect was written by someone else, but not published elsewhere, is a student's own work?

Ask the student to come to your office hours or a private meeting.

Then, say: "I was really impressed by your recent paper, it was an excellent piece of work! Let's discuss it some more."

Student who did the work will be able to discuss said work intelligently.

Student who didn't do the work is unlikely to be able to carry on an intelligent conversation about said work.

(This still isn't proof of any kind, and you can't accuse student of cheating without some evidence - but if you're lucky, student will at least be spooked enough to never do it again.)

  Are there any steps I can take to ensure I don't receive questionable essays in the first place?

Assign essays that are a few steps beyond, but still closely tied to, what's been discussed in class, such that somebody who wasn't in the class will not be able to produce the kind of essay you're expecting (the effectiveness of this depends very much on the subject matter).


Proposing a research project when contacting potential supervisors before master’s admission?

Your assessment of the situation is accurate: Faculty members usually have very little time to spend on your e-mail and likely do not like to wade through a project proposal just to assess your introductory email. However, your proposed project could be a decisive asset – be it only by showing your commitment.

With that in mind, you can write a short email declaring your interest and mentioning your project in one sentence, like you suggested. However, add something along the lines of:

  If you wish to know more, please find a sketch of the project appended.

(… and append your project). This way, the addressee can read what is essential in a minute, and if they decide that they wish to know more about your proposal, the information is already at hand.


Should you organise reviewer points thematically when preparing a complex response to reviewers document?

Any organization of your response will help.  Be sure and have someone else proofread your response before sending.  The organization of your response should follow the organization of the review, if at all possible.  Sometimes people use "in-place" editing, where a response is done in the review's own text, but this probably is not formal enough for your situation.


What are the masters funded opportunities for a British citizen living abroad?

As an EU citizen, you are eligible for free education in Sweden:

https://studyinsweden.se


Questions about the process of collaboration in Mathematics

Do mathematicians like to share their problems ?

Usually yes. Published papers will often have open questions or conjectures to which authors worked on / or think worthwhile but does not have a solution. These conjectures sometimes even have corollaries provided by the authors.
Mathematicians also sometimes just "hand out" open problems that arise in their research, write them on their webpage or public chat rooms.


Should I thank thesis committee before defense?

You should thank them by acknowledging them at the end of your defense (i.e. the acknowledgment slide of your PowerPoint presentation). Keep it professional though. Once your defense is over and you are cleared for graduation, then you can shake their hands and get a beer.


How does a Professor contact another professor regarding a PhD student?

We aren't in a position to address the question of why this professor made this specific request. However, on a more general level:
You don't specify where your home country is; let's suppose it's Ruritania. Why wouldn't a professor want references from your Ruritanian colleagues?

Reference-writing culture and purpose differs around the world. In US/Canada/Northern Europe/etc, an academic reference is expected to be a fairly detailed appraisal of your strengths and performance. Unfortunately referees from some parts of the world do not appreciate this, and submit attestations about a candidate's personal character or family circumstances. This damages their application, as there are effectively no meaningful references. Perhaps the professor knows, or fears, that Ruritanian professors do not write helpful letters.
Good references usually include information about how the writer perceives the candidate relative to others: "One of the most innovative researchers I have ever worked with", "Consistently ranking in the top 5 in her undergraduate class", etc. Of course, this is only meaningful if the reader is familiar with the comparators. If I have never encountered anyone else from Ruritania, how do I interpret such statements? I simply have no point of reference.
The concept of academic references relies on the fact that the writer stands to damage their professional reputation if they recommend someone who turns out to be a flop. For this to be a meaningful cost, the writer's professional circle has to intersect sufficiently with the recipient's professional circle. If nobody I know has any Ruritanian connections, why shouldn't a Ruritanian professor lie through his teeth in order to get rid of a troublesome postdoc?
Edited to add: The way in which academia operates varies around the globe. It is conceivable that the characteristics that are desirable in the Ruritanian system are undesireable somewhere else. Again, it is helpful to understand the perspective from which referees are writing.

As for communication, most academics prefer to communicate (at least initially) by email. However, a phonecall may sometimes be made for references, to allow transfer of information without generating any paper trail.


Is it impossible to find a PhD position for someone who has failed courses during their master's degree?

I will answer specifically for the German system, as that is one of the two countries the OP expressed interest in in the comments.
To enroll in a German PhD programme, you need the agreement of a professor to supervise you and (typically) an MSc in a related subject with (often) grades exceeding some threshold. Only the overall grade on your MSc certificate matters, not the individual modules.
Thus, the fact that you have some failed modules on your transscript will only matter for your admission to a German PhD programme indirectly, by impacting your ability to convince a professor to take you on as a student. There might be some professors for whom this is a deal-breaker, but there will also be some who don't much care; and certainly many who see it as a negative which can be overcome by other strengths.
It is worth pointing that failing modules is very common [or at least, used to be until not too long ago] in the German system (eg the math exam in computer science often have failure rates of 50%+). So I expect much less of a stigma carried by it than it seems to have in the US, for instance.


I would give a research-in-progress paper the same format as a typical research paper (using a typical format such as introduction-methods-results-conclusion).  However, the content of some of the sections would be different.  Using this format as an example:

Introduction This would probably be similar to the introduction on your final paper, but it should also give a bit of context on the progress of the project, so the reader knows how far along it is.
Methods Depending on the progress of the project, talk about what have already done, what you plan to do, and/or any decisions that still have to be made about what methods to use.
Results If you have preliminary results that you are comfortable sharing, definitely include them.  However, "results" can also be about progress so far on the project. e.g. "We have successfully completed three out of the seven ice cream launches", "We have recruited fewer accordian players than expected, but so far the drop out rate has been only 2.7%", and so on.
Conclusions You might reach tentative conclusions based on preliminary results.  But more likely the "conclusions" should be reflection on the overall progress of the work, as well as lessons learned so far.

For scope, use your judgment. As with any paper, the key is to make it tell a good, clear "story" that will be interesting to the audience.  Focusing on one aspect of the work, or giving a broad overview of the project, are both possible approaches.

Beyond this, refer to the call's specific guidelines.  The page or word limit is usually a good guideline to how much detail they are looking for.


What to look for when doing research for an institution-specific statement of purpose

The institution-specific parts of your statement are like the garnish on an already-existing delicious plate of food. Your statement of purpose needs to fulfil its basic reason for existing, which is to explain to the people in charge of admissions why you should be admitted. You can do this by describing why you want to take the course, why you are likely to do well in it, and what you hope to achieve once you have your diploma in hand.

When tailoring this statement to a specific university, look for opportunities to point out areas where your desires match what the institution provides. Examples would be things like the department being strong in an area which is important for your career, or having links with employers in a sector where you would like to work. You've read the module descriptions, and that apparently forms 70% of your decision, so I suggest you start from there.

In short, to write a statement of purpose, you first need to understand what your purpose is. Then you will be in a position to link your purpose to what the institution does.


Release software before the accompanying publication gets reviewed or accepted?

My experience in computer science has been that papers are rarely about software per se, but rather about the science that is either enabled by or instantiated in the software.  Computer science also typically seems to have a fairly open culture where people don't worry much about being scooped.  As such, research software is often available on open repositories like GitHub or Bitbucket long before it is published---it's just that nobody notices or pays attention to it before there is a significant paper to motivate them to do so.

So, to finish answering the question:

Pros: demonstrate commitment to openness, people might use it before publication
Cons: you can't do this with something you want to patent


Does impact factor of journal you publish in matter when getting a post doc?

[Note: my experience is from mathematics.  I guess most will still be applicable in other fields, but I don’t have first-hand experience.]

It probably doesn’t matter directly.

For any kind of job application, grant application, etc, you will be assessed on (among other things) the quality and notability of your research.

How exactly people assess that will depend on how close they are to your work.  Specialists in your own subfield will be able to judge your work on its own merits, regardless of where it’s published.  People in related fields will have to judge it indirectly, and may look at (among other things) the prestige of the journals you publish in — but they probably have a better idea of the journals’ reputation than just the impact factor.  The impact factor may matter most when the assessment is by people outside your subject — for instance, some government research agencies or university administrations have official criteria that include impact factors or similar metrics.

For post-docs (at least in my experience in maths), the main people judging your application will be your potential research group leaders, and their immediate colleagues.  So they will be able to judge your work directly — so impact factor probably is not too relevant there.

Long-term jobs and grant applications are much more likely to be assessed, in part, by people not in your own field, or according to fixed criteria.  So for these, impact factor and similar metrics are more likely to matter.  (How much they matter depends a lot on the specific country, institution, and field you are in.)  However, I’ve never heard of the criteria being as crude as “the sum of the impact factors of the journals you published in is close to 10”.


What is the difference between minor, moderate, and major revisions?

I have never seen the term "moderate revision", only "minor revision".

The exact semantics of major or minor revisions will depend on the journal - at some journals, a minor revision will not be externally reviewed any more, while a major revision will. At others, the difference is less clear-cut and may simply reflect the editor's feeling of how many additional rounds of review may be necessary.

Similarly, the differences in the probabilities for acceptance between different types of revisions will vary between journals. At some journals, even a major revision is almost certain to be finally accepted, even if it may still take multiple rounds of review, barring rare cases.


Contact the professor now, if for no other reason than to get out of your panic spiral.
Let them know that you are concerned that you failed to appropriately cite your sources and that you are generally confused about what can be treated as assumed knowledge and when you should credit a source.
You could even go as far as submitting a version of your assignment that does cite sources more completely.
This can be a learning experience. Go ahead and be an active part of that process.


I start an Assistant Professor position in August (in USA). Is it better to hire a Phd in August or January?

Often, your first semester in a faculty position flies by...especially if you are teaching (which you do not mention). You often meet with HR and administrators, learn where everything is on campus, and settle into your new home/hometown (I've started as a new faculty member at two different universities in my career). Consider that you might not have a lot of time to supervise and manage people during your first semester, which will waste your start-up funds. Waiting to hire the candidate in January will give you time to set up your program of research and have a full list of work for the candidate to work on when they start. Just a thought. Congrats on the job!


Fate of publications under review after accepting a tenure-track offer

I do not think it is either ethical or wise to try to delay the publications, anyone looking at the researcher will be equally impressed by a paper regardless of the address on it when it was published.


What is the proper way to denote coauthorship in a presentation?

Both styles are widely in use, at least in my field (computational mathematics). A common variant is that the presenter's name is underlined rather than in bold.

I don't perceive a difference between the two --- it's not like one of them feels "more polite" than the other. Just choose one, and don't overthink it. :)


Why don't things work with comparisons in reference letters and refereeing?

I suggest that an academic committee, sitting in consideration of an applicant to their PhD programme, would very likely view your addendum as being an honest attempt to preserve your set of professional ethics with regard to fairly ranking the applicant.

I do not think that the academic committee would doubt your trustworthiness. However, I expect that the committee would view whatever ranking you provided on the Good/Great/Excellent/Outstanding/Genius scale in light of your action of submitting your addendum.

Therefore the committee are not going to doubt your ability to rank the applicant, but are going to doubt the veracity of your ranking on the artificial scale.

However, I would hope that any sensible academic committee is going to be aware of the problem that we are discussing here and are therefore going to take a scaled single-valued ranking of any applicant with a massive grain of salt. They must know that a single value rank is going to be useless when judging the suitability of an applicant for a PhD programme.

Thus I would hope that, with or without your addendum, a sensible academic committee would take very little notice of the single value ranking and pay much more attention to the substantive letters of recommendation.

The addition of your addendum would not, I think, damage the applicant's application before a reasonable academic committee, as it wouldn't be news to the committee that such single-valued rankings are untrustworthy. To a reasonable academic committee, your actions of submitting the addendum might prompt others to do the same, and the practice of demanding a single-value metric abandoned over time. To an academic committee that places great store in such single-value metrics, your addendum sets out your concerns and presumably instructs the committee how you the single-value ranking is to be interpreted.


Does transferring to a different master's program look bad (from the perspective of the school you're attempting to transfer to)?

Note: this assumes that your current program is course-based, and that you have not made a supervision agreement for some kind of research work.
I do not think this will cause any problems, especially if you have been in your current program only for a few months. Many people drop out of study programs, both undergraduate and graduate.
There are some websites that say that changing graduate programs includes some challenges, but they mostly refer to losing credits, losing assistantship positions, etc. which you are probably already aware of.
Your target university will evaluate you mostly based on your qualifications and suitability for the program. I do not think they will see your few-month refresher course as a problem. If you have not started some supervision relationship with anyone in your old university, then probably no one at your old university will care much either.
It is good to mention a good reason for wanting to change programs in your cover letter, but I do not think you need to spend too much space on that. After all, you are telling your target university that you find them better than the old one: that is not going to bother them.
About how "the academic world" will see this... the academic world is not going to care at all. They probably will not even get to know it.
Just apply and see what happens: if they accept you, then it was definitely not a problem.


Losing focus in an exam, how does it affect my goal - grad school

I would try to find some of your class mates, that are performing very well on the tests and ask them for some advice. Regarding what sources they are specifically studying, how they decide what material to prep for the exam and what not to etc.

If you don't know anyone yet that is performing very well, this is a great opportunity to make some new friends. Taking tests is really an art form all of its own, and I'm sure those in your class that score highly will have some insights they could share with you about how to sit and prepare for a test well.

Also ask your faculty if they have old papers, you could practice with, you might also ask a member of the teaching staff to perhaps do a mock invigilation for you, with an old paper, and give you feedback about how you did, and where it fell short. Practice makes perfect.

Also isolate the reason you are not doing well in the tests. Is it because you simply do not know the answers? Or are you running out of time? Or are you not reading the question properly under exam conditions? Once you know this you will be in a better position to develop a strategy to improve in the key areas that are impacting your scores.


Could I arrange random gifts for the participants in my research?

Questionnaire design is a science.

Within that science, there is a body of literature on the ethics of incentives, and on maximising response rates. Behavioural economists and other social scientists have put a lot of work into this: you just need to make best use of their findings.

Just because questionnaire design looks easy, and lots of people do it shoddily, doesn't mean you should. Apply to questionnaire- and incentive-design the same academic rigour that you will apply to the analysis of the results.

In other words: the answer to your question is in the literature, so consult it: and then you've got some proper peer-reviewed literature to cite in your methodology section. And discuss the ethics with your university's committee and with your more experienced colleagues.


Some of the major corrections are already in the thesis

Consider that if your examiners have asked you to add things that were already there, then either (a) they didn't read the thesis very well, or (b) those things that were already there were not clear or obvious. In the case of (b), you want to improve that.

You could reply to "defend" things as they are - but be very sure of your ground before doing so, and expect that the examiners might respond "change it anyway". Unless there is a good scientific reason not to do the changes, I wouldn't bother - as your supervisor said, just swallow your pride, and do what they've asked. While annoying, it'll be less trouble for you, and also not risk annoying people you might want to work with in future.


Can the review of a tenure track application start before the reference letters arrive?

At least in my department, yes, faculty candidates can be interviewed before their reference letters arrive, although an actual job offer requires all letters.  (In fact, this is relatively common for more senior applicants, who often want to keep their application confidential as long as possible.)  But that was a policy decision by the department, made with the explicit approval of higher administration.  Other departments and other universities can set their own hiring policies/procedures/requirements.
The overarching rule (according to my understanding of US equal-opportunity labor laws) is that the hiring process must be consistent; the same process must be followed for all applicants.  If you interview one applicant before all their letters arrive, you cannot then claim that you didn't interview a second applicant because you didn't have all their letters.
(I ran my department's faculty hiring committee for three years.)


Should I use my university's letterhead for a cover letter for a job application?

No. It is you as a person who is applying, not you as a representative for your university. Univ. Y would probably look very negatively on an application on such lerterhead, as would Univ. X. Letterheads are intended for your official business of your position at X as teacher, researcher etc. Applying for a job or for example writing somewhere for your private business is just that, private. You can, however, create your own private letterhead to use for such instances but this should reflect your private standing and show only private address, phone and e-mail.

So keep the official business separate from your private. As alluded to this also applies to e-mail, something most people forget about. It is good to have your own private e-mail for instances such as this.


What do I do if my advisor made a mistake?

Just tell her, mistakes happen.

Dear Prof. OutOfCountry,
thank you very much for your comments and review, but it seems that you reviewed an older revision of the document. Find the latest revision attached.
As you can see, most of your points are already addressed in this revision, as well as the following major changes:
[...]
Regards, aspire94


Better chances for math grad school: graduate in three years or four?

What jumps out at me in your question is the assumption that because of your advanced standing you can only stay at Berkeley for two years and thus only spend three years in college altogether.  Though I do not have any direct experience with this (i.e., financial aid at state universities in California), I find that quite surprising.  Berkeley is an elite institution, and presumably they don't let just anyone transfer in.  The fact that you have two years' worth of university credit after one year in college is to your credit and probably factored into their decision to accept you.  So they turn around and penalize you by only offering you two years of financial aid?  That doesn't make much sense.

I would at least make a phone call and, if necessary, schedule an in-person appointment with a financial aid officer.  My first guess, honestly, is that you may not be understanding the situation correctly.  If you are, you need to explain why the junior standing could stop you from making best use of the amazing resources that UC Berkeley has to offer and could make you less competitive in your later academic plans.  I would expect them to be sympathetic to that.

On the other hand, I find your discussion of what it takes to get into a top mathematics program (here and in the other question you asked) a bit reductive.  It is not simply a matter of taking the most graduate courses, doing multiple REUs (in my opinion as someone who was involved in graduate admissions in my math department, one REU has the same effect as multiple REUs unless you do some truly notable research in one of the REUs, which is unusual; also, doing multiple REUs makes it natural for you to get more than one recommendation letter from an REU director, and this is a mistake: most REU letters sound the same no matter who is writing them or is being written about), and so forth: the goal that you rather want to pursue is to show mastery of mathematics and show the potential and the interest in doing mathematical research.  You can show this by taking 5 graduate courses rather than 10.  (Ten courses sounds almost ridiculously high, by the way: I took 9 trimester graduate courses -- so the equivalent of 6 semester courses -- over the last two years of my undergraduate program.  I got into all the top mathematics departments.  If I had taken a few courses fewer I don't think the outcome would have changed.)

In fact, the list of math courses that you've already taken compares well with what very strong undergraduates take up through the end of their second year in top mathematics programs in the US.  If you did really well with them, then I think you would be ready to take graduate courses (what other undergraduate courses would you take?) in your next year and thus as far as I can see you could graduate in three years and still be competitive for a top program.  But do you really have to?  If you are serious about studying mathematics, then you have the entire rest of your life to do that.  I would recommend a more balanced undergraduate experience that is not 100% calculated to optimize the graduate program you can get into and which lasts for the traditional four years: there are other interesting courses to take as an undergraduate which you will never take again, and there are other things to do with one's undergraduate life aside from coursework.  Don't get shortchanged on your undergraduate experience.


Career advice for a Physics PhD Student?

Internships. An internship or two will give you a taste of what a nonacademic career might entail and give your employers insight into you as a potential candidate. It's not uncommon for employers to view internships as a sort of extended interview. I have no doubt you'll learn things and see things you hadn't anticipated, perhaps interesting paths to follow. Best of luck!


What is the effect of background music in educational videos on the learning outcome?

See Moreno, Roxana, and Richard E. Mayer. "A coherence effect in multimedia learning: The case for minimizing irrelevant sounds in the design of multimedia instructional messages." Journal of Educational psychology 92.1 (2000): 117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.92.1.117

  The authors tested the recommendation that adding bells and whistles (in the form of background music and/or sounds) would improve the quality of a multimedia instructional message. In 2 studies, students received an animation and concurrent narration intended to explain the formation of lightning (Experiment 1) or the operation of hydraulic braking systems (Experiment 2). For some students, the authors added background music (Group NM), sounds (Group NS), both (Group NSM), or neither (Group N). On tests of retention and transfer, Group NSM performed worse than Group N; groups receiving music performed worse than groups not receiving music; and groups receiving sounds performed worse (only in Experiment 2) than groups not receiving sounds. Results were consistent with the idea that auditory adjuncts can overload the learner's auditory working memory, as predicted by a cognitive theory of multimedia learning.