None of 25 students at question session before exam has a question. What should lecturer do?

Some specific suggestions:

You likely know what material the students have been having issues with, based on questions from lecture, office hours, previous homework sets, or whatever. Mention those topics and review them.
Instead of asking for broad-based questions, go over the syllabus lecture by lecture, calling out specific topics by name and asking whether there was any issues with each of those. It'll help prime their memory.
Ask the TAs to attend. If that's not possible, ask them to send you common questions ahead of time. They also know what the students are finding difficult.


You’re applying for a job. Treat it like any other job application: write a cover letter, and attach your CV. If you aren’t sure how to do those things, consider doing a google search or asking your university’s career office.


Where is the latex template for IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health?

It seems JTEHM does not provide any template for LaTeX documents. The standard IEEE template is available with \usepackage{ieeetran} but it does not seems to be coherent with the word document provided (e.g. abstract), so it might need adaptation.


How much does college name matter for doctoral program application?

This answer applies to doctoral admissions in the US, and, while not universal, is pretty regular.
First, your successful admission will depend on a weighting of many things. There won't be a standard, published, weighting, but only the general sensibility of the individual faculty members on the admissions committee. Note that most (not all) doctoral admissions is by committee, not by individual PIs/advisors.
The important factors, varying for every candidate and for every committee member, in a rough order of importance, are grades, especially in the field for which you seek admission, letters of recommendation from professors, standardized exams (some places), writing ability in English (some places), research experience (more important if you have a MS, than otherwise), and intangibles. A gap or two in your education can normally be made up as most degree programs are relatively open ended in time.
Among the intangibles might be the place(s) at which you studied, but letter of recommendation from people who know you well would be much more important. A good student from a mid range place might be greatly preferred over a mediocre student from a great institution.
If your previous education is at relatively unknown places then it is likely to be ignored except in a few exceptional cases. If a university already has some experience with others from your place, then their success might help to make a prediction about yours. But it is, I think, much more likely to be a favorable impression made by a good student than the opposite situation.
And note that some great and demanding professors can be found at quite unknown universities. You can learn a lot from them.
The committee needs to make a fairly accurate prediction of the likely success of a candidate. Grades and supportive letters, along with prior research experience are very important. It is much more important what you have done so far and what others think of you, than other things.
Wherever you study, work hard, make a good impression. Stay in contact with professors who support you. But also know that the competition is very fierce.
Also note that most students in the US enter doctoral studies immediately after their bachelors degree. A MS is seldom required and can often be earned along the way.


I contacted the arXiv support, here's their reply:
"This is actually something we manually fix later in the process, after you submit. Our legacy perl based system does not handle utf gracefully. If you proceed with the submission as is or with Tom D\"orr we will change it to Tom D\"orr in the metadata so that it will be displayed correctly.
We are also in the process of updating our code base to python/flask that will support utf."


How to reference a website article of discussion between two people, posted by a third?

I would include as much bibliographic information as possible, but as long as the reader can unambiguously find the article I think that would suffice, and to find the article you need the author.

In your bibliography:

  Gooch, J (2013) Point-Counterpoint: Additive vs. Subtractive Rapid Prototyping. Webpage: http://www.rapidreadytech.com/2013/09/point-counterpoint-additive-vs-subtractive-rapid-prototyping/ [URL accessed: April 2015].

In your text you could use something like:

  Grimm, in Gooch (2013), states...


Supervisor wants me to withdraw from program

I used data from a publication but didn't cite it properly

It is hard to say from that description, but yes, that can qualify as academic dishonesty/misconduct and be grounds for removal from a program. That said, except in the most blatant and worst cases, programs, and universities, generally try and provide some other sort of punishment.

  some publications in journals not of a good standard and he started accusing me of lying

I cannot see how publishing your work would be grounds for dismissal under any circumstances. Lying obviously can be related to academic misconduct and be grounds for dismissal.

  got delayed in providing him with some research material and he plainly stated that he does not want to supervise me anymore.

Not meeting deadlines can be grounds for dismissal, but generally there is a procedure that most be followed. The fact that he does not want to supervise you anymore is probably the most problematic issue. Your program may require you to have a supervisor, if so, you will need to find a new supervisor.

It sounds like things are going poorly and a talk with the department chair (or head of graduate studies) is appropriate. If this is the first time you are talking to the department chair, then I highly doubt the conclusion of that meeting would be you being kicked out. The meeting might start the process of you being dismissed, but more likely, it will start the process of trying to improve your situation and resolve the issues.


Listing books read on a CV for undergraduate research in mathematics

How can I leverage this experience and incorporate it into my CV?

I'm not convinced there's any good way to incorporate this experience into your CV.  The basic problem is that it's unclear what it means to have studied a book: there's a huge range of levels of mastery that could all legitimately fall into this category.  Furthermore, many undergraduates have trouble accurately assessing their own knowledge and accomplishments, so a self-assessment of mastery is not convincing even if it's completely honest.  And of course honesty and bias are important issues.

The net effect is that these claims are vague, subjective, and unverifiable, which is exactly the opposite of what belongs in your CV.

You could always try to say something more precise.  For example, "I wrote out solutions to every problem in Hartshorne's algebraic geometry textbook" is much more compelling than "I studied Hartshorne" or "I mastered Hartshorne".  It's still not ideal; for example, it leaves open the question of whether your solutions were actually correct.  However, it at least gives a much clearer idea of how much you might have learned, and it allows the possibility of verification by requesting to see the solutions.  (Don't say this if you lost them!)

I wouldn't recommend trying to make precise claims like this for all your independent reading, since it would still come across as eccentric.  However, that would at least be a better option than just listing some books.


Bad advisor + a research area that interesets me or an active advisor + research topic that doesn't interest me?

I'm going to assume that by "bad reputation" that you don't mean that they actively impede and harass students. Avoid such advisors like the plague - which they are. The following only refers to situations in which "bad" means that they aren't very active in the field and are without much of a publication record.

If you really can't move to a more compatible place, then ask yourself how self directed are you and how much drive do you have to get it done on your own? If you have an advisor in analysis (my original field, actually) who is a decent person who will respond to your questions and concerns, even while not providing a lot of guidance, then you could probably be successful. It would be good training, actually, for an academic career, which you eventually need to be able to carry on by yourself. But it would take a lot of reading to find a good problem.

However, if you aren't that self directed and need a lot of guidance, then it might be best to choose an advisor from a related subfield if you can find one who will give you the external direction you need. It is a tradeoff, as are many things in life.

But study for Master's degree isn't forever. A lot of it is coursework most places and it isn't usually necessary to specialize so completely that you can't still keep a bit of generality in your program. (Yes, there are places in which that isn't true and where specialization is all, but not everywhere.)

Another option, if you have a good, compatible advisor, is to also seek advice on some aspects of your study via the internet from authors who write in your field. International collaboration is feasible now where it wasn't in the past.

My suggestion, then, is that the human qualities of an advisor, and a willingness to help you can be as important as an international reputation in the field.

But when/if it comes time to study for a doctorate, pick a place where you get more support for your field.

Note that this advice would be much less valuable for a doctoral advisor. There, the student probably needs more guidance.


How does the statement of purpose of students help professors to write letters of recommendation for graduate school application in U.S.?

The statement of purpose is helpful to me in writing a letter of recommendation for a student because I can say things in the letter that relate to the specific plans that the student has beyond the more general plan of entering a graduate program.

For example, a student might ask me to write a letter of recommendation for admission to a PhD program in applied mathematics at University X.  Knowing that the student plans to specialize in a subfield (say computational optimization) gives me the chance to write into the letter that the student is well prepared for graduate study in this area because of (whatever factors might be relevant, including specific courses taken, programming languages the student knows, etc.)  Those same experiences might not be relevant if the student wants to work in a different subfield.

Another reason for me to want to see the student's statement of purpose is so that I can provide helpful advice to the student.  Many students are naive and prepare draft statements that won't help and might actually hurt their chances of admission.  If I've read the draft statement I can suggest changes.  If it's really bad, then I might decide that I'm unwilling to write a recommendation letter for the student because it would reflect badly on me.

Ultimately it really doesn't matter why the recommender wants to see your statement- you're not in any position to demand a letter of recommendation, so you should provide whatever information the requestor asks you for.


I suspect that most people who ask about the possibility of doing multiple PhDs are missing something fundamental in what a PhD is and what it's for.  This is an understandable misperception because the general populace knows little about what PhD programs are all about, to the extent that even most people who enroll in a PhD program think they know what they're getting into and then find out that what they had in mind is an approximation to the truth (sometimes a good approximation and sometimes not).

In the various fictive media (novels, comic books, television, film...) having multiple PhDs -- often in confluence with a very youthful persona or explicitly pointed out that they were attained at an early age -- is a standard trope for a certain type of characterization: depending upon the genre it can signal super-genius types, intellectuals, or nerdy/socially awkward types.  For instance, Professor Charles Xavier graduated from Harvard at the age of 16, and he holds PhDs in Genetics, Biophysics, Psychology, and Anthropology as well as an MD in Psychiatry.  This is obviously meant to be a real-world grounding for his vast mental powers.  On the TV show House, the youthful medical student Martha Masters has previously attained PhDs in applied mathematics and art history, and the characterization is less positive: they are not trying to suggest that she's a genius per se -- House is the genius! -- but rather that she has an extremely overachieving personality type.

Of course, Charles Xavier and Martha Masters are fictional characters.  Moreover I imagine they were written by people who are not so familiar with PhD programs.  In real life, having PhDs in Genetics, Biophysics, Psychology and Anthropology is not the hallmark of a super-genius: rather it would mean that the person is pathologically obsessed with graduate study.  PhD's are not merit badges -- more of them is not better.  Rather a PhD is the necessary and grueling training for a specific type of professional career.

If you are interested in a subject then you read and learn about it.  You get a PhD in a subject because you want that subject to be an essential part of your career (which of course ought to imply that you are very interested in the subject).  Moreover, although the PhD provides specific technical training in a certain subject, it does not provide exhaustive training: in most cases people spend the rest of their careers continuing to train in these areas.  Rather the point of a PhD is to give you enough specific training so that you can henceforth direct your own training and learning.  Otherwise put, a lot of what you do in a PhD is learning how to learn.  But learning how to learn is actually a rather robust and subject-independent skill.  If you learn how to learn genetics, then if later on your interests turn to psychology or biophysics you will be in a much different and better position to train yourself in these areas.  In some ways, doing a PhD in one of these subjects and then turning around and doing another is like becoming an internet millionaire who wakes up one day and decides that she wants to sell electronics...so she shuts down her website, gives all her money away, and starts the business out of her parents' basement.  (Or maybe it is like what happens in some of my dreams: I am doing high school all over again, and somehow it is not going as well as it did the first time around.)  Why are you starting over from scratch?!?

It is true that "academic transfer" makes better sense between some fields than others.  If Martha Masters got a PhD in art history and then decided that she wanted to do applied mathematics instead then she would not have been able to "segue" from one field to the other: she would indeed have had to go back to school.  But that makes her story a bit sad: getting a PhD is very difficult and very time consuming, but it is not really a feat of strength, and getting two PhDs in two unrelated areas does not show how much of a super genius you are; it shows that you really changed your mind considerably about what you wanted to do with your life and maybe wasted a lot of your time.  No matter how smart you are, I don't see how you can get a PhD in art history and then one in applied mathematics without spending at least eight years.  You can't just skip to the end and pass the thesis defense by virtue of your preternatural brilliance: there is coursework, residence requirements, and various other mandatory things which necessarily take time.  Her character is comic-booky: it is not really plausible that she could have these two degrees and have gone on to be a medical student while still being in her 20's, no matter how brilliant.  [Well, "no matter how brilliant" is a little too strong: if she had graduated college at age 16, then the math works out okay...] Moreover, for someone who is that brilliant it would really be sad that she can't seem to figure out anything else to do besides infinite schooling.

Electrical engineering and mathematics are rather closely allied fields.  For sure do a PhD in one or the other.  While doing a PhD in either one you can choose the amount of involvement you have in the other field, i.e., you can do a very mathematical electrical engineering PhD or a math PhD on a mathematical topic with important applications in electrical networks.  Then after you get your PhD you can continue to learn and train in one or both fields as you see fit.  It is entirely plausible that you could land an academic job in one department while having gotten your PhD in the other department.  This is an ambitious goal, but any academic job is an ambitious goal.  Getting the second PhD is unlikely to be directly helpful once you have it, let alone worth the sacrifice of 4-6 years of your life!

Added: By the way, when you mention "mathematics" and "electrical engineering": I think of Raoul Bott, a brilliant and beloved professor whose long career at Harvard ended while I was studying there.  I think that his story will be inspirational for many people with this confluence of interests.  Check out his bio: he balanced his early interest in these two fields nicely...and only needed one PhD.


As an editor, what measures can I implement to prevent image/photo manipulation?

I think a search term for this type of manipulation detection is image forensics.  Matthias Kirchner: Notes on Digital Image Forensics and
Counter-Forensics may be a starting point.

What can you do?

I think a first step is to communicate clearly what image manipulations* are acceptable and which are not:

is it acceptable to adjust brightness and contrast?
correct unequal illumination?
whitelight correction based not on a whitelight measurement but on parts of the image?
digital sharpening or other enhancement filters?
where's the border between an inset picture and a fraudulent manipulation?

and so on.

Who should detect this?

I agree that the reviewer should have commented and asked about the pictures above, however my experience as reviewer is that I often get pictures in ridiculously low resolution (I comment on that). I'm not sure, but I think that the publishers may ask for high resolution pictures when they spot such problems in the production process. However, that would mean that the reviewers may not have seen the actual picture that is used for printing.

* manipulation in the data analysis sense: calculations that change the information content (e.g. enhance contrast), and cannot be easily undone (as opposed to a transformation where the back transformation is easily possible, e.g. rotation), not in the sense of fraud.


Here's how I would feel about various expressions of thanks, for something like writing a letter of recommendation:

No response at all: I might be a little disappointed but if I am busy I might not even notice.  Some people might be more offended.
Email saying thank you: Feels perfectly sufficient to me.
Handwritten note: A very thoughtful gesture.
Token gift (small box of candy, desk trinket, etc): Appreciative but slightly embarrassed.
Gift of non-negligible monetary value: Quite embarrassed.  I would probably gracefully try to decline it.
Gift of money, in any amount: Very uncomfortable.  Feels like a bribe.  I'd refuse.

Of course this could vary by culture (I'm in the US).

Regarding gifts for an advisor: A common tradition is to give your advisor a nicely bound copy of your dissertation, for their reference and as a memento.    (Also be sure to thank them in the dissertation!)  You could accompany it with a nice personal note.  But again, I wouldn't suggest anything of significant value.


How to deal with students asking very incremental questions?

You refer to a "quick back-and-forth" in your question. A danger with being too responsive is that it becomes easier for a student to ask the TA than it would be to reason it out on his own, look up material from earlier lectures or from the Internet, etc. It also encourages students to "check in" with the TA more often, e.g. about tiny changes to their code.

Perhaps limiting your responsiveness could help. For example, announce that you will visit Piazza at 4 PM every weekday and answer all the questions that have accrued since your last visit. Don't answer questions multiple times per day.

That way, students won't expect immediate "coaching" from the TA, and might be more motivated to work through small problems themselves.


Am I obligated to continue to work on a paper I contributed significantly to?

I think the Golden Rule applies here. While you have no obligation to act against your own self-interest here, if you were in your former collaborators' position, you would probably be rather unhappy at being blocked from publication because one co-author is no longer available.

Is your preference to not work on this paper at all, or just to limit the amount of time you spend on it? From your collaborators' point of view, a few hours of your time might be  sufficient to avoid blocking the publication, while not placing much of a burden on you. It's perfectly OK to tell your collaborators, "I'd like to help, but I have many other demands on my time right now. I can devote 4 hours this Sunday to helping you get this publication ready, please let me know how I can use this time in a way that is most helpful to you."

On the other hand, if a few hours is really unmanageable to you right now, just tell them this, and let them know if you expect to have a little more time in the near future.

I suggest that you learn from this experience going forward, and make sure to document your work in sufficient detail for others to follow before you leave any research project.


Looking for advices to stay motivated working with my master degree advisor

I did my bachelors and master degree in Mathematics in one of the country's top institute, but due to some reason, I am currently doing my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering department in another country and the university is also top in the country.

After joining Ph.D., I realize that as a Mathematics student, I do not like the research problems given to me by my supervisor. But there is one problem in which a lot of probability theory (very advanced level) is needed. I have started on my own to tackle this problem and after a year or so I have on my own progressed and published and also found a few other workable problems completely from a probability theory perspective. If I progress on these problems and publish then I am sure within the next 2–3 years I can start writing a thesis.

I must tell you since my supervisor is not a probabilist there is zero input from his side. I hope you can do on your own too. I feel sometimes the same way as you. But I really like the area I am in now. So at the end of the day, you have to find a problem and solve it, there will be rarely you and your supervisor both thinking and solving the problem together in my opinion.


how to express my thought to my supervisor without being disrespectful?

My personal recommendation would be to say you're trying to complete your PhD with a university that specializes in your field of study/research. I would also recommend a certain level of honesty (not saying their school isn't as respected, just that you're trying to get into a school that is well known and respected for your specific pursuit.)

Most people working in education understand and respect the pursuit of knowledge, not that they aren't unhappy about losing people, but they either respect you, or they don't. Either way you must do what's best for you.


How can I remove a verified google-scholar account?

Deletion of the entire linked Google account worked in my case.

I used to have a Google Scholar profile through a Google account at a corporation but when they (unwillingly) deleted my account, the Google Scholar automatically got deleted. Considering Google did not get back to you, it might be worthwhile to get in touch with your old university to see if they could permanently delete your account.


What are the pros and cons of doing a PhD in a small research group compared to a large research group?

The individuals involved are more important than the size of the group.  Different faculty have different management styles.


In-text citation for research paper. How to look for a "source" when a reference is an article on a website?

when you are citing a particular document or piece of information from a website, include both a reference list entry and an in-text citation.

The key to creating the reference list entry is to determine the type of content on the web page. Basically, provide the following four pieces of information:
Author, A. (date). Title of document [Format description]. Retrieved from http://xxxxxxxxx

The in-text citation includes the author and date (Author, date), as with any other APA Style citation.

You can read more about this from the APA style guide website at: http://www.apastyle.org/learn/quick-guide-on-references.aspx

Check out the "More Information" section for further clarification on what to do if there is no author, year or page numbers.

I hope this is what you were asking.  Andy ;-)


Seeking publishing advice for an academic textbook

One factor you should keep in mind is that most academics consider publication to be permanent.  Books used to go out of print because it was economically infeasible to keep them available, but with print on demand and electronic publishing, there's a broad expectation that anything available now will remain available forever under similar terms.  This doesn't really apply to standardized low-level textbooks, which can disappear if unsuccessful and are regularly replaced with new editions if successful, but it applies to anything with noteworthy scholarly content.  Based on your stackexchange contributions, I bet your book will fall into this category (and I'm certainly looking forward to reading it).

In particular, if you publish a book through KDP and later withdraw it to do something else with the book, you may upset people.  I'd certainly be unhappy if I had decided to use the book in a course (or had recommended it widely to students) on the basis of price, only to discover that it had abruptly been removed from KDP and now cost substantially more from another publisher.

I assume you would have to remove it from KDP, and couldn't keep it there while publishing a paper edition elsewhere.  It doesn't seem impossible, but it's not plausible that another publisher would put work into promoting a book that was available much more cheaply online from a rival publisher.

I don't know how academic publishers would react to having had a previous edition published by KDP.  I'd bet they would be open to it in principle, the same way other books occasionally move between publishers when the rights are available, but I also suspect they'd worry about anchoring to a very low price.  I think the only way to know for sure is to ask representatives (for example, you can easily chat with them in person at big conferences), since reluctance to do this could easily vary between publishers.

I'd also keep two additional factors in mind:

Academics who are enthusiastic about electronic publishing are often wary of digital rights management.  By emphasizing this aspect, KDP may decrease some of the enthusiasm for this approach.
If your book is not particularly successful on KDP, it may undermine your negotiating position with mainstream publishers.  This means you may need a plan to get publicity for your book, since you won't have advertising (outside of the Amazon ecosystem) or bookstore sales.  There are a lot of factors that are difficult to predict.  For example, will anyone publish book reviews if the book appears to be essentially self published and you are said to be seeking a mainstream publisher?  If there are no reviews, it will hurt your visibility; if there are reviews, they probably won't review it again upon finding another publisher, which might lower other publishers' enthusiasm for taking it on.


I suspect that the intent of the question is to have you explain things that you did completely unrelated to your career and to your field. As such, the things you describe don't seem to qualify. I don't think they are necessarily asking about breaks in your academic progress (time between degrees), but they might be interested in that.

But the sorts of things you did prior to the doctorate would seem, to me, to be supportive of your case for the position and so should be mentioned somehow in your CV whether in this "section" or just in a narrative.

Some people need to take a career break to care for an ailing parent or child, for example, or because they are in jail (oops). In such breaks it may be impossible to do much professionally. Those need to be explained if they last more than a few months.


What motivates professors to train Ph.D students who aren't nearly as smart as them in their schooldays?

As often happens, I'd disagree with significant parts of the implicit and explicit premises of the question.

For example, "as good as" traditionally makes most "sense" in the solitary-hero model of mathematics, in which there is some mystical gift/talent/genius without which one cannot reach the statospheric regions... blah-blah-blah. Further, "fast problem solving" is easy to see, but not much related to serious, long-term research enterprises, so to think about "solving problems faster" is misguided (I claim).

Yes, it is convenient for an individual (as it was to some degree for me years ago) to do well in contests, because this is an easy "success" to put on one's resume. In contrast, a natural affection for mathematics is hard to document, hard to "show", and so on. Many in my cohort at Princeton years ago had done very well on the Putnam, but turned out to not really like genuine mathematics (without quick gratification) enough to finish their PhD.

And, really, should one care in one's heart about the prestige of one's workplace? Sure, in some practical regards it may have advantages in pay and "status", but there are equally obvious downsides: pressure to generate status, as possibly opposed to genuinely advancing our collective understanding (for example). Tension and stress. Who needs it?

My own preference is for students who are genuinely interested in math, as opposed to viewing it as a career choice or a vehicle for ego. (E.g., some of my students who manifested a sort of mathematical "Oedipal" complex created needless troubles for themselves, and saddened me as well.)

To my mind, the operational difficulty in making interesting, genuine contributions to advancement of our collective understanding is not our "lack of heroic genius", but the commodification of research, and corporatization of universities, insofar as it leads to a fake objectification of "research". For example, success as measured by federal funding dollars. Srsly? The federal government as font of sage wisdom about human knowledge? "Even" NSF is driven by its accountability to congress, and certainly never having enough money to fund all the reasonably worthwhile projects people propose.

In summary, I like talking about interesting (to me) mathematics with people who are willing to not try to sucker-punch me or prove they're "better than me", but, instead, "focus on the math". Likewise, I have no interest in "proving I'm better than" anyone else, because I am less interested in those feral (if typical human...) interactions than in understand mathematics better.

The backstory on my possibly-extreme context for valuation of mathematics is that while I greatly enjoyed reading a variety of mathematics books in the public library as a kid, I had no idea at all that a person could make a living by doing such stuff, and was entirely prepared to just "think about math" as a hobby after 5:00 pm at some engineering job. The idea of teaching high school math was out of the question (crowd control), and community college was barely plausible (and pay not so good). The idea that one could teach "as little as 15 hours a week" and think about math the rest of the time and get paid pretty well was amazing and unfathomable to me at the time.

Plus, I claim that "math is not so hard", if portrayed less strictly-orthodox-ly than is common when "requirements" are used as a club to beat people with. That is, the ground question is interest and aesthetic, not "genius" (which is kinda a fake thing anyway).

(It is true that some people think their students should go off by themselves and come back only when they've done something amazing, but this seems to me a pathetic waste of the (supposed) accumulated knowledge/wisdom of more experienced people... This ultra-Spartan model connects to the bad hero-model, in my opinion.)

Wait, what was the question? :)

EDIT: ... and I should add that the main benefit of going to a fancy place for grad school was to get the idea that mathematics was not the dreary, grim, tedious, ugly thing that it may be portrayed by people who feel that they are inadequate, or don't really like it after all, but are "in too deep". That was a great relief!!!


English lit journals publishing graduate-level works

Theoretically, your status as student, senior lecturer or professor should not matter in terms of publish in a journal. If your idea is original and your research is relevant and situated in the current debates of the scientific community, then try to publish your texts. Talk to your professors or supervisors about it and tell them about your plan. Maybe, they have suggestions and can give you feedback on the text that you have in mind for submission.  Nevertheless, keep in mind, that your term paper or master thesis is not a journal article. I guess, you have to do a lot to rewriting and re-structuring your text that it will eventually become a published article. Moreover, publishing a text takes a lot of time (from submitting to the final version to get an onlinefirst publication, it can take 1-2 years). I don't know in which year of your master program you are, but eventually, the publication might happen after you are already accepted as a PhD candidate ;)

There are probably student-run journals who especially address young scholars to submit their papers. For this, just google...
 Literally, I just searched for it and found 2 websites which might be relevant for you: https://complit.fas.harvard.edu/journalsconferences-graduate-students and http://www.highpoint.edu/urcw/student-journal-publishing-opportunities-politics-international-affairs-law-2/


Can I write my affiliation from a current university though I did my work in my previous university?

There are two ways of handling this that I can think of, but regardless, I'm pretty sure your current affiliation should be used for your "official affiliation".

You can include a footnote or some other appropriate comment on the first page that says where the work was done. I did this once when I relocated to a new job while the paper was under review. See Additional information here (which appears without the label "Additional information" at the bottom of the first page of the actual paper).

You can include this information in an Acknowledgments section at the end.

In my case, we simply told our contact editor during the proof stage, after acceptance, that the work was done before a job change, and the journal decided how to handle this. This is surely something that occurs not all that infrequently for the journal (and presumably also for most any journal), so I suspect what they did was in their editors' "style manual" (or whatever passes for one at the journal).
My feeling is that if you include this information in an Acknowledgments section, then you probably don't need to say anything before doing so. If you'd rather not do this in an Acknowledgements section, then because journals often have certain styles for first page information and for footnotes, it's probably best to ask your contact editor, after acceptance, how they wish this to be handled.


Peer-correction / evaluation of homework

Peer evaluation (offline) is common in many universities and schools.

It is beneficial for students to see what their peers have written and to learn from their own and their peer's mistakes and strengths.

However, a well-formulated evaluation matrix would be necessary for objective evaluation.

In my University, short papers are almost always evaluated by students themselves. There is blinding and we even attempted three independent, blinded evaluations and awarded the maximum marks obtained if and only if all the three evaluations were within 15% difference range.

Hope this helps.


Is a PhD right for you if you hate doing research in your free time but love doing it as a job?

The other answers already explain that no, you shouldn't be doing research all the time, with no time for breaks, relaxation and other interests. All this is quite correct.

However, I am a bit unsure whether the stark dichotomy "all research all the time" versus "a few hours in the morning" is really helpful here. Maybe an answer to the following question is more helpful:

Is doing a Ph.D. right for you if you plan on doing it as a 9-5 job, 40 hours per week?

And there, I would be a bit more careful. Yes, there are people who can do a Ph.D. like a "normal job", at their desk at 9am sharp and dropping their pencils at 5pm. It is possible. However, my personal impression is that these people will avoid the typical Ph.D. burnout, but they will likely not be top performers. So my answer to the modified question above is:

You will probably do fine with a 40 hour workweek, if you make sure to stay self-motivated. However, you should think deeply about just why you want to do a Ph.D... because unless you are uncommonly brilliant, you will likely not be productive enough to stay in academia and compete with people who routinely put in 50-60 hours per week. You may want to think about leaving academe with the Ph.D. and going into industry.

Note that I am not saying "40 hour Ph.D. students" are lazy. However, if you can't work up the level of passion and commitment to your topic that makes you want to put in 50-60 hours per week often, then there will likely be someone else, and that someone else will have more publications five or ten years down the road.


Review asks me to demonstrate "what is the new thing done"; what should I write?

First, it is important to clearly arrive at a conclusion that shows how the manuscript contributes to our unerstanding of the matter at hand. The referee apparently thinks your paper is lacking in this respect.

Second, in most journals it is not up to the referee to decide if a papepr is published or not, the editor(s) decide based upon recommendations from the referees (usually more than one). So is there a second referee? and if so what did that person say?

You should revise your manuscript and think about the conclusions. Make them clearer as suggested if you think you can. Such comments froma referee usually mean that the manuscript is not as clear as you may think and it is necessary to critically view your work and see if you can improve it. If you cannot, you should provide a note to the editor to meet the criticism of the referee which should entail why the improvements cannot be made. That would make a decision on the faith of the manuscript easier and more clear to the editor (which I suspect is involved).


How do we keep ourselves humble as researchers and intellectuals?

Staying down to Earth is different from being humble. Having concrete, non-lofty goals is different from being humble.

The current academic environment does not encourage people to be humble, quite to the contrary. I am seeing many people whose career is built on preposterous grandeur.

What is different from being humble and a selling point is having a plan on how to make progress. If you have got lofty goals, fine, but then you better have a thought-through plan on how to make concrete progress in achieving your lofty goal.

Knowing what you are talking about will set you apart from the crowd that just emits shedloads of buzzwords.


Is it okay to inquire about the status of a paper when the online submission system shows no update three months after submission?

Yes, you should send a quick email asking for an update. In my experience, every electronic manuscript submission/tracking system seem to be different. Even different journals from the same publisher who use a unified log in system, seem to have tweaks to what you see. I think that after one month at any one stage, with the exception of "under review", it is perfectly reasonable, and probably desirable, to ask for a status update. The time a manuscript spend "under review" is often very field, and even journal, specific and can range from days to 12+ months.

When sending an email, be polite and explain that you just want to make sure that you do not need to do anything at the current stage. In all likelihood the status update will be no more informative than "we are working on it" (i.e., they haven't lost it), but that is informative.


It is part of your experience, so should go in. It also shows, to a degree, that there's more to your life than just science, making you appear more rounded. It also explains the age discrepancy.

However, should the place you're applying for require a nerd, who would appear totally immersed in the task in hand,  it may be considered that you have a somewhat butterfly approach - trying out something, but not following it through.

Some thought will be needed considering the c.v., and be more mindful of the recipients of it. Thus tailor it to the exact post applied for: tell them what they need to know. Or what you think they need to know...


I would say to list it, for a couple of reasons:

It does show that you are hardworking, 2 concurrent Masters degrees completed and completed to a great standard.
Practically, it further demonstrates the abilities necessary to research, synthesise information, draw valid conclusions from a wide range of sources.

Also, you put in the effort, why not 'show off' your good work. By steering your Literature Masters in a biological direction with your topic of tropical diseases, you have also shown how this long-standing and serious issue (tropical diseases) have been portrayed to the non-scientific community.


How to get a "teaching letter" when I don't want my department to know I'm looking for a job?

As noted in my response to @strongbad, I recommend against being open about job searches if you're in a T-T position. You don't have to look far to find a lot of horror stories about chairs and senior faculty making life difficult for the 'uppity' young faculty member "who thinks s/he is too good for this school." Best to keep plans close to the chest until you're at a more definitive place in a search.

So that being said...

First, if you have a trusted friend at a nearby college who is in the same or related discipline, you might ask them to do an observation and evaluation of your teaching.

Second, your college's teaching center may be able to do an evaluation but this involves you trusting them not to spill the beans.

Finally, if this is a middle or senior position (i.e. Associate or Full) you can ask in your cover letter that because you the need for discretion because you are already in a tenure-track position, that the request letters be delayed until you make the long short list. This at least buys you time and puts you in a difficult situation only if you're a serious candidate.

I've seen this done and it's not an unusual request. You can suggest that you will provide your full teaching evaluations and portfolio in lieu of a letter until you make the long-short list.


Can a professor require that I collect personal data from family members for an assignment?

Can my professor require, at the penalty of point loss, that I actually contact my family members?

No, because for all the professor knows, you might be an orphan without any living family members.

However, I suspect the request is meant in less literal a way than what you are taking it for. You should clarify this with your professor.

The issue is that the professor probably wants to create such an assignment that involves a number of subjects, without overburdening any third parties, while at the same time avoiding that everyone asks their classmates and all answers to the assignment are based upon essentially the same sample.

Some examples of similar suggestions to students that I find completely normal:

"Have your girlfriend/boyfriend proofread your thesis before submitting it."
"Ask your parents to use your prototype before running the study."

None of these means that you really need to ask these specific people, or that you shouldn't ask anyone else. They are just a way to express that you should find someone that probably only you are in touch with (so these other persons do not have to spend days for answering the requests of dozens of students), someone who might possibly have a different background (which, depending on the task, might be desirable), and at the same time someone who you can reasonably ask for such a favour without coming across as too demanding.

In these examples, the exemplary nature of the mentioned roles is usually understood; at least, I have yet to see a student who would truly respond to the first (w.l.o.g.) request: "Ok. But I can't have my thesis proofread because I don't have a girlfriend/boyfriend." Of course, it's just an example of a single person who might or might not exist or be available.

The request by your professor, in contrast, to ask "dozens of family members", seems a bit extreme in comparison, but as a bottom line, you should still try to find out whether it wasn't just an example.

  Or can I provide obviously fake data?

This, in contrast, might be counterproductive. You already wrote you were going to inform your professor if you do so, but better do this earlier than later. In most situations that I can think of, using an arbitrary group of real people as a sample for something is a closer match to one's real family members than making up that data.

The issue I'm seeing become apparent when considering the possible pedagogical goals of the assignment:

The professor wants to point out a phenomenon that typically appears in data from real people. In this case, fake data will probably not exhibit the respective traits and thus will be worthless in this respect.
The professor wants you to get the experience of interviewing real people. Obviously, this experience is not gained from producing artificial data.

In contrast, the following education achievement that you might be reaching is probably not aimed for:

The professor wants you to practice ways to create a realistic set of artificial data. If that were the task, the assignment would have asked you to generate artificial data right away.

Therefore, my two suggestions are:

Asking another group of people rather than your family members should be accepted by the professor. You may want to ask the professor, even though personally, I might even do so without commenting on it.
Producing fake data, even when known to the professor, might be counterproductive to the goals of the assignment, and therefore should definitely first be discussed.


My Professor is pushing me in a problem that isn't solvable for the deadline

So, if I understood you correctly, your professor wants you to run some time consuming program on the data, and it will not be finished before the deadline for your graduation, right?

If that is the case, you can just include in your report the subset of your data that is finished, indicating that the rest is being processed. Try to make that sample as representative of the whole, if that makes sense in your case (so, if your data goes from x=0 to x=100, try to get evenly spaced values of x, not just from x=0 to x=1.5).
 After all, what you need to show for an undergrad project is that you know how to do research, but not necessarily get results all the way.

Another thing is that if in four days only 1% has been processed, it would take a full year to process the whole dataset. You seem to need* either more computer power, or rethink the strategy; but now you have some hard data to bring up to your professor. Then, it is up to him to decide if he can get access to more CPU muscle, or if a compromise in the quality is acceptable.

Check also your cluster occupancy. If you are sharing it with other students with the same deadline, it is possible that it very crowded; more resources may be available after the deadline has passed.


Is it possible to be admitted to graduate programs in subjects one minored in in undergraduate?

In the U.S., for graduate work in mathematics, even a minimal major in mathematics is not really adequate preparation for a good graduate program in mathematics. Not enough coursework, which means insufficient exposure to higher-level ideas (assuming, as is apparently mostly the case, there's not much interaction with mathematics outside coursework). Even though various engineering programs require quite a bit of mathematics, in my observation the topics exactly do not get to fourth-year mathematics, so that exactly rigorous analysis, abstract algebra, point-set topology are not seen. The latter are a very minimal preparation for graduate work in mathematics of almost any sort. Still, if there's room for those courses in a "minor", then some minimum thresh-hold would be reached for appearing to be prepared for math grad school.


Recourse for patently unfair make-up exam?

Given that exams are difficult to create, especially make-up exams, it is just possible that it will work out when the instructor sees the results. I doubt that it was any sort of 'retaliation'. Wait for the grades and have a conversation.

It is too early to take action until you see the actual results and their effect.

Let me note that for some sorts of exams, writing intelligently about the problem is enough. If the problems are especially difficult then it may not really be possible under exam constraints to find a proper solution. But if what you write is "sensible", and demonstrates that you have the required knowledge, it may be enough, depending on the person interpreting the results. In any case, it is pretty much impossible to treat the results as "equivalent" to those of the normally given exam. A sensible instructor will recognize this.


How do I ask a professor for a summer research project?

I get many letters of this kind, and I now summarily delete them without replying. Let me explain why.

Money: it's never clear in these letters what kind of support the student wants/expects. The default assumption is that I would pay for them, and as an academic with limited resources, I have very little incentive to pay for an undergraduate to travel  from India to the US to work with me, especially when it's unlikely they'll be able to do much in three months. Which brings me to
Project timeline: most letters of this kind are of the form "I'm interested in BROAD TOPIC A and want to work with you because you're interested in NARROW TOPIC B". For a three month internship to work, a project has to be very focused, and set from day 1. There's no time to explore.
Self-interest: There's very little gain for me here, or at least none that's mentioned in the letters. If I want to hire an undergraduate, I can do it locally. I can even get financial support (sometimes) for doing that. I can't do that with a student from abroad, and I can't even vet them in advance.

So any successful letter needs to address these three issues very effectively and quickly (because I delete these emails without reading more than a few lines).

Having said that, I know of at least one example where a student came from India to work with a colleague and that summer project turned into an application to grad school. The student is now at my university.


Is there a tool like the Open Science Framework that can be run on a private server?

Moritz,

Jeff here--I'm the co-founder and CTO of the Center for Open Science--developers of the OSF. First off, I'm happy to hear that you like the OSF. While this doesn't answer your question necessarily, you have a few options if you'd still like to use our service:

It sounds like you're interested in encryption of data at rest, which is something we don't yet offer for OSF storage, although all data is encrypted during transmission. Of course you could encrypt the data before uploading it, but that's probably not an ideal solution. With that said, Amazon S3 (one of the services we connect to) offers encrypted buckets (so you'd get encryption of data at rest in a cloud service), and we make that option available via the OSF. Alternatively, you could install Dataverse on your own server and connect that to the OSF. Owncloud and Gitlab connections are coming soon--both storage services you can also host on your own machines. These latter services don't offer encryption of data at rest, but they wouldn't be hosted in the cloud.

Depending on your needs re:storage, there are a few other options that I'd be glad to talk to you about. For example, I haven't tried it, but I think you could install the open source Minio server (which has an S3 compatible API) and connect to the OSF via our S3 add-on. We might need to make a few tweaks with regards to authentication, but we could look into adding that to the feature queue, or we always appreciate pull requests if you have developer time. You mentioned a donation, so if you did have some money for something like this, we could see if someone in the community would be interested in a bounty/grant. Alternatively, you could directly hire a developer or an intern to make the necessary changes and contribute code back to the code-base--making that add-on available to the rest of the community.

So, lots of options, and we're happy to help support community-initiated endeavors like this. Feel free to get in touch with us at support at osf dot io or reach out to me directly at jeff at cos dot io. Hope to hear from you!


How do I cite an article with no page numbers and only a DOI number (APA format)?

According to the 6th edition of APA:

When using the exact words or a close paraphrase or summary of a source, a page number must be provided as part of a complete in-text citation. However, some publications (such as websites) have no numbered pages. To help readers locate the words being cited, include one or both of these elements:

Paragraph number (counted by yourself or as indicated in the text)
Main heading or sub-heading within the text (if available and appropriate)

So, if you are using a direct citation the approach with manually counted paragraph number and sub-heading section is recommended. The link above provides the following example:

According to the 2012 Canadian Survey on Disability, “[o]ver 11% of Canadian adults experienced one of the three most prevalent disability types: pain, mobility or flexibility” (Statistics Canada, 2013, para. 2)

However, if you are referencing for a purpose other than direct quotation or a close paraphrase, you can simply use 1–N, where N is the number of pages in the cited paper:

Simon, S. L., Field, J., Miller, L. E., DiFrancesco, M., & Beebe, D. W. (2015). Sweet/dessert foods are more appealing to adolescents after sleep restriction. PLoS ONE, 10, 1–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115434


Postdoc with full-time appointment while doing business part-time

We try not to give legal advice on this forum, so the legal question of whether or not (and if so how) you can have a business on the side is one that you probably need to ask a potential employer.

But I do want to comment on a separate point. As you point out, being a postdoc is a tiring phase of your life. In essence, people who want to be postdocs do so because they aspire to getting faculty positions in their next career step. I suspect that that is the same for you.

The reason why being a postdoc is so tiring is because you're competing with others for these few faculty positions: it's not necessarily that your job description requires you to work 60 hours a week, but that you feel like you need to because you see all of these other postdocs crank out 3 or 4 papers a year, and these other postdocs are your competition. So, if you are thinking of running a business on the side, then you need to be aware of the fact that that curtails your productivity compared to other postdocs, and that that in itself curtails your chances to get a faculty positions because you will have less to show on your CV.

If you know that your chances of getting a faculty position will be significantly diminished, and you still keep your side business, then you ought to ask yourself why you want to become a postdoc.


First off, please note that IANAL.

That said, the Copyright Transfer Agreement is what ACM used to be doing to everyone: when you publish with the ACM, you transfer your copyright to them, and thus lose ownership of your creative work. The ACM has been receiving criticism for this as the Open Access movement has gained momentum.

The Publishing License seems to be their response to this criticism: with the Publishing license, you retain copyright yourself, and instead grant ACM a specified list of rights:

An exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, transferable and sublicenseable license to publish, reproduce and distribute the work in any way they feel like — including to hand these right on to other parties.
A non-exclusive permission to publish, reproduce and distribute any software, artistic images and auxiliary materials.
These rights “infects” any minor revisions (derivative work with less than 25% new substantive material).

I don't actually know what the exact implications here will be — the conditions are restrictive, but the copyright remains with the author.


emailing contacts after applying for faculty jobs

It is a good idea to reach out to your connections at the places you apply. You want to

let them know that you are applying,
express your enthusiasm about the place,
remind them briefly about your research,
ask them to bring the application to the attention of their colleagues on the search committee.

For example:

  Dear Susan [or Dr. Williams, if you are not on a first-name basis],

  I was intrigued to see the recent advertisement for a faculty position in the area of cosmological neuroeconomics in your department. While I have a year left on my postdoc, your program matches my interests so well that I did not want to pass up the opportunity to apply. Moreover, I've always loved New England and would leap at a chance to move back to the area.

  I know we had a chance to talk about my work on hypothetical ultimatum games in extraterrestrial populations at the San Francisco meeting last summer, but you may not know that I've started to move into the area of inflationary neuroimaging. I have [list a few findings or directions here].  As such, I feel that I would bring an important set of skills to your department that is already so strong in this area.

  If you think that I might be a good fit for your department, I'd be most grateful if you would bring my application to the attention of your colleagues on the search committee.

  Best wishes and see you at AACNE in Chicago next summer.

  Sincerely,

  John Smith

You are not asking for a special favor or doing anything inappropriate. Instead, you are doing your colleague a favor by letting her know that your application is in the pool, and you are doing their department a favor by helping them sort through the hundreds of applications that a department may receive.


Do graduate school admissions committees care about an official bachelors degree, or just the relevant coursework?

Short answer: You will almost certainly need an official bachelor's degree.

Long answer: Your main obstacle here is not the admissions committee, but the requirements of the university you'd be applying to. Any university in the US surely has it written down officially in multiple places that Masters and PhD students must hold a bachelor's degree (or its foreign equivalent) before enrolling. I believe doing otherwise may even get the university in trouble with their accreditation board.

Even if there are exceptional circumstances under which this rule can be broken, the university would have to really want you. "Pretty competitive" won't cut it. And indeed, why (from their point of view) should they admit you now if they could admit you in a year, after you have more training under your belt?


Coauthor used large part from common paper almost verbatim in another paper

The submitted manuscript is proof enough that you also have worked on the results he published alone. You have authorship rights over all the content of the manuscript, do not worry searching for proofs that you have worked on those particular lines.

You should contact your collaborator and ask for a retraction of the article. If he disagree with that, you should contact the editor and send proofs that the results were submitted before in another journal, which breaks one of the rules your collaborator accepted when submitting to this journal: "The manuscript/results shall not be/were not submitted anywhere else.".

This is very serious because if the editor handling your manuscript find the other publication with the same results he will reject the manuscript and, worse, your co-author could be accused of self-plagiarism.


(Australia) Conjoint senior lecturer? Do they teach?

I used to hold a senior position in a Group of Eight university in Australia. At my old university, conjoint appointments ranged from Lecturer (Level B) to Professor (Level E). Conjoint appointments were not allowed at Associate Lecturer (Level A) level.

In return for the appointment, conjoints were expected to fill roles as negotiated by the Head of Department. They were paid a specific rate for their time, but this was NOT a regular salary; they were contractual employees. Some provided lectures or workshops or seminars, others were tutors, yet others supervised students on placement, others were "prestige" conjoints who featured on websites and other marketing material like prized chooks on display.

All conjoints received an email account, library access, facilities access (such as the gym or childcare), and (perhaps most importantly) has some limited parking privileges.

I hope this helps.

*Edited to correct pesky typos.


Why has the status date changed while the status remains unchanged at "Editor Assigned"?

Most likely someone touched the submission, but the status didn't advance. My guess would be that an editor was assigned but declined, and they've assigned another editor.

In any case it's not something to worry about, because it's just the journal's interior processes over which you have no control.


Referring a paper which is still under publication

I would make a distinction between whether your paper has been presented at a conference and whether it has appeared in IEEE Xplore.

If it has already been presented, then it's out there in the community and, in my opinion, it is entirely reasonable to take advantage of IEEE's self-archiving options and post it on a personal or institutional website where it can be readily found by search engines.  There is no reason to wait for the (sometimes painfully slow) updating of the IEEE Xplore database.

If it has yet to appear, however, then I would recommend instead attaching it as supplementary material, if possible.


Can mathematics professors do consulting work external to their university?

Is it generally true that mathematics professors do not / cannot engage in consulting work external to their universities?

No, it's not true. Doing external consulting may be less common among mathematics professors than among faculty in certain other academic disciplines, but it's fairly common nonetheless. The professor would need to make sure that the consulting arrangement they are entering into is compatible with their other responsibilities, and specifically (in connection to the theory you mentioned in the question) the intellectual property policy of their university. While this issue is not something to be casually dismissed and certainly it can create difficulties in some cases, there are still many consulting opportunities in which the work the professor wants to do would not be in conflict with their institutions' IP policies. Examples may include:

The professor is on unpaid leave from their institution so the IP policy doesn't apply.
The professor is doing the consulting over the summer when they are not receiving a salary, so again the IP policy doesn't apply.
The consulting work is of a kind that generates deliverables such as code or data analysis that the IP policy doesn't apply to. Specifically, in the U.S. all university IP policies I'm familiar with apply only to patentable inventions and do not cover copyrightable content, which remains the property of the faculty member. If the consulting work does not require anything sufficiently creative that it might result in a patent, there is no conflict. (Of course, the professor still needs to make the contracting company aware of their IP-related commitments and let the company make the decision about whether they are willing to take the risk of losing rights to a valuable patent. It seems likely that some companies in some situations would be averse to entering such an arrangement, as you described in the question.)
The consulting work is in an area sufficiently unrelated to the professor's area of research that the IP policy doesn't cover the work.
The professor takes sufficient care to perform the consulting work on their personal time and without using any university resources. In that case, depending on the legal jurisdiction it may be the case that the IP policy cannot legally apply to them, since courts in certain places have ruled that an employer does not own work their employee has created in the employee's private time and using private resources, even when the employer claims otherwise.

Finally, I was discussing consulting to commercial enterprises, but mathematics professors also engage in various other forms of consulting to governmental and non-profit organizations, where IP restrictions would usually not be much of a consideration. For example, in the U.S. it is quite common for professors to be invited to sit on panels for the National Science Foundation and other funding agencies. This is a form of paid consulting, although it usually doesn't pay very much.


Is it cheating to use solutions to identical problems from other universities to do my homework?

I do not view it as generally unethical to refer to these solutions.  This situation is more complex than I think some other answers have admitted. Here is a list of claims:

In an ideal world, the point of homework is for the student to learn the material.
In a perfectly ideal world, we would not need to grade homework, because students would do it on their own to master the material. They might refer to other people's solutions to see if theirs are correct, and that would be fine.
Experience shows this world is not perfect. Students will often skip ungraded homework, and their learning and exam grades will suffer.
So instructors assign homework for a grade. But this isn't because the grade is really important: it's because we want the students to do the homework and learn the material!
Some students then get the idea that the grade is the real goal of the homework, and simply copy their assignment from others. Professors often find this unacceptable.

One important point that others have answered is that, if you are going to turn in the homework, what you turn in should reflect your own understanding of the assignment. But, equally importantly, it is important to let yourself struggle with problems for a while before looking up the answer.  That is the only way to really learn how to solve problems.

Most professors accept that the internet exists - we know you can look up other people's answers. It used to be that fraternities had giant files of old homework and exam answers for this purpose (maybe they still do).  And students study in groups all the time - research shows study groups can dramatically increase learning.  So getting help is not a bad thing.

But you don't want to get help too quickly. Make a genuine effort to answer the problems yourself first. If you find that you are looking up the answers to all the problems (even the easiest ones), then something is off - try going for more tutoring, or studying more before doing the homework.

If you find that you occasionally need to look up one of the most difficult problems, that's perfectly normal (but it still wouldn't excuse directly copying the solution into your homework, of course).

Of course, the usual caveats apply: some professors may specifically tell you not to collaborate with anyone or use any other resources. But most professors know that students usually collaborate with each other on homework (e.g. study groups) and know that students can look up answers using other resources. We have no problem with that, as long as each student's submission reflects their own understanding in the end.


Lack of passion from the beginning of my PhD

I'm afraid to say that I think you've worked this one out for yourself.

Completing a PhD requires passion and determination to get over the finish line. I remember someone once saying to me that they had done two PhDs but hadn't written either up... So they had actually not done a PhD at all. The point is that in a lot of ways, the writing up and creating a thesis is the hardest part because it requires so much time, energy, and dedication. If you don't feel like you have that for your subject then I would really consider your options.

As for your family (and friends)- they don't love you because you're on a PhD programme, that doesn't even come into it. More than anything in this world, they want you to be happy doing what makes you happy and I'm sure if they read your post just now they would tell you to stop and find something you really want to do.

Right now, it may be best to have a sit down with your supervisor and discuss how you're feeling and see if there is a way for you both to move forward that suits you both.


Getting a masters in WildLife Biology after receiving a PhD in math advice

You almost certainly won't need a BS in biology and you should, if possible, take the undergraduate deficiency courses for a grade.  Now for the more general advice:

I have known many people (in my university) who have been in Ph.D. programs while taking courses in other graduate programs or even entering other graduate programs, so it won't be a problem, except you need to talk with both your committee in mathematics and a representative of the Wildlife graduate program.  From the latter, you should find out if you can enter the program now (while in the Ph.D.) and what undergraduate deficiency courses would allow you to be accepted to their Master's program.  These might only be a fraction of the courses in the undergraduate curriculum.  It is hard for someone outside the their department to tell what they think is a minimum amount of background needed to enter a program.  Some programs will also let you enter their program before all of the deficiency courses have been taken.  You can't guess at this without talking with an advisor in the Wildlife Biology program.  In fact, they might prefer that you take a graduate level broad-based course rather than some of the undergraduate courses.

At the same time, in order to have your tuition covered, you'll probably have to have your Ph.D. committee approve the courses.  If you tell them that you are interested in applications of mathematics to wildlife biology (that's true, I'm guessing) and want to take a couple of applied courses, they'll likely approve as long as it doesn't interfere with your progress in the Ph.D.

In other words, don't guess at what you need to do.  Talk with your advisor and an advisor in the Wildlife Biology program.

(In addition, you may also want to take a couple of statistics courses if you haven't had any statistics in your mathematics program.)


Question on whether I have committed plagiarism (modifying paragraphs from an unpublished document sent as email attachment for PhD thesis)

Not knowing the policies of your university, nor of your advisor, it is hard to be definitive in an answer here. However, I'll suggest that you do two things. One is to re-write the paragraphs as you seem willing to do, but also contest the characterization that the original wasn't joint work with you as an equal contributor. If necessary (and possible) make your claim formally, in writing. You don't need to accuse the other student of misconduct, but you need to be clear that you worked jointly. The other student may just misremember the interaction, of course. Best if you have preserved some evidence of course.

I would also try to get the professor to stand up for you with the internal examiner.

If you are reporting accurately, then nothing you did was wrong unless the attachment was somehow published and you failed to cite it. That would be self plagiarism and is in a different category than ordinary plagiarism.

My personal opinion about self plagiarism is that you can copy and include your own unpublished work without citation, but need to cite earlier work of your own rather than just copying. That is to permit readers to trace back and find the complete context of a work.

However, there is one aspect I'm unclear about. If the attachment wasn't ever published, how did turnitin even find it for analysis? If it was published, perhaps without your knowledge, that raises other issues.


Intellectual theft by a former colleague, how to respond?

While I sympathize with your situation, I believe that you are vastly overestimating the severity of the wrong-doing by the coordinator and your former supervisor, labeling the question with tags such as plagiarism, and calling it intellectual theft in the title. It is hardly either.
As I understand the situation, neither you nor your former supervisor has any ownership over the data. They belong to another group, and when prompted, they said that they would rather do the study themselves. From your description it seems like the study was a rather obvious one, so there is really little intellectual ownership as far as the method goes. The coordinator was even nice, and offered you another data set.
These things happen all the time, and you have not sunk too many resources into the project yet. Cut your minimal losses, write back with a "thanks for the alternative data set", and if you feel like it, you can even add that the coordinator may pass your contact information, in case the group is looking for a collaborator with your expertise.


Is scanning an handwritten peer-review suitable for editor/authors?

I do not think that there is anything wrong with a scanned handwritten report. As for anonymity: you may even sign your referee report as it is your decision to stay anonymous or not. As for usefulness: I once received an annotated scanned manuscript as a referee report at is was tremendously helpful (as there were several suggestions for formulations which greatly increased the readability). A computerized summary would also be helpful for the editor to form the decision and also for the authors to find out what you main points are (so that they can distinguish between just typo corrections and serious remarks).


In teaching, what are the advantages of using slides over doing board work?

I am a student and I much prefer lecturers who write on the board than the ones who use slides.

Profs using slides generally go into loop mode where they have the objective of going through all the slides before the end of the class. As such, profs tend to go in a very fast pace.

Writing on the board brings some dynamism to the lectures. The lecturer tends to pace himself much better, and students are then more encouraged to ask questions as they go along.

Also, having students write notes help them become more active and aware during the lecture.

In my experience I've seen lots of profs who just read the stuff from their slides without elaborating any further. The students then tend to fall asleep since they know the lectures are basically in the slides.

Also, I have the impression that profs using slides are lazier in their teaching, in the sense that they don't even review the slides they are about to present before the lectures.


Advisor interferes too much with my research

The basic issue is that your advisor is a micromanager, and if you have to submit the thesis shortly, it's unlikely you're going to get him to change his behavior in time to affect your thesis positively.

Therefore, I think your best course of action depends on the relative "cost" of switching projects. If you are somewhere What you should do depends on the rules in place at your institution. If you are able to easily switch projects and restart your thesis in a new group under a different advisor, that may be the best possible outcome you can achieve.

However, if you're at an institution like mine, where the topic, advisor, and timeline of the thesis have to be approved in advance, starting over may carry serious consequences. Rather than run the risk of not being able to complete your degree, I would recommend that you consider just "toughing it out" and putting up with your advisor for whatever time you have left.

If you are determined to raise the issue, though, the best thing might be to indicate politely that you believe his supervision is making both of your jobs more complicated: you're not learning as much as you could if you were working independently, and he's not as productive as he could be if he weren't spending all of his time watching you work.


Why should a publication present results in a way that significantly differs from the discovery of said results?

I think this comes down to the subtle but important difference between communication and education. The target audience of a research paper is experts in the field, not students. Most readers want to know what your theorem says, why it's important and relevant, intuition about why it "should" be true and why the proof works, and (sometimes) the details of the proof. Few people are reading in order to learn how to prove theorems, which is what your suggested presentation would serve.

Having said that, it's possible to take the "uneducational" approach too far and actively cover one's tracks, so that the paper is hard to understand but looks impressive. By all means, if an informal discussion of the special case "X" will help give intuition about the main theorem, include such in your introduction.


Masters in mathematics after bachelors in mechanical engineering

I think your plans for your future are quite reasonable, but my thoughts count for very little. Many engineers have a mathematical bent of mind and I believe many mathematics departments (especially in applied fields like statistics) will recognize that. An example of an engineer who became a mathematician is: Raoul Bott. In all probability, you are not going to be Raoul Bott (prove me wrong), but I think it's worth pursuing the career goals you want. Your job, is to make a convincing case for yourself and to find the right department for you. You can do this by talking with people who have achieved what you are trying to achieve, getting their feedback on their department and your application (especially statement of purpose).


Would it be a good idea to ask professor about academic standing relative to other students?

"How am I doing so far?" is perfectly reasonable and acceptable. "What can I do better?" is fine too. "Based on my performance so far, do you think you'd write me a good recommendation?" is okay; that's a legitimate concern. "What's your impression of me as a student?" is needy and annoying, but not outright wrong -- I've gotten this question before and answered it.

"How am I doing relative to everybody else?" is out-of-bounds. For one thing, in some legal jurisdictions the prof can't say much without risking breakage of student-privacy-related law. (Revealing another student's grade, for example, is a no-no in FERPAland.) For another, law or no law, you are the only student whose progress is your business. For a third, "tell me I'm the bestest ever!" is needy to the point of creepiness.

Sometimes this is unfortunate, e.g. the situation of someone in an intro CS course who is from an underrepresented group in technology, is catching flak from other students, and doesn't have an accomplishment-meter calibrated enough to ignore their nonsense. Still. Look to your own work; leave that of others alone.


If by "supervisors" you mean your dissertation committee, then, as far as I know, the standard approach is to allow the committee chair (advisor) to resolve various conflicts of that kind between her/him and committee members.

At many universities (well, at least, at some, mine included), a Ph.D. student is actually prohibited from direct communication with committee members — in particular, on dissertation (manuscript) revisions' feedback — so, this burden is a part of the advisor's responsibilities. Perhaps, such arrangement is not common across universities within a country and across different countries.


Do I have to acknowledge the company where I started a project when I later publish related research in college?

At least in my field, Acknowledgements are generally regarded a fairly informal mechanism. There are few rules dictating what must and mustn't go in there. However, given that mentions in the acknowledgements don't dilute formal credit, I see no reason not to be as generous, gratuitous and grateful as possible in an acknowledgements section. Its not like adding an author, it costs you nothing and makes you look like a better person. Why wouldn't you?

Also there is probably an argument that you spent time thinking and learning about the general problem domain while being supported by the company.

I recommend adding something like "The author acknowledges BigCorp PLC for first bringing the problem to the authors attention and [financial?] support for work on related approaches", to the acknowledgements.


What does it mean if a professor asks you to draft his reference letter for you?

For me, it means two things:

I am really busy
I don't know anything about the job you're applying to and what you want to emphasize about yourself

If the first draft you write is something I can't sign, I'll edit it or I won't sign it. If it's not braggy enough, I might add some emphasis. But metaphorically handing me a piece of blank paper and asking me to recommend you is actually asking me to put in quite a lot of work. Do these people you're applying to value initiative? Creativity? Willingness to work long hard hours? Cheerfullness? A driven nature? A gentle spirit? Is the fact you write great software relevant to them? How about your careful bench work? For all I know you want to do less of one thing and more of another. So now I need to ask you a zillion questions about what you want to emphasize, and maybe go research the job too, and then ask you if what I've written is ok - frankly, it's way easier to ask you to write the first draft. And some days, I take the easy route.

It does not mean:

I intend to sign words I didn't write. I will write the final draft
It's ok for you to make up strengths you don't have
You'll know what I send in the end
I can't write a simple letter without help from a student.

Your first draft doesn't even have to be a letter, it can be point form. But tell me you're choosing me as a reference so I can confirm your amazing Xness, Yabilty and Zation. If I can, I will.

By the way, I wish I could find the idiot who started the theory that it means I don't think well of you and want you to retract your request. Several students have retracted their requests after I asked for a first draft, and that's a shame, because I would have cheerfully signed a glowing recommendation for them. I just didn't have time to write it all from scratch myself.


how to find highly cited articles in journals with low impact factor?

Scopus allows you to do this. Search for the journal name and then sort by number of citations.


What does "Awaiting SE Preliminary Decision" mean for IEEE transactions journal?

A reasonable guess would be "section editor", that is, an editor responsible for a thematic section.
The wording suggests that there will be a further check. In some journals, there is a final check by the editor-in-chief for every article. Normally, you can expect that the outcome of this check is positive, as editor-in-chiefs are usually very busy and inclined to trust their editors.


I was given to review a journal paper that overlaps with a submitted paper of ours

If you already submitted the paper you have some evidence of your own work even without a "published" preprint. Inform the editor of the situation and get advice. You may even be permitted to review it and point to your own paper in the review, but that would be up to the editor.

Parallel independent work is pretty common, especially in popular fields.

One option is to use editors of the two journals (assuming there are two) to act as intermediaries to get the two groups together. I don't think I'd recommend doing it on your own, however.


How do I deal with my family which doesn't respect science and math while I am doing a double science and math major?

There is one thing you should actually do: listen to them, even if just a bit.

Your parents are funding your education and are not entirely happy with what you do. They are also proposing to you to get a job during your breaks.
Try to do just that. To elaborate: I think there is a high chance that your parents will not be willing to help you later on (i.e. at M.Sc. level), thus you will need money.

Also, speaking from experience, the sports part is not to be underestimated. You do not have to be a pro-whatever, but going to the gym and keeping fit is certainly not going to hurt your brain.

Beyond this it is up to you to educate them. Look for statistics etc. which
show that having higher education is beneficial for a job and then make it understandable for your parents (basically it should be easy to imagine for them). The latter part is actually the hard part. It seems to me that your parents may have a warped understanding of how difficult it is to actually "get rich quick".

Do not think that trying to educate your parents will be a waste of your time. You might lose some study-time now, but if you are successful you stand to gain much more in the long run (i.e. tuition for masters) – do not underestimate this.


When giving a talk, no matter how good a storyteller you are, some significant percentage of your audience will be distracted at any given time. Outline slides are extremely valuable for helping those people catch up and rejoin your presentation.

What you don't have to do, however, is have a dry list outline. Whenever possible, I like to use a diagram instead, which unites the whole thing graphically, and indicate which aspects of the diagram we are currently dealing with. Nicely, this works quite well in chalk talks too.


Historical data for success rate of grant/project applications?

Check out the NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools. It may take you some time to find exactly what you're looking for, but there are numerous reports available, with a good deal of detail.


Why are degrees revoked due to data fabrication/manipulation only in specific fields?

I think that part of what you see is due to the fact that in some fields it is more necessary to actually look for problems than in others. Thus, in medicine, for example, people's lives may depend on the accuracy of results, so people are more inclined to want to either investigate the accuracy of the claims or to replicate the studies. Faked data becomes obvious only if you look. If opioid research is faked, for example, bad things happen to a lot of people. When bad things happen, other people want to know why.

In other fields, where the consequences may not be so dire, there is (a bit) less incentive to go looking for trouble. If few are looking, not much will be found. On the other hand, people who find themselves plagiarized are generally happy to raise the issue, but I think that happens in all fields, but is also fairly rare.


What does "Contribution to Knowledge" mean?

Contribution to knowledge means creating new knowledge based on the previous available knowledge by doing extensive and innovative research.

Look up this related illustrative post by Matt Might on what is a PhD.

And for the said MS student, he should get his degree without any problem, because he showed a new & original application of the CS algorithm in a new field. Hence, new knowledge generated.


There are research papers that are discovered 20-30 years later and new interesting research is build on it, thanks to the internet and digital indexing nowadays. So if you can (?) publish your research and live for it and can finance it, nothing speaks against following your interest and intuition (e.g. Einstein)

I will take an approach to also work on very risky, unknown, niche questions the next years, apart from working on a funded research project fulfilling some TRL levels required. This gives me some freedom of research and I think I have to risk it to yield some possible high-impact papers. Most tenured researchers always work on several topics:

you have to risk something in research (money, time, ...)
it's diversification of such risks
you are paid to find original new stuff in comparison to industry research, not just climb up the TRL ladder (although several TRL steps are not covered by industry research and developement)

But working solely on a very risky topic with unclear future outcome or likelihood of publication is like betting all your money on one stock.

No phyiscal simulation software I know matches nature exactly. How could it?! Nature is nonlinear and in complex systems with many degrees of freedom any model is imperfect if you don't simulate the H-atom. If your methods/models are original and of significance is hard to answer here without knowledge of your exact research topic.

To take up Nates comment, mathematical topology knowledge is nowadays of tremendous importance in modern solid state physics, although mathematicians work probably since centuries on it.

If your research is only "useful" in dependence of progress in other related research areas/methods (as you seem to think and qualify), than it doesn't look like fundamental research to me, because you wouldn't and don't have to think about usefulness. Rather applied research, and without any people interested in it or its results, this could be riding a dead horse.

In conclusion I think you have to make a strategic decision and risk assessment, if you want to do research on fundamental aspects/questions or move closer to the research methods/data/questions of your peers. Putting them as wrong or having a finite horizon is probably a dead end for you, also most of fundamental research ideas end like this. Currently your methodological approach and questions seem too distant for them. But doing and producing research that can be published in fundamental research vs. applied research journals is a huge career decision to make, as different requirements for significance and originality exist.


How to respond to “philosophical” questions that aim to undermine a position or derail a discussion?

Is this colleague really an academic? How on earth did he get a job in academia? How does he manage to retain it? He sounds like a teenage boy from your description of his style of arguing.

He's a troll, so best ignored. He also sounds like he's realised he's way out of his depth, and this is bluster to cover it up.

Formulate a single sentence that lets him know he's been heard, but that it was irrelevant, and that you've already moved on. Use it. Vary it, but keep it short, and always end with an invitation to the interrupted speaker to carry on where they left off. The troll should get the message that he's been sidelined, and troll elsewhere.

"I don't think we need to surrender to nihilism just yet, do we? [turn back to the interrupted speaker] Now, as you were saying ..."

Then just exclude him from discussions in the future. Take your fellow discussants to another room, away from the troll, if you have to.


I don't see any reason that a professor wouldn't be able to continue to use grants while on leave.  In fact, I'm on unpaid leave from my home institution right now, and have been able to use my grants (for travel support for myself), so that's one data point.


Is a student eligible for PhD in Mathematics from top US universities with just B.Tech (Bachelor of Technology) in Electrical Engineering?

You are eligible to apply to any doctoral program, but acceptance is a different matter. Everyone seems to want to join a top university's doctoral program according to many questions here. Think about that for a minute. You have thousands of competitors for relatively few slots. Many, not all, top institutions have relatively small math programs.
Like anyone else, if you make an application it will be evaluated. If you show clearly that you are likely to succeed in the program, then you will be considered. This means your application will be moved to a large pile of those that need further scrutiny. But many of the applicants are coming from good (maybe "top") mathematics programs and so have all of the "expected" courses.
I don't mean to discourage you, but the task, given your desire for a "top" program, is very hard. If you want to study for a doctorate in math, pretty much anywhere, don't focus too much on a narrow set of universities. Cast a wide net. Apply to several universities, including a few "top" institutions, but not only those. Make sure you meet their stated requirements and make sure, in the US that you have very good letters of recommendation.
The fact that you have been trying out some research ideas in math will certainly be a plus. But the individual admissions system will have to judge whether they have sufficient merit to move your application to the "further consideration" pile, and then what occurs thereafter. Make your case, but cast a wide net, also.


Selecting the relevant papers for a survey paper I have to write?

The answer may differ from field to field.

First of all ask yourself "What is the central question" or the goal of you paper?

Do you want to give an overview on all aspects of the theory / concept? Or is it more about the central aspect of the theory / concept and extensions / applications are not that interesting? Or something else?

Then think about the story you want to tell. If its about the theory itself you might want to talk about the development of the theory, central aspects, proofs, and maybe some applications or extensions at the end.

If you want to give a general overview, try to create groups, are there some main movements, aspects, fields of application? Where are the links between these things?

Then select your paper according to this "central story".

While writing think about the audience of you paper, which concepts are common knowledge? Which are important to explain? Which depth of information is appropriate?

And, of course, try to get more feedback: Read the feedback of your old paper, then read your paper and try to find the flaws. Ask the person who graded you to give you some advice. Read some paper of your fellow students which got good marks, find out what you like about them.

in short:

1. Identify the central question of your paper
2. Create a structure / central story
3. Think about the audience
4. Fill the structure, create links between your sections.


When writing an email asking for PhD positions/projects

Quite simply, if your email to me does not explain why you want to do a PhD in my group, I am probably not going to respond to your "cold" email, unless your CV is so outstanding (several papers, good grades, working with people I already know, etc.) that I can't help but take a closer look.

So you need to make sure that your email not only expresses your research interests, but also explains why your profile makes a good fit for the group to which you're applying.

Also note that if you're sending a "cold" email and the professor isn't in the process of advertising a position, you still may not get a response.


Repeat dropper and failure at multiple community colleges. Is there no hope for me?

If you succeed now in community college, the previous failures are unlikely to be a factor.

The point of the admissions process is to determine whether you are capable of succeeding in a university now, not ten years ago.  Your recent track record will demonstrate your present ability best and will be weighed most heavily.

Plus, you have a very plausible story for why things are different now: you have matured, and now have a motivation and direction you didn't have previously.  When you do apply, you should highlight this story.

I don't think there will be a problem here, assuming you succeed now (best of luck to you).

If you do attend the same institution, you should apply for an academic renewal, so that your previous failure doesn't drag down the GPA.

At other institutions, don't worry about it.  You may need to include a transcript for them, but the old GPA will be considered ancient history and will probably not make any difference.


Funding for Belgian student to do a PhD in UK?

The top universities often have a lot of reasonably obscure funding options.

For example with the University of Cambridge - if you go through the steps at this website they list all their funding options, you'll see for Physics there are fully-funded scholarships such as these that might be of interest to you:

Leslie Wilson Research Scholarship (£17,427 per year)
Winton Scholarship(s) in the Physics of Sustainability
Thalmann Bequest (covers EU fees only)
Schiff Fund (upto £20,000 per year)
Gulbenkian Studentship (specifically for non-UK nationals)
Gates Cambridge Scholarships

The equivalent website for the University of Oxford is here

and it reckons

  35 Scholarships were found for a new student from Belgium studying
  Theoretical Physics (DPhil)

so I'm not going to list them all here!!!

Best of luck!