How do you leverage a good transcript in PhD admissions?

As you stated, the lack of research experience is a problem.  When your application is being reviewed, above all, the committee will be looking for evidence that you will be able to perform impactful, independant research.

The specifics of your industry experience and design projects will vary how much you can 'leverage' them.  Your good grades, while helpful in demonstrating your engineering knowledge and dedication, do not provide much beyond that.  If, in your industry or design projects, you had to investigate or solve a problem, I would try to emphasize them in your statement of purpose/personal statement. A specific example where you experimentally solved something could do you a lot of good.

I would not discount your research at a lab even if it was outside your field. It is direct evidence that you can perform such after all. Depending upon when you performed this research, it could even form a logical flow of why you are choosing to pursue a PhD (had the first structured experience of research at (x) but field wasn't a good fit because of (x), had several chances to do applied engineering work which was great because of (x) but was constrained and lacked (research), combined = PhD in engineering).

As the next typical round of applications will be this fall, it looks like you may have a summer to fill in some of this gap. It is critical that, if at all possible, you find a research position in engineering or a related field for these couple months.  It would be difficult to justify how interested you are in research and a PhD if you used your time to take another typical industry internship.

As for your last statement, you are obviously a weaker candidate because you have less evidence of your ability to do research. I certainly wouldn't call you an outsider, however, and industry experience, especially for an engineering student, is not uncommon. Funding will be highly dependant upon the university and your eventual advisor. Some provide departmental funding for the first year, giving you a chance to find an advisor after admittance and for one or both of you to secure a fellowship/grant. Some are fully funded. Some are much more dependant on pre-admittance contact and an interested potential advisor with an existing grant. I don't see how your work history would affect the issue of funding any differently than it would your admission process.


Can I get an office in a university as an independent scholar?

If you know someone at the university, you can discuss getting an adjunct appointment, which is probably the closest thing to what you're looking for.


Is it okay to copy somebody else's words and sentences?

As I'm sure you know it isn't correct to just copy things from others. However, there are a couple of additional considerations.

Something is really plagiarism only if it is copied without citation. Then, the author is claiming the work of others as their own. The safest way to avoid this is to use quotes, as you suggest, but certainly to cite.

However, if some of the work you find is old, it is also possible that the standards have changed a bit over time and are now a bit more rigid. Citation and being clear about who originated ideas is the important thing, not, specifically, the punctuation.

But another consideration, especially in fields such as mathematics is that there may be only one way to write some given idea in words. So, in a calculus textbook, for example, the definition of the derivative is nearly identical to every other calculus text on the planet. This sort of thing has actually been discussed in courts, as I understand it.

But for your own work, be as clear as you can be. Cite anything you use and clearly mark what is being quoted using some reasonable typographical convention. Of course you also need to worry about copyright infringement, but that is a different issue. The sloppiness of others shouldn't bleed over into your own work.

The question of copying without understanding is a deeper problem. I won't comment on that.


Will journal editors contact you if your book review has been rejected?

In two of the journals I help edit (both in the field of medicine and health), book reviews are commissioned by the Editor. We identify potential authors, choose one and invite him or her to participate as a book reviewer. Those that agree are sent a copy of the book together with some instructions about what is expected of them. Then, they are entered into the manuscript management system under a separate code set aside for commissioned pieces. This system differs in two distinct ways from that used for typical submissions.

The Author is reminded of the deadline.
The Commissioning Editor is allowed expedited review.

When the submission is received, it goes onto peer-review and the Commissioning Editor makes a recommendation that is discussed during the typical manuscript meeting. Whatever the disposition of the manuscript -- Accept, Revise, Reject -- the author is informed. This is true at any stage in the process.

Book reviews are way way down on our priority list. They serve as "space fillers". No one cites them, very few read them, no one reacts to them. Thus, they are regularly bumped for more of the regular fare -- research articles, editorials, clinical practice briefs, etc.

We have never had a case in which a manuscript was rejected without the authors being informed. This is because they have the right to appeal the decision. More importantly, it's just plain wrong.

I note that this has been resolved already. However, I want to end by saying that the Associate Editors, Commissioning Editors, Deputy Editors, Managing Editors and the Editors-in-Chief are human. You should feel free to contact them if you have questions in the same professional manner you would contact the teachers or principal of your child's school. After all, it's your manuscript and they wouldn't be doing so well if you'd submitted elsewhere.


Can I put the proofs to my lemmas/theorems/corollaries in my appendix?

Can I move the proofs to my lemmas, theorem, etc., into an appendix?

Yes - this is often done in journal articles. You might want to put a sketch of why your claims should be believed in the main text, with a pointer to the full proofs in the appendix.

But, you have tagged this thesis, so it would be worth discussing this with your thesis advisor, as they may have a different opinion for your particular field or their particular preferences/style.


How to select a Master's thesis topic if your advisor won't suggest one?

One approach is follows:

Find one or two good recent PhD theses in your chosen area. Read these thoroughly. As you read, write down every question that pops into your mind, write down every time the author states that something is left for future work or needs further investigation.
This will have a dual effect. Firstly, you will get a good introduction to a particular research field. Secondly, you will have a bunch of questions that need to be investigated.
Prune trivial questions, non-sensible ones, etc.
Next, organize your questions thematically and see whether you can find a common thread to these questions, something that could form the basis of your research.
Remove any questions that do not fit will with the others.
Based on the remaining questions, formulate a couple of coherent questions that your research could address.
Write a plan to address these questions.
Work through plan.
Write thesis.


Publish the paper without letting know one of authors?

One must not submit a paper for publication without the consent of all coauthors. In my experience, most submission systems will point this out explicitly, but it remains true regardless of such notice.

It seems that for the first submission to a conference, your coauthors retroactively consented (maybe grudgingly, maybe happily). Nevertheless, you should have asked before -- not just informed, by the way.

You then committed the same infraction again, and submitted to a journal without everyones prior consent. Going ahead with the publication without your coauthors consent would be even worse (drastically so!) than the mere submission, so this is not an option. Your professor coauthor would almost certainly find out.

The appropriate step for damage control is to contact all coauthors immediately, apologize profoundly for your mistake, and ask them whether they want to go ahead with the publication. If everyone agrees, go ahead (and never do this again). If someone disagrees, you need to withdraw your submission and apologize to the editor (and indirectly referees) for wasting their time.


Advisor threatening to pull his name from accepted paper that I submitted without his knowledge

You are wrong for putting the name of someone on a paper and submitting it without asking them for permission. Having them as an author communicates to the world that they approved the content and agree with the conclusions. Implicit in that is that they signed off on the manuscript. Some people get angry when this happens even if the paper is fine and they agree with the conclusions. Some don't. This happened to me recently, and even though I didn't agree with the recommendations of the paper, they weren't wrong, scientifically, so I decided to let it go.

You need to figure out a way to smooth this over with your advisor and to work with them to get edits turned around more quickly. That being said, don't lead the discussion by bringing up the turnaround time issue. That's combative.


What circumstances could justify getting an extension on graduate admission offer deadline?

Most of your colleagues are going through stressful scenarios right now as well, finishing up exams, projects, term papers, and the other parts of their undergraduate careers as well. So it’s unlikely that you’d get an extension just because of deadlines.

If you had extreme extenuating circumstances—personal illness, family issues, or other events—you could make a request that is more likely to be accepted. But in general, there’s not much you can do.


Are three year degrees from India equivalent to Four years degree in the US?

US does not have centralized rules about such things. It's in the hand of each university how they want to handle it.

Very few US universities will admit students with a 3 year bachelors from India. You can check that by writing a mail to the admissions office of the respective university.

Majority of the universities however will not accept the 3 year bachelors. For these universities, you will have to complete 16 years of formal education(10+2+4). This means that you will either have to complete a masters degree or some additional one year degree.

Note that most of the B-schools accept Indian 3 year bachelors nevertheless.


some questions before applying for postdoc

In general, you should be communicative with your PhD advisor about your applications. This is so that they can do their job and advise you about the process. Their input will be invaluable to you. In particular, you will probably want your PhD advisor to write recommendation letters for you.

You should tell your advisor in advance that you are planning to apply. (Although it is usually not necessary to specify exactly where.) And, once you have applied, you should tell them where so that they are on the look out for a letter request.

However, if you have a problematic relationship with your advisor, then that's a big problem that you will need to navigate. If this is the case, then your question should make this clear.


How to organize my papers and notes from the beginning of my PhD?

First of all, a graduate school is a learning process so finding what is perfect from you from the start is a valiant endeavour but not necessarily sure fire.

You should start to use a data base system, some (mentioned in comments) that come to mind are Mendeley (free), EndNote (commercial), RefBase (free) to mention a few. If you consider going into LateX (which many of us swear by) then I can recommend JabRef (free; BibTeX format). There is also a Wikipedia comparison page that can be of assistance.

To sort your references concerns managing some form of structure where you  group or "mind map your articles. In the old days you simply kept them in piles. With a data base software you can start providing key words in the data base and also keep some short notes for each paper which makes everything searchable and ready for sorting. I think the process or sorting articles is one that changes with different tasks and also persons so you are best of taking some advice from others and looking into it. Hopefully you also have peers around who can provide their insights. In the end you will develop your own set of tools that suit your needs and to keep trying different ones at an early stage, and discarding many of them, is far better than trying to do it later when the mass of information is much larger. Another option is to simply start using something and sticking with it regardless of weaknesses.

The bottom line is that with experience you will rely less and less on note-taking and be more efficient at seeing structure in what you read and so keeping a reference database is the main tool you will use. Even if this may not sound very constructive, I also say that the time you spend now on testing different solutions will pay back later, putting it off is only pushing problems forward.

A final personal note. If you want a free, platform independent, and completely versatile way to author documents you should look into LaTeX-writing (for example through TeX.stackexchange). I recommend it to everyone unless you are in a complete Word-environment, being alone with a different system can be hard. You should nevertheless look into it.


How much non-thesis work should a GRA do, and how to let PI know if I think it's too much?

Are you being paid as a GRA? Usually your contract should specify how many hours you are being paid for. This is  10 hours a week for some fields (20 for others, as seen in comments), but it can vary. You need to find out what your GRA limit is.

Note that your letter of acceptance -- if it included a GRA package -- may also specify your contractual obligations. If not, check your graduate handbook.

If you have concerns, you should bring it up with your advisor, your Director of Graduate Studies in your department, or your department head (in that order of ascension).


Can I be a lecturer without doing research?

My institution has policies that talk about 'teaching and scholarship' positions. These presumably require more teaching than the 'teaching and research' positions. So I believe the answer is yes. I don't know what the availability of such positions is though. It is conceivable that nowhere actually hires on that basis now.


Should a professor write a LOR if he does not remember the student but remembers that the essay was excellent?

It's not clear if the question is being asked from the standpoint of a student requesting an LOR or from that of an instructor who's received a request.

If the question is from a student, the answer is, there is no "should".  An instructor is free to decide whether or not to write an LOR based on whatever reasons they like.  They are under no obligation to write an LOR just because they remember the student or a particular submission.  In practical terms, most instructors will decline if they don't think they can write an LOR that will be helpful to the student, either because they don't know the student or their work well enough or because they just weren't that good.  Obviously, there's no point to writing a poor reference so most instructors just won't do it, no matter how much a student might think they "should".

If the question is from an instructor, the answer is, there is still no "should".  You are free to decide on your own whether you think that one submission plus whatever other evidence you have is enough to support a helpful LOR.  You might, e.g., review the student's grades in your class and their other submissions, e.g., if they were captured in Canvas or a similar online system, you can ask the student to provide a copy of their transcript and an essay on their objectives and you can ask to meet with them to help you decide whether and what to write.  If you teach at an institution with large lecture classes (e.g., I have 250 students in one of mine), it's inevitable that you won't get to know even some of your best students but you may still be able to review their work, describe what they did and what that means for their potential, in which case it may be perfectly appropriate to write the LOR.


Are there any negative consequences to an instructor attempting to achieve "all A's from everyone"?

No, there are no negative consequences.
The key is this sentence right here:

Assume that students only earn an A by demonstrating that they have
achieved the course goals

That being the case, grading becomes evaluating the following:

If everyone in the class is able to do everything that they should be able to do... mission accomplished

Edit: I teach pilots how to land airplanes safely.  Students only earn an A by demonstrating that they have achieved course goals (they land the plane), and I never lower my standards for anyone (you don't get an A unless you land safely).  As for the third criteria, I don't make students explicitly aware of my goal, but let's face it, it's implicit in the training.
My argument comes from seven years of personal experience:

Are there any negative consequences of me making sure that all my students are able to land the plane safely?  No.
Are there any negative consequences of me not making sure that all of my students are able to land the plane safely?  Yes: flame and then newspaper headlines.


Going for a PhD after being unhappy in industry

I strongly disagree with user117219. When I started my PhD, I was not 100% sure that that was what I wanted; the PhD seemed like an OK option to me at the time. Now I'm an assistant professor, loving my job. Your mileage may vary, and it might not. No way of knowing in advance.

If your personal finances can take the salary hit that comes with transitioning from an industry job to PhD research, it can be the right move to make. You indicate that your primary goal is to do intellectually stimulating research, and a PhD is definitely one way to achieve that.


Are research opportunities common in India and how can I enroll in a research program in India during my undergraduate studies?

Some observations:

In India, as far as I know, some institutes like CMI, etc. offer (or used to offer) internship programs. Please note, it is usually very competitive to get selected. Earlier, they used to select students based on NPTEL exam results. I remember reading somewhere that you could also email the respective professor and ask if he/she is willing to assign an intern. So, it is best to email the professor. He/she might invite you to work with him/her during Summer/Winter vacation.

Sometimes, I see professors of electronics asking undergrads to write codes. So, you can understand that they would let you do something which perhaps they might not be very comfortable with (reasons being, new languages, new areas, etc). I remember a friend of mine was assisting a professor by writing python codes for some machine learning experiment. Most of the Physics/Electronics professors in India above 50s are comfortable with FORTRAN, while the younger generation learns Python right at high school.

Usually, you would not see much research in a normal college offering undergraduate degrees. They wouldn't have the equipment, etc. They go to a university for those.

So, if you are willing to contribute to research the best thing would be to:

talk/email professors from your areas of interest. If you are in a reputed institute like in one of the IITs, IISc, etc. it becomes easier and it's best to try to get into one of such institutes.


Why do major international universities still have courses in languages other than English?

ETH and all other universities in Switzerland are funded by the government and offer college education for minimal tuition. While foreign students are welcome to attend, the primary purpose (at least at the undergraduate level) is to provide education to the locals. Nonetheless, that doesn't seem to be a limiting factor, especially at the graduate/research level since ETH has been recently ranked one of the most international institutions by Times Higher Education.

There is a wealth of excellent textbooks in German, and many fields still have original research published in German.
Also, the majority of students don't pursue academic or research careers and thus might very well spend their entire career speaking almost only German.

Plus there are practical considerations too: asking non-natively English speakers to teach in English is most certainly going to decrease the average teaching quality. Now if it's to give lectures to a class that is almost entirely German speaking, it borderlines the absurd.

The question seems to be more: why would some universities switch their teaching language to English?


Is there a list of the largest academic journal publishers, ordered by the number of journals they publish?

There are a large number of predatory publishers who publish 300+ journals of no real value. So there is no way to include all publishers.
However, if you would be satisfied with scopus indexed journals, then you can download the excel file, sort it based on publisher and filter it. Thus, you will get a list of publishers with the number of journals. Of course, the list will be confined to scopus indexed journals (around 40000 journals by 4000 publishers).


What is the rationale for having references before the article text?

Usually the article consists of three or four parts. Introduction, main text which is your original research and conclusion. There may also be an appendix.
So, usually most of the citations are from the introduction because you mainly talk about the prevosly done researches there. So, when I read the introduction I have to constantly go back and forth to check the citations, but if the citations are located nearby the introduction, it is more convenient.

I read sceintific articles a lot and I can say that this is not a common practice in physics. I can't talk about the articles in other fields.


What is the difference between a lecture and a seminar?

Both of them can cover a wide range of events, and there’s a big overlap in their usage.  So there’s no clear cut-and-dried line between the two.  The typical usage of them varies between fields, countries, and individual institutions or evengs; I’ve known things which were called a seminar at one place that would have been called lectures at another.  That said, trying to set down the differences in what they’re typically used to mean:

as you say, a lecture usually means less interaction — typically one person lecturing at the front of the room, perhaps taking questions from the audience.  A seminar can be like this, but can more often also involve more substantial interaction, up to general discussion.
a lecture typically has more difference in expertise between the lecturer and audience: a professor lecturing to students, a professional to a lay audience, or an expert on some topic to researchers who aren’t necessarily specialists in it.  A seminar is more likely to have its presenter as a “first among equals”.
some more specific senses: a coherent series of talks presenting a single topic is usually called a lecture course; a one-off general-audience talk is usually called a public lecture; a regular series of research-level talks is more likely to be called a seminar series, or a research seminar.

Again, these are all differences in typical usage; I’ve seen most of these tendencies broken sometimes, and I’m sure that beyond my experience (mathematics and computer science, in Western Europe and North America) their usage varies more widely still.  But these are a start.


What to do when I can prove a conjecture of a paper I'm peer reviewing

I was once in a very similar situation, proving a conjecture from a paper that I was refereeing. (But, unlike you, I hadn't worked on it before, and I didn't have a coauthor.) I essentially left the situation up to the editor.  I sent her my proof along with my report on the paper.  With my permission, she shared this information with the authors. It turned out that, in the meantime, someone else had also proved the conjecture, by a quite different method. He and I ended up publishing a joint paper that combined and extended both of our methods.
One warning, based on this experience: Don't get so excited about this that you overlook an error elsewhere in the paper you're refereeing.


Lots of people publish under things that aren't their legal name (nicknames, middle name, one last name instead of two), and I've never heard of it being a problem for anyone.  As for the timing, in all the cases I'm familiar with (and other fields may be different from math), there's a time after acceptance where you can make minor revisions and I think it shouldn't be a problem to modify the name you're using then.


How to minimize cheating with open source assignments?

As somebody who has, for years, hosted assignments publicly I feel that you are vastly overestimating the threat case here. If all you do is make your assignment and material public on GitHub, it is extremely unlikely that somebody will just browse by, do it out of fun, and then make the solution available to your students.

I often analyse GitHub data as part of my research, and the number of repositories out there is downright staggering, and by far most of them get no traction at all. In order to make a repository visible, quite a bit of active marketing is necessary. If you don't go out of your way to advertise your assignment, and if your assignment is not somehow extremely intriguing so that a random developer would really want to work on it, it is very likely to just sit there, all in the public, without getting any kind of attention at all.

Additionally, even if somebody would solve your assignment and make a solution public, so what? You presumably do some sort of plagiarism check on the solutions your students submit anyway (otherwise, how do you ensure that different students or teams did not copy from each other?) - this is just one more existing solution to compare your student's solution to.

In my experience, by far the most "rampant" type of cheating is student teams copying from each other, and this is really unaffected by how you decided to host your assignment.


My PhD research has a negative outcome -- how can I still graduate with it?

Conditions Under-which Fancy Algorithm Has Inflated Error Properties by A. Student. Journal of Science and The Doing Of It. 2017.

This would be a perfectly acceptable paper, and one which should appear in the literature. If you can, correcting said algorithm so it does not do so would be a bonus, but not necessary. Also, it's slightly late for you, but one should always ask when embarking on a thesis/dissertation project "What happens if the answer is "No"?"


Why does my advisor / professor discourage all collaboration?

This sounds pretty extreme, even for the "sink or swim" school of education. If you can meet the extreme standard without going crazy you will probably turn out ok, if a bit of a workaholic. But the road will be hard and painful.
But, given your sense of it, you should probably move quickly to the exits. Not everyone is like that. Some of us actually try to be supportive.

As for the "why" of it, he just seems to demand perfection and won't compromise in any way.


Is it ethical to express thanks and gratitude to a reviewer in the reply to the review text?

Yes, how could it possibly be unethical to thank someone? This is very common.


Exemptions to taking IELTS/TOEFL/Regular GRE

If I were you, I'd write a letter to the admissions' departments at universities you're interested in to figure out what they'll want you to do.

I'm in a similar situation (graduated middle school, high school, and college in a non-English speaking country, but grew up in the United States until age 13), and I've already sent emails explaining my situation to universities that interest me. So far I've received a range of answers from I have to do TOEFL to I need to show evidence of living in America to they trust me and I don't need to show anything.

In regards to GRE's it differs from each university and country. In mathematics, you only need to do the GRE's (both regular and math subject), if you're planning to apply to the United States. If you don't want to do the GRE's, check out universities in Canada or Europe which don't require them.


How does one approach reverse-plagiarism -- being attributed authorship without contribution or consent?

The head author’s insistence that you contributed is irrelevant. One simply cannot make someone a coauthor without their consent. I suggest that you reply to the chain of emails with something along the following lines:

Dear [ACM editors],
Thank you for your assistance with the issue of the coauthorship of [paper]. My colleague [head author], cc’ed, is being too kind when he says I contributed to the project. Perhaps there is some truth to that; regardless, for personal reasons I do not wish to be made a coauthor, and do not give my consent to be listed as a coauthor of the paper. I make this decision without implying any opinion as to the content of the paper, its quality, or the question of how much I contributed.
Please confirm that you are removing my name from the list of coauthors [optionally, you can add for added pressure if you expect more resistance:] or I will be forced to escalate the matter to the [Editor-in-Chief/Advisory Board/etc].
[head author], thanks for the lively discussion and for your generous suggestion to make me a coauthor. If you wish to mention me in the Acknowledgements section that is totally fine.
Regards,
Layman

Once you expressly state your refusal to be made a coauthor in this way, it’s difficult to imagine them “shrugging and walking away”. My guess is you simply haven’t been assertive enough in your earlier request. Good luck, and do update your question to let us know how things turn out with this curious affair...


Using a source and being unable to cite it

What to do in this case is EXTREMELY dependent on the exact nature of the documents involved, and particularly on who declared them confidential and why.  You need to talk about this in detail with your advisor and understand the situation extremely carefully, because otherwise citation may be the least of your concerns.

Let me outline a few of the scenarios that you might be facing here:

Your advisor may have supplied you with classified information, making you complicit in a serious crime and subject to high fines and a possible long prison term.
The information might controlled under other legal regulations, such as privacy legislation, insider trading, international arms control.  These are far-reaching laws that can interact with lots of bits of science you might not think relate.  Once again, potential criminal prosecution unless the information is carefully managed / abstracted / de-identified in a way acceptable to the agencies that enforce these regulations.
The information might be related to patents, trade secrets, or other IP not yet fully disclosed, in which case you might end up on the receiving end of a civil lawsuit unless appropriate permissions are obtained.
The information might be related to something that another group is planning to publish on first, and it has been disclosed to your advisor with the understanding that they get to publish first and not be scooped.  In this case, you need to coordinate publications schedules.

Many other situations might apply as well.  In some of these situations, some form of citation or acknowledgement is appropriate.  In others, the information must be carefully "fuzzed" and citation is inappropriate or even illegal.  The details cannot be guessed without a thorough understanding of the exact nature of the information and how you are using it.

Bottom line: go have a long heart-to-heart with your advisor and work out exactly what is the nature of the confidential information and what is the appropriate way in which traces of it should be handled in your thesis.


In what tense (present/past) should papers be written?

The rules of thumb are:

Established facts are reported in the present tense (“The path of light follows Fermat's principle of least time”). However, you should use the past tense when you refer to previous work in the field (“Maxwell et al. demonstrated clearly in a laser cavity experiment that no mirror is perfect”).
The experiments, simulations or calculations you performed are narrated in the past tense (“We dissolved the remaining solid in a 5:1 solution of acetone and benzonitrile, and heated to 200°C for three hours.”)
Discussion of the data presented in the paper uses the present tense (“The results obtained, shown in Fig. 3, clearly emphasize that the cell colonies grew faster on pink toothbrushes than green ones. We attribute this to the color-sensitivity, or kawai factor.”)
Mathematical proofs are written using the present tense, because going through the proof occurs at the time of reading (“From Eqn. 1, we derive the following system of inequalities”).

Overall, the choice of tenses is actually pretty logical.


Approaching a professor for a postdoc, after not taking his previous postdoc offer in favor of an industry job

Start the conversation by being honest: describe what had happened, and assure them that it's only because of personal reasons that you could not accept their offer, not just the industry offer. You did the right thing by emailing them in March to keep them in the loop. However, I would emphasize that the reason that you didn't email them sooner was because of the personal stuff.

The same reasoning goes for your 1 year gap: if you do amazing work in your postdoc all will be forgiven. You need to convince the advisor that they can trust you to do well despite the initial setback (which was not something you could control), and the only way I can think of doing this is by telling them the truth.

I had a collaborator (not a postdoc) who left academia for personal reasons and returned to work with me (their story is somewhat similar to what you're describing, though the personal circumstances are different). I was very happy with them and was understanding regarding their situation. I'd like to think that I'm not an exception: most reasonable people understand that their students/postdocs have a life outside academia, and this particular advisor sounds like they should be as well.

Your age is not a major factor in this equation. I'd say that 27 is relatively young (I started my PhD at the ripe old age of 28).


Can my advisor ask me to drop a project?

There are three different hats your advisor might be wearing, and the question how strong you should drop that project can be depends on which one it is.

As your advisor: Your PhD advisor's responsibility is to, well, advise you on your PhD. So it is definitely appropriate for them to suggest that you focus on one project and drop another. However, the person ultimately responsible for your PhD research is you. If you disagree with the advice, you are free to pursue the research you want to focus on. [Obviously, you should not readily dismiss the advice of your advisor, and if you or your advisor feel they cannot advise you, the advising relationship might have to end.]

As your manager: In many settings, PhD students are also some sort of employee, and as such have a manager supervising their work. This person will typically be the same as the advisor. However, acting as manager, it is probably within their authority to direct what you work on. As such work contracts are almost universally for fewer hours than a PhD student is actually expected to work, you can use that extra time to pursue your side projects. Be wary of the risk for conflict though if you and your manager have different impressions on how much time you spent on what.

As your lab head: Some research requires resources besides the time of the researcher. If you are given access to such exclusive resources in order to work on some particular research, then using them for a side project would be unethical. In many cases, the resources might be paid for by a grant to do particular research, so it might not even be allowed for your advisor to give you permission to use them for your side project. If this applies to you, you might want to look for small grant schemes you can apply for to get the required resources for the side project.


How to organize a graduate student seminar on pure math?

It depends on what you mean by seminar - it sounds like what you'd like to organize is simply a reading group, in which case all you would need to do is recruit some students (via email or otherwise) and set a date and time to meet. If people are interested in the topic, they'll come because it requires a low commitment. Organizing such a thing requires no special knowledge on your part, just do it.

In my department, we have several graduate student seminars that are slightly more structured, but still fairly casual.  Every week, a student presents some work, either to practice for an upcoming conference, defense, or just to talk about a subject they recently learned about.  These are usually organized by a second or third year student, mostly because they need to coordinate a particular person to talk each week, and this is difficult to do if you don't know anyone and they don't know you - it's easier to persuade someone to give a talk if you know them.  For this type of seminar, I would recommend not trying to organize until you've seen how it is run.


Several questions regarding the writing of SoP

I think your overarching question is "What do I include in a statement of purpose for US PhD applications". You can find several great answers to that question if you search this forum. Further there are many, many sample SoPs available online. If you review previous forum answers as well as sample SoPs, you will be able to answer these very specific questions on your own.

And please do have a native English speaker proofread your SoP, your CV, and all other application material before you submit.


Research statement for second time PhD applications to a different graduate program

Since you are entering a different field, the new SoP should be specific to that field. What are your future plans and how do you expect to achieve them? The "tone" of it can be similar to what you wrote before, but the details will be different.
What areas do you hope to explore? What do you intend to do with the knowledge you gain? What sorts of research do you want to work on?
Let the SoP speak to your proposed future in the new field. Having a bit more experience than you did before you can probably be a bit more specific.


Proof error found in accepted conference paper - what to do?

This is what errata are for.

I had something like this happen to me with one of my early papers.  For that paper, I knew the result was likely to be significant, so I knew I did not want to let the paper stand with an error in it.  It was too late to correct for the conference proceedings, but I could correct the archival version that ended up in the ACM Digital Library, and I did.

Every (reputable) publisher has its own procedure for dealing with errata; you just need to figure out what it is and follow it.  Following this process is likely to be somewhat long and annoying, but if it's important to you to get it right, there's no reason not to do so.


Publish research with few details to promote company

There are two basic directions that you can go in using scientific publications to promote a company:

You can publish in the same sort of conferences and journals as university scientists, thereby proving your technical depth and strength.  If you take this path, you will be expected to conform to the same standards of quality and depth of information as a university researcher: there is no "peer review lite" unless you go to a junk publication, which won't help your goals.
Many conferences explicitly have an "industrial track" or "demo session" that is explicitly designed for showing off capabilities without necessarily having to explain details, in order to better promote engagement between the academic and commercial sides of research.  These often have some sort of "extended abstracts" published in association with them, which may be what you have seen in the past.

Neither approach has any particular requirement of credentials: you just need to submit material that is of interest to the community and up to its standards of quality.


Differences in the capitalization of my name

This should not cause any problems.  People working on graduate admissions typically quite well understand that different systems mess with names in different ways.  Certain types of permutation might cause difficulty, but ALL CAPITALS versus Standard Capitalization is so routine as to likely go entirely unnoticed.


What can be done about the problem of bullying in post-PhD academia?

I'm not sure that I accept your premise that "academia is paradise for bullies". There are bullies in academia, but also there are bullies elsewhere.

Nevertheless, we can meaningfully ask if there are any dynamics in academia which may help bullies prosper. I can think of two particular ones:

Some parts of academia have a culture of tolerating and in some cases venerating "the brilliant asshole", i.e. the arrogant academic who routinely belittles and harangues students and junior researchers but we all go along because they've done some really important work in their field. Your question hints at this and user104075's answer kind of exemplifies it. This attitude can lead people who should really be seeking to prevent bullying to shrug it off with a "but that's just who he is".
Strong disparity in job security between the people at the top and bottom of the ladder, perhaps more so than in other professions. Postdocs are constantly, painfully, aware, that their contract will be up soon, and you need to get some papers, and there are hundreds of applicants to every faculty position etc etc. This makes junior researchers wary of leaving a position, even if it is terrible, and extra nervous of not getting a good recommendation letter from their present supervisor. I have heard of academics boasting of keeping their postdocs on short contracts, so that they can use the threat of not renewing it to get their postdocs to work unreasonable hours.
On the other hand, in some places, a tenured professor is virtually unfireable, short of outright academic fraud or serious criminality. So while the person on the end of the bullying faces huge risks from making a fuss, the bully may not face much consequence even if it does come out.

What can be done to mitigate these?

Use the wellbeing of an academic's students and postdocs as a criterion on which to evaluate them for funding and tenure
Better job security for postdocs - i.e. work towards a norm of longer contracts where possible. If this means that there are fewer postdocs, but they work under better conditions, I think that would be reasonable. Others will disagree.
Universities can implement robust anti-bullying policies with meaningful sanctions against academics who violate them.


What should I do about a professor who got in my face and yelled at me?

It sounds like you were the victim of a (relatively moderate) kind of abusive workplace behavior.  I would not seek to handle this through the department-level chain of command but rather through the university level policies on such things.

You don't say where in the world you are, but at a US university there will be something quite formalized in place about this: e.g. see this policy at my university.  Note that the prohibited conduct includes

  harassment of any nature such as stalking, swearing or shouting.

The webpage goes on to explain that any employee who witnesses this kind of behavior should report it to human resources (HR).

You want to find the equivalent at your university.  When you report it, you should mention the name of your coworker, and they will very likely be contacted.  The rest of it is really up to HR, and they will know how to approach it confidentially and so forth.  They are also the experts on how serious the behavior is, but I think there is no question but that it is serious enough to report to them.

By the way, none of this sounds like it will be much fun for you, but I really encourage you to do it anyway.  I suspect that the likely outcome is that if this is an isolated incident, the professor in question will get nothing more than a talking-to.  But what if it isn't an isolated incident?  The community needs your help to identify and deal with the problem.


What tense to use in arts and humanities papers?

Verb tense often distinguishes a paper in the humanities from one in the
natural and social sciences.

Generally you would write in the present tense in the humanities (e.g. John Doe explains) and you would use the past tense in a humanities paper only for reporting historical events.

The UNC Writing Centre have a good webpage with examples that explain the three types of verb tenses (present simple, past simple, and present perfect) that they say account for approximately 80% of the verb tense use in academic writing.


My advisor's new student copied parts of my PhD thesis; advisor doesn't care. What to do?

You have two options:

Not care about plagiarism enough to warrant getting involved.
Care about plagiarism to the degree you get involved.

There are arguments for both points here.

It would be an obvious matter of record as to whose thesis was written first if anyone else happened to notice the similarities. Why get involved further? You notified the adviser, let him deal with blowback from letting a student plagiarize. Pushing the issue further would just compromise your relationship with your adviser. Whistleblowers rarely get rewarded properly anyway. And, cynically, some universities may not even care about a student plagiarizing parts of a thesis. It's more paperwork and labor for them to deal with and it's easier to just hope (from an administrative perspective) that the problem goes away.
Based on what you have told us, it seems reasonable that your thesis was plagiarized from. You have contacted the adviser about this and he declined to do much about it. The graduate college and university administration, however, may not concur with your adviser. Plagiarism should be stopped on principle alone. I would report the offending thesis to the graduate college and see if they are willing to investigate it further. If you really wanted to do some nasty damage and the university declines to investigate, notify the local newspaper and see if they'll send over some junior journalist to write a spot on how your university is allowing plagiarism to occur.

Part of writing a thesis is learning to articulate in your own words what your research is about. This has to do with much more than just shoving original data in a table.

If your adviser told you the student "might not know what plagiarism is" then.....wow.....No one reaches graduate school and is completely oblivious to what plagiarism is. Let's be honest here.

For me personally, I would let it go. The network with my adviser is more important to my career right now. This is pragmatism, not principle, speaking.


Is excluding a co-author from a proposal considered academic misconduct or just an ethical issue?

Your question as I understand it is: is it considered misconduct to exclude a co-author from a proposal, or is it some other ethical issue?

Certainly "research misconduct" can broadly be defined as "ethically problematic behaviors in research" - in which case there is no difference. However, let us assume a narrower definition of "misconduct."

The specific definition of "misconduct" may depend on where you are. In the United States, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) defines "research misconduct" as follows:

  Research misconduct means fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.

and "plagiarism" is further defined as

  the appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.

(Individual institutions may, and often do, extend this definition as a matter of internal policy. However, the ORI policy represents the least inclusive definition of misconduct in the United States.)

According to this definition, it seems that using your coworker's ideas, processes, results, or words in your research proposal without giving him credit is academic misconduct.

Having said that, the ORI also says this on plagiarism:

  Many allegations of plagiarism involve disputes among former collaborators who participated jointly in the development or conduct of a research project, but who subsequently went their separate ways and made independent use of the jointly developed concepts, methods, descriptive language, or other product of the joint effort. The ownership of the intellectual property in many such situations is seldom clear, and the collaborative history among the scientists often supports a presumption of implied consent to use the products of the collaboration by any of the former collaborators.

  For this reason, ORI considers many such disputes to be authorship or credit disputes rather than plagiarism. Such disputes are referred to PHS agencies and extramural institutions for resolution.

From your description, however, it seems that this is not the case in your scenario - you and your coworker did not "go separate ways." There is no "implied consent" to use his ideas. He fully expected to be a co-author, and you yourself admit that he should have been a co-author, except that you somehow left him off.

(Even if this is considered an "authorship dispute" and not "plagiarism," it's not up to you to make that determination - it's up to the investigative body, who will look into the matter if your coworker chooses to report this.)

Finally, "honest error" is not considered misconduct according to the ORI. However, your coworker is not required to take your word for it that your exclusion of him from the proposal was an honest error. This is a determination that a third-party investigative body will typically make.

In summary: Your coworker is well within his rights to report you for misconduct. If he does so, you are free to try and persuade the investigators that this was an honest mistake.


Regarding "discussion sections" for undergraduate science courses

I can say with 100% confidence that it will depend on the professor(s).  That being said, you should expect to:

Reteach all content.  You won't actually have to, but you should of course be able to.  Students often use discussion sections to ask questions they don't want to ask the prof for fear of "looking dumb."
Give meaningful practice problems and explanations the students should familiarize themselves with for an exam.
For some classes, actually lead a discussion of topics.
Just use it for office hours.


Referencing Springer products: what name to use for the publisher?

The suffix "-Verlag" basically just means "publisher" or "publishing company in German. Therefore, I would include it only if other companies in English—such as Dover Publications, for instance—also appear with the "publishing" term in their listings. If they don't, I'd eliminate the "-Verlag" for consistency.

As for the others, those tend to be "imprints" within the publishing house. In general, I believe these can also be omitted, particularly in "abbreviated" citation styles. In longer styles where full details are provided, you may provide this information; if the publisher doesn't want to include it, they can remove it when editing the proofs.


What is "Honorary Lecturer" in the UK universities?

In this link they explain the subject in detail
In general regarding honorary academic titles for non-employees it is written:

  To recognise the association, the College may confer an honorary academic title on a non-employee during the period of their association.... The title to be conferred will depend on the level of distinction and qualification of the candidate.

And specifically with regard to "honorary lecturer":

  Honorary Lecturer: Must continue in teaching, research or joint industry/academic activity to an appropriately high level


When applying for postdoc funding, what are the consequences of backing out if I can get another position where funding is already secured?

The key is to be open and honest. To answer the question lets define some terms. Let Prof X be a potential post doc supervisor who already has funding and Prof Y be a a potential post doc supervisor without any funding.

Prior to working on a funding application to Prof Y you need to discuss whether he expects you to put all your eggs in one basket or if he is okay with you applying for different jobs. There may be applications that Prof Y will not make with you or it might change the application strategy. For example, Prof Y may not list you as a named post doc so as not to cause problems with the funder if you do not take the position. The key is to be honest and up front.

If you have a application in with Prof Y and Prof X offers you a job, then you have problems. If it is close to the decision deadline for the funding with Prof Y, you may want to wait before starting with Prof X. Again you need to talk with Prof X. Maybe Prof X X needs you to start right away but instead of a 12 month commitment he only needs a 6 month commitment and maybe you can delay the start of the funding with Prof Y, if you get it.

In general, most people understands that a guaranteed job is important and will try and be flexible. That said if you have funding, you need to deliver the work you promised, and you don't want to apply for funding you cannot use.


From the ACS Style Guide, regarding the correct format for citations of websites (quote slightly reformatted):

Recommended format for general web sites:
Author (if any). Title of Site. URL (accessed Month Day, Year), other identifying information (if any). Use the title found on the Web site itself; add the words “Home Page” for clarification when needed.
...
ACS Publications Division Home Page. http://pubs.acs.org (accessed Nov 7, 2004).
Chemical Abstracts Service. STN on the Web. http://stnweb.cas.org (accessed Nov 7, 2004).
International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Home Page. http://www.iupac.org/dhtml_home.html (accessed April 24, 2005).
...
Recommended format for documents retrieved from institutional or agency web sites:
Author 1; Author 2; Author 3; etc. Title of Document, Year. Title of Site. URL (accessed Month Day, Year). If an article is contained within a large and complex Web site, such as that for a university or a government agency, the host organization and the relevant program or department should be identified before giving the direct URL of the article and accession date.
Chou, L.; McClintock, R.; Moretti, F.; Nix, D. H. Technology and education: New wine in new bottles: Choosing pasts and imagining educational futures, 1993. Columbia University Institute for Learning Technologies Web site. http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/papers/newwine1.html (accessed Aug 24, 2000)

In your case, I would considering citing it as a document, so it would become:

KGM007, Opium pod cut to demonstrate fluid extraction1, 2006, Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Opium_pod_cut_to_demonstrate_fluid_extraction1.jpg (accessed Feb 17, 2018)

You could cite it as a web page - that would look like this:

KGM007, File:Opium pod cut to demonstrate fluid extraction1.jpg - Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Opium_pod_cut_to_demonstrate_fluid_extraction1.jpg (accessed Feb 17, 2018)

In your citation, you gave the name of the site, not the title. The title (as defined by the HTML title tag) is what shows in the top of your web browser when you visit the page:
If you intend to submit this for publication, the publisher should check and confirm the format during production anyhow.


Seeking undergrad research position at another university: is it OK to email PI and copy lab member? What if there's no response?

I suggest you contact the PI directly; I do not believe it is good to cc others on such emails unless you know someone already at this lab and you have told this person you will send an email.  The PI will eventually be in the loop and will presumably have to approve the position so emailing one and cc-ing another is in most cases tantamount just generating one extra email to delete.  (It may well be that the PI will pass it to someone else but that's internal and none of your business.)

If you don't get an answer, do not be insistent.  Senior researchers get 10s of such emails per week and there is no way they can answer all of them.  It's nothing personal, it's just a question of time management.

To improve your chances of your email being noticed, use for instance the subject line to refer to a recent paper by that lab and indicating in the email that your have read this paper and are interested in the topic etc.  This does not guarantee a reply but it will show you have done your homework to find what they do and it will increase the likelihood that your email will be read in full; avoid generic emails as people rarely read beyond the first two lines of emails explaining how honored you would be to work in group under such fantastic leadership.


Low ranking university with fund VS Unsure opportunity at a higher ranking one

The answer is clear, and has nothing to do with ranking: if you want to go onto a PhD, your application will mostly depend on the letter of your research advisor.

That being said, there are terrible warning signs, and I would not take that position. Requiring you to work on sundays (and saturdays I presume) does not make a healthy student. Even students need down times. Sure, when I was writing my thesis I worked for a month straight; but thats crunch time. During normal students life it should be fairly balanced (40-60 hours a week working, with some play).

If you are willing to pay (another topic) go to the higher ranking schools, or wait a year and reapply to see if you can get funding at a better school. The advisor at the lower ranking school seems unethical, and I would not work for him even if he was at a school like MIT or Caltech. The fact that he wouldn't write you a letter of recommendation if you decided to leave is truly an indication that he does not have your best interests in mind: writing letters his his job.

As so many put it here, run don't walk.


Re-applying to medical school after misconduct

I think the road is uphill and very steep. Research misconduct is bad, but in medicine it is deadly. Literally deadly. You will need to find a way to convince people that the past isn't going to be repeated - has no chance of being repeated.
But it is difficult for a person to reassure others, on their own, that they will be good, now, where before they were bad..
I think your chances depend very strongly on what kinds of recommendations you can get from others who know you well and are aware of your past as well as your present capabilities and attitudes.
It may be that people will take your previous "undiagnosed disability" as an ameliorating factor, but even then will need assurance that it won't/can't return. Again, others can speak for you and if they are putting their own reputations on the line for you, can make the difference. But people will need to be wary, because of the possible consequences.
The same concerns wouldn't be there if you were studying, for example, CS or math. But medical research is qualitatively different.


How to search for institutions/universities that have good contributions on a certain physics research topic?

Statistics on institutions should be taken with 14,000,000 grains of salt: some institutions have changed name over time (including many recently, e.g. in France many institutions were forking twenty years ago and are now merging back), and affiliation rules vary widely between authors (you'll see below huge contributions from state-wide agencies like “Russian academy of science” or “CNRS”, they are not the same as universities or labs). But, you can do it with many bibliographic search tools.

Here's how to do with Web of Science:

Make a regular search (here I chose “title”, but you can do something more complicated)

On the results page, click on the “Analyze Results” link

Choose your field of interest (here, organizations)

Enjoy!


Is it ethical to withdraw a paper if it’s still with editor beyond the journal time policy?

It is ethical to withdraw it until your agreement with them is finalized. But it seems unwise to me and a (very) hasty decision if you do. Two weeks in the publishing industry is just about a nanosecond. There are a lot of reasons for delay.
You won't get the two weeks back if you withdraw and will need to start the process over at another, likely even slower, journal. Why? Calm down. Take several deep breaths.
And you can ask for an update before you make any final decision.
Withdrawing won't make the editors happy with you but the paper is yours.


How acceptable is it to publish an article without the author's knowledge?

It is obviously not ok to publish the work of someone else without asking all authors. It is also certainly startling to see it done in such an apparently careless manner (as an unedited copy of a thesis chapter that doesn’t conform to the standards of the publication journal - and still somehow gets published). So what happened is puzzling.
Realistically, there is nothing you could have done to prevent it from happening. Given how strange this story is, you couldn’t have been expected to explicitly tell your adviser to please not do what they did. Maybe they meant well, maybe they did it to add a publication to their own record, but they shouldn’t have done this as they did.
What this means to you depends on details you don’t mention in your question (e.g., are you in industry or academia, did you plan to use your thesis work in other ways, are you worried about what you consider a sub-par publication).


Suspicion that fellow PhD student lets someone else do his job

First of all, I'd like to express my opinion that none of us here have the moral authority to tell you what to do, and you should be suspicious of anyone telling you that you definitely should or should not do this or that. This situation is very serious and you are the one who will be living with the consequences of your actions, not us anonymous (or not) internet strangers.

Instead of telling you what to do, I thought it may be helpful to list the choices you have and each one's pros and cons. Here they are as I see them:

1. Continue to investigate by sending a fake application to the job posting.

Pros: through such an investigation you will be helping (if your suspicions  prove correct) to expose a very serious ethical breach (bordering on a criminal offense of conspiring to commit fraud) by the student in question, and helping to rid your department, university, and the academic world of someone who clearly has no business being there.

Cons:

You will likely incur the wrath and hatred of the student you will be investigating (and possibly his family members, friends, and even other grad students in the program) later on when he finds out you were the one who sent the fake application that helped expose him.
You may very possibly be suspected of sending in a real application, which would implicate you in unethical behavior yourself and cause you to get in serious trouble. Make sure to document your activities in a way that clearly establishes your honorable intentions. Even then, you could end up being accused in some unexpected way of causing harm or even doing something illegal by your meddling.
By choosing such a high level of involvement in what sounds like a very messy affair, you may cause yourself a lot of wasted time and emotional entanglement later on (e.g., being debriefed or interviewed by university officials and administrative investigation committee, even having to testify in court some day).

The bottom line is that this course of action carries a significant amount of risk and potential for trouble for you.

2. Continue to investigate by asking the student about his activities as one of the answers suggests.

Pros: can't think of any. Someone so immoral would almost certainly just lie and you will gain no information.

Cons: by asking him what he's doing you will alert him to the fact that his current deception scheme is too easily detectable, making it likely that he will come up with a better, less transparent scheme, and ultimately helping him to defraud the university.

3. Do nothing, just ignore what the student is doing and mind your own business.

Pros: no work for you, no wasted time and emotional entanglement in a messy scandal, no colleagues who hate you for getting them expelled from school, etc.

Cons: you will have to live with the knowledge and potential guilt and shame associated with having known about the student's possible unethical and maybe illegal behavior and done nothing. The student will go on to fraudulently receive his PhD and your university'a reputation may suffer as a result. Your own degree may be worth a little less as a result. In a small but real way, all of society will suffer.

4. Report your suspicions to the chair of your department and/or the student's advisor and/or other appropriate university officials.

Pros: you don't become involved in the affair in a messy, major way, but will likely lead to the student being exposed if he is in fact guilty. You will also know that you did the morally right thing by reporting the student and won't have to live with the guilt and shame of having done nothing.

Cons:

you may still eventually become known as the person who helped expose the student (you can try an anonymous complaint if you want to keep yourself completely out of the story, but I think that will be less effective and would make it harder to prove the student's guilt), with the possible animosity and other negative consequences I described above. However, the level of animosity would likely be less great than in the scenario where you submit a fake application.
you won't get the satisfaction, excitement, and superhero feeling that you might get by becoming actively involved in the investigation and playing private detective as in the suggestion to submit a fake application.

To summarize, you probably want a recommendation about which action to choose, but as I said, I don't think it's right to offer one. You will have to make your own decision, but hopefully the analysis above may still be helpful. Good luck!


Is it inappropriate to share journal article reviews?

Yes. A review is normally a job performed by somebody at the request of a journal editor for your benefit. Hence the review is not yours per se to do as you please although you have received it to improve your manuscript. The review is basically a communication between two persons, albeit through an intermediary. Thus posting somebody's comments without asking for permission is similar to publishing somebody's private letters online without asking. It is not strictly illegal as I can see it but it is inappropriate.

If reviews are done in an open system, they are public and then the problem is a non-issue. Such reviews, if one wants to couple them to a paper or manuscript online, can, and probably should, be linked anyway.

As a side point, some journals only allow you to post pre-review versions of your manuscripts online. Revised manuscripts then involve the journal's "services" and are apparently seen as covered by the publisher's copyright rules, at least until they are rejected. This is not something I find appealing, it is just the case and one needs to take a close look to the agreement entered when submitting a manuscript.


Is it commonplace for a recruiter to ask to see an unpublished PhD thesis?

In a word, yes.  It is very common for academic employers to want to know about a candidate's research in progress, and they often ask for research plans, unpublished manuscripts, reports on ongoing projects, etc.  From the employer's point of view, they want to know as much as possible about what the candidate is doing, so as to evaluate the promise of their research program and their productivity.  This is especially true for junior candidates who do not already have a large body of published work.  So a request for a draft of a PhD thesis would not be out of line.

When a candidate shares such material as part of their application, the hiring professor or committee has an ethical obligation to hold it in confidence.  They should not circulate it beyond those people within the department who are involved in the hiring decision.  Also, it would be ethically inappropriate for anyone with access to this material to exploit it for the gain of their own research program (e.g. by trying to solve the candidate's thesis problem before they do, or giving it to one of their own students).  As the candidate, you have the right to expect that this will not happen.

Of course, as a matter of practice, if you want the job, you don't have much choice but to give them what they ask.  But I wouldn't see such a request as unusual or unreasonable, and I don't think you need worry about them using it unfairly.  If you are still worried, you could send them the thesis along with a note saying "since this is work in progress, I would ask that you keep it in confidence".

Also, I would say it's an exaggeration to say a thesis should be a "closely guarded secret" or to react with "horror" to a request to share it.  It's generally prudent not to share unpublished work indiscriminately, but it's not as if it were missile launch codes.  If there is something to be gained by sharing it with someone (e.g. useful input from an expert, a potential collaborator, a job) then often that's a good idea.  It seems to be pretty common for people starting out in academia to overestimate the risks of people stealing their work: yes, there are horror stories, but in the long run, you usually have more to lose from excessive secrecy than from reasonable openness.  Paranoia is generally not a helpful trait for an academic.


Should we input Chinese characters in a table of summarizing vernacular names in a Scientific Paper? or only write in Pinyin

My suggestion differs from the reviewer. I think that for maximum readability across countries, your solution is very good. Including the local names as well as a translation when appropriate makes your results accessible for more people, especially as you are dealing with international data. Some kinds of research will depend on having the "official" name expressed in the local way.

But, it may be that the reviewer is also concerned about the difficulty of typesetting your paper at that particular journal. They may be correct or not. It might be worth a note to the editor asking if including various non-Roman scripts in the paper will cause any difficulty. At this point in time they should not, but the editor will know for sure.


I'm not sure that you will find a global database, but for graduate studies and beyond, the Euraxess portal is pan-European and all EU-funded positions must be advertised through it. Unfortunately, "Sustainable Consumption" does not return any hits on the job search, but perhaps other keywords will be more successful.


Methods for figuring out the best schools for a particular field of study

Research groups that are active in a particular field will publish often in those fields.

So, identify conferences* in your field of interest. Look at the technical programs for the last couple of years, and check out the groups that seem to be contributing a lot.

Also, ask professors at your undergrad university who work in related fields.

* Also workshops, large conferences with a few on-topic sessions, journals, etc.


Is 100 hours per year of teaching a heavy load for a lecturer?

The load seems reasonable for an established lecturer, but is a little heavy, by UK standards, for a first year lecturer. It might be worth asking for a partial teaching (or marking or tutoring) release for the first year.

Many universities, including those in the UK and US, talk about the split between research, teaching and admin. A split of time of 40% research, 40% teaching, and 20% service is not atypical at a UK Russel Group university. In the UK, the work year consists of about 1800 hours (37.5 hours per week times 48 weeks a year). With a 40% teaching load, you should be doing 720 hours of "teaching". I have never heard of a Russel Group university with a teaching load lower than 30%. The non-Russel Group universities I am familiar with don't go above 60% teaching time.

Teaching obviously consists of more than just standing in front of students lecturing. My UK university work load model credited us with time for supervising undergraduate final year project students, our mandated office hours, marking, tutorials, and lecturing.

We typically had 40 office hours (2 hours per week of the two 10 week semesters) and 150 grading hours. This left about 530 hours of traditional teaching time (tutorials, lectures, and practicals). For every hour of tutorial and lecture, we are given either 4 or 8 hours of prep time depending on if it is new teaching or not. This means an established teacher would have 132.5 hours of lecturing a year and a new lecturer would have 66.25 hours of lecturing a year.


Prolonging undergraduate school to do research

No.

Nobody cares how long you took to graduate.  There is no advantage to graduating early, and there is no disadvantage to graduating late.  It is extremely common for students to take more than four years to get an undergraduate degree, especially if they change majors, as you are effectively doing.


Employment in academia for doctorates w/o same field undergrad

Don't base life decisions on anecdotes. I'm sure such cases exist, and, other cases in almost any combination. But your future as an academic, or even in industry, will depend far more on your later work and far more than that on the potential for success that you can demonstrate to anyone in a position to hire you.

But it would be a mistake to stay in Mechanical Engineering for life just for such a reason. It might be a reason to switch earlier, rather than later, but only so that your path into a physics doctoral program might be eased a bit.

But, a single case is always a poor indicator as there are always, potentially, other, unstated, reasons for the outcome.

Create your own life. But work hard at it.


Can you have a career in academia without having to write grant applications?

The need for grant funding depends a lot on the type of research that you do.  The more that your research requires laboratory facilities and equipment, graduate student research assistants to run the equipment, or travel for field work than the more that you're going to need grant funding.  In the other direction, grant funding is less important if you do more theoretical research by yourself or with collaborators at other institutions.

No matter what type of research you do, you're going to need time to work on the research and some money to travel to conferences and present your research.

One of the few ways in which this can be done is to hold a faculty position at an undergraduate liberal arts college.  Some of these positions have reasonably light teaching loads (although typically higher than at research universities) and funds to send faculty to conferences.


Is there any level or tiers in conferences or all conferences are of same level?

The Australian Research Council (ARC) publishes a comprehensive ranking of journals which classified each as A*, A, B or C. This list can be found here.

The best way, however, is to talk to researchers or faculty members from the relevant field. I would be surprised if any researcher worth their salt didn't know what the main conferences are, each conference's preferences and biases, or what notional level of prestige is associated with each.


After the draft was accepted, can I ask the Editor to publish it as soon as possible?

You can ask, but "push" is probably the wrong verb. If you have a specific need to see it, then include that in your ask, but I doubt that you will be successful.
If the editor responded to every such request, I suspect there would be chaos and thrashing. You may have bumped up against year end holidays accounting for some delay.
And they will probably prioritize their own process over your request. But you can ask. Especially you can ask for an estimate of when it might appear.
Stay polite for strategic reasons if nothing else.


Is writing recommendation letter job for a faculty required?

As stated in the other answer, no professor has to write a recommendation letters for a specific student. The most common reason is that it would be a letter the student wouldn't want anyway, ie a bad recommendation.

On the other hand, it is part of the job of a professor to write recommendation letters for students in general. So if a professor states that he/she categorically refuses to writes recommendation letters for anyone that would be a reason for complaint to their dean or head of department.


Suggesting connection to one's own paper in a referee report

It happens quite often that as an expert asked to review a paper, your own work is relevant.  But you are right to be concerned that it might seem gratuitous.  So just like it is often the case that papers authored by any member of the Technical Program Committee (TPC) are held to a slightly higher bar at a conference than other papers, to try to avoid the appearance of nepotism, I try to recommend my own papers only if I'm really sure they deserve to be mentioned. Avoiding them at all costs would do a disservice to the publication because important work might be missed.

As an aside, I recently served on a TPC where I contemplated mentioning one of my papers and decided not to.  A different reviewer went to great lengths to point out why my work was relevant, and I'm 95% sure the authors would conclude incorrectly that I was the reviewer in question.  Meaning: just because you suggest a paper doesn't actually mean someone can be sure you're the one suggesting it!

You show a reasonable sense of caution in posing this question.  That is certainly all that is required.


The first form is more common in APA style format.

  See Smith and Pitt (1999) for overview.

Although I would be more picky in the use of 'see'. The word 'refer' would be used to point to a reference where a point is taken from or pointing to further readings. While 'see' is used to point to a reference that supports your claim (kindly refer this post).

Having said the above, both see and refer are used interchangeably in practice with the nuances not kept in mind.


Dropping out of grad school with F's: how will this affect job prospects?

Did you try seeing if you could formally withdraw, rather than do so "de facto"? A withdrawal means that you normally don't receive grades for courses (although some schools note a withdrawal while having a failing grade in a course).

The likelihood that a future employer will overlook this depends largely on who's doing the applicant screening. If your "direct boss" is handling the process, you have a chance of convincing them that the grades aren't reflective of your true abilities. On the other hand, if a human resources "specialist" is handling the screening process, a grade of F will unfortunately mean your application will probably end up in the "circular file."


How should one choose the research interest as an international student at current university?

You are not forced to stay in your undergraduate research area forever. It is quite common to change directions when entering the master's, and again when starting a PhD. So don't worry too much about picking for the long-term.

If you are a strong self-directed student who doesn't really need an advisor anyway, you could pick solely for the topic. I have known people like this, they knew what they wanted to work on exactly, so they picked a random topically proximal prof as a signature-generating machine and then they shut themselves up at home or went on an extended holiday, showing up with a completed project and thesis at the end.

But as it sounds from your description you care quite a lot about having a supportive environment and interacting with others in your group. As someone who is also more of that type, picking primarily for a good relationship with the advisor was a more successful strategy for me. Of course, you should at least be somewhat competent in the area and not completely disinterested in the topic either.


Any way to create dynamic pdf from ppt presentation? I would like to upload a pdf version of my PowerPoint presentation lectures

Keynote is a free app on your a Mac (it can handle Microsoft PPT files, but it doesn't always lead to 100% satisfactory outcomes -- you will have to check your case by hand).
In Keynote there's a setting 'make separate slide for each build stage' when you export your presentation as a PDF.


Why is the two-column format so popular?

There are some established standards for page layout in publications. One that I'm familiar with is a set of patterns for desktop (that is, personal) publishing by Andreas Rüping, published in the EuroPloP 1999 proceedings (University of Konstanz).

One of the patterns says that a page should be no more than about half text. A fair amount of white space, margins, and other elements besides text.

Another pattern says that a line of text should be no more than about twice the length of the alphabet used, so around 52 lower case letters in English. This isn't applicable to Chinese, of course. This limit is "imposed" by the physiology of how the eye works. Among other things, if a line is too long, then it is harder to pick up the start of the next line when scanning back.

But a full line of text in a reasonable font can be nearly twice that limit.

So, just those two patterns suggest two column format or some other accommodation.

And note that, if you are young, you have an easier time reading long lines than someone older with poorer eyesight.


Withdrawing a paper after acceptance due to error

I would contact the programme chair of the conference and ask for advice (perhaps suggest the options you have already given).  It could be that by submitting the paper you are under an obligation to attend, in which case you should seek permission from the conference chair to withdraw the paper.  To protect your reputation, at the very least explicitly state in the draft that lemma is currently unproven.   We all make mistakes, without exception, so we should all be understanding when they happen to others.


Where can I find scientific poster examples?

See Colin Purrington's advice on designing conference posters.  You can find it here: http://colinpurrington.com/tips/poster-design

For more examples than you'll ever want, see the comment above by Danny Ruijters.

(I know we frown on link-only answers here, but Purrington's pages have been very stable for a very long time, and the advice is too lengthy even to try to summarize here.)


A question about authors listed as having "contributed equally"

This is going to very a lot from field to field. Some fields try to have extremely sophisticated order of authorship rules while others do not. For example, in pure math there's pretty much no emphasis on author contribution order. In contrast, astronomy and biology often have first, second and third author at least, and sometimes later authors listed alphabetically (until one gets to the very last author who may be someone who runs the lab but didn't do much directly).

In your hypothetical, all of them will list it on their CVs. They can signal to people that they did more in part by giving talks about the research or mentioning explicitly what they did in research statements or the like. But that will often be a more natural thing to talk about in interview contexts.

And regardless of field, regardless of how much Smith contributed, it will definitely help Smith in terms of graduate school. How much so will depend on the field. For example, I have a friend who is in astronomy. As an undergrad he was on a paper with about 40 authors. They listed five people in order and then listed the remaining alphabetically. My friend was listed third. I strongly suspect that when he applied to graduate school, they noticed exactly where he was on that list. But even if he had been listed in the long alphabetical section, it would still have helped.


Referencing assignments from past students

I think it is both ethical and within the rules (or at least it is within the rules at my university) as long as the reference is clearly cited.

Furthermore, it should also be fine with current students as long as the work is cited too.

For example for undergraduate experimental lab course I took during my 3rd year, I worked on an experiment with 2 other students working on the same experiment independently. We each had to write a project report on the results we obtained during the experiment.

Only one of us managed to get a particular dataset for a part of the experiment that was sensitive to conditions and difficult to get results on. In that situation we were able to used that student's data so we could discuss their result in our report (as long as we cited the person who actually obtained the dataset, of course).

In a seperate experiment I let someone use a java code I wrote for the analysis. This was also fine, because the person cited me when they used my code in their report.

I think if the handin were supposed to be completely independently written (e.g. a math problem sheet) it would be collusion to reference older (or current) work but that is generally acceptable to cite anything (past student work or otherwise) in work which you would normally expect to see citation (e.g. essay or report).

If you have assessment regulations, there is probably a clear indication of what your university expect in there. That would not be able to tell you the answer to ethics part of this question but otherwise might be able to tell you the rule at your College or University.


Which libraries are included in the Scopus citation database?

I don't think Scopus manages their indexing by what you call "Libraries" (you probably mean publishers, and I agree that many publishers seem to call their online publishing platforms something like "digital library"). Instead, Scopus selects individual titles for indexing. That means that not all titles offered in a specific "library" may be contained in the database. Scopus offers a list of titles they are indexing on their website, which you could use to research the titles that you are interested in.


Professor won't comment on research in his recommendation

If you are applying for positions where you need recommendation letters, it's going to look pretty strange if you don't have one from one of your co-supervisors if it's possible to tell who they were. You don't say what degree you are currently working on, but I'm guessing it's either your undergraduate or master's degree since you appear to be applying for a PhD. I wouldn't recommend saying the following directly to this person, but refusing to write a letter of recommendation in order to try to prevent a student is highly unethical.

I recommend you talk to your other co-supervisor and see if you can get them to help you talk the recalcitrant co-supervisor into writing you a letter. It is very common for students to move from group to group and institution to institution while getting their successive degrees. In fact, most institutions in the US have a preference towards moving around like this. While losing a good student is hard, it's very inappropriate for a professor to try to prevent a student from moving on.

If the professor is having trouble coming up with things to say about your research progress, you can help him out by writing some text about what you've done so far and the good progress that you've made. Faced with some true statements about how good your research prospects are and the progress you've made to date, they may cave easily and write you the letter you need. If you show your resolve to apply elsewhere, they should hopefully give in.


Should academics be concerned about professorwatchlist.org

If that website is really about what it says it's about, then I don't think there's anything to worry about. Academics should be open to criticism, especially if they are vocal about their political opinions. Academic freedom means the government should not interfere with what professors teach, not that they should be shielded from criticism. There certainly is political bias among university professors and it's not unhealthy per se to question that via independent media.

Off course, this website is very partial and lumps together extremists, people under FBI scrutiny or who were convicted with people with simply non-conservative opinions, and people whose research actually contradicts some of the American conservative positions. That last bit is probably the only worrisome aspect.

I suspect readers of that website are really looking for a confirmation of opinions they already have. I don't think it's going to have a lot of traffic from random people (apart from the one you're generating with that link). That is also true of blogs and website from the other side of the political spectrum.

If such websites challenge facts because they conflict with their political opinions, then there is a threat and it's our job to fight it with science, not with political activism.


The abstract should be self-contained, so any abbreviations used therein should be explained at first occurence (if a term occurs only once, then there is no need to introduce an abbreviation), and citations should be given in its full form (i.e., [Name, Journal, Volume, Pages, Year]). Then starting from the Introduction, one introduces abbreviations at their first occurence again, even if they were introduced already in the abstract.

And while I somewhat understand the desire to keep the Conclusions self-contained, too, at times when I wanted to do so either the reviewer or the language editor insisted that there should be only abbreviations once they are introduced. Personally, I don't like starting a sentence from an acronym, or a number, but the editors don't have such dillemas; so I usually just write so that there are none at the beginning of a sentence.

I once argued about it with the reviewer, but the language editor then again said to stick to abbreviations. I guess there are more chances to get it one's way in case of a very long paper (>50, or even >100 pages) for the sake of clarity.


Professor stopped replying about internship

It's summer (in the northern hemisphere), and many people take vacations or travel to conferences in summer, during which it may not be possible to answer emails.  So don't assume the professor is intentionally ignoring you.  If you haven't heard anything in another week or two, you could try again.


I graduated last year and my advisor passed away unexpectedly soon after. What should I do now for subsequent academic job searches?

This is a very difficult situation. As per the comment by Andy Putman, let your other letter writers explain the situation. Considering you got the Postdoc job, your current supervisor must have been impressed with what your advisor said in his letter. Your current supervisor can include a personal story about something your advisor said about you or even include a few of his favorite verbatim quotes about you from the letter of recommendation for your current postdoc. Anyone on a hiring committee will understand, and will possibly even be personally touched. This will not count against you.

I wouldn't send a copy of your postdoc letter in your application materials If your postdoc supervisor highlighted the strongest quotes from the advisor's letter. If he chooses not to do this or if your advisor's letter in its entirety is much stronger than the best few quotes from it and your postdoc supervisor still has the letter he could send it along with his letter.(note that in other fields this letter may be a bit inappropriate because it could contain a lot of detailed information about how you are a great fit for the particular postdoc position but as Pete points out this usually is not true in pure math).

Unfortunately this does not heal any wounds caused by the unfortunate passing away of your advisor and life long friend, but you should not worry about the letter writing situation. I can't say that I even begin to imagine the emotional pain of losing an advisor so close to graduation, but as someone who lost a parent while in college I greatly sympathize with you and I can think of no greater honor to your advisor than to continue in academia and continue doing great work.


Is it possible to do a cheap or free online or distance Ph.D. program?

To a first approximation, it's not possible.  There are few online or distance Ph.D. programs, and they usually have bad reputations.  A Ph.D. from a university with a bad reputation will actually be worse for your career than having no Ph.D. at all, so you should be very careful.  Plus these programs are as far as I know never free.  You can get financial support for Ph.D. work in several ways (competitive fellowships, a faculty member's research grant, teaching classes for the department), so depending on the field you may not need to pay anything yourself and may even earn a modest stipend, but that's not because the program itself is cheap or free.  Ph.D. supervision is intrinsically time-consuming and expensive.

I'm skeptical of how serious your question is.  Hoping for a free online Ph.D. isn't really reasonable; furthermore, if you have no time to attend a university, then you probably have no time to complete the years of full-time research required to write a Ph.D. dissertation.

However, I felt it was worth answering to warn you about scams from unaccredited universities.  There are plenty of diploma mills that will offer you a relatively cheap and easy Ph.D. online.  Such degrees are completely worthless, so they'd basically be stealing the fees from you.


Special character from an arXiv paper title displayed incorrectly in Google Scholar

I suspect that Google Scholar is getting the page title from the metadata of the arXiv page, which has the following title metadata (look at the HTML page source in your browser to see it):

  [1509.00976] In-Band $\alpha$-Duplex Scheme for Cellular Networks: A Stochastic Geometry Approach

The good news is, you can edit how your own papers appear in Google Scholar.

Create a Google Scholar account if you don't already have one. Then sign in to your account.
Click on "My Library."
Then click on the paper in question, click on "Edit," make your changes, and hit "Save."


Can a single co-authored paper be part of two stapled dissertations (by two people)?

Every university should have guidelines around how publications can be incorporated into a PhD thesis. The correct advice (as @Andreas notes) is to consult these guidelines. Furthermore, it seems that PhD by publication is becoming more popular and guidelines are evolving.

I'm familiar with various models of "PhD by publication". At my institution in Australia, the PhD student is expected to be first author on any major publication that forms part of a PhD by publication submission. They also need to attach a form for each publication outlining their contribution and the contribution of the other authors. The form needs to be signed by the other authors. Non-first-author publications can be included but they are intended more as supplementary contributions. Exactly what this means is a little open to interpretation.

By way of a concrete example, here is an example of such a policy (the policy at your university may differ):

  It is expected that the student will be the first author on the papers, as per 1 above; the number of co-authors is limitless. Students may be second or later authors on additional papers.

Thus, to answer your specific question, at my institution, a paper could be included in more than one PhD. However, the student who is first author would have a stronger inherent case for it being seen as an integral part of their thesis. Furthermore, the contributions of all authors would have to be explained.

You may want to consider practical alternatives such as thinking about how the work could form two papers where you each drive one paper as reflected in being first-author on that paper.


Should I number all formulas in published documents for citations?

The guideline for this is to use whatever method the journal to which you are submitting asks you to use.

As you indicate, many journals do this automatically, for exactly the reasons you suggest—to make it easier for others to cite and follow along your work. However, not all journals do this, and as a result, it's better to follow their guidelines instead of improvising.


Under Education, presumably you have a line for your Bachelor's.  You may also put a line for your Masters study -- perhaps something like this:

Start date: October, 2015 (tab) (name of degree, name of institution)


Citing published papers while using their pre-print versions

I'm going to answer from a (theoretical) computer science perspective.

For historical reasons, in computer science, the "published version" of the paper is likely to be much lower quality than the arxiv preprint. Conference proceedings typically have terrible page limits. Usually 8-12 pages are allowed, but I have heard of 4-page limits. Formally, the published version is not a full paper, it is an "extended abstract".

The standard practice in has become to cite the conference paper but to read the full version on arxiv. It's the only thing that makes sense given our publication system. I rarely bother to find the published version of papers I cite, even if they are readily available.

If it's standard practice in computer science, I struggle to believe that it is unethical in other fields. The arxiv version should be good enough and, if it isn't, it's the authors' responsibility to update it (or withdraw it).