Why don't more professors utilize their students as research help?

I do employ students to participate in my research. In my department these students (Bachelor and Master students) are paid. That is the first limit to the number of students I can employ: I can only employ so many students as my budget allows.

The second limit is that in the kind of research I do these students cost me more time than they save (unless they are really good). Doing real research is for them a whole new experience, and they have to learn. That costs time, I need to do a lot of explaining, errors happen that need to be found and than fixed, etc.

That is fine, giving them that experience is why I employ them. They can see if this is something they are interested in pursuing as a long term career. If so, then they start with a bit of experience. If not, they are saved from starting a PhD and than dropping out. Either way is a positive outcome for them. For me, employing students for research is more a teaching task; an enjoyable and rewarding teaching task, but not something that I expect to improve my productivity as a researcher (If it happens than that is a nice bonus).

This obviously depends on the kind of research one does, and the kind of tasks that needs to be performed to do that research.


Writing papers with deceased co-authors?

This situation can happen, just like some professors have been caught putting the name of their son or their wife on their paper in the past.
Generally, the editor will not verify if authors really contributed to a paper because it would be hard to verify. Hence, journals adopts some simple mechanism such as requiring that authors disclose what are the contributions of each author at the time of submission, some journals will also send an e-mail to each author to notify them of the submission, some journals require authors to use official e-mail addresses, and some journals also require that authors sign a document when submiting.
Upon receiving a paper, some journals do a pre-screening where they check for plagiarism, if the paper is out of topic and other problems, before sending to reviewers. During that phase, if something is suspicious, the editor could try to investigate more. Or if the reviewers subsequently find something suspicious, they could also raise questions during the review process.
But generally, it is not easy to discover such cases unless it is quite obvious or some authors talk about what happened to the editor.
For the article that you mentioned, it is maybe correct because top journals sometimes not only have a long review time (1 or 2 years), but also have a backlog of papers to publish that can extend to 2 years in some cases. Maybe that the famous statistician has participated to an earlier draft. But in any case, it is hard to verify this.


Why are some countries more popular destinations for higher education than the other?

Why do some countries get more international students than others? Wikipedia gives a few reasons:

Traditionally the U.S and U.K have been the most prestigious choices, because of the presence of top 10 rankings Universities such as Harvard, Oxford, MIT and Cambridge. More recently however they have had to compete with the rapidly growing Asian higher education market. While US is the leading destination for foreign students, there is increasing competition from several destinations in East Asia such as China, Korea, Japan and Taiwan which are keen to attract foreign students for reputation and demographic reasons.

So university ranking is a major reason. Other reasons implied by this paragraph include competition: because international students pay full tuition fees, they are very lucrative, and universities want them. Therefore they send representatives worldwide to recruit students. Government incentives, e.g. less restrictive visa requirements, certainly help too.
Otherwise there is:

Due to the research base and funding opportunities, the USA was one of the key destinations of choice, especially in science and technology at master’s and doctoral education levels (National Research Council 2005).

Given that "Students were motivated to study abroad as they were also getting economic rewards from the skills gap they could fill in high-demand, technology-related jobs" (quote taken from the same source) it's natural that the countries with the most research funding gets the students. Historically, that is the US.
That explains much of your countries:

Ireland, New Zealand & South Africa don't have highly-ranked universities.
Switzerland actually has a high number of international students at tertiary level - 16.9% of tertiary students are from outside the country. It's not in that list because there aren't many tertiary students in the country in the first place.
China's research funding has been rising tremendously, plus there are top universities in the country.
Japan's R&D funding is also one of the world's highest, plus there are top universities in the country.


Is it permissible to use somebody else's words (without quotations) to describe a concept once their work is cited?

No, it's not permissible.  Some minor overlap in wording can occur naturally (e.g., you couldn't possibly avoid all two-word phrases anyone has ever used before), but deliberately copying text is different.  If the copied text is special or remarkable and says something better than you could have said it, then you should attribute it to its source and not seem to be presenting it as your own words.  Citing the source nearby is not considered enough to indicate a verbatim quote.  On the other hand, if there's nothing special about the copied text, then there's no reason to copy it.  (I suppose it could save you a few minutes of work in writing your own explanation to replace these sentences, but that's not considered a good excuse.)


Writing sample for Economics PhD: empirical or literature review

Since this is published research, I would certainly expect to see the whole paper submitted with your application in any case. It follows that using part of the paper also as a "writing sample" is useless.

I would contact the committee and ask whether, since you have published research, it can stand in for the "writing sample" they ask for. If they nevertheless want both the whole paper and a "writing sample", or if you don't get an answer on time, you should prepare a "writing sample", which should then be in the spirit of a "Introduction and motivation" of a research paper, down to describing the subsequent sections of this yet-to-be-written paper.  This section will show command of language and of concepts, ability to defend the value of a research topic, and also how comprehensively you plan to explore the topic.


Why does a copy editor count the number of characters on a line?

73 x 39 x 27 would give an estimate of the total number of characters in your manuscript.  They presumably have some standard estimate for the number of characters that fit on one page in the final format, and they've divided by that number (not shown) to get 25 pages.

I can't think of a good reason to subtract 1 from the number of lines per page (unless one line is obviously a header or something) so I'd wonder if they just miscounted.


I would say that you would be better off going with the new faculty member. The question now is "How do I switch?" If this emeritus guy does email (which some of them are so old they do not. Although it sounds like you maybe are in Computer Science, so hopefully the guy uses email) I would write a brief email to him explaining why you are switching. This avoids a face to face if possible. Then unilaterally switch groups. I would take care of any introductions with the new advisor in person, however.

Much of this also depends on things like if you share an office with people in the uninformed group, how large your department is (If you have 40 profs in the department, you can fade away. With 4 profs, not so much), etc.

I switched drastically in what I was studying (Algebraic group theory as a MSci student to applied statistics as a PhD student) and there were a few eyebrows raised. But, it was ultimately my career. And people in my department came to accept it. It is SO much better to have a good research group than to have a placated advisor. Do not put yourself through that.


Language of application and CV for Junior Professorship in Germany

Unless stated otherwise, you should apply in German.

Most undergrad courses are taught in German, and usually it is expected that your German is good enough to teach in German, and also good enough to write an application in German. You may check the departments website if they have any courses in English, and if you even find that they offer a degree where everything is taught in English you may consider asking the contact person (see the job ad).


Should I explain my poor performance during undergrad, due to mental illness, when applying for PhD?

You do not need to disclose the nature of your illness if you do not wish to.  It was your illness, and you get to decide how you handle it.

The short explanation you propose is fine.  You might want to specify that it was the first three years:

  My performance during the first three years of my undergraduate studies was not representative of my abilities, and was due to illness. However, I am glad to say that I have fully recovered, and as my transcripts show, I was able to overcome those early difficulties.


Is it possible to get admitted to a MS program with funding if I have a poor GPA but good GRE scores?

Before I begin to answer your question, let me elaborate that US and European universities typically do not have much funding available to students participating in a masters degree. Most funding options (in some universities all of them) are reserved for PhD students and for the universities that do offer funding for master students, it is usually awarded to a selected few. Furthermore, it is less common for European universities to offer funding (when compared to the US) but study cost in Europe can be much cheaper.

A poor undergraduate GPA alone does not prevent you from being accepted to a masters program. One can even hope to receive full funding if he can satisfy the admission committee that he is a fully capable student and his grades do not reflect his potential for being a graduate student.

However to be applicable for a fully funded masters program you will most likely need more than a good GRE score. Having the following can significantly increase your chances:

Good letters of recommendation from professors whom you've worked with and can vouch for you
Having related research experience (preferably with published results in a peer-reviewed journal)
Finding a professor (for your graduate supervisor) who has a highly matched research interest as you
Having related industry work experience
Preparing a compelling statement of purpose, providing convincing reasons for your poor undergraduate performance
Having a high TOEFL/IELTS score (for international applicants)

In computer science, having valuable achievements in an internationally recognizable contest like the "ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest" can tremendously boost your chances of getting accepted (and funded) at even the top schools. However, even qualifying to participate in such a contest requires a strong background in programming and algorithms.

Final note. From my understanding, European universities are more sensitive to bad undergraduate GPAs and many have hard cut-offs which will eliminate you from the admission process without considering your application as a whole. Therefore, it is my personal recommendation to apply to US and Canadian universities alone as it will improve your chances and save you time and money.

Unfortunately even by having exact and complete knowledge of your GPA (which I don't), there is no way to be sure what your chances will be and parts of what is said above can be deemed opinion-based. The graduate admission process, from what I understand, is a complicated and nonlinear process with many different factors playing their part.


The question is: why wouldn't you send an e-mail? Consider you send him/her an email for permission to use the lectures, he/she may:

(most likely) Accept your request providing you reference him/her. He/she might even point some possible errors in the slides.
Deny your request. In that case you just avoided an awkard situation, would he/she ever find you plagiarized (if you modifications don't change the style).

If he/she denies, should you still use his/her slides as a guideline (assuming you do the slides yourself)? Yes you can. And if you wish you can also reference him/her as a reference, in the same way you reference books.


I frequently privately share pre-prints that have not been published anywhere (not even pre-print servers) with colleagues who I know and trust.  I often won't say where it's under review, however, just because it's kind of pointless to say a place it might be rejected from.

In fields where pre-print archives like arXiv.org are used, once you've put it up in such a pre-print server, it's got a public date stamp and it's entirely reasonable and safe to share with anybody.  Likewise, once a paper has been accepted and is just waiting to appear, I feel it safe to share pre-prints privately.

With something that is under review and not on a pre-print server, however, I would not share it with people who I do not already know and trust.


Taking suggestions for grading rubric for multiple answers test

One simple way to design a grading rubric for this situation is to consider the question as though it were a set of true-false questions.  So if there are 5 answer and the question is worth five points, then there is 1 point for marking each true, and 1 for not marking each false answer.

Thus, for example, consider the following question:

  Which of these are mammals? (5 points)

  Cat
  Turtle
  Lizard
  Fish
  Dog

If the student marked "Cat, Turtle", then they would receive 3 points: they lose 1 point for marking "Turtle" and 1 point for failing to mark "Dog."


I suggest that you pursue all options open to you at the current time and delay decisions until you are required to finalize them. In other words, apply for some positions in your home country and see what develops. If they then seem better than your current situation, then do that. But you can also pursue options in your current country with the same goal.
Just be honest with your supervisor, who seems supportive now and may be supportive of your need to be flexible.
Many of us had to make compromise decisions along the way due to such things as a bad job market. Now it is the pandemic. People generally will understand such things and that one can't proceed now as if things were normal.


How much does a low undergraduate CGPA affect chances of getting a faculty job in a top-tier university?

As you have already done Masters and PhD, your CGPA in undergraduate is least to be bothered. If you are in academia, your quality of research matters more than the grades that you have obtained long back in undergraduate studies.

As your credential will grow, your resume will be filled with much more valued contents rather than just grades.


You asked one question in the title, but asked a somewhat similar but not the same one in the subject.

Your original question: "Do graduate admission committees include persons from outside the field?"

I'm not really qualified to answer that one.

Your second question, however: "Can I assume that everyone in the committee knows what that means? Computer Scientists should, but administrative staff probably won't. Should I explain what the term means?"

You don't have to explain what it means, but you should explain what you did. I know what a penetration tester is, but I don't how much of a penetration tester you are or if you just sat at a keyboard trying to put in 1234 and other generic passwords at a log-in screen all day.

You can follow the who/what/when/where/why/how guidelines when discussing any role you have taken, even in or out of field. Being too clear, versus not being clear enough, have entirely different effects on your application.

The blurb probably should cover:

Who you are (your position)
What you did (your tasks/projects that you completed)
When you did it (month/year to month/year)
Where you did it (company, who your supervisor was, city, state)
How you did it (if you implemented technology, you can mention it)

The why is not quite objective, so I normally keep it out of the job blurb and in the personal statement or statement of purpose.

I've pulled up a snippet of my own resume (with non-important details removed) of my time as a clinical researcher as an example, so you can see it in action.

  University of Someplace Family Medicine, Someplace, SS

  Under auspices of Drs. John Doe, Jane Doe, and. John Doe, research mentors,
  as part of a clinical research study analyzing novel testing equipment for [disease] and [disease], June 2009 – June 2010
  Clinical Researcher

  Designed and maintained a secure, encrypted database
  Took a direct role in obtaining patient consent forms
  Evaluated and used novel testing equipment and obtained results
  Informed health care providers of procedures and the workings of the equipment
  Coordinated work between the clinical site and the research lab
  Was critical in determining the effectiveness of a rapid clinical test for [disease] during the [disease] outbreak


Is there a publication that critically reviews the effectiveness of academic accreditation bodies?

Is there any objective proof that accreditation produces excellence in higher education ?

This is a very broad question, and the answer may have varied over time and may presently vary from place to place. But at the present time, in the United States, there is considerable evidence that accrediting bodies are not just useless but harmful.

One case in point is the  Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), a regional accrediting body that came unmoored under president Barbara Beno. In 2013, ACCJC tried to shut down the City College of San Francisco. There was no evidence of any academic problem at CCSF. The problem was that they didn't check all the boxes on the forms as demanded by ACCJC.

Another good example is the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), which helped for-profit colleges such as Corinthian Colleges and ITT to bilk the US federal government of vast amounts of financial aid money.

As far as I can tell, the basic problem with accreditation in the US is that the federal government wants to subsidize education as a public good, and in order to do that they want to have metrics of quality. But as soon as we designate a metric of quality, we guarantee that people will game the system in order to boost that metric. The result is a Darwinian struggle in which schools, whether good or bad, compete to feed at  the public trough.


Yes you can change if you want. Your advisor will probably be unhappy about this, but you have to do what's best for yourself.

And yes you can tell other professors that your position is not what you thought it would be, so you are looking to change. Yes it won't be the best story for them to hear, but it isn't universally poison either. I presume you don't exactly want them to ask for a reference from your current employer (on that note, probably should be quite careful your current advisor doesn't find out until your plan is set).

But finally consider that many (if not most) people probably feel overwhelmed, like an imposter, in over their head, etc. when they're six months into grad school. And it's probably never exactly what they expected to be doing. So just be sure this particular position is really the whole problem.


How many self-cites to other works are too many in my paper?

The answer, of course, is to cite the relevant papers and only those.

This is not very actionable advice. Rather, here is what I would suggest. My discipline is mathematics, for context.

If you use, expand, contradict, give a new perspective to, etc,  a previous result, then you should cite it.
You can usually decide how much space and writing to devote to historical overview and establishing context for the paper. Cite relevant literature; everything if there is only little, or representative sample if there is much. Cover different perspectives at least briefly.
At this point, ask yourself: Given the references here, is there something that is missing, or something that seems to be excessive? These questions should weed out excessive self-citations or add citations to other relevant literature.

If you afraid that some citation is not relevant, then consider writing at least a sentence to describe it in the context of your present paper, rather than writing for example

  similar questions have also been considered in [1, 2, 3, 4, ..., 13].

A few sentences of context will also serve your readers, who might find your paper when looking for something related. The sentence can guide them towards more relevant papers and away from less relevant ones.


Is it necessary to submit papers to IEEE conference which are PDF Express Plus approved?

PDF Express is basically an automated means of making sure that you didn't mess up your document preparation in a way that will later become a headache for you, the conference organizers, or the IEEE.  For example, you might have things misconfigured such that you ended up with A4 instead of US Letter paper, or have some bad fonts in there.  If you're using the standard IEEE LaTeX templates and not doing anything particularly creative with your formatting this shouldn't happen, but even then sometimes it does.

The IEEE camera-ready sites will typically tell you that you are required to check beforehand, but de facto allow you to submit.  This is sometimes very important, because sometimes PDF Express isn't working (we had an issue of this type with a conference earlier this summer).  Checking with PDF Express is a good practice to follow, however, because it's a few seconds of insurance against the possibility of a whole bunch of headache for yourself and others down the line.


Is it ethically defensible to attain consent on an opt-out basis in a newspaper?

You'd need to obtain the first informed consent and examine the wording. If the informed consent does state that the collected samples or information may be used for other research-related purposes and the new projects will be announced on some specified channels, then the researchers have fulfilled their due diligence.

The problem being the general participants are really not very well-informed when it comes to providing biological specimen or medical records. For example, most of them may not realize that their samples can reveal a lot more as technology evolves. Unlike a questionnaire or an interview, the respondents know clearly what's written and said, but they may not realize what their blood or DNA can reveal, or what they can reveal a few more years down the road when molecular technology further develops, and the researchers want a re-analysis.

The researchers are usually not to blame, however, as they are probably equally clouded by the ever-changing hot topics. There are many occasions that a study was set up to test compound A, but fearing that compounds B, C, D... etc. may be the next scientific focal points, the researchers may opt for writing in the "opt out from reanalysis" statement into the consent form even they are not entirely sure what are to be reanalyzed and even if that analysis will ever happen. As for why opt out but not opt in, part of the reason is cost control: It's extremely difficult to track people down and collect a consent form again. For that, I can empathize.

If you will potentially be one of these studies' participants and are worried about this opt out mechanism, do realize that you don't owe them anything and you are completely free to walk away or require an amendment to limit the use of your samples, or request your sample or copies of record be destroyed after the study. The worst is that they will say no and you'll walk away without a chance to participate or receive the stipend. However, you'll have your peace of mind.

So to answer your question, this practice is defensible as other mechanisms can be cost-prohibitive. However, I personally do not feel it is entirely fair as I am doubtful that the participants fully know the consequences and their rights when it comes to giving biological samples or related medical records. Guidelines are being developed, and hopefully more education on how to be an informed participant will happen.


How do professors find consulting projects?

I think there are endless possibilities and no definitive answer. So just to name a few:

A company rep sees a talk of the professor´s group and sees that they are a good fit.
A company rep reads an article of the professor´s group and sees that they are a good fit. (Which not only includes articles in academic journals.)
They know each other from former joint projects (like publicly funded ones with industry partners, ...).
A former student/colleague works for the company and knows the professor is a good fit.
They search online for professors/institues that fit their needs.
The professor worked for them before going into academia.
They get refered to him by other companies/institutes/individuals.
...


Why do engineering PhD programs require undergrad degrees in engineering or physics?

I'd expect many math majors to have the skills needed to succeed in an engineering program, but they are likely to lack the vocabulary needed.  This is especially true if the engineering is theoretical or computational.

I would not be surprised if math majors are accepted from time to time.


Re-sending a rejected paper to the same conference next year

I would not recommend stating that it's a revised paper for several reasons:

Contrary to your assumption, it is not likely to be reviewed by the same people.  Typically, each topic in a large computer science conference may be covered by many reviewers, and they get assigned either arbitrarily or by a bidding process.  With a few reviewers assigned from a large pool, there might or might not be overlap, but the majority will likely not have seen the prior version.
Computer science conferences, unlike journals, do not tend to provide a "comments to reviewers" section in their submissions.  Trying to wedge that in will likely make your submission stand out in a bad way, putting the idea of rejection in your reviewers' heads.
If you've really done a strong set of revisions, it should be pretty obvious that the paper has changed a lot even to a reviewer who's seen it before.

In short: I see no particular positives and several negatives for such a declaration.


Into which category of the CRediT contributor role taxonomy does an (extensive) literature review go?

Literature review is "formal analysis."  In particular, it "synthesizes" data.
Exceptions apply for poorly executed literature review.


Is omitting a school with blank transcript considered unethical in academia?

If you did not enrolled/registered yourself, you did not attend that school of higher education. You could maybe insert this information of being accepted by that school but never registered somewhere in your submissions if there is such space for extra info on the Education section.


Acknowledging a single funding source: do I say "partially supported"?

The NSF requires the following text (or its equivalent) in publications from work funded by their grants:

  "This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (grantee must enter NSF grant number)."

No need to quantify the level of support.


Practical implications of noting "equally contributing authors"

I would see such a step as a clear indication of authors contributions for the record, so as to make sure this gets accepted as truthful also in the future during promotions, job applications, etc. Technically speaking, in a CV one can write stuff even dishonestly disregarding co-authors (e.g., arbitrarily indicating the percentage of own contribution). This  kind of public indication of the contribution tackles the problem once and forever. In some fields the alphabetical order is a standard (mathematicians I know have that as almost a strict rule) and then you need a tool to make your contribution visible. Especially if your name is at your disadvantage in this game. E.g., when you are called Zhang and co-author paper often with some Adams or so. Also, if alphabetic order is desired for whatever reason and the more senior co-author happens to precede the student who did the actual work, such an indication might be desirable.

Another point is, some journals require such an explicit indication. E.g., Nature does that, although the statement of individual contribution comes as a paragraph at the end of the paper.

Finally, some national schemes for evaluation of research output require such an indication made in a publication archive system. Having it included in the paper also indicates that authors try to avoid any future disputes regarding individual contributions.


What can students do if a professor penalizes an entire class because one student cheated on an exam?

The described event does taint the exams given by everybody in the room. Even if they didn't mean to cheat. Sorry.

What to do in such a case is a hard question. It ranges from doing nothing this time, but e.g. collecting cellphones and such next exam; just punishing the careless cheater (if caught); grade the affected question(s) for less maximal grade (or even not grade them at all, leaving them for a separate evaluation); or even repeat the exam.


What to do about questions that are designed to embarrass the speaker?

Firstly, I should note that the examples you give are certainly somewhat agressively formulated (more so than would be common in my field), but not in themselves invalid questions. It is certainly "allowed" to be critical of the presented work, and there is nothing the session chair can or should do about this.

As a speaker, it always helps to think in advance what kind of "negative" question there could be, and prepare for them. You know that your work is very close to Foo et al, 2001? Good, have a backup slide that highlights your contribution over them. You think people would argue that a much simpler standard approach would have also worked instead of your super-complicated new custom method? Have a backup slide which compares the results of the two methods (you did test the standard method first, right?). If your answer does not convince the person asking the question, then much of what I wrote in this related answer also applies here. Specifically:

  (...) try to explain calmly why you did what you did. Yes, maybe that person asking the question will disagree, but so what? The fact that your actual peer reviews are good shows that there are a non-trivial amount of researchers that actually agree with you. The person asking the question is not your supervisor, you don't need to agree with him/her specifically on your research agenda or approaches.

As a session chair, you need to step in as soon as a question starts to become an ad hominem attack. That is, "I think this has been done years ago." is still fine, while "How the heck did you even get a PhD?" isn't. Further, a session chair should interrupt a series of questions as soon as he feels that the discussion isn't of interest to the larger audience anymore. I do not think that there is much that can be done in advance. As a session chair, you typically want to foster discussions, not preemptively set out the ground rules.

About the parts regarding sexisms and whether senior professors tend to be mean: I don't really have much to say about this. Not being a woman, I have not yet noticed any particular pattern about how females get asked questions versus males. The same is true for whether senior professors ask more critical questions - personally, I rather have the impression that fellow grad students and young postdocs or assistant professors are more likely to be extremely critical of other person's work than more senior researchers.


Will my stressful year be seen as a negative?

"Stressed out" could hurt you insofar as people who would give you otherwise positive recommendations might be tempted to tone them down.

When asking for letters of recommendation, discuss these issues candidly with the prospective recommenders. Some might not care. Others might "care" but they might also be open to a discussion of extenuating circumstances. A few will have their opinions shaped by your behavior. If and when you identify such a person, you might want to withdraw your request for a recommendation from them.


How to write practice exams as a student as a way to study

One way to do it is to make a kind of game out of it. Instead of trying to write a complete exam, just come up with one question. Give it to your peers and expect an answer in a few minutes. The first to give a correct answer asks the next question. Each person will need at least a couple of questions to get started, but not a complete exam. Questions asked will, hopefully, help people think of additional questions.

It would be good to do this face to face, but it could be done online if in real time - everyone simultaneously at their computer.

If no one answers in the allotted time, the asker gives the answer and another question is asked, either by the same person or another.

You might be able to use an online forum such as the physics section here to prime for questions. But searching for answers online sort of defeats the purpose of the exercise.


How might a PhD-holding physicist submit independent research after leaving academia, without appearing to be a crackpot?

Actually, you just write and submit papers just as if you were in academia. They will be reviewed in the normal way and published if they are seen to have merit. But if the reviewers tell you that you are a crackpot, then try hard to come up with better (or more acceptable) ideas.

But I think that physics research must be pretty hard without labs and a circle of collaborators, etc, that you find in academia. Theory can, perhaps, be done while you are a functionary in the Patent Office, but you need to stand out to make a name.

But if you have a supportive advisor you can, perhaps, get connected to a research group and work with them even though not employed.

But don't publish your work in venues normally associated with crackpots.


Do I need to cite an artwork? How would I do it? Is permission needed?

Simply contact artwork's author (since the artwork wasn't published, the author is copyright holder, otherwise it usually would be the publisher), requesting permission to adapt the artwork. I suggest sending the author planned version, so that any potential issues can be assessed and addressed.

(1) I'd say Yes. The citation is usually located below or above the figure in the following form:

  (Adapted from “The DeLone and McLean model of information systems success: A ten-year update.”, by DeLone and McLean, 2003, Journal of
  Management Information Systems, 19(4), p. 24. Copyright 2003 by M.E.
  Sharpe, Inc. Adapted with permission.).

(2) Since artwork is someone's intellectual property artifact, protected by copyright, it is usually (for an exception, see fair use in the next point) required to cite the artwork (as any other such artifact) to properly credit its authors. The format of citation depends on the publication style you're using (my example above is based on APA Style).

(3) You're required to get permission, unless you want to risk by using the fair use legal doctrine.

(4) If the artwork is part of a figure, see example above; otherwise, other relevant standard citation guidelines for visual elements apply, based on the publication style you use.


Should I give a talk about an insignificant result?

I'm pretty sure you aren't alone here. People find surprising things all the time. Be thankful that you are the one who found it.

This may sound risky, but I don't believe it is. Give a technical description of the problem as you normally would and then give an historical tour through what you originally thought and what you now think and why.

Rather than being career suicide, you will, IMO, be thought refreshingly honest and open to the truth wherever it leads. If you "get away with it now" but don't later, things will be much worse. Much much worse is if a student in your talk raises his/her hand with ... well, you know.

Out with it my friend. Just take a deep breath and say it all. You can even say that you feel a bit silly now that you've gotten a deeper understanding. Noting wrong about a deep understanding, of course, even if it eludes you early.

And, of course, your more senior colleagues and the reviewers, if any, also missed the point. You are a hero, not a bum. The math is what it is.

Another option, of course, is to say that you have found an issue along with the consequence but then talk about another topic. But I think that would disappoint people. Seeing the flaw can, itself, be enlightening.


In the UK, postgraduate degrees are broken down into two categories Postgraduate Taught (PGT: MSc & MA mostly) and Postgraduate Research (PGR: MRes, MPhil & PhD).
Generally, any 180 credit course for which a Bachelors degree is an entry requirement is referred to as a "master's degree".
In science, where it is normal to go directly from BSc to PhD without a master's degree, master's degrees generally serve 3 purposes:

To provide more specialist training (often vocational) than is provided in a BSc. For example we have a MSc that qualifies people to work in human genetics diagnostics labs. While were have a module that covers the same general area in our undergrad Genetics degree, this is a whole year of just that very narrow subject. Or alternatively, a student with a computer science undergrad might do a databases masters - the degree title is much narrower than the undergrad equivalent.
To allow people whose Bachelor's degree isn't good enough for what they wish to do in the future to obtain a better qualification. You can often do a PhD in the British system without a masters degree as long as you get a good grade. But PhDs and almost all graduate jobs require good grades (grad jobs require a 2:1 in British speak, and PhDs formally require a 2:1, but you often need a 1st these days). If you don't get the grades you need, you can do a masters degree and have another chance at getting a good grade. The other people who take these sorts of masters are overseas students who want the cache that comes with having a degree from what they regard as a more famous/better regarded university.
Conversion courses. You've a bachelors in one subject, but decide you want to do something different. These degrees will generally have the same title as undergraduate degrees, and often have similar syllabuses, but compressed into 1x180 credits rather than 3x120 credits. These work on the basis that most the teaching at undergraduate level is not the course specific knowledge, but the transferable skills - you learn how to write, how to read, and how to think critically at a high level. Importantly, you also learn how to learn. The assumption is that if you turn this to a new subject, you will learn that new subject much faster than you learnt your first subject. For example, I had a friend who got a 1st class BA in Philosophy, and then did a genetics master's degree.

People in the know (recruiters and PhD admissions panels) will be able to tell what sort of master's degree a particular MSc is. If you have a BA in philosophy, and a MSc in genetics, no one is going to expect you to know as much about molecular cytogenetics as someone with a BA in genetics and MSc in human molecular diagnostics, but if you were both going for a PhD in population genetics, you might be on a similar footing.


Are undergraduate journals a good choice for publishing papers?

Don't publish in weird journals

Work to publish in the mainstream journals, despite their fickle biases and sometimes burdensome cost. Fields often have a pecking order of journals and the journal in which an article is published can change the perception of an article. Journals such as the national high school journal of science may be well-intentioned, but seem to provide a way for people to start worrying earlier and earlier about publishing.

It is premature for you to worry about your publication profile.

You've already published one paper at 16-- that's great. You are ahead of the curve. Graduate programs look for undergraduates to have published. Colleges look for evidence of potential. In the two labs I've worked in, the PI evaluates prospective high school students and undergraduates based on a letter of recommendations and a brief talk with the prospective student. Incremental publications in third tier journals may be a necessary part of the tenure slog, but you have the time now to just learn science and decide whether you want to pursue it as a career. Worrying about publications in high school is putting the cart before the horse.


Visa and funding options for undergraduate internship in US

I doubt that there is a lot that you can do. A lot of the options will depend on the internal policies of the university and/or the department concerned. Since your professor is better placed to contact the department administration, international students office and any other entities involved in the process, him/her coordinating the process would result in the most efficient resolution of the problem.
Absolutely. You only stand to gain if you do. Professors understand that it could be expensive for international students to fund themselves and will do all they can to help you with it. Its best to phrase your question in a brief, straightforward but polite manner.
A lot of the scholarships require a US citizenship or permanent residency. Your best option would be to contact your home university, destination university or your home government to look into options to sponsor your trip.
As far as I know the F1 full time enrollment requirement is for the academic terms and does not apply to summer programs. The best judge of this would of course be the International Student Office at your destination university since it is a matter of university policy.


Potential advisor asking which other programs I got into, but I haven't gotten into any others?

You haven't been not accepted, you haven't heard. There's a difference.

"I'm still waiting to hear back from a couple other places." Should be a sufficient answer. If you want, a light quip about her university apparently being really on the ball.


Should an undergraduate summer research project be put under "employment history"?

Yes they count.

  "work experience, internships or volunteer work"

is clearly more broad then just regular employment. Just make clear what type of position each role was. If there is some other section that allows you to report other types of research experience you could be free to classify these either way, it wouldn't affect much. The people reading your application just what to know what you've done.


How to politely point out a basic mistake in a published top tier journal when working on some extension of the paper

That depends on the consequences of the mistake. Does it invalidate the main conclusions of the article or is it only a side issue? If the former, you can write up what the consequences are and present the new results as an article an submit it. If it is only a side issue, you can mention it in a footnote when writing up your results for the open problem.

In the former case, keep the tone professional: don't use any adjectives to describe the mistake and certainly not when refering to the authors, i.e. it is a mistake not a basic mistake. Focus on the point you want to make, and let the strength of the argument speak for itself.


How many hours a day on Mathematics as a successful student?

I am afraid that your computation is not even wrong.  You might as well ask how many hours a day you need to practice dribbling in order to be a professional basketball player.

Mere knowledge of mathematics is just one component of being a professor, even a professor of pure mathematics.  To become a successful mathematics professor (or any type of professor, really), you need a lot more than just to have studied many textbooks: you need scientific creativity, you need vision, you need to be able to communicate and write well, you need to be able to teach, you need self-discipline, you need some broader understanding of how mathematics fits into the larger world, and you need many more things besides.

Moreover, one of those many things that you need is skill at extracting knowledge from texts.  The deeper your understanding becomes, the more that you will be able to see the structure of the content that you are reading, to analyze which parts are critical and which are accessory, and the less that the computation you present makes sense.

In short: yes, it takes a lot of effort on mathematics to become a professor, but the process and challenges are very different than you think.


Is a "textbook" considered to be an academic work?

A textbook, if published by a reputable publisher, is certainly an academic publication.

How much a specific textbook is considered by a selection committee depends on the field, the textbook, the country and the selection committee. Thus, we cannot tell you if it's worth writing it just for the purpose of strengthening your application.

It might be worth noting that in the humanities, as far as I know (I'm from STEM), books are frequently a more common form of academic publication with respect to journal papers.


Teaching at university (pathway 3 and teaching-oriented positions)

Many places in Europe try to follow US examples, and that involves promoting research first, as a way of educating the faculty itself. Of course a acclaimed handbook author like Tom Cormen would almost always get the job anyway.

It is noted that there is many more postdoc positions than professorial positions worldwide.
Even if there are professors that focus mostly on teaching, they would not be advertised by universities trying to attract research funding.


Is it plagiarism and/or copyright infringement if research started from one person but another diverged onto a different path?

Honestly, there's too less info provided here for strangers on the internet to guess and come to a conclusion. I'd recommend talking to your research guides to look into the content and sort out the matter. After-all, it's a few definitions, and you have branched off to create fresh research on your own anyway, so your research isn't in danger. "Pick and choose your battles". Some battles may not be worth the time and energy.
   Think about it this way: If you lived in a jungle and heard nothing about Newtons laws but you came up with those laws and definitions on your own and came to the city and tried publishing a book and then Newton accused you of plagiarism, what would be the right course of action? Unless you have hard evidence that you had not heard of Newtons laws earlier, nobody would believe you.


Is there documentation on how long it takes before publications are indexed by Scopus and Web of Science?

This is a really interesting question!!

According to Clairvate Analytics WebofScience/WebofKnowledge), updating of the WOS collection occurs daily on Monday through Friday. This revelation, paired with @Andrew 's comment about Scopus, suggests that the lag time exists with the publisher and not the database compilers (i.e., how long before the publisher submits (or makes available) the DOI and metadata). Here is an interesting op-ed on these lag times.

It is also important to note that articles which are published in non-indexed journal will not appear in most collections/databases, however, GoogleScholar will may pick up more grey literature (e.g., government articles, theses), and potentially some of the non-indexed journals. This article suggests provides 'optimal' updating frequency compared to GS and WOS in their field.

If the article is available online as either an early print or post-print, then it should have a DOI (I assume), and therefore should be searchable via Google. It follows that Google Scholar should pick up articles faster than human-curated databases (Scopus, WOS).

In a brief search (using GoogleScholar), I came across a preprint by Haustein et al. When is an article actually published? An analysis of online
availability, publication, and indexation dates.. The authors found that in some fields lag time has decreased but has increased (!) in others:

  Various studies have analyzed publication delays and found differences
  between scientific fields, journals, and publishers (e.g., Abt, 1992;
  Amat, 2008; Björk & Solomon, 2013; Das & Das, 2006; Diospatonyi,
  Horvai, & Braun, 2001; Dong et al., 2006). Since long delays interfere
  with priority claims and slow down scientific discourse, publication
  speed plays an important role for authors and scholarly communication
  (Rowlands & Nicholas, 2006; Schauder, 1994; Tenopir & King, 2000).
  Short publication delays can therefore be considered as a quality
  indicator reflecting the up-to-dateness of scientific journals
  (Haustein, 2012). Publishers have begun to reduce delays by making
  so-called early view, in press, ahead of print or online first
  versions of accepted papers available before they appear in an (print)
  issue. It has been shown for food research journals that online ahead
  of print publication has reduced publication delay by 29% (Amat,
  2008), while Das and Das (2006) reported for 127 journals in 2005
  average lags of three months between online and print issues
  publications with particular differences between publishers. Tort,
  Targino, and Amaral (2012) showed that this lag increased
  significantly over time for six neuroscience journals. Online dates
  are now being recorded in bibliometric databases like Scopus, which
  impacts bibliometric analyses (Gorraiz, Gumpenberger, & Schlögl, 2014;
  Heneberg, 2013).

Various distributions are made available in Table 2 of the aforementioned paper.

An aside: it may be worth checking out some of the works citing Haustein et al.


École Normale Supérieure's students' class rankings and ranking on the national concours exam for agregation?

I found half the answer:

Here's the link to records for rankings in the concours exams for aggrégation:

Les agrégés de l'enseignement secondaire
Répertoire 1809-1950


If a paper cites a work and its translation, is it counted as two citations for calculating h-index?

The h-index, as usually employed, does not take translations into account. The case you cite would be effectively the same as citing two genuinely different publications by the same author. Under certain circumstances, this might increase you h-index by 1. I leave it to you to decide whether this is fair or not.


Where can I find standard high school textbooks used in the US and UK?

In the US, at least, some of the states have lists of approved books. Texas for example has a list: https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/19095
Maryland, or at least some large counties there, may also have such an approval process.
There are probably others. But note that some of the textbook selections in Texas are very controversial, as the selection board is sometimes dominated by creationists and other science deniers. So, use caution with this list and any other.


What is a proper way to consider the supplementary materials as a reviewer?

Your job is to provide critique and suggestions by which the authors can improve the paper. The published paper should be self-contained; that does not mean that as a reviewer you should ignore the supplementary material.

It sounds to me like you already know how to advise the authors to improve their paper. I would definitely ask them to make improvements and submit a revision, rather than reject — especially if the paper would be "perfect" with your suggested changes.


What are the pros and cons of dealing with a very large dataset in qualitative research?

There are no pros or cons just as there are no pros or cons to having $1,000,000 versus $1,000 to work with.  You are less constrained.  That is just a fact. The range of things you can do goes way up.  If you don't like things being larger, you can voluntarily choose for them to be smaller by sampling.  If you have a more specific question regarding methods, you should ask it on Cross Validated.


(converted from a comment on request).

I don't think much has changed about pricing, but Elsevier has made open access all the content of their journals in mathematics after a 48 month embargo (source). This was a very appreciated move: mathematicians often rely on old articles for their research, so 4 years isn't too long to wait (for some), for this discipline. It is also a shrewd move from Elsevier, since it pleases their audience but doesn't cut into their main source of income, which are yearly subscription access deals with university libraries.

Maybe this will encourage academics from other fields to consider a similar protest to obtain the same boon...


Approaching unresponsive high level research professor as an undergraduate without any program

Well, faculty-student research is a two-way street, and for whatever reason, it certainly doesn't sound like this professor is showing a lot of interest in working with you.  This is not necessarily anything about you or your abilities; he may just be busy with other things, or not very interested in working with undergraduates in general, or too disorganized to keep track of potential research students.  But any of those would suggest that this is not someone that would be a good research supervisor for you at this time.

If you did start a research project with this professor, you'd be counting on him for actual supervision: advice on what to learn and what to work on, feedback on your progress and on your products (papers, code, etc), availability to meet to help get you unstuck when you are stuck on a problem, signing necessary university paperwork, collaboration in writing and submitting papers if you get that far, and so on.  You can see from many questions on this site how frustrating a research experience can be if this sort of support is not forthcoming, and it will be especially important in your case since it's apparently your first time getting involved in research.   And the fact that he is already so unresponsive to something as simple as "I'd like to talk about research opportunities" is reason for serious concern that he'd be similarly unresponsive when you really need his participation.

I would suggest that, at least for now, you move on and look for research opportunities with other faculty members - ideally, someone with a record of working successfully with undergraduates, and who shows clear interest in working with you.  I think these are more important than a perfect fit of research interests.

You have plenty of time to consider approaching this professor again in a year or two.  In the meantime, you might try to talk to other students he's supervised (either undergraduate or graduate) and find out how the experience was.  This may give you some ideas about how to get his attention more effectively, or it may convince you that you don't want to work with him at all.


Why do big companies ask for conference instead of journal publications?

It depends on what field you are in and the types of jobs you are looking at. In computer science, conferences are typically valued more than journals, although this doesn't necessarily mean the quality of the papers at conferences are better than journals. A popular computer science department ranking site, CSRankings, does their rankings by top conferences, where the three you list are used in the Robotics area.


Is it appropriate to show that a conference paper is prestigious by comparing the conference rejection rate to that of Science and Nature?

I am a CS researcher and I know the reputation of CVPR conference.

Please see the following situations:

People submit to Science/Nature journals when they see that their work is highly qualitative and could give a high level of contribution to the scientific world. It is not like someone does a small thing and submits. So, if 1000 papers are submitted to journals like this and only 450 gets accepted then, the acceptance rate is far high.
However, similar case as above does not happen in conferences. Anyone can submit anything, even if it is a small contribution.

Please remember, it is NOT WISE to compare conference with such journals. Journals are far better than conferences given the amount of contribution you may find in the published works.


How are these kinds of published errors managed?

I suggest that you write to the Journal to point out this error. It is, after all, still an error and needs to be corrected.

If someone were to write to us describing such an error, one of our editors would confirm the validity of the claim. If upheld, then this will result in a small correction (perhaps one to two lines) to be printed in the next issue of the journal. This is the practice at least in the journals in health and medicine that I help edit.

In the electronic versions of the manuscript, we would make the change in-house and release a new version of the paper with a notation at the end of the article specifying the change. That way, no new versions would be released with the error still in place.

We would issue an apology, too, and a statement that the inferences and conclusions were not affected.

This error would not be significant enough to alert indexing services. Also, this would not trigger a need for us to investigate the source of the error or to review our processes.


Should I stay in PhD program I dislike to have a shot at liberal arts teaching?

You should know that these days, most 4-year liberal arts colleges in the US expect their tenure-track mathematics faculty to do research.

Colleges want to be able to offer their students the opportunity to be taught by experts who are contributing to their field.  There is also increasing interest in getting undergraduates involved in research, which means the faculty have to have research programs to get them involved in.

Of course, there is a wide spectrum of expectations.  At the most selective liberal arts colleges, research expectations can approach those of a mid-level research university, demanding a regular output of papers published in good journals.  Elsewhere there can be more flexibility, replacing a specific requirement for "research" with the broader term "scholarship"; they might require only occasional publications, and they could be projects with students, or articles about teaching.

But in general, if you want an academic job in mathematics that doesn't require you to do any research at all, you're going to restrict yourself to the least selective tiers of liberal arts colleges, or to non-tenure-track positions (and often liberal arts colleges tend to have relatively few such positions, compared to large universities).

You might have a look at MathJobs to get a sense of what jobs are out there, and what they expect.  Note that there are not so many listings in summer, since this hiring cycle is mostly finished; many more will appear in the fall.


Multiple accounts of plagiarism (?) during literature study: are my standards too high or should I take action?

It's also worth noting that conventions on citing and quoting are not universal, and can vary between academic communities.  For example, in mathematics, it is quite common to copy definitions or statements of theorems verbatim, or nearly verbatim, from other papers.  The precise wording and notation can be critical, so wholesale paraphrasing is risky.  However, the convention in this field is that quotation marks are not used in such cases, though a citation should usually appear.  Likewise, if a definition or statement is "common knowledge", it might be that every paper discussing it uses almost identical wording (maybe without citations), even though they have not consciously copied from each other.

(I don't really know how this practice arose, but one point is that it often happens that you want to state a theorem almost verbatim, but modify the notation to match what you're using in the present paper.  Now it's not an exact quote anymore, so you can't strictly use quote marks, and noting your amendments with brackets could be very confusing when mathematical notation is involved.)

This can add up to several paragraphs or pages of "copied" text over the course of a paper.  A newcomer to the field might see this and be horrified by the blatant "plagiarism", but within the field it's regarded as perfectly proper.

Additionally, it's completely normal in mathematics to write things like "The material in this section comes mainly from [3]" without adding [3] to every other line.  It's more about common sense than following rules.

So, the moral is to make sure you're calibrating your standards properly to the specific discipline in which you're working.


How to deal with a disorganized professor?

Talk to academic advising, or someone higher up in the department.
I applaud your efforts at being understanding, but keep in mind that teaching this class is his job.  Students not knowing what material will be covered, or how they will be evaluated on it, is him not doing his job.
It's certainly possible this professor has other things going on in his life that are preventing him from getting these things done, but they're very fundamental pieces of the job itself, and you're already three weeks in.  If he's incapable of doing this basic part, then the department should be involved, at a minimum to provide the professor with the support he needs.  And unlike in the spring, when the COVID crisis and at-home learning was suddenly thrust upon us all, we have had many months to prepare for it this time.  The same things that might have been excusable in April, such as scrambling to figure out how a class will work in week 3, are not excusable now.


Advice? One of my PhD supervisors is insisting on involvement with my article based off my Masters thesis.

The standard answer to all questions from graduate students applies here as well: Talk to your adviser. Have a frank conversation in which you bring up your concerns, have him explain to you why he wants to help, and then -- between reasonable adults -- come to a conclusion of the issue.

You can speculate all day long about his reasons and maybe he about yours. But grown-ups can have a professional conversation that resolves these issues to everyone's satisfaction.


Attaching reprints of published but copyrighted papers with job application

Like almost all such questions, the ultimate answer is "look at the copyright agreement you signed."

However, in almost all cases, it is fine to distribute copies of your papers privately to individual people, so I can't imagine there would be a problem with you sending your papers along with your application.  In the past, publishers would give authors a certain number of paper "offprints" for exactly this purpose.  Nowadays, you more often get an official PDF (with the journal's logo) that you can send to your friends and colleagues, and that would be just the thing to send with your application as it also proves that the paper was in fact published.

Posting on your web site is likely to be specifically addressed by the copyright agreement.  Some publishers allow it, some do not, some allow the posting of only certain versions (e.g. before revisions based on peer review).  So read what you signed.  (And next time you publish a paper, read the agreement before you sign it!)


Does any country have free college & open admissions?

Here is an overview of the situation in Germany, where there are no tuition fees for Bachelor and Master programs at public universities (though student union fees and public transport fees totaling 60-130 EUR per semester still apply).

For Bachelor degrees, the general requirements for admission to any German university are (1) proof of knowledge of the language of the study program (German or English) and (2) university entrance qualification (Hochschulzugangsberechtigung).

"University entrance qualification" means proof that you are eligible to attend a university. In Germany, this is obtained by completing the Abitur examination. In the German education system, at the age of 10, students are already separated into different types of schools based on their performance, some of which have direct access to Abitur (and therefore to university), and others which have practically no access to university. About 50% of German students complete Abitur and have directly access to university.

For international students, this is the corresponding high school leaving certificate. Depending on the country, your school leaving certificate might directly qualify you to study in a German university, or you might be required to do a two-semester preparatory course (Studienkolleg) before being allowed into German university . In this database (only in German), you can search for your country and school leaving certificate to see how it is in your case.
For most Bachelor degrees, admission is unrestricted (Zulassungsfrei), which means that  any student that satisfies the above general requirements will be admitted, without going through a field-specific aptitude test. Switching programs after the first year is not difficult, but there is a somewhat strict requirement to pass the first-year courses in a limited amount of time, so the idea is to let students "test" their preferred program and switch to another one after the first year if they are not comfortable with it.

Note that not all Bachelor programs have unrestricted admissions: in some fields such as Medicine there is a limited number of admissions and students will be chosen according to their grades in previous stages. This is called Numerus Clausus (NC).
On the other hand, most Master programs do have an aptitude test and students are admitted based on qualification in their field (in addition to the general requirement of having a Bachelor's degree). At this stage, students are supposed to already know what they want to study. I would expect the level of "strictness" of the aptitude test to be in some way related to supply and demand (disclaimer: personal opinion here), so the requirements do not necessarily have to be stricter than in US universities.  The offer of Programs taught in English (which are mostly only Master programs) is more limited than for German programs, so the aptitude test for English programs might also be stricter.

As pointed out in the comments, many Master programs are the result of the splitting of old 5-year programs (Diplom) into a 3-year Bachelor and a 2-year Master. Students doing the Bachelor program that apply to continue with the corresponding Master program at the same university usually have very easy admission into the Master program.

In summary, the requirements for entrance to German university in general are somewhat strict, but once you are in, there are in most cases few additional requirements for choosing a specific university or field.


Mothers listing children's dates of birth on academic CV?

This is common in Europe. Parents are not supposed to (and to some extent not allowed to) work during maternity or paternity leave. Thus, such periods are deducted from your phd-age, tenure clock etc.

Quoting from the ERC Starting Grant 2017 call:

  For maternity, the effective elapsed time since the award of the first PhD will be considered
  reduced by 18 months or if longer by the documented amount of leave actually taken for
  each child born before or after the PhD award. For paternity, the effective elapsed time since
  the award of the first PhD will be considered reduced by the documented amount of
  paternity leave actually taken for each child born before or after the PhD award.

And from one of the largest commercial foundations supporting basic research in Denmark, which explicitly states that the CV should contain this information:

  In the case of maternity leave, the number of months on leave, times two, will be deducted from the seniority.
  The specific dates for the period of maternity leave must be clearly stated in the CV/resume.


Paper rejected. Should I appeal against biased reviews?

@Fomite's answer is spot on. I would like to expand further on the differences between a biased review, a lazy review, a significantly erroneous review, and a negative review, and which do/don't warrant an appeal.
The examples given in this post come from a contest held by the always-excellent FemaleScienceProfessor. Quite a few are real reviews, or based on real reviews.
Biased Review
Does warrant an appeal, if it's the reason your paper was rejected. Often editors are smart enough to identify a biased review on their own, and will simply discount its advice.
Example #1 (here, the reviewer clearly lets his personal goals get in the way of a fair review):

I am afraid I cannot support the publication of this paper. The authors present an idea that I myself have had for some time and just haven’t gotten around to writing it up yet. I think that when I write my paper, it will be better than this one. These authors would be well advised to wait until my paper is published, and then they can cite it.

Example #2:

Since the author is a woman, I had lowered my expectations accordingly, but the author did not even meet those. Even though I have never done experiments in my life and have never used any of these techniques, the experimental results presented were completely misinterpreted in my distinguished opinion.

Lazy Review
Does not warrant an appeal. If all of your reviewers give you a lazy review, you need to do a better job exciting the reader (thereby motivating the reviewer to carefully read the whole paper in detail because it's such compelling reading.) (Very rarely, this can be an indication of a bad journal/conference and you should find a better place to submit your work).
Example #1:

The topic of this paper is not of critical importance to furthering knowledge.
Sent from my iPhone

Example #2:

Paper Title: Linear and Nonlinear Methods to solve XXX
Review: "Why is the approach limited to linear methods, and the author does not propose nonlinear methods?"

Significantly Erroneous Review
(per JeffE's suggestion)
This is a distinct case from the Lazy Review. It does not include the case where the reviewer "erroneously" concludes that your work is not interesting or useful, just because you disagree with this conclusion.  It does not include the case where the reviewer says "I am concerned about X" and you believe you've adequately addressed X.
It does include cases where a review is affected by a significant factual, logical, or mathematical error.  This is grounds for appeal.
Example (the reviewer is mistaken as to the meaning of "graph" here):

Paper title: Graph analysis of System ABC shows differences in A-B connections during Condition X vs. Y
Review: This paper uses a novel method to study ABC system dynamics. However, I don't know anything about graph analysis so I'm going to interpret the paper through the lens of a different analysis method I do know something about. Thus the only constructive feedback I can give is that this paper is a poorly written explanation of a structural equation model of XYZ - the conclusions drawn make little sense given the data, i.e. they frequently refer to "graphs" but all I see are these pictures of circles and arrows.

(A minor error is highly unlikely to be the reason for a rejection. Therefore, for a minor error, an appeal is not likely to be successful - an appeal will be useful only if the point of appeal was the reason for the rejection. In the case of a minor error, I would advise to use the reviewer's mistake as an opportunity: to clarify in the text points that might lead people to mistakenly discount your results, or even to decide to ignore the criticism because it's not a common enough misconception to be worth addressing in the paper.)
Negative Review
A review that does not fit into the above categories, but still criticizes your paper, is just a negative review. It is not grounds for an appeal. It should be taken as constructive criticism, and you can use it to make your paper better.


Should you always report to faculty with equal or higher rank?

Universities are not like the army, in which your commanding officer is always someone of higher rank than you.

For instance, it is common for an academic department to have a chair or head who is drawn from among the faculty.  Many (most?) universities allow an associate professor to serve as chair (some would even allow an assistant professor).  In such cases, an associate professor can certainly be the "boss" of a full professor.

I don't think there is anything unusual or worrisome about the proposed organization you're describing.


Can an energy drink or chocolate before an exam be useful ? What sort of other edible goods be helpful?

I think doing such things may be risky. Instead, do something natural. The most important is to get plenty of sleep the night before the exam and don't try to cram up to the last minute.

Between the two exams parts, get some light exercise and, again, don't cram. Let your mind relax and let it integrate what you know rather than trying to force it to absorb things that may mask other, more important things.

As for food, eat as you normally do but nothing heavy that will make you groggy and wanting an afternoon nap. If you eat differently, your gut may rebel against you.

If you have been taking good notes throughout the learning period, then summarizing them on note cards (big ideas only) in the week previous can be a good plan. You can then do a light review at the morning and mid-day meal. A light review. Big ideas.

But make your body and mind as comfortable as possible. Breathe deeply. Relax your face. Smile. (These are martial arts advices, actually.)


How to arrange reading for a literature review and writing it?

As a professor in a French grande école de commerce, I am pretty familiar with the requirements of a literature review for a master's thesis.

I can recommend to you an article I wrote on the subject. In summary, there are eight general steps:

Identify the purpose of your literature review. In your case, it is to understand what scholars have said related to the topic of your thesis.
Plan the review. Outline the steps that you plan to take to carry out the literature review.
Apply the practical screen. That is, clearly decide what kinds of topics you will search for and which you will not search for because they are beyond the scope of your focus.
Search for the literature. Try to have a meeting with you your school library to help you understand how to use the scholarly databases and get you started in searching for the articles.
Extract the data. Read the articles and use a table to record the most important elements from each article.
Appraise the quality of the studies. This step is probably not necessary for a master's thesis.
Synthesize studies. Do not just summarize the articles one by one; rather, identify and discuss the most important themes that run through multiple articles.
Write the review. Compose and put everything together.

The article linked above has details on each of these steps.

Reference

Okoli, Chitu, 2015. A Guide to Conducting a Standalone Systematic Literature Review. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 37(43), pp.879–910. Available at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol37/iss1/43


How to respond to PhD offer emails politely

If you already know, for sure, which school you are going; simply respond to others by thanking them and telling them that you already chose your school. Something like the following:

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thanks for the offer. However, after extensive consideration, I chose the university X for my Ph.D.

Kind Regards,

Your Name


Asking part of the salary in advance while starting a postdoc at a US university

My university would give you a moving allowance that could be used to cover first and last months' rent plus security deposit on an apartment or rental house. You might start with asking what kind of moving allowance or support they offer and whether upfront rental costs like these are covered. This is not considered an advance on salary at my university, but is part of the cost of hiring. The university simply pays it to get good people to come work there.


Sharing information between two mutually uninvolved collaborators

I would simply ask A. Say "this project has been fun, but I assume you don't want to continue to work on it for reasons X, Y, and Z. Do you have any objection to me continuing the work after this paper is published." You don't need to wait for this to be published, I see nothing wrong with saying this while writing the paper or even while concluding the research.

If they say that they don't mind, great. You don't need to tell them about he other person you will later bring in.

If they say they do mind, find out why and address their concerns.

The third option is that they surprise you and say "actually, I want to keep working on this." In that case I wouldn't try to push them out. Instead I would continue the research with them and at some point later suggest bringing B onboard as an additional collaborator.

You can inform B of the contents of the project as soon as you bring them onboard or as soon as you have a public preprint, whichever is earlier. Alternatively, you could also ask if A has any objections to you sending the paper around to a few people and send it to B.


Is it OK to have a significant drop in grades when moving from the Middle East to the EU?

Background: Some time ago, I've been working at a German university as an assistant in electrical engineering, and we had some students from Arab countries.
Generally, they were much better than the Germans in reproducing content they had learned, but had more difficulties than their colleages in applying that knowledge to the problems at hand. And the university valued knowledge application much higher than knowledge reproduction. So they had a hard time adopting to that different learning style.
Coming back to your question:
It might be that from a different cultural/educational background, you're used to a different style of learning than what the German university expects from you.
My best recommendation would be to seek contact to your professors and your colleage students, to find out what the professors expect / what the other students do differently. Try to find some colleages to form a learning group.
Your colleages are surely not brighter than you, they only have better adopted the learning style that the university expects (they grew up in the same educational system where they are studying now). Most probably, they'd have comparable problems when going to a Middle East university.


Got 0% on a midterm in Math Graduate school

Remember exams are supposed to measure your mastery of the material, and if you focus on only two out of four topics, you haven't mastered all the material - at best you've mastered 50%. Trying to game a passing score this way is not a winning strategy; even if it works, you'll come out of grad school thinking you barely learned anything (example).

That said, one failed midterm isn't the end of your graduate program. It's likely even one failed course isn't the end either. You will however need to step up your game. If you're able to do the homework but not the exams, figure out why. You alluded to you being able to "having time to look at the homework". If this is the reason, then you must work faster. Try doing the homework problem with solution covered up, and timing yourself. Repeat it several times. The time you need should go down, and if you can do that, you can solve the exam questions in the time available too.


Writing a Master's thesis for 2 years ... is that appropriate?

Of course it's hard to say without knowing a lot about your specific situation, but I doubt spending an extra year on your master's thesis would be worthwhile.  In particular, if your advisor doesn't think another year is a good use of time, then I'd bet he is right.

Completing a master's degree is not necessary before applying to Ph.D. programs in mathematics in the U.S., and the primary purpose is to make up for a weak background or to shift fields.  From this perspective, the main goal is to do good work and move on, not to spend extra time trying to accomplish even more.  That comes across as eccentric, like you are wasting time on a side track rather than moving on with your academic career.

Two years in a master's program is the upper limit for what's normal in mathematics in the U.S., and this includes coursework.  Spending two full years working on a master's thesis would be unusual.  If you spend an unusually long time on your master's thesis, it may look like you just weren't able to write one more quickly, either because you weren't adequately prepared or you aren't good at getting things done.

  I thought that expanding the scope of my thesis, even if it would take longer for me to complete and defend, would look even better on my Ph.D applications.

If you write a much better thesis, it could be worthwhile, but it needs to be dramatically better even after normalizing for the time spent.  Linear scaling can't help you: if you spend twice as long writing a thesis that looks like it involves twice as much work, then it won't end up being a significantly better demonstration of your abilities.  The only real benefit is if your thesis is much better than twice as good.  (For example, if you have almost proved a significant new theorem, you might be better off taking longer and actually proving it.)


Are the methods used in math-based teaching (including physics, engineering, etc.) substantially different from those used in other areas?

At the University of Georgia we have a program (which is not identical to a "department", but is close enough so that the distinction has always eluded me) in Mathematics Education and thus we have undergraduate mathematics education majors and also mathematics education graduate students (both master's and PhD).

There are certainly close ties with both the mathematics department and other education disciplines -- e.g. the mathematics courses I teach have a substantial population of mathematics education majors -- but such undergraduate majors also take plenty of courses with the name "Math Education XYZW".  These courses are split into "content" and "pedagogy" courses.  This distinction was very hard for me to wrap my mind around (it literally took me a few years to do so, although obviously I was not working very consistently on it!): see for instance
this page, and please read carefully: the courses that they list as Content are actually in the math department (one or two of them are taken mostly by math education majors, but many of the others are also required courses for undergraduate math majors).  Rather the distinction between "content" and "pedagogy" -- which are the terms used by UGA students and faculty who talk to me about this -- is a distinction being made between two types of courses in the longish list of Professional Education courses.  Thus e.g. compare

  EMAT 3800.
  Course Title:   Connections in Secondary Mathematics II
  Course  Description:    Exploration of secondary mathematics topics related to number and measurement with an explicit focus on reasoning that connects critical topics of secondary mathematics to one another and to problem situations. Sample topics include proportional reasoning, number theory, and probability.

and

  EMAT 4800
  Course Title:   Teaching Secondary School Mathematics I
  Course Description: Introductory ideas about mathematics education, including current mathematics standards and policy documents, learning theories, and teaching strategies. Students will explore how secondary students think about and learn mathematics, examine how to select and modify tasks, use appropriate technology, and apply their learning in an accompanying field experience.

This seems to give rather strong evidence that the answer to the OP's first question is yes: Math Education is rapidly becoming distinct enough from Education in general to count as its own discipline.  (Obviously there remain many connections and commonalities between Math Education and other kinds of Education, just as virtually any academic field overlaps significantly with others.)  In particular, yes, math education students learn math-specific teaching methods.  This is indirect, though strong, evidence that there are differences between the teaching methods of various subjects.  But my other point is something that is not explicitly in the OP's question: more than just teaching methods, techniques or ability, there is actually additional content that math teachers learn and that other teachers (and students of mathematics who are not intending to teach!) do not.

Let me also introduce you to my colleague Sybilla Beckmann.  Beckmann (who was trained as an arithmetic geometer and holds a faculty position in the UGA mathematics department; her office is next door to mine) is truly* one of the very top American experts in the field of mathematical education of teachers.  (Beckmann is also largely responsible for my awareness and understanding of the issues presented above.  In fact I will contact her and ask her to look over this response to make sure I have gotten things right.) One of her initiatives over the last few years has been to promote the idea of an explicitly identified mathematics teaching community. In this regard, please see this article and this website.  Also, Beckmann writes on her webpage "Longer term, we plan for this project to include an electronic self-organizing journal."

tl;dr: Yes, this is definitely a thing.  It is a thing which has grown in recent years and is liable to continue to grow in the near future...and everyone seems to agree that we want/need it to grow.

*: So much so that I need not justify it here: just search the web for her and you'll see it right away.

Added: My colleague Sybilla Beckmann took time out of her busy workday [on Saturday!] to quickly look over what I wrote above.  She pronounced it "basically accurate" and went on to add the following:

  Teaching methods in math are definitely different from other disciplines. Work of Lee Shulman and Deborah Ball on mathematical knowledge for teaching has been transformative for the field in that regard. Some sources to refer people to: the CBMS Mathematical Education of Teachers II on the CBMS website. It refers to various other sources. Math education is a separate discipline with a large body of research amassed over the last 30 - 40 years. It connects to other education research but is its own separate field. At UGA, the math ed program is within the department of mathematics and science education (it used to be a separate math ed department but was joined for administrative reasons some years ago).

I added links to the wikipedia articles on Shulman and Ball, and I recommend at least skimming these.  Shulman is responsible for the idea of pedagogical content knowledge, a concept which is rather slippery at first [or at least, it was to me] but really seems to lie at the heart of an answer to the OP's question: it is precisely the material that you need to know as a mathematics teacher that you do not learn in your mathematics courses and cannot learn in non-math specific education courses. To nail it down more specifically than this is beyond my expertise -- e.g. the above two course descriptions were intended to convey this distinction but looking back it seems even more complicated: none of EMAT 3800 would be appropriate material for aspiring teachers of most subjects other than mathematics, and some but not all of EMAT 3900 would.

The two linked wikipedia articles give entry points into the vast body of literature
on these matters; people who were interested enough to read this far are encouraged to delve into the literature itself.  And when you do, come back and tell me about it!  I am an academic mathematician and thus a mathematics educator, but I have no specific training in mathematics education.


How did you or your advisor’s behavior change after obtaining tenure

That is a hard question to answer as a lot of things have changed simultaneously. For one thing I have just grown older (that makes me sound very old), got married, became a dad. All of these things affect who I am and how I view and interact with other people. My time as a PhD student was for me the first time in and employment relationship. Since than I got experience with other work positions, other bosses, and been a boss myself. This again changes how I view my advisor, independent of having tenure or not. At the time my dissertation was very very very important to me and this has decreased over time as well. I suspect that these changes were a lot more important in how my view of my advisor changed than the type of my employment contract.


When can/can't I upload full-text to researchgate?

This is entirely dependent on the policy of the publishers - there is no single general rule. For example:

Cambridge: no (but you can upload the submitted version)
Elsevier: possibly share the manuscript, but not the final PDF
Springer: accepted manuscript only

You can see most journal policies through the SHERPA/Romeo site. Note that some (eg Cambridge) have explicitly different policies for institutional or subject repositories versus commercial sites like ResearchGate.

The big exception is if your paper was published open access with a Creative Commons license or similar, either through an all-OA journal such as PLoS ONE or through a 'hybrid' OA option. In this case, you can repost it anywhere you want without permission.


Whose responsibility to detect plagiarism during peer review: editor or referee?

Well, we now have two opposing views, so I'll add a third: Neither.

I don't think that either the editor or the reviewer has a responsibility to try to detect plagiarism.  When I read a journal, I don't assume that anyone has taken explicit steps to check for plagiarism.  I don't see it as incumbent on either of them to take steps like matching against a database of previous papers (indeed I think such things cause more trouble than they are worth; see arXiv's "textual overlap" detector).

If a plagiarized paper should make it into print, I blame the author, but I don't blame the editor or referee for not catching it.  They are victims of the plagiarist, along with the rest of the community.

The referee is typically asked to judge the novelty of the paper, so they should be reasonably familiar with the existing literature (if not, they should decline to review the paper).  If the paper seems very reminiscent of a paper they've seen before, then they should certainly compare them, but not so much to check for plagiarism as to better understand the innovations of the new paper.

That said, the referee certainly has a responsibility to report plagiarism if they do notice it, and the editor has a responsibility to thoroughly investigate any reports or allegations of plagiarism, and take prompt and decisive action if warranted.


Manuscript in pipeline, corresponding author between jobs

Finish it in their own time (that is, if they want to) The only downsides you mention are of a practical nature. I'll explain below why they are not actually relevant.

You don't need an academic affiliation in order to publish in journals. But, I believe you might have a misconception of the affiliations listed on paper: affiliations listed are institutions that provided resources for the job. In particular, while your current employer should in most cases be listed as an affiliation, it doesn't mean that stops when you leave. If part of the work was performed with their resources, they should be listed as an affiliation. In particular, if your performed at least part of the work under their employment, you should list them.

As a special case: if an author (not just the corresponding author, but any author) has a new employer, but the work was entirely done without their resources, it is not an affiliation but they can usually be mentioned as a footnote with the text “Current address”.


Is it possible to download paper from academia.edu without being registered there?

Google Scholar provides the direct link http://www.academia.edu/download/37277308/Introduction_to_the_Keisler_Order.pdf. It seems like there are two identifying elements: the code 37277308 and the filename Introduction_to_the_Keisler_Order. Both appear in the source of the article page on academia.edu even when you are not logged in, for instance here:

  registrationParams: {
    doc_id: 37277308,
    splash: true,
    redirect: "https://www.academia.edu/11902653/Introduction_to_the_Keisler_Order?auto=download",
  }

So in theory it should be possible to recover the direct link by piecing them together. I don't know if there is software already available, but it does definitely seem possible to write, for instance, a Greasemonkey script that adds direct download links to these pages.

Of course, all of this depends on the specific format of academia.edu's webpages and direct download links, which are subject to change at any time. In particular, if they find out that many people are using them, I suppose they will quickly change the format to pull the plug and force people to login.


Should I be considering a Accelerated Master Program?

I would suggest to change your thinking style. There are many things we are passionate about them, but the life is too short and there is always a career competition. Therefore, most of us could be successful in one branch.
I suggest specify a deadline for yourself, ask others in these fields and at some point decide when your decision deadline come. By deciding I mean throw away all the other subjects completely from your mind.


Difference between research gap and research question

In short:

Research gap, I understand it as a field, subfield, mechanism, that has been under-researched and there is space for improvement.

For example, object detection using telepathy might be under-research, so there is a gap in the research of that specific field.

The research question seem to refer to a more specific hypothesis, which in cases, it can coincide with the gap. For example, can telepathy work to detect an object, or can telepathy work under these or those conditions. In my understanding the first could also be a gap, the latter is more of a question.

Then the main question could be, "can telepathy work", while the subquestions could be, "can telepathy work also while you sleepwalk", "can it work if you are drunk", "can it work if you are tired".

Just to avoid misunderstanding, I'm not from your field and I can only guess what you plan to work on. The maybe humorous answer does not intend to make fun of anything (I hope it's clear, otherwise I'm willing to retract it).


How much more does a recommendation letter from alumni help in PhD admissions?

I disagree with Damien's answer for the specific case of your question. A graduate of the department, who knows you very well and can write a good letter of recommendation, is worth just as much as the "big name," because she is familiar with the department as it is currently operating, and would be able to place your work in context of people also known in the department. So, for the specific case of applying to a school that is someone else's alma mater, I would say go for it, with a caveat.

That caveat is that if a person is not able of writing a good letter of recommendation, then you shouldn't use it. A bad letter will not help you at all. If you have a career services office or academic counselor who can help you sort through which letters are most suitable for graduate school applications, that will help you make the decision.


Prof at small university or postdoc at big university

As others remarked, this is highly individual. To make the answer easier, i'm going to assume that you don't have a strong personal preference and there are no factors that would 'make the decision for you', such as your partner working near one of those places.

Being a prof at a local university would likely mean a safe, stable position, so that you can focus on living your life. It might also be fun, if you can find motivated students or the curriculum offers something unique. On the downside, funding options might be very limited in such universities. You could end up in the vicious cycle where grant applications fail because you don't have enough research output, but you don't have research output because you have no money to fund a proper group. This of course depends if the position is a teaching or a research prof.

Smaller universities also sometimes attract people who, pardon my French, 'didn't make it'. If you're unlucky, being surrounded by such individuals can bring you down with them. You can imagine where that would go.

To be honest, i am facing a similar decision now, and am opting for the postdoc option. The reason is simple: freedom. Especially in a good university, you'll meet plenty of people that can steer you to a more advantageous situation, and the extra experience will only help. It also gives you the time to build a wider portfolio, and hence apply for better prof jobs. You will likely be less pressured to look for funding and have less administrative work, giving you the time to focus on your ideas, supervise students, build your own course and so on.

Two-three years from now, when you'll be finishing the postdoc, the local uni will perhaps still be available as an option. If you go for the prof position, switching jobs will be much more difficult. You do the math.