What can I do if my advisor threatens to take away authorship of my undergraduate research work?

If you are the original author, you have authorship rights and your advisor cannot take that away from you. The worst that she can do is refuse to coauthor with you and take her own name off the paper, not yours, although if she did that, you should remove her contributions from the paper.

At your school, there should be a number of people who will advocate on your behalf, and I would start there. The dean of students and the department secretary are usually good first stops. If that fails, you could consider going to the school dean, the provost, or conceivably even the university president (although if it got that far, you are likely in the wrong or have a terrible program). If your advisor publishes without you as a co-author, you can seek redress with the editor of the journal where she publishes.

If you already know that this is an issue, you need to start getting your "ducks in a row." A first step would be to 'publish' your paper as a working paper somewhere. Where you do that is going to be discipline specific, but SSRN is a good choice if you are in the social sciences, and Academia.com has this ability as well. If you do that, make sure you give appropriate credit, too. Two wrongs don't make a right, as they say.

Try to ensure that as many people as possible can attest that the idea is yours, and if you still have the original graded by the professor make digital copies, preserve the original at all costs. In the end, you don't want it to be your word against hers, and the more evidence and witnesses you have, the better. Rightly or wrongly, other faculty are more valuable than students, so show it to as many faculty as possible.

A few words of warning.

What you are talking about is plagiarism, and could even be intellectual property theft. Universities take this very seriously, and it can end careers—both yours and your advisor's. Consequently, things can get very dicey very quickly. Be absolutely certain before you start making claims publicly that you are in the right: talk to someone you trust outside the department and outside the discipline and show them your work with the work you are doing jointly with your advisor; verify your sources; know your allies. Once this goes beyond you and your advisor, and perhaps a small cadre in the department, it is the intellectual equivalent of going to war.
Be prepared to come to the table. If this isn't published yet, then there is still hope for a negotiated solution. Know what your objectives are, and use your position to get those objectives, and don't get hung up on abstracts. For example, if you are really hoping to get into law school, then being author may not be as helpful as something else, and be prepared to accept that something else. Make no mistake, what I am talking about is corruption, but as an undergraduate, it is highly unlikely to be worth hanging yourself out to dry over something like this, if there is a negotiated compromise. On the other hand, if you are hoping for a PhD and a career in the field, then authorship can be crucial, and you may need to go to the mat over this so as not to be seen as a pushover or a flake in the future.
Don't get caught up in office politics. If your advisor has enemies, and she likely does—especially if this is typical of her treatment of others—departmental enemies will likely try to use you as a weapon to get to her. While it may be gratifying to do so at first, if you let that happen your interests will fall by the wayside as the whole issue becomes about whatever stupid issue is driving the office politics, and not about your intellectual and students rights.
Don't get steamrolled, but don't overstate your contribution. This is hard as an undergraduate, because you definitely don't have as much information about the discipline as your advisor, and it can be tempting to think "My idea changed the world!" whereas it is only a minor contribution. Know what you have done, and don't get pushed off that, but being seen as someone who is self aggrandizing or consistently over-estimates their own importance will hurt your cause. There are already people who devalue contributions because of who the contributor is, and you don't need to give them any ammunition, or give your potential allies pause because they are unsure of the reliability of your perceptions.


Can I put the editor in the Acknowledgements?

There is nothing wrong with acknowledging an editor that goes beyond what can be expected. It is of course not customary to provide such acknowledgement in most cases. Editors do not expect it and it may simply appear as inappropriate attempts at flattery. It is difficult to draw the line where acknowledgements are appropriate but, I have probably acknowledged editors in a couple of percent of my own papers. I have also been acknowledged a couple of times in my capacity as editor (out of editing hundreds of papers), all in cases where I have felt my assistance would save a paper that could otherwise be buried undeservedly. In any case, your description seems to fit a case where the acknowledgement is appropriate, although no editor would probably expect it.


From the Nature guide on Other Submitted Material:

  News & Views
  These articles inform nonspecialist readers about new scientific advances, as reported in recently published papers (in Nature and elsewhere). This is a commission-only section.

So the articles are selected and commissioned by Nature editorial staff, and written by invited authors. A quick look through recent News & Views articles finds contributions from scientists and science writers (including former Nature writing / editorial staff).


Unfortunately, academia is not always a model example when it comes to hiring practices. There are several reasons to it:

academics are often very busy. A senior faculty member can get hundred(s) emails in their inbox daily. The importance of these emails varies dramatically: most of them are general "academic spam", announcements, or something not really important. As such, most of the email is quickly trashed, including (sadly) potentially important emails from unknown address.
Academic positions are often very competitive. There can be hundred(s) of application for a single post, then reduced to a shortlist of 5 to 10 candidates. Sadly, not always HRs and academics have enough time (or motivation) to send a polite notice to unsuccessful candidates. Such a huge competition is mostly for faculty posts, rather than for PhD posts, but I imagine the attitude can be the same.
Formal procedures established by HRs can be very slow. Often academics can not make an offer of a post without HRs approval. Since HRs do not report to academic staff, a professor has a very limited possibility to speed them up. If some gears in HR department desperately need oiling, this can affect the whole university, but almost no-one except higher management can do anything about it.

There is one thing you definitely can try: email your professor again.

If this does not work, here is another one: telephone him (at work number in work hours).


How do you keep track of papers during a brainstorming literature review?

My workflow/suggestion would be to keep this all in Zotero. I'm a big believer in keeping the number of tools one uses relatively small and becoming very proficient at using ones favorite tools.
I use a collection  ("Inbox") dedicated to items I may or may not keep and don't have time to read right away. I will then go through those items periodically and either throw them out (remember you need to "Move to trash" or shift+delete - just pressing delete will just delete them from the collection.) or file them in the right collection and delete them from "Inbox".
To quickly remind you of why you saved the items, you could either attach Zotero notes or you could use tags, including colored tags if you can make do with only a couple of short keywords.
Finally, since you will always save items into Zotero right away, you can sort the collection by "date added," which should give you a good idea of the context in which you saved an item.
Since you're using Zotero Standalone, you'll want to use alt+tab to quickly move back and forth between Zotero and your browser.


"Exceptional candidates from other areas may also be considered". What does this mean?

Do not filter yourself out. You do not know what the hiring department wants (and they might not know/agree themselves). Just send your application in.

Do not worry about clouding application pool. The application pools are huge, but most applications are dismissed within a minute. As a member of a hiring committee, I prefer to spend an extra minute on one more non-competitive application than miss a chance to hire an excellent colleague who will work side-by-side with me for years.


If I get an encouraging but noncommittal response from potential advisor, should I continue to pursue other potential advisors at this school?

It doesn't sound like he is just being kind. Using the wording "strongly encourage" is a good sign. Many US universities do not let individual professors have much of a say in a admissions and his response may be a reflection of that.

Furthermore, many professors are not willing to commit to advising any students before they have been accepted. It sounds like this professor wants you to apply and would be open to talking more if you are accepted (or are visiting).

You can continue to look for advisers, but I'd imagine most of them will say the same thing. It's never a bad idea to see what else is out there, but it's hard for many professors to say much this early in the process.


Using a publicly available code and modifying it to my PhD thesis. Should it be cited in the paper if I have modified the core equation?

If you borrowed something from another source and modified it, you should definitely cite the original source in your paper.


Doing a second PhD in different field instead of a Habilitation

As has been covered in other questions e.g. Is doing two PhDs a good path? or After PhD in Aerospace Engineering, could I be admitted into a top university for a second PhD in Computer Science?, there is rarely a need to pursue a second PhD to change fields. Once you have acquired the basic research competence, you can shift fields at any point in your career (as indeed you are already doing by publishing in a CS field).

Moreover, the volume of research required for a PhD thesis and a Habilitation is quite similar. Rather than going back and doing a second PhD, would it be possible to start pursuing more collaborations with the CS department and publishing CS research, so as to eventually obtain your habilitation in CS? Or interdisciplinarily with research from both fields, if you would like to keep your options open?


Getting a 2nd bachelors or go for a masters?

I'd go for the masters degree. I went from a bachelors in music, to a masters in CS. The rewards of having a masters degree I feel is greater than a bachelors. And you have the ability to do that with the bachelors completed, so take advantage of it. You may have to take a few core CS courses which will extend your schooling a semester. Check the program you are interested in for deficiencies you will need to make up.

One suggestion. If it is possible for you to get a job at a university with a program you like, they may pay for your classwork to obtain a masters degree. Then you can take your time to complete the degree while working full time.
It will take you longer to complete the degree, maybe 4 years. But you'll be working, gain experience, maybe get your tuition covered, classes could potentially be in a nearby building, and have flexibilty to take a semester off if needed as a result.


Accidentally addressed lecturer as Mrs instead of Ms

I have heard from women (in mathematics departments, in the US) that they prefer not to be addressed as Ms or Mrs.

The issue is that some students address their male professors as "Dr." or "Professor" but their female professors as "Ms." or "Mrs." Perhaps you don't do this, but I would still recommend "Dr." or "Professor" unless your professor encourages otherwise.

Indeed, I know of one female professor who tells students that she is happy to be called "Dr. X" or "Professor X", and happier still to be addressed by her first name, but requests that her students avoid "Ms" or "Mrs".

It should also be added that this in the US, and cultural practices may be different elsewhere.

I don't think it's necessary to send a follow-up e-mail, but since you are worried about it, I think it would be perfectly polite to write something very brief like "p.s. How do you prefer to be addressed? Is Dr. X better?"


How to get enrolled into a PhD program without a reference letter from a PI with whom you have worked for 2 years?

If you are going to reveal your past mental health issues as part of the application process then you may as well also say that your past PI reacted unreasonably to your leaving. I don't think you need to "explain that away." Not everyone acts correctly and it sounds like you were treated badly.

It only becomes an issue, I think, if you don't want to reveal that past, for whatever reason. That is your right, of course. In that case, you should depend on recommendations from others to carry you forward, as well as the publications you developed under this PI. Your written materials need not necessarily mention that he was, in fact a PI. However, if it comes up in an interview, you can mention as much of the past as you need to. His name will likely be present somewhere in your materials and it is possible he will be contacted, so be prepared for a full explanation even if you don't introduce it yourself.

But if you are asked directly why you left, you can start with "an unresolvable conflict with the PI." Whether that is enough or not depends, but what you decide to say further is up to you.

But a lot of questions on this site detail various kinds of unreasonable conflict with advisors and PIs. so it isn't a unique problem. Your application materials need to stress that you will be a success.

While your geographic constraint seems to work against you here, it may also be that the opinion of the PI isn't necessarily very positive. So the fact that he is talking about you may not matter as much as you fear. But the only way to find out is to get out there and speak for yourself.


What makes someone deserving of a Ph.D.?

For a Ph.D., my favorite explanation is this cartoon by Matt Might.

In short: a Ph.D. is a measurable contribution to a sum of human knowledge.

To be able to answer this question, all you need is an idea of how to describe what you have discovered, and how it fits into the context of work by others that has come before.  This is often not easy to answer, but an important thing to think about as one is writing one's thesis in any case.


Should systematic reviews be submitted to journals as original or review articles?

I can see a good case to be made on either side:

A systematic review, unlike a more traditional narrative review, is often an explicit numerical meta-analysis of prior data.  Its systematicity allows it to be an actual experiment with objectively verifiable conclusions, and thus it may be reasonably considered original research on a new data set drawn from the literature.
Systematic reviews still, however, are organization and analysis of other studies, and so could be grouped in with other reviews.

Since both of these are reasonable, I suspect that there is no way to tell which perspective a particular publication subscribes to without reading their guidance to authors or asking their editorial staff (who will no doubt be happy to answer the question).


Informal vs. formal journal acceptance letter

You shouldn't worry much.  It's extremely unlikely that an informal acceptance will turn into a rejection, although I suppose it is theoretically possible.  In my experience, this is something editors do to get leverage over authors: authors are faster and more diligent about making revisions when acceptance has not yet been guaranteed, even when they know it is almost certain.

I wouldn't worry about the two week delay or get in touch with the editor yet.  For example, if the editor is in the U.S. the Thanksgiving holiday intervened, and the end of the semester is always a busy time.  It's also possible that the editor is checking with a referee (although this may not be necessary for such minor revisions).  It can't hurt to ask whether the revised paper was received, but I'd recommend waiting another week or two.

Incidentally, asking you to add citations sounds a little odd.  Are these from a referee report, and do they look like important references that you missed?  One unethical thing editors are occasionally tempted to do is to pressure authors to add citations to manipulate citation rates.  (For example, adding citations to their journal or their friend's journal.)  That's not necessarily going on here, but if it is then it's an inappropriate use of informal acceptance to get leverage over authors.


It seems to me that for a position with teaching duties, the main question is: leaving during the year versus leaving at the end of the year. Suppose you teach a semester course and you give your notice in the first month, then 3 months sounds a bit short. It might be that they want to make the schedule for the next year 3 months before classes start and want to know what teacher are still there next year.
My advice would be to discuss this with the university. However if you are looking for a job that you can quit at an arbitrary time within weeks/a few months, then teaching might not be for you.


Should I still try to publish this paper I wrote after it getting rejected?

In publishing there is a phenomena called "me too" publications (see for example Day & Gastel: How to write and Publish A Scientific Paper) where one takes existing methods and apply them to a new area, data set, whatever context is applicable. Although not wrong, these types of studies usually do not contribute much new knowledge except resulting in the understandng that the method(s) work in (yet) another circumstance.

What can then be done? As I alluded to initially, there is nothing really wrong with such studies. What is necessary is to convince the editors and reviewers that by applying the method(s) to the new area, you have actually achieved something new (in the sense of scientific discovery). For example, applying a formula to a new set of numbers is not a discovery unless the new numbers themselves contain something that can be set apart from what has been done before. So it boils down to what might sloppily be called "packaging"; you need to package your study so that it is evident what new discovery is achieved. It is not sufficient to just say that it is a new data set but you need to convince that applying the method(s) to the new data set shows results that expand our horizon beyond the obvious and also be explicit why one, for example, would not expect the result you obtained (or equivalent).

I have deliberately kept this answer as general as I can because the issue you bring up applies to many if not all fields. I would give the manuscript a hard work over and really think about what truly scientifically (intelectually) new aspects you bring forth. It may be that your writing has not been clear enough to bring the message through. It may be that you are too involved to see the bigger picture that needs to be explained to others. Or, in the worst case, it may be that your study is too trivial. Avoid falling into the "me too" trap, it easily happens and the remedy is usually to make sure the perspectives of the study are re-written carefully to highlight the core research problem to be solved.

So to answer, yes you should try again unless you find you are stuck in "me too" land.


Most common departmental structure for degrees in EE, CE, and ECE

CE program has actually been formed to address the digital-electronic-driven technologies, considerably, related to the computer technology, such as computer architecture, parallel processing, VLSI, CAD, etc.

EE program points to the electrical-driven stuffs like power engineering, analog electronics and semi-conductors, telecommunications and so on.

ECE program would often be considered as a mixture of the above cases. As a matter of fact, some minor interdisciplinary programs like robotics, neural engineering and bio-medical engineering could be covered under the aegis of such program.

Above clarifications might be fuzzy and even interchangeable in many cases. One could contend that the applicant must opt among the aforeaid programs, solely, based on the faculty members' research, are who affiliated with the responsible department of each program, are which mostly-aligned with his/her interests.


Regarding asking for writing about some courses in my CV in which I got bad grades due to my non interest in those courses

My general advice in such situations is to stress the positive in any application. Show the reviewer that you are a good candidate for success both in background and in work habits. Don't focus on explaining things that aren't positive but be prepared to respond when/if asked about them.

While the competition for a slot in a good university is very strong, nobody is perfect. And you won't know how competitive you are until you apply.

If you have a fairly narrow focus you intend to follow in graduate studies, focus on that and how you are especially well prepared to work in that field. Be enthusiastic, not apologetic.

Caveat. I don't know how your grades are interpreted by your own university, not how they will be seen when you apply. But focus on the good stuff, not the bad.


Is it bad practice to cite MSc dissertations?

Cite it. It's a source you used, so you need to cite.

In addition, good explanations are also good for readers who are looking for an introduction.

  didn't go through the usual peer review process

Where I am, a Master thesis is reviewed (+ graded) by two professors, and that can include a list of required corrections/clarification for the final version. A paper is possibly reviewed by 2 PhD students who have barely published their first paper...

  was almost by definiton written by a rather inexperienced mathematician

so is everyones first paper. Including possibly reviews: I know PhD students who were put to the task of writing a review paper right with their literature study to familiarize them with their thesis subject.

There are things in my Diplom thesis that I wouldn't write or do like that any more (now, 15 years later: science and my personal knowledge have advanced, after all - which is as it should be), though the downright mistakes I've found are mostly typos or otherwise the correct expression is clear. So it's rather that I have different expressions/sentences/wording now that I think are more clear/better or explain things I could only observe back then.
But then, the same is true for some of my (peer-reviewed) papers.


Is there any reason to register the copyright to your PhD dissertation with the US Copyright Office?

Registering a copyright with the US Copyright Office is a legal formality that establishes a public record of your claim to the work.
It is mainly useful if, in the future, you want to sue someone who infringes your copyright. Specifically,

  Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration
  is necessary for works of U.S. origin.
  If made before or within five years of publication, registration
  will establish prima facie evidence in court of
  the validity of the copyright and of the facts stated in
  the certificate.
  If registration is made within three months after publication
  of the work or prior to an infringement of the work,
  statutory damages and attorney’s fees will be available to
  the copyright owner in court actions. Otherwise, only an
  award of actual damages and profits is available to the
  copyright owner.

These and some other similar benefits are described in this circular from the US Copyright Office.

Based on your post, you seem to have some misconceptions about how copyright works. Note that:

Even if you do not register the copyright, the work is still copyrighted. In the United States and many other countries, a creative work is protected by copyright automatically as soon as it is written down or otherwise placed in a fixed medium.
Even if you do register the copyright, you can still make the work available under a permissive license, such as a Creative Commons license. See Is Creative Commons against copyright? for more information. For example, with CC-BY-NC you can choose to allow most non-commercial uses of your work as long as it is attributed to you, but still prohibit others from selling your thesis as an expensive book on Amazon.
You mentioned that you want to "let people use my work and cite me appropriately." Copyright does not prevent people from doing either of those things. Even if you reserve all rights under copyright, people are still free to use the ideas in your thesis. Copyright only protects your expression of your ideas, i.e. the words or images you used to express your ideas. So copyright prohibits people from copying large parts of your thesis verbatim into their own, or from posting copies of your thesis on another website (unless you choose to allow those things by assigning a permissive license to the work), but not from building on your work (and citing you). See Does copyright protect the author's creative ideas? for more information.
You wrote "a thesis should not be copyrighted simply because I think of it as an extended paper." The vast majority of papers are also copyrighted.


Being in "reviewer invited" state for a long time before changing to "under review" : Is this a bad sign

The status “reviewer invited” implies that your manuscript has cleared the initial screening and your paper will be sent for peer review. Finding reviewers usually takes some time as reviewers are busy researchers themselves.
Also, potential reviewers may decline the invitation, in which case the editor will have to begin looking for more reviewers. The reasons for declining may simply be too much workload or others, not simply disliking the paper.

Once the requisite number of reviewers has been assigned, the status will change to “under review.” You can wait for some more time to see if the status changes. I'm not too sure, but the number of reviewers probably varied, so you may simply have needed a lot of reviewers.

The time frame for review is around 3 weeks or so based on what i've seen based on some looking around. Then you might have a decision made, which might be a short round of reviews.

It may simply have been a month timelag in updating the listing, and simply difficulty in finding people in quantity (and probably expertise imo) to review the paper. I doubt it is an inherently bad sign, but do write to the editor, after all 7 months is a long wait. Best of luck with getting it published.

I would also check here and here.


Is a "lecturer" position sufficient for a career and not a temporary position? Can it ever be useful if not intended as permanent?

The context here is clearly the US system.  I'm responding based on my own experience working with people in such positions at my institution and elsewhere.

This is ultimately a personal decision.  There are certainly many institutions where instructors have been employed for decades and even reached retirement.  Having a stable job is better than having an unstable job or no job at all.

However,

Lecturer/instructor positions are not generally tenure-track positions.  You won't have the protections of tenure, and if your institution comes on hard times, you'll be one of the first to be laid off.
Although some institutions have "senior" instructor or lecturer job titles, there isn't nearly the same scope for advancement as for a tenure-track faculty member.  In particular, tenure-track faculty can advance from assistant to associate to full professor and ultimately into department chairmanship or higher administration.  In terms of salary, you're likely to be stuck at a level below the tenure-track assistant professors for the rest of your career.
Instructor/lecturers seldom get to teach any but the lowest level (remedial, developmental, and first year) courses.  You probably won't have the opportunity to teach advanced undergraduate or graduate courses.
You may not have much control over the syllabus, textbooks, etc.
Teaching loads can be very high in these positions.  There just won't be time for any professional development.
Taking one of these positions for a year or two might help your chances of getting a tenure-track position at a teaching-oriented institution (because you'll have gained some teaching experience to balance with your research background), but after you've stayed in such a position for a while (say five years), your chances of being able to move into a tenure-track position at even a teaching focused institution will decrease substantially (because at that point your research will have stopped, and even teaching-oriented institutions want some research from tenure-track faculty.)

In short, it's a deprofessionalized dead-end job.


EDIT:
Try Open Editors, a newly published dataset of ca. 480.000 editorial board positions across 6.000 scholarly journals at 17 academic publishers.

OLD ANSWER:
There are no open data* about editorial boards yet.
Thus, research articles that analyze the composition of journals' editorial boards unfortunately collect their data manually. For instance, a paper in 2016 writes at p. 4:

We began with a collection of 605 abbreviated titles of journals
[...]. Crowdworkers from Amazon Mechanical Turk then expanded those
abbreviations into full journal names and collected the individual
editorships associated with each journal.

It has not gotten better since then.
However, there is a reason for optimism as ORCID allows users to list their editorial board positions. Unfortunately, ORCID remains underused; but perhaps in the future its API could offer a greater treasure trove regarding data on journals editors. (The same is true with WikiData).
* Note: By "open data" I mean data that are, inter alia, interoperable, machine-readable, structured - see, for instance, the explanation of "Open Data" at the European Data Portal.


Professor that refuses to fail students - should I talk with him?

Personally I'd consider it worth talking to him, where 'talk to him' is defined not at 'tell him he's wrong' but as 'for your own peace of mind try to find out why he believes his choice is a good one'.


Professor Ignoring Emails RE disagreement over grading

Your professor has probably decided that make-up quizzes are time consuming and not worth it -- students need to learn that sometimes missing an appointment has consequences etc.

I'd recommend checking if the professor is willing to drop 2 quizzes instead of just 1 for the whole class or for anyone who has a doctor's note.

That way you are working with your professor's plan rather than negating it.


If the author of the copied slides gave his/her permission for your professor to use the slides, we could reasonably have a debate about whether this is plagiarism. I would be on the side of those arguing that it is at least a mild  form of plagiarism if not worse, and in particular is setting a very bad example for the students attending the lectures, who are exactly the population that professors spend inordinate amounts of time and energy trying to educate about the wrongs of plagiarism and related forms of academic dishonesty. But as I said, I can understand if some people may disagree and argue that the culture of teaching in some places might look with some forgiveness on such practices.

On the other hand, if the author of the copied slides did not give permission to use the slides, then this is as clear-cut an example of plagiarism as I can imagine. To see this, try to imagine yourself as the author of the slides, who put in a large amount of time and creative energy creating something of value and will now be getting an email from the OP informing them that someone else has casually taken their creative output and put it to work for their personal gain, for free and without permission or attribution. How do you think you would feel? I do not need to imagine it; it so happens that a week ago I discovered that someone has plagiarized a work of mine. The details do not matter, and that incident involves plagiarism that cannot hurt me in any tangible way (though it is harmful to others), but I can assure you that it doesn't feel good. So to @ff524 and others advocating a tolerant attitude on this question, I hope you never find out how this feels from personal experience, and perhaps without this knowledge you cannot appreciate my argument. Nonetheless, I urge you to at least try the thought experiment I proposed above and reconsider your position.

EDIT: The premise of those arguing that this isn't plagiarism is that originality isn't expected in a teaching context. I'm afraid this argument doesn't stand up in the face of scrutiny. Let's say I were to show up to my class and instead of giving a lecture that I myself prepared, I were to recite word for word a lecture from a popular MIT OpenCourseWare class that I found on the web and transcribed, but without acknowledging the source or letting on that I was delivering someone else's lecture. If criticized, using the logic of @ff524's comments I will simply point out that teachers are in the habit of reusing each other's material, so it's no big deal. I will also claim that I am doing my students a favor since the author of the lecture is an extremely eloquent and charismatic lecturer whose lectures have been viewed millions of times by people from all over the world, so their lecture is obviously more compelling and useful than anything I can prepare myself.

Now, is there anyone here who seriously suggests that this can be acceptable behavior for a lecturer? Regardless of what you want to call it, there is serious dishonesty being committed. If I really believed reciting someone else's lecture serves the best interests of the students, why not acknowledge the source? My behavior shows a clear intent to deceive the students, to claim credit for the intellectual fruits of another person's labor, and to avoid criticism for not putting in the hard work involved in teaching a class, something for which I am paid. The situation described by the OP is 100% analogous to this, except my example is slightly more extreme. So again, before we discuss whether this is plagiarism I would like us all to agree that the OP's professor's behavior is 1. wrong, and 2. dishonest.

Now that we've agreed, the question is why anyone would be resistant to calling this behavior plagiarism. Okay, so maybe in a teaching context there is a bit less of an expectation of originality, but come on - copying 35 slides verbatim? Moreover, the dishonesty and intent to deceive that I described above are exactly the characteristic features of why people commit the more usual kind of plagiarism: they are lazy, don't want to work hard or aren't smart enough to do good work, and they want to get credit for doing something, so they choose the easy solution of taking someone else's work and passing it off as their own. Why the reluctance to call a spade a spade? I just don't get it.

Finally, let me elaborate on something I mentioned at the beginning. We in academia spend a huge amount of time and energy trying to inculcate in our students the moral ethos of doing original work and never acting dishonestly, especially in connection with claiming credit for someone else's work, and we agonize endlessly over why some students don't seem to be getting the message. I witnessed this on many occasions when I was serving recently on my university's Campus Judicial Board and sat on disciplinary hearing panels for students accused of many kinds of academic misconduct, including plagiarism. You cannot imagine the silly excuses and rationalizations people come up with for why they copied someone else's work or happened to be glancing directly towards the exam notebook of another student for extended periods of time during an exam, and you cannot imagine the frustration of the instructors who caught them. So, my point here is that if we refuse to label this professor's behavior as plagiarism, this makes us look like total hypocrites. If we are to have any hope of getting the message across to students that one must do original work and attribute any usage of someone else's, we have to be firm and consistent in our standards. I chose to focus on the scenario when permission for using the slides was not given by the author since there it is a bit clearer that a strict moral boundary had been crossed, but as I said my opinion applies also to the scenario where the author did give permission, although in that case it would be a milder offense since the author at least would not have been harmed.


ScholarOne Manuscripts File Designations

Summary of Differences: If you are submitting an extended version of a previously published work, you may be required to submit a "Summary of Differences" between the new work and the original.

Summary of Changes: If you have made revisions and are re-submitting a manuscript that has already been reviewed by this journal, you may upload a file in which you respond to the reviewers' questions and comments as a "Summary of Changes."


Searching for papers from a specific conference

It is always better to search a single article to know how the citation manager in Google Scholar has extracted the information. You can then use the information to search the full proceeding.

For example, an article looks like this:

  Filippas, A., & Horton, J. J. (2017, June). The Tragedy of your Upstairs Neighbors: Is the Negative Externality of Airbnb Internalized?. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (pp. 537-538). ACM.

The required answer is here. You can see the full set of articles in this link under Google Scholar.

I hope you got the required answer.


What does it mean when a faculty member invites the candidate to apply for a tenure-track position?

When you get an email inviting you to apply for a position, it can mean many things.

It may mean nothing special. At one extreme (and this doesn't sound like it applies in your case), faculty send out a batch email to many of the other academics they know informing them of the position. This is typically not personalised.  Often there is also a hope with such emails that people will share the job advertisement around with colleagues.
It may mean that they think you would be a good fit, and that they would like you to apply. Within this range, there would be degrees of support. At the very least, the academic is indicating that they'd like you to apply. In some cases, they may be really hoping that you get the position. They may want you to get the position for various reasons: (a) they like you and want to support your career, (b) they think you'd be best suited for the job and the department, (c) they would rather have you as a colleague than someone else, perhaps because they like your area of research, they get along well with you, and so on. In other cases, they just want a strong applicant pool; so you would contribute to the strength of the applicant pool. From this perspective, their goal is to ensure that the department hires someone strong, and they see you as a strong candidate, but they would be even happier if a stronger candidate also applied and got the position.

Academics also vary in the degree to which they are involved in the decision of who to hire (e.g., no involvement, input of academic considered by selection panel, on the formal selection panel, person who makes final decision, etc.). If you are receiving an email from someone who is more involved with making the decision, then the email is likely to be more indicative of your chances of getting the position were you to apply.

More generally, if you are considering applying, receiving such an email is an invitation to have a chat with the sender to discuss the position and learn more about what the job entails and what your chances are of getting the position, were you to apply.

Update:

How do they know that you'd be a strong candidate?
You write:

  Would it be fair to say that if you get multiple of these emails from decent institutions, you are a strong candidate? It surprises me that people can make these deduction before seeing the application package, though.

PostDocs have a reputation. This is formed by many factors: (a) publications, particularly main or first author publications that give an insight into your capabilities (b) where you did your PhD, (c) where you are doing your PostDoc, (d) presentations and interactions at conferences, (e) your reputation within your academic social network, (f) your online activities, and so on. Some of this information is a publicly available. In other cases, it will depend on whether the academic sending you the email knows you personally or knows people who know you (and presumably are recommending you).

But yes, in general, I would think that if you are getting regular personalized emails from academics encouraging you to apply for faculty positions, that sounds like a good sign for your career. That said, you'd probably want to form the assessment of how your career is travelling based on other information. I imagine follow-up contact with these academics would help to clarify your chances of getting such positions. And presumably, you are starting to be able to independently assess (perhaps with advice from mentors) how your track record is going in terms of skills, experience, publications, and other academic outputs.


How will the academic boycot of Israel (BDS) influence my career if I get a PhD in Israel?

If there is going to be a problem, then it will occur when searching collaborating institutions outside Israel. I know there has been talk about stopping such collaborations. However, how much that has been implemented is another question. In my field (quantitative sociology) that has not been the case. The argument being that you are not going to help solve a conflict by closing down channels of communication. This is not the place to discuss the merits of that argument, but you can imagine that such an argument is popular in academia. So I suspect that it should be possible to find a collaborating institution if you needed one.

I don't think you have to worry about the value of your PhD. That should be recognised outside Israel without problems.


What does an empty auto-reply email from a potential supervisor mean?

It means something went wrong. It could be "an indication that I won't be able to reach her via this email address" or it could be something else. You should check the department webpage to see if it is the correct address. If so, wait a week or so and try again.


Questions about contacting a professor for getting PhD

This doesn't look very good. The guy is happy to take you on, but requires that you pay full tuition fees for your studies and is only willing to “explore options for securing funds” after you do so. This would be expected at undergrad level, but for a PhD it means either he is not very interested in you, or he doesn't have funding but is not willing to decline a potential student. In any case, it doesn't look good.


Using research paper as guidance vs research plagiarism?

There's nothing wrong with replicating a paper as long as you cite and credit it. If you pass it off as your original contribution, that's never okay, but science works by advancing on previous work and it's not expected for any work to be completely novel from top to bottom (nor is it desirable).
If all you do is make some minor improvements on something already published, though, that may not be research per se, even if it is still a good exercise for a beginner. Whether that's sufficient for some competition you might submit to is up to the standards of that competition. As long as you are up front about what you have borrowed and where you've borrowed it from, you are in the clear ethically, but it's possible your project won't be judged as highly - it all depends on what those criteria are.
When you make improvements and advancements, it's also important to be honest and thoughtful about where those ideas came from, too. They can still be your contributions, but if you got the motivation from some other source then you need to cite the source. It's good to keep some documentation of the things you've read because it can become difficult to remember where exactly you got an idea from and you may even inadvertently fool yourself into believing you came up with something that you actually read days or weeks ago.
Also, be wary when actually writing up a paper that it isn't enough to make something "your own words" just by restructuring sentences and replacing words with a thesaurus. Your "own words" should come from your own head, without making close reference to another document except to refer to where specifically your ideas and knowledge are coming from.


How bad is it to only have taken a max of 2 courses/semester in a premed post-bacc

I think you are paying too much attention to how others will interpret your workload and grades, and not enough attention to what you can learn from them.

The money issue is irrelevant because you would be prevented anyway from taking more courses because of the time you need to devote to orgo II and mathbio. You are considering dropping from three courses to two because of the workload, not to save money.

Something needs to change before you would be ready for a demanding graduate program such as an MD/PhD. The question you need to ask yourself is what are the reasons for the difficulty you are having handling three courses, and are those reasons something you can change in the future.

For example, if the problem were a full time job you could solve it by planning to be a full time student.

If you can identify a fixable problem you should do two things:

Fix it ASAP, so that you can see and show what you can do with the fix in place.
Discuss the problem and its solution in your application materials.

If you cannot identify a fixable problem you may need to reconsider your career path to pick one that does not require the sorts of courses that are giving you trouble.


It is normal that a thesis contains mistakes and wrong conclusions. If you did not yet do your defense, it is not a problem. The examiners may find and mentione it. Otherwise, you do it by yourself the day of your presentation, by indicating that honest mistake. You can then correct it in the final version of your thesis.

If your thesis is already in the library and you got evaluated for it, try to talk to your adviser and he will suggest either to ignore it or to add a correction on the website or as an extra document in the library.


Is it bad style to include a list in an abstract?

One important thing to keep in mind is that the abstract is typically copied to various article databases, which have varying support for markup. As such, much of the formatting will not necessarily be carried over. That nicely formatted bulleted list which appears in the pages of the journal can turn into a confusing mess in online article databases. (e.g. It might lose the bullets and be smashed into a single paragraph.)

For this reason, it's generally recommended to avoid any special formatting in article abstracts - even things like italics should be kept de minimis.

If at all possible, skip the bulleted list, and keep the list in plain text format. If you do want to keep the bulleted list, be sure to format the list entries such that things stay readable even if the bullets are removed and everything is collapsed into a single paragraph.


Teaching a student (as a TA) when there is flirting, etc. and mutual interest

I am performing my job, but I am worried that if things go bad with us she'll claim sexual harassment. What should I do?

Don't let things go bad.  I.e., stop talking about sex, try to hide your feelings, don't flirt, etc.  As long as she is in your class, you have a professional obligation to treat her the same as your other students, regardless of whether she welcomes your interest.  Doing anything else is dangerous.  (Even if she makes no complaint, other students may raise the issue with the administration, if they are upset by it or suspect favoritism.)

In principle, you could try to change your teaching assignment to another class.  However, I'd strongly recommend against asking for this.  It might not be possible (maybe there's nobody available to switch with you), in which case you'll be in a real mess if you have implicitly announced that your current assignment is untenable.  Any changes will be disruptive, which will annoy the professor teaching the class as well as whoever handles the teaching assignments or has to switch with you.  Plus the teaching change will be public enough that it will probably create rumors of impropriety.


Suggested tablets/writing pad for online teaching and giving maths lectures

XP-Pen is a good off-name cheap brand. However £50 for a device with a 6x8 screen seems unrealistic, especially after the pandemic drove demand up. If budget is your main concern, the first thing I would cut is the screen. Getting used to a tablet without a screen takes some time, a bit like touch-typing, but once you do it it's not that bad and you can get some good deals.


How does the quality of a PhD differ in Germany, Denmark, Sweden?

In Germany, there's a huge variability in the quality of PhD theses. The quality of a particular PhD and the benefits gained from it are mostly determined by the quality of the workgroup and its supervision culture.

To identify the good workgroups, you can simply look at the research output of their PhD students, in particular, publications at good venues.


How do you thematically include accidental findings ("serendipity") in a dissertation or paper?

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but rather, 'hmm... that's funny...” (Isaac Asimov, thanks to EnergyNumbers for reminding me of it)

If you're worried that it will distract the flow of your thesis, why not put it in a “special” part of your thesis (e.g., an appendix) and refer to that from the main text, at the point that would be most logical.

  [Following the description of your experiment.] In the next few sections, I describe the results obtained from operating the Pocket Helium Flux Positron Annihilator on a variety of samples: metals (section II.B), graphene (section II.C) and heavy water (section II.D). You will also find in Appendix A a description of the observations made following an accidental operation of PHFPA without a helium flux [you may not want to be specific and say: some moron forgot to replace the bottle] which allowed to check what happens when electroneutrality is violated on the µm scale.

An appendix is a good place, or maybe a small section as the end of the relevant chapter.


Do citations of the arXiv version of an article transfer to its journal version after publication?

No, the citations will not change just because the paper is published in a journal (however, if the citations are themselves in preprints, then contacting the authors to make them aware of the publication would make sense, and would probably make them either update the citations in the preprint or at least change them for the final publication).

However, what you can do is update the arXiv paper to add a mention of where the paper has been published.


My research paper filed as a patent in China by my Chinese supervisor without me as inventor

This sounds like a clear-cut case of a violation of academic ethics to me - if he’s willing to steal work from you, how could anyone trust anything he’s ever published? I’d strongly consider going to talk with the head of your faculty, school, or department, depending on how your university’s hierarchy is structured, so that the university can begin academic integrity proceedings against him, and I’d also consider talking to the university’s lawyers about what your legal options to dispute the patent are, and if you would be able to file one in the UK.


Isn't the PhD supervisor required to teach the student the research subject and prerequisites, in order to save time?

Supervisors train; they don't teach. (Albeit the distinction between terms is rather subtle.)

  why can't the supervisor teach at least the prerequisites and the subject of research to some extent?

A PhD is like an apprenticeship, rather than a taught degree (such as an undergraduate degree). Hence, supervisors are expected to train, not teach.

  the literature survey and the publishing will be done by the student only.

Actually, the supervisor will guide the student in both activities and will (likely) be a co-author of any publications.

  is...the supervisor [likely] to teach or not?

No: The supervisor has said they won't teach nor is it their job to do so.

The supervisor is quoted as saying, "I am not going to teach...it is your responsibility to complete prerequisites," which might reference (especially in the US) taught courses that PhD students are required to take. Given such context, the supervisor may merely be explaining that it isn't their responsibility to provide any help for taught courses.


How to check geographical variation/self citation in the citing articles on Google Scholar?

Many universities subscribe to Scopus. Scopus make it much easier to identify self-citations. It also makes it  easier to identify articles that belong to a given research and export citation of these articles for analysis.  So you might want to check that out.

I think scopus will identify how many citations to a given author are self-citations.

Identifying more complex features such as geographical patterns is likely to involve more work. It's unclear even what is meant by geographical pattern. I can imagine that each author could be assigned to a country based on their current institutional affiliation. And each paper could then be assigned to one or more geographical locations based on the affiliation of the authors of the paper.

However, this would probably involve a lot of manual work. Perhaps there are scripts that could automate this. Scopus does have the affiliation of many authors.


What should I do when I do not get a reply to an email?

This differs hugely by field and country, but in mine you don't contact the professors directly. If positions are available, then they will be advertised. Now you need inside/national knowledge where these positions will be advertised, but typically they will also appear on the website besides the "normal" venue.

Imagine how many people are looking for a job. A prof would not be able to do her job if she had to answer all the job enquiries, so they are typically just ignored. This is not very nice, bit an understandable strategy of dealing with too many e-mails.


Should I learn to use LaTeX to write up a History Masters Thesis?

I'm finishing up a PhD in philosophy that I've written in LaTeX. Here's some suggestions:

make sure your advisor is ok with leaving you comments in pdf. I suspect he or she will not understand the question and will not be able to give you any feedback unless you submit chapters in word format. This is a deal breaker. Don't make any more problems communicating with your advisor than absolutely necessary.
lots of academic journals in the humanities still don't accept submissions in pdf or latex source form. If you are planning on submitting your stuff to a journal, you might save yourself time writing in word format.
there are some tools available to convert latex to rtf, html and other tools. texht is the best.
If you do decide to go LaTeX, don't get lost in the minutiae of learning how to tweak everything. It's easy to lose lots of time learning new packages and stuff when you should be writing, writing, writing. Use the wikibooks latex guide as your quick start guide when you need to learn how to do something fast.
Especially if you're on Ubuntu, don't get the LaTeX distributed through Canonical's repositories. It's usually out of date (haven't checked in a while). Just go on and get the vanilla TexLive 2013 distribution from CTAN.
The tex.SE site is really, really good. Like ridiculously helpful.
If you are familiar with version control programs like git, mercurial, or svn you can actually keep a very precise idea of exactly how your thesis has grown over time. You can roll back changes, etc. This is kind of advanced stuff for LaTeX, so I wouldn't spend like a lot of time learning this stuff if you aren't already familiar with it, but if you are, it can be really helpful. EDIT:  Per @henry's comment below, see the following guide by Roger Dudler to get started with git.


How common is it in papers to contain copied paragraphs from previous papers?

As a user of papers I strongly prefer copy-paste to rewrite for the sake of rewrite. It takes a lot longer to see if there are any differences in the method between the papers if the descriptions use different words.

That said, it seems to me that the later published paper should reference the earlier one.


Can I take pictures from posters and slide presentations in a conference?

In the US, audio recording is legal in some states (one-party consent states) and illegal in others (all-party consent states) without permission of everyone involved, so I wouldn't do it without asking. Some conferences or universities may have rules against it (so you could be removed from the premises of a conference or thrown out of a lecture by the professor), or you may find that the speaker finds it rude and confronts you or stops speaking. Neither is particularly professional behavior by you. In other countries, the rules probably vary even more. Also, just because it is legal, that doesn't mean that it will be seen as acceptable by the speaker or the audience.

I see audience members taking photographs of every slide shown at conferences all the time, but I find that speakers and audience members are frequently annoyed. When it happens to me as the speaker, I usually stop and offer to share the slides after the talk with anyone that wants them. That usually stops the photography and settles everyone down a bit.

Also, someone other than you owns the copyright in the slides or poster. I would avoid what is likely a copyright violation by photographing a slide or poster.

Edited to summarize: I wouldn't. People do it all the time. That doesn't make it OK. Get permission if you can or don't do it.


Do MDPI reviewers have access to each other's reviews?

I confirm that you can see all the reviewers’ comments. I review for them since January 2020.


In the upper echelon of universities, is it the case that international students generally perform better than local ones?

In the UK at least, this is not the case. Non-EU international students pay full fees so there is a strong push to accept as many of these students as possible. They still nominally meet the same minimum admissions requirements,  but very few home students come in at the minimum. Once at university, many struggle with the language and differences in learning expectations and perform more poorly.


As an editor, I can say that although we ask for reviews within a certain time-frame, we almost always get some reviews back late. But what often takes more time is finding willing reviewers in the first place. My journal aims to get four reviews for each manuscript, but usually settles for three. I start by sending out requests to five potential reviewers. Two weeks later, I might have accepts from two potential reviewers, declines from two, and no reply from number five. I'll send a reminder to potential reviewer number five. A week later, still not having heard back, I cancel that request and invite another two potential reviewers. Two weeks later, if I haven't heard back, or if they both decline, I'll look for more possibilities. Sometimes I get three reviewers on the first try, but sometimes, the process takes many weeks. We give our reviewers 21 days to return the review. In maths, I understand that reviewers are given longer, because they are expected to check the proofs in detail. Regardless of how long they are given, it is normal for some reviews to be late. Editors send out a reminder. Then a second reminder. Some reviewers, despite having agreed, never reply. In that case, we need to start the whole process again. This is why some manuscripts take so long to review.


Recommendation letter has slightly wrong info – should I mention it in my cover letter?

If I was writing the letter, it wouldn't matter to me if you were the top student in your cohort; I still might list you as a Top 5% (or Top 10%) student.

I've been asked to fill out similar references before, and I'm often asked if the person I'm evaluating would be considered Top 5%, Top 10%, Top 25%, etc. In my mind (unless stated otherwise), I am not being solicited for a precise numerical calculation based entirely on GPA or class performance; rather, I'm considering a myriad of other factors as well, such as reliability, attitude, professionalism, integrity, etc.

You don't say what your letter is for (employment or graduate school), but, either way, the student who is top of my class academically (that is, the one with the highest average) isn't necessarily the first student I'd recommend for hiring – and I answer the "Top X%" questions accordingly.

Moreover, your professor may not be evaluating you among the classmates in your cohort, but taking a more historical look at all the students he's ever had who have taken the class(es) you took. So, for example, if you took BWV 201 with me, and asked for a reference, I am going to evaluate you as compared to all the students I've ever had who ever took BWV 201 – not just the handful of students who happened to take that class with you last year, or the students you are graduating with on graduation day.

Bottom line: I'd recommend that you be happy with the high rating you got, and stick with that.


I have struggled with this too.  Two things that I find help are:

Write much bigger than you think you should.  It's easier to be neater with bigger letters.  You can fit less on a board, but honestly that's generally a good thing.
Move your body along with your writing as you go.  My writing gets worse the farther my hand is from my center of mass, and tends to trail downward too.


What are "Numerically Weighted Transcripts"?

This seems to be explained in a FAQ from a previous year for this scholarship.

I do not have numerically weighted academic transcripts, can I still apply?
We require academic transcripts/official documentation showing specific subjects and how your overall grades were obtained. We require evidence of the progress of your studies in individual subjects, so that we can see, for example, whether your strongest subjects were in the areas in which you propose  your specific research inquiry, or whether your grades improved over the course of your  years  of  study.  We  require  evidence  of  the  subjects  you  completed  and  of  their  actual  value,  not  just  the  one  figure  for  their composite value. This  information  is  required  so  that  panel  members  can  make  appropriate  and  informed  recommendations  on  the  ‘academic achievement’ selection criteria. We would suggest you contact your University to obtain this information as your application would be deemed ineligible without this information.

So they want a transcript which has grades for every subject you took (and not just an overall rating, which is all that some very prestigious schools in England provide).
It sounds to me that what "numerically weighted academic transcript" actually means to them is one that has an overall GPA, as well as all the numbers that went into computing this value. Most schools provide this in their standard transcript; the most notable exceptions being the few U.K. schools noted above—I would guess that these schools are the ones that this criterion is directed towards.


How can I emphasize my interest towards PhD with no real research experience?

This is a pretty specific question but I'm going to try and answer it broadly.

Generally speaking, applicants with no research experience are not appealing or competitive candidates to professors for graduate school. When professors want to admit a student to work with them, they want someone who is going to be able to hit the ground running somewhat - who knows the basics of how research works, who has some ideas about what interests them, and who knows how to do some basic research tasks. Furthermore, they're looking for students who aren't going to realize halfway through their first year that they hate research and decide to drop out. (Which makes me turn the question back on you: Why do you want to get a PhD, if you have no research experience?)

That said, if you have no research experience and you still want to apply for a PhD program (which I don't recommend), you'll have to demonstrate that you have acquired the knowledge and skills to succeed in a PhD program in another way. Being able to live alone isn't the way - they expect that as a basic part of being an adult.

-Recommendation letters will go a long way. Your professors don't have to be famous or personally known by your graduate program committees. They just need to know you very well, and be able to comment on your ability and potential to do research and succeed in the field.
-If you had to do research-like tasks for any classes - like a final project or capstone - you can discuss that, and what you learned and how you will translate that to research in the program. The research C++ developer position is a good example. You did research; use that experience as a basis for further explanation.
-Motivation is good, but you can't just say that you are motivated - you need to demonstrate it in an academic sense. What academic things have you done to show that you are motivated?

However, you will probably need to apply to an MS program first and get some research experience that way.


What is the difference between an academic department and program in US colleges/universities?

I am not sure everyone uses the words the same way, but here is the difference at schools I have been at:

A department is a collection of faculty who are organized into a unit for management and course planning purposes. Some departments have faculty from just one area, while others have faculty from many areas. The division into departments is used in particular for hiring and tenure decisions, which often begin with at the department level. Several departments are collected together to form a division, school, or college, which is the next level up the management hierarchy. Different schools use different divisions, but the smallest one is almost always called a department.
A program is a collection of courses that lead to a particular degree or certificate. These courses (ignoring general education) may be taught by one department, or by many. For example, a degree program might be "bachelor's of science in mathematics" or "bachelor's of arts in management".  The mathematics program will require predominately courses from the mathematics department, while the management program may require courses from the management department, the accounting department, the economics department, and maybe a computer information systems department also.

Some departments offer a single degree program, while other department offer multiple degree programs. On the other hand, some degree programs are interdisciplinary and are offered jointly by several departments in collaboration.

Each faculty member will work for one or more departments; these assignments are called "appointments". A student will not be part of a department in the way that faculty are, but a student may "declare" one or more degree programs, and in that way each student is typically "advised" by faculty of one or more departments.


If your advisor is a well-known researcher in the academic community, it is very unlikely that anyone will believe you. Even if they do, they would prefer their own advantage and prefer not to ruin their relationship with this advisor.

You have two choices: you can move on and forget about it. Or, you can do what you think is the right thing. If you are confident about the story, send an email to the department head, look at the research ethics and IP department in your university and also include them. Ideally, there are written procedures in such department on how to make a complain about such issues. He/she will know about your complain from this department.


How to prepare lessons as a visiting professor?

This is ultimately a very broad question, but I will give you some starting points.

  Since I work full time in industry before I leave to teach, I am rather limited in preparing my lectures. So I have to be very efficient during preparation.

You are doing this pro bono, so I am assuming that you also want to do a good job teaching. Unfortunately, there is an obvious tradeoff between "being efficient" and teaching well - the material that you can prepare quickly is not necessarily the one that will work best didactically, especially if you start factoring in the "ratio of them being occupied versus you preparing" (a pretty bad metric to go by when it comes to prepare a good course, especially since it may lead to you assigning some sort of "busy work" to students to make the lecture time go by). Hence, my first suggestion is that you try to shift your focus away from trying to be efficient about your preparation, and more towards how to teach your subject in the most effective way. This may also mean that you need to prepare a bit in the evenings prior to leaving (or in the evenings while you are there).

  What recommendations to you have to quickly prepare good lecture material (slides) for the lecture?

I feel the best way to do this, both in terms of efficiency and quality, is to find a good set of teaching materials (this can include book(s), slide sets, papers, or even online material in form of blog posts or video tutorials - there will be something useful out there for pretty much any topic) and reuse it. Many lecturers, myself included, have a fatal tendency to always want to do everything anew from scratch, because clearly no prebaked material will cover exactly what you want to teach in exactly the way you would teach it. I consider this a fallacy, especially if preparation time is of the essence. Do not be afraid to use all resources that are at your disposal, and enrich them with your industrial experience. You get no teaching brownie points for creating all your material from scratch. That being said, consider that collecting, screening, compiling, and annotating this material will take considerable time as well, so start early.

  What can be pitfalls I should avoid in preparation?

Depending on your background and personality, there are many potential pitfalls. Teaching is after all an activity that you get better in with experience. Generally speaking, and based on the pieces of info you provide, you should at least watch out for the following.

Your material needs to be suitable to the audience. Find out early the level of prior knowledge of your students, and adjust your material accordingly.
Make sure that the amount of material you prepare is in line with the length of the course. Don't try to shove 10 years of industrial experience into a two-week course.
Make sure that your course is not just a string of related industry talks that you have given previously. Especially if you have given talks before and time for preparation is short, there is a temptation to just re-give talks that you had prepared for other occasions. This will almost certainly not result in a compelling lecture.

  I was told (though I am not sure whether this is going to be true) that the students will have computers at their disposal. Would you prepare exercises?

This depends on your topic, but for most topics I would say you should definitely prepare exercises. Not because exercises are more efficient in terms of preparation time (although they may be), but because, for many subjects, a good mix of lectures and exercises work much better in terms of retention than just lectures alone.

However, the fact that you don't even know whether there will be computers or not suggests to me that you will need to find out a bit more reliable information about the university where you will teach, its students, and the environment. It is hard to prepare a good course when you don't even have this basic information at the ready.


Past vs. Present Tense in APA Format when discussing other's work?

While the past tense is perfectly sensible for discussing published work (which was necessarily undertaken and published in the past) it is also acceptable to discuss these in the present tense -- e.g., "Alicke (2000) models the conditions that cultivate or mitigate blame".  In academic work it is legitimate to treat each cited paper as if it were akin to a person who is here with us making an argument, so that the academic literature is like a dinner party, with argumentative guests.

In view of this, it is acceptable to talk about a paper in the present tense, even if it is very old.  You can make it sound like Aristotle is right here with us, arguing with Kant.  You can even make it sound like papers by the same author are independent dinner-party guests, arguing against each other -- e.g., "Johnson (2010) argues that capitalist production methods were a net benefit to rural economies, notwithstanding outward migration of workers to cities; Johnson (2011) demurs on this issue, and Johnson (2013) seems to completely disagree".

Some things to note:

APA style allows either past or present tense for discussing the literature, so long as you are consistent.
Style guides are all well and good, but they have sometimes been described as "anti-style" guides.  Excessive adherence to their conventions can have the negative effect of sucking the style out of your writing.  (In fairness, this is something that the style guides themselves acknowledge, in their discussions of smoothness of expressions.)  What is more important than strict adherence to style guides is consistency, clarity, smoothness and readability of your writing.  Make your writing clear to your reader, pleasurable to read, and be consistent in your use of tense.
When considering appropriate tense, be sure to correctly identify the subject of each sentence.  In the example you give in your post, the subject of the latter sentence is "the model", not the original paper or its author.  Since a model is an eternally lasting description of reality, it is standard to speak of what the model does in the present tense, even if you are referring to the paper that introduced it in the past tense.
There is often some freedom to maneuver, but make sure you are consistent with tense for subjects of the same type.  So if you say "The model postulates..." in one place, don't say "The model predicted..." in another place.  If you start talking about another model, treat it using the same tense convention.  If you start talking about another type of subject (e.g., a paper, or an author) you may use a different tense if it is still clear and readable.


How to allow students to work off-line, while still using an LMS to collect work?

I suggest that you use git to synchronize documents.

If assignments are provided as simple text documents, they are easily readable on all sorts of devices, and when printed can easily be understood, they can be edited with very low levels of computer hardware and do not require many resources. They can easily be edited with something even as simple as an alpha smart or electronic typewriter! Word Documetns will work with this scheme but it makes the storage requirements (on your side) larger and harder to manage

When at school, a student uses git to "clone" the asignment repository.

When they go home they then work in their own sandbox, and are free to save ("commit")  intermediate versions, locally, on their computer, as many times as you want. They can start from scratch if they wish multiple times without affecting the integrity of the assignment and their other attempts.

When they return to school, the student "pushes" the assignment project to their personal repository. You can review their work and can even examine intermediate versions that show their work and thinking,

The commits have timestamps so you can verify assignment, test, and quiz submission times! (This can be "hacked" but it requires cheating behavior and intentional circumvention)

This is very reminiscent of what we I used for CS courses in University, all of our coding assignments were submitted through a UNIX shell

There are many services that provide Git for free or low cost, Github from microsoft, atllasian bitbucket, and gitlab are common examples.

They can also be deployed , for free, by your school IT on any available server infrastructure.

In a pinch, the students can even synchronize directly to your laptop or other computer, that is, not requiring ANY LMS infrastructure...

Students can even synchronize to/from another student, i.e. you can submit assignments for others and distribute assignments as well, so students who cannot make it physically to school can still get the assignments from their peers. While retaining integrity of the assignments and solutions

There is a significant training challenge, but the tradeoffs are worth it, and the solution is Free, free as in no cost, and free as in freedom (see free software)


advisor slow to submit my research article

You believe the paper is ready. S/he doesn't, it seems. Ask him what conditions the paper needs to fulfil to make the paper submittable, and, if it is something that you can do, do that.

If it's him/her who needs to read the paper (but you say they approved of the arguments), then ask how you can proceed to make the paper being wrapped up soon, to avoid scooping.


Is it appropriate to email a professor about something unrelated to class?

I assume you mean something related to academics rather than a completely random meme/cat video.

If so: yes, it’s totally appropriate. Discussing cool research topics with students, especially when it’s free from the context of grading, is one of the most fun aspects of a professor’s work. I absolutely love it when students email me links like that.

And if the professor thinks it’s a waste of time, they’ll reply with a curt thanks and ignore the link, or simply ignore your email altogether.


What's the best way to justify your choice of baseline methods for academic paper?

When you propose a method in a research paper, it is customary to describe how you came up with the method and why choose it over the others available in literature. There are a few tips you could follow to justify your selection.

The traditional way to do this is by doing a thorough literature survey of all other methods assessing the advantages and shortcoming of each and then show how your chosen method could probably supersede those methods.
Sometimes you may find many such methods that are applicable but for which you cannot find existing results. In such a case, the best thing to do is to produce results for all of those methods and select the one with least drawbacks and most desirable merits. If the amount of publishable work exceeds your paper limit (or if your time is limited), choose one among such methods for your current publication, but discuss the other methods that can also be applied that could be of scope for future work for research.
A few journal publishers would also welcome negative results (such as PLoS ONE). Hence you could assess a method and show how suitable/unsuitable it is for a certain application based on the results.


If I leave mid-year, am I still eligible for summer pay?

I've run into this issue many times while I was serving as a department chair at a large US university. If your university's academic year salary system is similar to the standard one used at US institutions (which by your description it sounds like it is) then your analysis is correct, and your administration is wrong.

The point is that paying your salary over 12 months is nothing more than an accounting trick to spread out your salary (paid for 9 months of actual work) over the 12 months of the year. The reasons why this is done (as far as I know) are: 1. tradition, 2. health benefits, 3. the psychological convenience to faculty of being paid each month and being continuously employed, and 4. possibly other advantages involving things like taxation and labor law.

However, the trick is irrelevant to the fact that you performed 50% of your assigned duties for the year. It therefore stands to reason that you need to be paid 50% of your annual salary. I don't have any sources to cite, but this is just common sense.

I can also say from my experience that this discrepancy between the schedule of payments to faculty employed on a 9/12 basis and the schedule of work they are performing causes a lot of confusion, even among experienced administrators: whenever someone joined or left the department in the middle of the academic year, some calculations needed to be done to figure out how to make the salary figures work out, and people would get confused and sometimes require a bit of gentle persuasion to get to the correct answer. Thus, Hanlon's razor might apply here, and it's definitely worth going back to the administrators and trying to make them see the light. Good luck!


Keeping track of and sharing what you read

Yes, there are several products to do this.

There's CiteULike, which is completely web-based, has good support, allows you to share your library, see who has read which papers, which papers are trending in the last seven days, and has a good recommendation system.

I hate to say this, because I've always had good support from them, but its functionality doesn't really extend beyond that, and that's a problem: I was really enthusiastic about it, but I notice that I've barely used it in the last 14 months.

There's the Elsevier-owned Mendeley, where you can add people as contacts, and share what you own. Recommendations are also provided anonymously, based on overlaps between your library and other people's. It has a desktop application, which I have used, and a website, which I very rarely use.

There's zotero, which does allow you to share your bibliography with others, and to see who is sharing what. I found that it also insisted on duplicating all the pdfs on my local drive too, which meant I quickly uninstalled it.

And there's EndNote Web, which might allow libraries to be shared publicly, but I found the interface frustratingly unusable, so couldn't say either way.

In short, there are several applications which allow you to share the metadata of the papers you read, on the web. However, the user experience, ergonomics and functionality is patchy.


finalising a postdoc employment contract

Having done a post-doc in The Netherlands, I think I can answer your questions.

Your "yes" is an acceptance, though probably not legally binding. They will take it in good faith that you have accepted. The contract may arrive in the mail for you to sign, but you may just sign on your first day.
The starting date is the date you will start and get paid from. You will probably need to go to The Netherlands earlier to find accommodation, though you could easily start everything on February 1 without causing any problems. They will understand that in your first few weeks you'll need to vanish to register yourself with the city, to get bank accounts, etc etc.

I would ask them if the have an accommodation service, even if it only provides short term accommodation. Finding accommodation in The Netherlands can be difficult.
In fact, I would simply ask them what their expectations are, essentially sending them the questions you've posted above. Unless it is the first time they've hired a post-doc, these questions will be unsurprising and they should have answers for them. The Dutch are good at dealing with direct questions (and you'll need to get used to receiving them ;-) ).


Why do supervisors hide my rights from me?

I don't know your institution, but it's fairly likely that the right of appeal is limited to a subset of things like:

administrative irregularities and errors (e.g. you should have passed, but the examiners ticked the wrong box).
Immediate mitigating circumstances (e.g. your parent died the night before so you couldn't present a coherent defence of your thesis)
Inherent bias (e.g. you turned up in your favourite Everton shirt and know the the examiner failed you because he's a Liverpool fan)

The precise topics should be documented (properly, on paper) in regulations available from your registry (or however your individual institution labels that service).

In particular, it almost never covers academic decisions, or problems arising from previous poor supervision advice, which is typically meant to be dealt with far earlier in the process when it first arose.


How do I decline a PhD offer by my master's thesis supervisor?

"I have another project running outside academia and would rather try my luck in the private sector at that stage in my life. I have thought about this carefully and I will not be considering a PhD right now, but I might consider it in the future. Thank you very much for the opportunity and your support, it is deeply appreciated and I would be happy to keep in touch".


Request not to be named as a co-author on my own paper

You certainly can refuse to be named as co-author, but at this point it's probably easier just to sign off publication, unless there are stronger reasons than you've given.

Most reputable journals have processes that require all credited authors to sign off on publication, so you can't be credited as an author if you don't want to be*. However, this may mean that the paper can't be published at all - your supervisor shouldn't be claiming sole author credit for something that is largely your work, and even a mediocre journal is likely to balk at accepting a paper if it learns that one of the authors is unwilling to be associated with that work.

Publishing this paper probably won't help your career significantly, but from the description you've given it doesn't sound likely to harm it either, especially if it's not in the field that you're aiming for. I changed career and I have several publications on my CV that have no relevance to my current career; I doubt any of my co-workers have even bothered looking them up, let alone passing judgement on whether they're a valuable contribution to the literature.

*Some loopholes may apply. I had an ex-boss who listed me and another researcher as co-authors on a poster and conference presentation, even though he knew we had significant objections to the content. While the associated journal required sign-off from all authors on published papers, this was not the case for conference material. We had to write in to request that the "error" be corrected for the published proceedings.


Why do some universities refuse to issue duplicate diplomas?

It comes down to what the theory is about what a diploma is.  Some consider it a piece of paper that you can hang up and not an explicit representation, some consider it a legal document.  (Having degrees and working in Higher Ed for 20 years, often with various policies including those of Registrar's offices gives me some insight.)

Reasons for the policy:
These policies are based on legal theory or precedence regarding identify theft and legal documentation.  Schools with a higher 'reputation' or a better 'ranking' will have more restrictive policies to protect themselves.

Queens U, above, states "Each diploma is considered a one-of-a-kind legal document."

If you give/sell a copy to someone to attempt to represent themselves as having a diploma, then it might be fraud.

What is the difference between having two originals, and simply saying 'I lost my original, can I buy another?'  --  It could be quantity. If you can go to a web site, pay $40 each and buy 100, then sell them all on Ebay with a "custom name" for $500, that's fraud.  The schools are attempting to protect themselves in a few ways.
Here's a sample of a fake diploma for sale:
http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/fns/5668595297.html

Here's a list of real diplomas for sale:
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xdiploma+degree.TRS0&_nkw=diploma+degree&_sacat=0

People lie on resume's and they lie with diplomas.

Reasons why such restrictive policies are nonsense:
IANAL, though, legal documents often have multiple copies, both original and duplicate.  Ever buy a house?  It is normal to have to sign multiple 'originals' of the contract documents.

What is the difference between having two originals, and simply saying 'I lost my original, can I buy another?' regardless of whether the original is lost.

If you have a diploma, and you make a photocopy, frame it, and hang it in your office, and keep the original in a fire-safe, seems ok to me.

For degree verification, I've been asked to provide official, sealed, stamped transcripts, not a copy of the diploma.

In summary - the policies will vary based on laws, precedence, legal theory, and/or policy.


Old friend wants to use me as an academic reference

Why would it not be reasonable?

It should be clear from his CV that he didn't complete his degree, but you surely could say relevant positive things about his character and skills.


Your advisor is there to advise you on your research, but also on more general issues involving finding your place in academia. Getting a masters degree (or not) is relevant in that context. Keeping that a secret would hinder her or his ability to advise you. That is unoptimal for you, but it also hinders your advisor to do her or his job, which (s)he may resent.


How to find out to which journal(s) I could hand in my paper?

Considering you are talking about publishing papers based on PhD content it would be usual in most STEM fields for your doctoral supervisor(s) to be involved in this. As such, one or all of them would be worth discussing this question with as they're likely to have the best read on what / where is appropriate. At the very least they should be able to consult with or introduce you to a colleague more familiar with your specific work direction. That said it would be sensible to consider where your dissertation / lit review sources were published, as suggested in the comments, and to come up with some possible choices of your own before approaching your former supervisors


Do most postdoc offers include travel funding?

None of my postdoctoral positions had travel funding in them, nor have I heard of anyone getting such funding.  There are several factors to mitigate this, not all of which may be available in all situations.

The postdoc can learn how to apply for grants and other things, which can provide the necessary funds for travel or other research needs.
If he is invited to give talks, then the inviting institution/department/professor will often cover travel expenses and offer a per diem.
He is likely coming there to research with specific people.  These people, being experienced, established professors who can attract promising postdocs, likely have grant money of their own, some of which could be allocated to the postdoc's travel costs.  This is often what pays for the previous point: professors can often use grant funds to cover the costs to bring in speakers.
Exceptional postdoc candidates are likely to be offered exceptional postdoc positions, with fancy names like The Harry Smith Postdoctoral Fellowship in Dynamical Systems.  These often come with bigger paychecks, making it easier for the postdoc to afford such outside costs.


Plagiarized programming assignment - How to proceed

It's hard to judge whether your specific situation constitutes plagiarism, since copying "structure" has room for a gray area.

From what you've said though, I personally would take it to the professor.  As someone who has graded student coding work many times in the past, I can say I've definitely developed a feel for when code is copied, and it's usually very easy to check.  Every individual has a signature way of doing things that emerges when enough time is spent looking at their work.

Go in and say you intended to use it as a reference, but upon reflection without the looming deadline you feel like you overdid it, to the point of the work being too close to unoriginal.  Offer to redo it, but be prepared to accept whatever the professor says.  Personally, I can say I would be totally receptive to a student who owned up like that, but obviously there are no guarantees.

Unequivocally though, the worst-case scenario is that the professor figures it out on their own and agrees that it's plagiarism.  The fact that it's a previous student just ups the chances of that.  Plus your own gut is telling you you did something wrong, or you wouldn't be here asking us about it.

Good luck!

Edit: It's also worth consulting your syllabus.  It's possible there are explicit guidelines laid out for dealing with outside code that you should be very aware of before deciding and/or talking to your professor.


Should I mention I had no funding in my Ph.D experience?

I can't see into the mind of the PI, but think that you would harm your chances by suggesting that you might not need funding when they may be, explicitly, looking for funding sources. (Caveat below)

Since they ask for your proposed funding sponsors, you probably need to provide that to be in contention. If you can do that then an "Oh by the way, I've done research without funding" may not hurt you, but otherwise it could (possibly).

But you would probably be wise to look elsewhere for a PI that can themselves provide funding for their postdocs. If they can't do that, I wonder how much commitment they will have to you.

Of course, since the link is a very general one, they may not require all elements, especially self funding. You could also inquire directly about that.


What can/should be done about journals that spam potential contributors?

So what is, if anything, being done about this?

Ignore them.

No, you are not missing anything.  These journals are scams, not serious scientific literature.

If you plan to publish a longer version of your conference paper, send it to one of the journals that your paper cites, or at least to a journal where you recognize a significant fraction of the editorial board.

Sadly, trying to "doing something about" these scammers is as futile as "doing something about" fake email quota warnings, diploma mills, exiled Nigerian princes, international email lotteries, and three-card monte.  Set up your mail program to blacklist their emails if you can, but then move on with your life.


Is the Encyclopedia for Life Support Systems (EOLSS) a legitimate source?

It appears to be a completely earnest and legitimate effort, and I at least recognize a few names that appear to be involved. It also appears to be pretty old in Internet Time, dating from around 2002.  This makes me think that it's basically an idealistic but largely abandoned project, which would certainly account for its design.  It's also huge and almost certainly poorly curated, which means that there's no reason to think its quality will be uniform.

As such, I would recommend against using leaning on it strongly for any assertion, just because it's hard to tell what you've really got ahold of when you're reading it.  If you find something in it useful, look for the other review papers that the authors will likely have written or have cited, and work from there instead; cite it if you found it useful, but make sure that anything important has another source as well.


Difference between official and unofficial transcripts

If I want a copy of my records, I have two options: one, is to log in to the university website and generate a up to date PDF; or I can pay the university for a signed copy, that consists on a copy printed by them, signed by two or three officials, and rubber stamped. The reason admissions usually want the second, as it is more difficult to forge, but it usually takes time (from a week to more than a month).

I want to bring attention to the Stockholm University system. Whenever you generate a transcript, it includes a code and a website. Anyone receiving that transcript can verify its authenticity easily. Reliable, fast, and free.

Depending on the university, they may want a translation, a certified translation (made and stamped by some official translator, usually expensive), or nothing at all. In my experience in Europe, in most cases, they only need a certified version for making things official when they have decided to hire you -if any. I know for a fact that my supervisor has not ever looked at my transcript, and they never requested a translated version.


Can I take multiple GRE subject tests in the same day?

No, you may only take one test during a single session. Unlike the SAT subject tests, you get three hours to do one test, not the other way around.

Source: I've took a GRE subject test last year.