What does an optimal grading distribution look like?

Assigning grades to fit some "optimal distribution" is misguided.
We don't want to maximize the entropy of the grades in a particular course. It's not a very useful measure of a "good" set of grades. To quote from an answer by Anonymous Mathematician:

  Strictly speaking, Shannon entropy pays no attention to the distance between scores, just to whether they are exactly equal. I.e., you can have high entropy if every student gets a slightly different score, even if the scores are all very near to each other and thus not useful for distinguishing students.

(Note that this was in answer to a question that asked about using the entropy of exam scores as an indication of how good an exam is at distinguishing between different levels of mastery. It wasn't suggesting that grades should be curved a posteriori to maximize entropy.)

What we actually want is for grades to signal as closely as possible the students' mastery of course material. If every student in the course has achieved truly excellent mastery of the course material, they should all get high scores. This grade then seems to carry very little information. But in reality, it is much more useful to say that all students in this particular class achieved excellence and deserve a 10/10, than it would be to maximize the "information" carried by the grade and give some students a 1/10 because their performance was slightly less excellent than the highest level of excellence achieved by a student that year. This scenario (where all students achieve excellent or very good grades) is not even that unusual, as Michael Covington points out:

  In advanced courses, it can be quite proper for all students to get A’s and B’s, because weak students would not take the course in the first place.

For an individual student, the grade should depend on that student's demonstrated mastery of course material, and hopefully not at all (or as little as possible) on the other students in the class.

If you insist on thinking about it from an information theoretic perspective, what we really want is to minimize the Kullback–Leibler divergence between the distribution of students' achievements and distribution of students' grades.

If you have no information about the exam and what it measures, you cannot assign meaningful grades based on that exam score. If you know about the exam, you can assign meaningful grades based on exam scores, but not according to any optimal distribution - you would assign scores based on how much of the exam students are expected to know to demonstrate various levels of mastery, not by mathematically shaping the grades into some predetermined "optimal distribution."

  Edit: Suppose these test scores have only ordinal meaning. A student with a higher score can be said to have achieved better mastery of the course but having double the score does not mean that one has achieved double as much as another student.

Your edits are not going to change the answer; there's still not going to be an optimal distribution. If I have many excellent students in the class and I do an exceptionally good job teaching them, I'll give out many excellent grades, no matter how they rank with respect to one another. If all of my students are terrible and do poorly, they'll all get low grades even if one manages to get in a few more points than another (although in that case, I'll also take a closer look at the class to see why students are doing so poorly.) If half of my class excels and the other half fails to meet minimum standards, I'll give out 50% top grades and 50% failing grades. If their abilities happen to be normally distributed, their grades will be as well. You get the idea.

The distribution of student grades should follow the distribution of demonstrated achievements. Any grade distribution that doesn't is definitely not optimal.

The idea of grading students to some predetermined distribution (of any shape) is known as "norm-referenced grading."  For more information about alternatives to norm-referenced grading, see:

Sadler, D. Royce. "Interpretations of criteria‐based assessment and grading in higher education." Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 30.2 (2005): 175-194.
Aviles, Christopher B. "Grading with norm-referenced or criterion-referenced measurements: to curve or not to curve, that is the question." Social work education 20.5 (2001): 603-608.
Rose, Leslie. "Norm-referenced grading in the age of carnegie: why criteria-referenced grading is more consistent with current trends in legal education and how legal writing can lead the way." Journal of the Legal Writing Institute 17 (2011): 123.
Guskey, Thomas R. "Grading policies that work against standards... and how to fix them." NASSP Bulletin 84.620 (2000): 20-29.

These go into some more detail about problems with norm-referenced grading. You asked for a grade distribution that is "informative about student's grasp of the material." The literature I have cited explains that pure norm-referenced grading is not informative about that; it can only inform about student's relative grasp of the material, compared to others in the same group who have taken the same exam. In other words (emphasis mine):

  It can be useful for selective purposes (e.g. for the distribution of a scholarship to the 5 best students, or extra tuition to the 5 which are struggling most), but gives little information about the actual abilities of the candidates.

Source: McAlpine, Mhairi. Principles of assessment. CAA Centre, University of Luton, 2002.

In the middle of the 1990s, the Swedish secondary school grading system was changed from a norm-referenced to a criterion-referenced system. Thus it became possible to compare (for the same population) the ability of a norm-referenced grading system and a criterion-referenced grading system to predict academic success.

The first paper looking at this Swedish data set is not written in English. (Cliffordson, C. (2004). De målrelaterade gymnasiebetygens prognosförmåga. [The Predictive Validity of Goal-Related Grades from Upper Secondary School]. Pedagogisk Forskning i Sverige, 9(2), 129-140.) However, in a later paper, the author describes those results as follows:

  Cliffordson (2004b) showed in a study of 1st-year achievement in the Master of Science programs in Engineering that the predictive validity of CRIT-GPA was somewhat higher than it was for NORM-GPA.

In that later study, Cliffordson found (consistent with the earlier study)

  a somewhat higher prognostic validity for CRIT-GPA
  than for NORM-GPA.

and that across a variety of disciplines,

  Despite differences in both design and purpose, the predictive efficacy of criterion-referenced grading is at least as good, or indeed is somewhat better, than that of norm-referenced grades.

For details, see:

Cliffordson, Christina. "Differential prediction of study success across academic programs in the Swedish context: The validity of grades and tests as selection instruments for higher education." Educational Assessment 13.1 (2008): 56-75.


Is IRB approval required (by publishers or otherwise) for volunteer human subjects research?

Many journals have policies that require authors to have obtained IRB approval (or its equivalent in countries other than the US) as a condition of publication for any paper that involves human subjects. Here, the consequence of not obtaining IRB approval would be that your paper isn't published.

If you are employed by an institution that has a policy on human subjects research than you may be required to obtain IRB approval for any research project involving human subjects by your institution's policy, whether or not the research is sponsored by the institution or makes any use of the resources of the institution.  Here, the consequences of not obtaining IRB approval could include being fired from your job.

There are Commercial Institutional Review Boards that provide review and oversight for research involving human subjects outside of an institution with its own review board.  These are used, for example, by companies that do human subjects research as part of the development of new products.


Scoring GRE analytical writing practice essays

You've got a few options:

See if your school has a GRE preparation course (you may have to pay for this) or other writing tutorials.
As Tirath said, look at ets.org for strategies.
If you're still in undergraduate school and have at least another semester, enroll in a writing class. The practice you get from the class should improve your overall ability.
Look online for test preparation courses. These can be expensive, but sometimes they have "guaranteed results," and you can probably figure out the best ones by looking at reviews.
Advertise on Craigslist (or similar) for a tutor. If you are in a college town, you may find someone willing to tutor you relatively cheaply.
Look online for GRE writing samples, and read as many as you can.
Practice writing every day. The more you practice, the better you'll get (and read as much as you can, too).

Keep in mind that while you always should strive for high scores, your field of study will partially dictate how important the writing score is. If you're going for a history PhD, you'll need a high score, but for a science degree this tends to be less important (for admissions--being able to write is important for any PhD!).


Is having a "too good to be true" recommendation bad?

Saying that you gave the first proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is too good to be true.  (I.e., it is literally false, since the result was resolved 20 years ago by someone else.)  Saying that you are more talented at physics than Einstein and Feynman combined is technically possible but strains credulity to the point that it would  have a strong negative effect if not backed up by some truly remarkable facts.  However, saying that you are in the top 1% compared to all students in the last five years is obviously not too good to be true: it must be true of at least one student.  (These questions are often muddied by not being precise enough about the cohort being compared, and you should know that admissions committees interpret them with a grain of salt.)

When I was involved with PhD admissions in the UGA math department, each year I saw several applications in which the recommender gave the applicant top marks in every category.  When this happened I didn't say "Ridiculous!" but instead looked carefully at the rest of the application.  It may be that I conclude that the recommender is a bit naive and/or hasn't seen as good students as I have...but that still might mean that the student's application is quite strong.  In general top marks are good things, not red flags.

To my mind the fact that two of your recommenders showed you the letters is much more of a red flag than the top ratings.  The strongest letters of recommendation often contain confidential information that would not be suitable for the candidate to read (e.g. comparisons to other named people).  If such information doesn't appear then there is nothing inherently wrong with the practice, but nevertheless it does not inspire my confidence.

I guess if you are looking at the recommendation letters you have a chance to evaluate their suitability (which you can use in a future year; it is awkward and perhaps even ethically suspect to withdraw a recommendation letter after reading it).  At least in US graduate applications, good letters are about a lot more than the slightly silly ratings.  They also contain several paragraphs of text, usually occupying at least the better part of a page.  If someone gives you absolutely top marks and then writes little or nothing to back them up, they look quite lazy.  Though that does not specifically reflect on you, it certainly doesn't help your application either.


Why there isn't provision for writing comment on published articles like social media?

This is just opinion but the question seems to call for just opinion, of course. But, my opinion is that when the paper has been published it is too late for general public commentary on it at the place of publication. Researchers have better things to do than fend off trolls for example and much published research will draw the trolls.

The process for getting published, of course, is generally very rigorous with informed comment being fed back to the authors. They get (or should get) the feedback from people who are informed about the field and what has been done previously and what is important.

If a person, genuinely, has an issue with what is published the preferred avenue of response is to publish something better, citing the original.

Most authors can, of course, be contacted privately, either with praise or concern. The author can see it and take it into consideration. This can lead to better future publications benefitting everyone.

However online controversy about published research is less valuable and draws the authors into non productive response.

When something published is egregiously bad, however, comment often occurs in letters to journal editors or even, in extreme cases, in the general press. Sometimes corrections take a long time to occur, such as in the Stanford Study. But I doubt that social media type commentary would improve that situation.

tl:dr; The Trolls will Troll.


Web service to subdivide projects among students

Yes. You can use Google Sheets and Google Forms to achieve all that.

Its easy enough that you can use functions like RAND for randomizing (https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093507?hl=es and https://www.lifewire.com/rand-function-generate-random-numbers-3123931) without even needing a script.

Also please consider that you should ask in 'https://stackoverflow.com/'  for the specifics as this question is sort of out of the scope of this site. I'm not sure if you can send me a message directly or if only by comments, but ask me if you wish help with this.


Undergraduate in Computer science and now graduate in Bioinformatics

There are a number of bioinformatics programs that do not require you to have experience in both programming and biology. For example, the program at BU

What if I don’t have experience in both computational and experimental fields?
Applicants are not required to be well versed in both fields. Even if you do not have the academic background in both the computational and experimental fields, we are looking for highly motivated students

So only having a programming background should not be too much of a problem. You will probably want to have picked up and had a look at some undergraduate biology texts so that you are not completely clueless about the field.
As for approaching professors, it really is no different from other fields. Applicants to graduate school, whether for a PhD or a Masters, don't have all the skills to carry our independent research in the field. To get a research assistantship you need to find professors who are doing research that is interesting to you and send them your CV along with a well written email expressing why you want to work with them, what skills you bring with you, and what you want to learn. There are a number of related question on AC.SE that can help you in this regard.


I am studying computer science but I am passionate about electronics

A friend of mine came out of university with a piece of paper saying he's electrical engineer. He has a bachelor in electronics but now what he's doing is virtualization, servers and networks, absolutely not related to what he studied (actually he told me that low level languages he learned were helpful for understanding how optimization works, but that's it), and he earns pretty well! I think your degree will matter only for a short period of time in the beginning, but if you can get a job in a field even if it's different from you education, you can use it to continue learning in that field by yourself. Your degree won't be the most important thing for your future employers, experience will.


Should I give up on trying to get into a PhD program?

Based on what you've said, there is little to no evidence that you are "just not good enough" for a PhD in linguistics, so it would be a mistake to not apply again for that reason.  Rather, you should try to become more "genre savvy",
which in this case means learning more about the application process and what PhD programs in your field are looking for.

Here are some mistakes -- or, at least, opportunities for future improvement --
that I can see based on what you've said.

1) The writing sample: To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what this is.  In my field (mathematics), we have a "personal statement", which may or may not be similar to a "writing sample": in fact, it mostly functions as a writing sample, as what is expressed is usually not as important as the clarity of the writing and the reasonableness of the sentiments expressed.  But I don't know what it means to contribute a writing sample "in philosophy" versus "in linguistics", and I really don't know what it would mean to spend a year improving the writing sample.  I hope that academics in these fields can comment and clarify this point. My best guess at the moment is that you are actually supposed to submit a piece of academic writing in the chosen field.  If so -- applying to a linguistics PhD program and submitting a writing sample from philosophy is pretty strange: given that you took five graduate courses in linguistics, you certainly didn't need to do that.  Why did you do that?

I would not take as a given that your writing sample was the main problem -- rather, you should find out; more on that later -- but I would definitely take steps to improve your writing sample the next time around.  You wrote::

"And my professor was supposed to look at my writing sample in linguistics, he didn't end up giving me comments. I got comments from a PhD student who knew his stuff really well so that helped, and he said my sample was good."

You are not getting enough help here.  A professor who looks over something like this and has no comments is not helping you at all: it doesn't mean your writing is good or bad or anything: it just means you need to find a different mentor.  Getting comments from a PhD student is much more helpful than nothing, but a PhD student will have absolutely zero direct experience with PhD admissions, so he cannot directly help you.  You need to find at least one faculty member in linguistics who is willing to give you significant feedback.

2) Programs applied to: In my field of mathematics, most students apply to about 6-12 PhD programs.  You could get away with applying to the lower end of this range if you choose carefully: almost all students should apply to at least three different tiers of programs.  The lowest tier should be such that your faculty mentors say that they expect you to get in there.  In my field, anyone who would get waitlisted at a top program could certainly get admitted to a lesser (still wholly reputable) program.

Then next year you apply again to only 9 programs including the world number two program in your field.  Having had to wait an entire year because you "almost" got into a PhD program, you should have applied to many more programs the second time around and also included a lower tier of programs than you did the first time.  While I won't say it was a mistake to apply to the world number two, it is also not so clear how close you came to being admitted.  The waitlist is still an ordered list.  Unless they said you were at the top of the waitlist, it does not necessarily mean that you were very close to being admitted, especially since they told you that they didn't go to the waitlist at all.  (Also, for PhD programs you should be making a clear distinction between admission-with-funding and mere admission.)

I would suggest that you apply again to PhD programs, to more of them, and with a larger range.  Get a faculty mentor in your current master's program to help you with this.

3) Guidance and feedback: You have not gotten good advice.  It's hard to get good advice, but it can be almost impossible if you don't stick your neck out and try to get it.  I strongly recommend that you write to each of the programs that waitlisted you, carefully (though relatively succinctly) describe your situation, and tell them how helpful it would be to get feedback about improving your application.  What is the one thing you should work most on improving?  In particular, you have a golden opportunity to do this at your own undergraduate institution.  For that, I would suggest an in person visit.  When you talk to your old professors in person, they are really going to have to open up and tell you what happened.  You don't want to be bitter or confrontational about it: rather you should make clear what you are doing, which is getting the feedback you need to improve your application.

In summary, based on what you report about your profile, I myself am surprised that you did not get into a PhD program, given that you applied to 17 of them over two years.  I think you're right that people with worse records than yours are getting admitted.  This means that something in your application is not as it should be.  It is your life, after all, so it is worth devoting some energy to the sleuthing here: really suss out the problem before you apply again.

Good luck.


desparate [...] terrified [...] depressed

First of all, however, I think you need to get proper counseling.

   Does anyone have managed to leave academia after 40?

I'm maybe within 5 % of that mark - but my story is nevertheless quite different from yours: I like research, I like teaching, I didn't look for a job when I left: I'm freelancer/self-employed now, my field (analytical chemistry + statistical data analysis) is quite different from yours. I decided early that I don't want to become a professor. Last but not least, I'd been considering this step for a long time. I.e. I considered this my plan B in case I end up without a new contract at some point. As it is, it was I who didn't renew the contract, and I took the opportunity to do a slow transition by part-time remote work at my now former employer.

I'm still involved with research and closely cooperating with research groups. And I'm teaching both in industry and in academic settings.

  And are you happy with the change?

Very much so.

But I'm sure you realize that neiter is n = 1 a proper base for decisions nor will you be able to predict much how you will do even from a good poulation description of 40-year-olds leaving academia since the variance will be large.

I'd also like to state the somewhat obvious that by asking on academia.sx you'll probably get mostly answers by people who are still close to academia, since those who cut all ties to academia are very unlikely to read your question. And this means a selection of people who probably like research or teaching or both.


Status meaning: report on revised version promised by referee

Flippant: It means Referee 2 has promised a report on the revised version.

I'd normally say that this probably means that Referee 2's review is overdue, they have been contacted by the editorial office, and they've said it's coming. However, given the short time frame, unless you have submitted to a journal with an extraordinarily fast turnaround, this isn't likely the case.

With your added information, and that only one referee has appeared in the status, that likely means they have accepted the review. The updated status may mean that the referee has given the journal a head's up that the report is coming, but that it's delayed in some way that they know in advance (hence the "promised") and the editor selected the wrong status. It may also mean that something went wrong in the initial dispatch of your manuscript and they had to fix something (hence "revised) - I have, for example, had a supplemental file go missing in a packet sent to me.

But all of this is idle speculation - no one here can really know what it means.

My advice? It's been one day since your paper was sent for review. Stop checking on its status.


Is it worth going to college when you have no real passion for the subject you will study?

Decision-making is a science, so I'll try my best to stick to the science instead of trying to push you into academia because, well, judging by the name of this place, I'm probably a bit biased. The extent of my expertise in the science of decision making is that I once read a book about the subject. Disclaimers out of the way, this is a short procedure for making a decision:

Make sure you know what problem you are trying to solve. Why
do you want to go to university? A good job, living the uni student life, etc.
Specify what exactly you want to achieve. Do you want a
better salary, a job in an office, a job outdoors, learning to be
independent, living with young adults your age, etc.
Think of alternative ways you can achieve your objectives.
Have an open mind here.
Think of the consequences for each of your options. What
happens to you 5 and 10 years down the road? how certain are you of
those consequences and how can you reduce that uncertainty?
Make a table listing your options alongside all the pros and cons you can come up with during a week or so. Consider the respective weights of each pro. Do the pros and cons of option 1 cancel out, or do the pros outweigh the cons? Also try to put things into perspective. "Is 30k of student debt worth the pros of getting a degree?" becomes "are the pros of getting a degree worth X amount of dollars per month for X ammount of years?" or "are the pros of getting a degree worth living in a smaller house?". Be creative, but also be realistic.
Sixth and perhaps the most important step for your question, make
sure you identify the uncertainties affecting your decision. For
example, how sure are you that you won't eventually grow to like
your subject of study? Try to assign percentages to this. Can you
bear the consequences of not liking the subject? How much debt, and
what will that mean in your day-to-day life? Try finding new data to
fill these uncertainties.

Other general advice:

Don't avoid the decision because it's complex. Avoidance often gives you the worse possible outcome.
Don't be afraid to change your mind in the face of new evidence. If after your first few months you learn or you get a gut feeling this isn't the subject for you, go through this process again.
Keep in mind the heuristics that may be at play, such as the anchoring trap, the status quo trap, the cherry-picking trap, the
overconfidence trap, etc.
Take your time. You would not buy a house after only a few hours of thought. Making choices when you are young is like steering a ship
when you've just left the harbor. The older you get and the farther
that boat has gone off-course, the harder it is to correct it, but
not impossible! But it pays to spend a few weeks, months or even a
year charting your route and getting your heading right. And if you
are completely lost, then you need data, and to get data you often need to
try new stuff, like joining the military to see if you like it.

There are many books about decision making. My comment is based on Smart Choices, by Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa (2002) and Benjamin Franklin's letter on decision-making sent to J. Priestley in 1772. I also recommend Meg Jay's The Defining Decade. This is a much lighter read than the first book I mentioned, but it will make the consequences of your decisions clear, maybe even painfully so.

Godspeed.


Finishing a PhD while working at a community college

Teaching at a community college while in grad school is certainly an option and I know people who have done it.

My major concern would be workload.  I'd expect a community college job to be drastically more work, greater responsibility and stress, and less likely to accommodate your coursework and research time.  It can be very difficult in grad school to balance your time and energy among your responsibilities, and it's easy for  the short-term demands of teaching to push the longer-term demands of research to the back burner, ultimately sabotaging your chances of finishing your degree.    I certainly wouldn't suggest a full-time community college appointment; even part-time seems like it would be hard to manage.  But it sounds like you've actually taught at this college before, and have also TA'ed, so you'll be in the best position to make that judgment.

At the university, you'll probably get to TA a variety of courses, including more advanced courses in your discipline.  This can be a great learning experience for you, and fill in gaps in your education that you didn't know you had.  It can also be an asset on the job market.  At the community college, I presume you'd teach introductory or remedial courses exclusively; that's a learning experience too, but not in the same way.

At the university, you're more likely to find fellow students and faculty mentors with whom you can discuss aspects of teaching, and being a TA can be a great social / bonding / networking experience.  If you stay in academia, you'll be able to get letters from well-known professors attesting to your teaching ability.  At the community college, you'll probably be more on your own, and a letter from the department head there may not carry so much weight.

Overall, it might be better to plan on teaching community college during occasional summers (when TA'ing may not be available), or perhaps near the end of your PhD (and especially if your departmental funding runs out).  It seems overly ambitious to plan to do it throughout.


Stuck completing master's thesis, how to overcome poor choice of topic and supervisor at this stage?

Both my partner and I felt exactly the same way towards the end of our respective master's programs (in totally different disciplines, at different institutions). I was advising her, and vice-versa, to just stick it out for a few more months and complete the program. We'd both put in so much work and effort up to those times, it would have been a shame to just totally wash out with nothing to show for it.

Now here we are a decade or two later, and both of our careers have been completely predicated on having those degrees as door-openers and a foundation for success. I really love my job in academia, and it wouldn't be possible if I hadn't completed that program. I just asked my partner if she could go back in time to that very difficult period, how she'd advise herself, and she said "Definitely, stick out! Get that diploma!".

In both cases it took us about 5 years to mentally "wash off" that feeling of desperation. But we both feel so much better off, skill-wise, to have that under our belts. Best wishes; it does get better.


How to find out who were the reviewers of an article?

Although @xLeitix answer is spot-on, I think you are missing the main point. Anonymity is directly linked to any democratic process. Likewise, your election vote is anonymous. In this sense, a review is just a vote of confidence for the reviewed article and therefore it has to be and remain anonymous for a more objective opinion.

Another point is that anonymity in reviews not only protects the reviewers against repercussions but also protects against nepotism and mutual exchange of favors. Moreover, anonymity also ensures that all reviews are (almost) treated equal. So, a favorable, short review from a professor (who just said ACCEPT because he might personally know the authors) might count less than an informed, in-depth review even if that review comes from a PHD student. So, although the editor knows the reviewers, one reviewer cannot argue / discard with the other reviewer based on their individual status. In this sense, anonymity also protects the reviewed, since if the paper is actually good, it is more probable to be reviewed based on its merits then the authors' public relations.


Efficiency techniques for recording screencast lectures

Recorded lectures only seem harder because you are listening to yourself afterwards.  I think if you never listened to them or thought about listening to them you would not notice the difference.  Listening to yourself or watching yourself perform is always painful because it's never as good as the imagination.

I recommend limiting your lectures to three minutes.  That might seem extreme, but it's what I was taught by several experts and in my experience it works.  Several reasons:

Shorter recordings are less likely to have serious mistakes, so less gets discarded
A normal student's attention span is 3-5 minutes.  If you lecture longer than that, they can't pay attention.  Target your lectures to less than the attention span, because they tend to turn out longer than planned.
Faculty attention spans are not much longer than students'.

Separate your lectures with activities.

Also, during a crisis isn't the time to do a perfect job.


How does a dual degree (Computer Science/Maths) compare to a degree in a single area?

Your choice depends on your purpose and your competitors. You should ask yourself: who am I competing with?

If you want to pursue a Ph.D. degree, and if the subject you want to study contains a lot of math, such that a standard syllabus of a M.Sc. is insufficient, then you should go for it.

If you don't want to work in academy, then this depends on the company's choice of employers.

But remember, it is not about taking a lot of courses. As far as I experienced, professors pick their Ph.D. students by their i) research skills ii) background knowledge about the subject. And those are listed by priority.

Assume that, there are two CS students, Alice and Bob. Both are seeking a Ph.D. position in area of Game Theory.
Game Theory is closely related to Economics. But also, Multi-Agent Systems is main subject that relates Game Theory to Computer Science.

Alice chose to enroll a double-program which is a hybrid of Economics and Computer Science. Whereas Bob enrolled a standard M.Sc. Computer Science program, and took more Computer Science related courses.

They both graduated at the same time, with the highest possible graduation grades.

Scenario I

One of them wants to work at a company, and the other wants to join the research team of Professor Charlie. The result is, they are not competitors.

Scenario II

Both want to join the research team of Professor Charlie. There are two vacancies. The result is, they are not competitors (assuming that they are the only ones who want to join).

Scenario III

This time, there is only one vacancy. Now, you are Professor Charlie. Who would you pick? The right answer to this question is: what is my research team doing? Yes, it is indeed a question, but a necessary one in your situation. If professor Charlie's team is working on theories from field of Economics, then he will pick Alice. However, if his team is working on pure computer science and Multi-Agents, then he will pick Bob.

However, above all these, if there is a third student, Daniel, whose grade is not so high but published two top-conference papers and submitted one of his papers to a top journal, all in the area of Game Theory, it is most likely that Professor Charlie will pick him.

All in all,

  If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there. -- Lewis Carroll


According to this Springer document

  The "Version of Record" is defined as the final version of the Work as originally published, and as may be subsequently amended following publication in a contractually compliant manner, by or on behalf of the Publisher.


Asking my Professor to create a Google Account to submit a Letter of Recommendation for me

My best guess, and just a guess, is that he was frustrated with the system that was required, rather than with you. It is probably a mistake for any admissions system to require an email address from a particular provider (unless it was for a job at Google, I suppose).

I don't think you made an error, but if you want to ease the waters, go see him and apologize for the hassle of it all. It would probably be a mistake to just forget about it, but also a mistake to obsess over it.

Such systems infuriate me, also. Such extra accounts are always a security/privacy issue.


Is it normal to have several one or two month extensions after a fixed term contract postdoc?

As a fixed-term postdoc you should pretty much always be looking for another job, and your PI should expect this. Unless you have more than about 18 months left it is worth keeping an eye out for other plausible postdocs - it takes time to go through the process, if you get it they may be flexible about start date, and even if they aren't you have probably gained a year or so of security if the new job is 2 years. If you have longer than that left, is there anything semi-permanent you would be competitive for? It is a bad idea to wait until your postdoc is almost finished to start looking - academic jobs are difficult to get and you should expect to make multiple applications before finding something.
So definitely start looking now, if you haven't already. Of course it is nice to have an extra couple of months to fall back on if you don't get something else, but that's how you should think of them. And you should think of the possibility of your PI getting extra funding as no different to any other potential job you haven't got yet - you need to be pursuing multiple options to give yourself the best chance to get one of them.


First person plural or singular pronouns for thesis presentation

Use "we" when referring to something you did as a team, and use "I" when referring to something that you did by yourself. That is what these words are for.
Using "we" and "I" consistently in this way helps to make clear what your contributions were, and this is often exactly what the jury wants to find out during your presentation.  If you choose to not go with the above option you should make it clear in some other way what you did and what others did.
Of course, if there is a clear preference in the culture where you are presenting it is best to follow that preference, but you would probably not be asking the question if that were the case.


how to incorporate Virtual Reality in a business school setting?

A Quick Thought

Using VR in the classroom is pretty difficult if not all students can benefit from the VR system simultaneously. If only one student could use it at a time, you'd have to schedule time for students to use it outside of class.

My Best Ideas

Perhaps your best bet is to create a brainstorming contest for your students and incentivize it with prizes. As business students, they'll benefit from coming up with ideas for a "client" and competing for funding.

You could just purchase the system and encourage students to create VR applications for it. Encourage them to network with people in other fields to see what their needs are and how those fields might be able to benefit from VR. Perhaps they could do some market research? If you're feeling ambitious, and your students are up to the challenge, have your students work with computer science students to make a new product. This may work better as an honor's project or a class project for an upper-level or specialized course.

You could also use existing VR software to show the students what is being done with VR in other fields in order to inspire creativity and innovation. Show them how it's being used in medicine (a tool for robotic surgery), engineering (design visualization/analysis), real estate and tourism (virtual tours), the military (drone control, virtual warfare, etc.) and so on. You could show them Google Expeditions.

If possible, try to build a course around it. Virtual reality is expected to become much bigger (citation needed), so there are tons of business opportunities. Use your VR system to give your students an advantage.

Other Thoughts

The primary strengths of most commercial VR systems today are:

3D visualization (seeing in 3D with the ability to view any angle)
Interactivity (the user can manipulate the virtual environment)

If you can leverage both of these things in the context of business, you're good to go.

Using it as a flashy public-relations stunt is a great idea, but try to effectively use the VR system in an interactive way. One possibility is using existing VR software to show the students what is being done with VR, and inspire innovation. Show them how it's being used in medicine (a tool for robotic surgery), engineering (design visualization/analysis), real estate and tourism (virtual tours), and so on.

I designed a VR system for an intro CS class once and came up with some demonstrations/applications for related fields. I'll try to do the same for a business school:

Practice navigating difficult situations (or job interviews!) in a simulated, repeatable and immersive way. (An example of this is the "training room" in Monsters, Inc.) If before you simulated these situations using people, you had have a few people play the part of a difficult boss, employee or client, and students' experiences would vary. A VR system could simulate it all in a repeatable way, and it would be easy to record and analyse how students react (their words, body language, etc.). This could be used as a training exercise or in evaluation. After the software was developed, you wouldn't need to hire people to "play the parts".
Marketing: Users walk down a city block and experience a number of signs, billboards, advertisements, etc. Use this to discuss what sorts of marketing was effective vs. intrusive.
Visualize data: certain logistical and/or financial data may benefit from immersive 3D visualization. It may help visualize how different fields/markets/regions are interconnected. Machine learning is huge, so helping students learn via visualization could be useful.
Programming is becoming more essential for all fields of study. You could develop a VR framework and offer a course where business students learn to program using this framework by creating their own content. They'll learn a programming language in an engaging way, and might create something new.


Should I apply to a job where the requested area of specialization is my area of competency?

I would say look at the other aspects of the job (location, pay and benefits, company spirit, tasks and teams you would be a part of) and if all of that fits you could make an excellent applicant. Don't be too narrow in your search as many jobs change over time or people end up doing things not strictly related to their training.

If the job looks good, don't be scared about not perfectly fitting their profile.


Should I ask to meet graduate students during a TT job interview?

There is two different styles of "prospective faculty meets grad students" meetings:

The interview (the grad students are in some form on the selection panel or their input is otherwise valued by the panel)
The applicant gathering data (the grad students are not involved in the decision, but the applicant is interested in getting a different - probably more accurate - perspective on how the department really operates)

These are fairly different meetings. The former is basically the same as all the interviews with faculty, only that it's now a grad student on the other side. The latter should be much more driven by the candidate, and it's the candidate who will ask most of the questions.

For the former, the department will tell you whether you should meet students, and which. If they do not have it planned and you don't care about the second angle, there really is no point in meeting with students.

However, I have found the second angle to be extremely valuable if you have any doubts at all about the institution. Grad students tend to be more honest about administrative procedures, quality of life, work culture, etc. However, you need to enter this with the right mind set - this is not part of the interview, but people external to the entire process doing you, the candidate, a favor. It pays to be friendly and open here, and putting down the interview guard just a little may be necessary to get an open conversation going. I have found a good pattern to be to take out 2 or 3 grad student volunteers to an informal lunch (if schedule permits), or at least to a longer coffee break - and the candidate should invite them (or, in some cases, the department offered to pay, which is also fine as long as the students are invited).

  I worry that, if this is not standard, then it might be an awkward request for them. One school of thought is that this is a bad sign I should be aware of, but I don't think I should read too much into it.

It may be a little non-standard, but not standard is good! Your goal isn't to appear exactly like the other four candidates. If your request makes you seem more interested, more thorough, or just plain nicer than the others, this is a good thing. I am not sure what "school of thought" you are talking about, but trying to be as uniform in your requests to any other candidate seems horrendously bad advice to me. That is not to say that every department will say yes. Sometimes they really don't bother setting it up, sometimes they simply did not find students that were interested in meeting prospective faculty, both of which may be a small red flags on their own.


How common is it for people to apply for a PhD from industry?

I am about to go into a PhD (Computer Science) after a year in industry. During my campus visits at one large public and one small private University, I was the only prospective student that wasn't straight out of undergraduate. I did meet one graduate student who had been in industry for a year or two. So my experience confirms your impression.


Accepting admission offer from more than one institute in United States

You are only allowed to accept admission at one university.  As soon as you do so, you should contact all other universities to which you applied, and tell them you have chosen another school and are withdrawing your application.

If you accept admission at University X, then withdraw it and accept admission at University Y instead in the same year, it's considered unethical behavior, and Y might rescind your admission if they find out.

Most US universities use coordinated acceptance deadlines, so you should know exactly which schools have admitted you before you have to choose one.


Should you choose your committee members or should your advisor?

You first have to check to see what the university rules are for a Ph.D committee. Many universities have rules that limit the number of external members, the number of members not from the department, the number of members that are not "regular faculty" and so on.

Assuming that you've checked all those constraints, then you should definitely discuss this with your advisor, who will have more experience in constructing committees in your area.

Which brings up another issue: community norms. In your field of research, are there customary roles that committee members play ? that's something you need to discuss with your advisor.

Finally, after all of the above, to answer some of your questions:

  Should you already know them?

Not necessarily, although that helps with the first approach. It helps if they're familiar with your work even if you don't know them personally.

  Should they be doing research related to your dissertation topic?

Not necessarily, but they should have some connection to your work, otherwise they won't be able to provide any kind of useful feedback for you.

  Should they be in your discipline?

Definitely, unless your topic is interdisciplinary and you want the input from someone in the other discipline.

  Should they be selected more for how much they'll help you get a job?

That's definitely a factor. It's not a critical factor for all members of your committee, but it can be a factor when looking for an external member. Ideally, if you're able to do some research with members of the committee, they can write a letter for you.

Bottom line:

talk to your advisor and discuss all of this with him/her
Different members of the committee can play different roles. The mix is what's important


I have been affiliated with two doctoral programs in the social sciences and a GPA of 3.6 would be sufficient for the requirements of both programs. Have you looked at some prospective PhD programs that you would like to apply to? Check what the minimum GPA is - many will probably be between 3.0 and 3.5 minimum, which would mean that you should be fine.


Is taking a method explanation from books and papers considered plagiarism?

If you are using somebody else's words, you need to make this fact clear and explicit via quotation/block quotation; to do otherwise is clearly plagiarism, even if you are splicing together multiple different sources into some sort of Frankenparagraph.

If you are making a complex remix of two sources, proper quotation may feel very choppy and incoherent, however, so you are probably better off paraphrasing into your own words instead.


In this context, it is referring to the particular department or school, that is to say, "don't go to graduate school unless you get into a good university, or rather a good department." Don't go to graduate school for the sake of going to graduate school - make sure you're going somewhere which does good research, where faculty members publish frequently, has a history of graduates doing well for themselves, etc.


How do you address holders of non-Ph.D. doctorates such as an Ed.D. or Sc.D. etc.?

Traditionally, you would also address these people as "Doctor", as the distinction into different types of PhDs is mainly a naming thing.

As an example, look at Britain. Oxford University confers "DPhil." degrees, while Cambridge University confers "Ph.D." degrees. If you look at academic web pages of lecturers of British universities, they will be listed as "Dr" regardless of where they get the DPhil or PhD from. This is the same for other variants of the PhD as well.

Note that it can be that a person with such a degree does not call himself/herself "doctor" (which can be the cause of such a confusion). This can be due to legal requirements in using the Doctoral degree as part of your name or as a prefix to it. As an example, in Germany, if you got a PhD from a US university, you will typically not put a "Dr." in front of your name, as legally, you are only allowed to do so if you got a PhD degree from an accredited institution in a country with which Germany has a contract about seeing the degrees as equivalent. It is however fine to put a ", PhD (University name)" behind your name in this case. And there is no obligation to correct somebody if he/she calls you "Doctor" if you only have such a degree.


How to find ISSN number of IEEE Sponsored (or IEEE related) Events?

You can look at this list https://www.ieee.org/documents/2005_present_list_of_titles.xls from IEEE of upcoming events, and events from 2005 to present with all corresponding publication numbers.

As a comment points out, many of the listings do not have ISSN numbers. However, you can look at line 10935 of the excel sheet and see your conference.

IWCMC.  The IEEE conference number is 34432 and ISBN 978-1-4799-5345-5


What are typical examples of "scholarly work"?

For sciences, scholarly work means peer-reviewed publications.  Conference papers count if they are peer reviewed.

In other disciplines, it can mean different things.


(Master's Degree) What are they 'precisely' looking for in a Statement of Purpose, and does a SOP matter when one has excellent GPA?

What I'll write is based on my experience with mathematics Ph.D. admissions in the U.S.  How far it generalizes beyond that may depend on the circumstances.  (I'd bet much of it would still apply to a research-based master's program in computer science, but perhaps not to an MBA program.)  Note that U.S. graduate programs in math primarily take students who have just graduated from undergraduate programs, so the target audience is not so different from those applying for master's degrees.

  I'm still not quite sure how to write a 'breathtaking' SOP to blow the reader's brain.

It's impossible to write a breathtaking or superb statement of purpose, and I mean literally impossible: such a statement does not exist.  Even if Einstein and Shakespeare collaborated to write one for you, the best they could do would be to write a good statement of purpose.  Once your statement hits the ceiling, there's nothing more it can do to help your chances of admission, and the ceiling is low enough that a substantial fraction of applicants reach it.  If I had to make up a number based on my impressions from reading applications, I'd estimate that a third of all applicants write a good enough statement of purpose that trying to do better would be a complete waste of time, and many of the others at least write pretty good statements.  [By contrast, the ceiling is vastly higher for letters of recommendation, as well as for accomplishments as an undergraduate.]

It's certainly possible to write a terrible statement of purpose.  If you come across as a jerk or seem incompetent or dishonest, you can ruin your chances of admission, no matter how good the rest of your application is.  Even a statement that has nothing outrageously wrong with it can hurt your application if it's poorly done.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of bad advice on the internet.  Some of the common recommendations, such as childhood memories or inspirational quotes, will not help at all since they simply aren't relevant to the admissions decision.  At best, they come across as a little naive (and committee members will groan about another applicant who was inspired by Marie Curie), but they probably won't hurt your application if you include genuine content in your statement of purpose as well.  At worst, they will fill up your entire statement and render it useless.

Similarly, you don't want to write a "unique" statement of purpose.  It makes sense to include explanation if there's actually something unique about your application, but there's no value in writing a statement that's gratuitously different from everyone else's.  The admissions committee isn't trying to understand what makes you a unique and special snowflake, but rather what makes you a good prospect for graduate school.  That's not a genre of writing that generally benefits from wild creativity.

So what are committee members looking for?  This varies a little from person to person, of course, but here's a first approximation:

Do you know what you're getting yourself into?  Do you have a good feeling for what graduate school entails and what's involved in your chosen field?  Do you sound like you know what you're talking about?  (Don't bluff!  It's better to demonstrate an impressive undergraduate-level understanding than to look like you're pretending to have even deeper insight.)  There are any number of ways to mess this up.  You can sound clueless, you can display crackpot-style fantasies, you can sound like you are choosing grad school to put off having to get a job, etc.
Can you summarize and highlight aspects of your background in a way that shows some maturity and perspective?  This could include undergraduate research, an undergraduate thesis or capstone project, favorite courses, outside reading, etc.  Some students do things that sound impressive from a one-line description on the CV, but when they explain in more detail it sounds a little hollow, like they never really got into it or learned much from it.  Others are able to take similar experiences and fashion a more compelling case for going to graduate school.  For example, if you are describing undergraduate research, it's generally not enough just to give a brief descriptions of your results.  You should also explain the purpose and motivation behind the research and reflect on the experience.  (Maybe it pointed you towards what you'd like to do in grad school, maybe it showed you what you don't want to do, maybe it made it clear what you need to learn, etc.)
Can you explain anything that's unusual or worrisome about your background?  You don't want to overemphasize these things (your explanation should be just part of your statement, preferably not right at the beginning or end), but this is your chance to put everything in context and explain why any apparent flaws should not worry the committee.
Do you have compelling plans for the future?  You certainly don't need to have your whole career mapped out (that comes across as silly), or even your whole time in graduate school.  However, it's best to show that you are moving forward thoughtfully and sensibly, rather than just applying to grad school because that's what comes next.

You shouldn't panic about writing a statement of purpose.  Remember that your goal is not to write something brilliant, but rather something good enough.  (For example, there's no way you could demonstrate amazing plans for the future or profound insight you derived from reflecting on undergraduate research.  That just can't be done in a document of this length and style, so you just need to aim for good plans and good insight.)

It sounds like you are caught in tons of stress and planning before trying to write anything.  What I'd recommend is this:  Take a few hours and write a first draft, while keeping in mind the questions I listed above.  Then get feedback from friends and mentors, and pay the most attention to feedback from people who have served on admissions committees.  Probably you'll decide to make some minor changes and be done with it.  The worst case scenario is that you somehow did a lousy job, in which case you should reflect on what people didn't like about your first attempt and try again.  Either way, you'll have a decent statement of purpose by your second attempt, and probably the first.

  Does the Statement of Purpose matter as much if one has a GPA of 92%?

Some aspects (such as explaining poor grades) may be less relevant, but most of the things I listed above still matter.

  My interest in my field of study just happened over time; one day I saw that, hey this is pretty a fascinating filed of study and it totally matches my interest in different fields, I can apply the knowledge gained from this field to almost anything. So nothing extraordinary, it just happened with no reason.

You're right that this is nothing extraordinary, but that's fine, and it's very far from having no reason at all.  A bad statement of purpose says "I've loved area X since I was a child and have always dreamt of contributing to this field.  Admission to the University of Y will help me achieve my dreams."  That's nothing but a fancy way of saying you'd like to do X, without giving much of a reason.  Instead, a good statement of purpose could say "Area X fascinates me because it brings together my interests in A, B, and C.  [...further explanation...]  Among the many applications, D and E particularly appeal to me.  [...further explanation...]  Faculty members U and V work on related topics, which is why the University of Y would be an excellent fit for my interests."

If you can elaborate on your reasons that are "nothing extraordinary", you'll already be well on your way to writing a good statement of purpose.


Does publishing a paper with a non-edu email influence the review process?

None. Outside/commercial email addresses are more likely to be permanent than academic ones, since people change jobs all the time. I think that a Gmail or Yahoo address is fine, and I rarely look at them when reviewing. Some venues use double-blind reviewing, so the reviewers won't know your email address or affiliation anyway.


Is it possible to survive as a researcher being a dispassionate person?

The "passion" thing is a myth and a shoddy cliche.
Your true feelings need not have any effect on your career.  You just need to do the job.  In academia, there is lots of competition, so "doing the job" means doing it very well - among the best in the world.  But this requires actions, not feelings.
It can be handy to have the skill of making others believe you have certain emotions, though.
If you dislike academia, don't be an academic.  Especially don't teach if you dislike it.  There are better paying and easier jobs that are no more dislikable than teaching, but where you cannot harm students.


Why is Brill selling chapters of my book for $30?

Brill Announces Collaboration with the Harvard Semitic Museum on Three Book Series
(September 29, 2017).

This is most likely a press release from Brill, so I wouldn't give it 100% credibility just because it looks official. That said, I don't see why your priors are so much against it either. Recently, the Mathematical Association of America handed its journals (including its de-facto flagship, the American Mathematical Monthly) over to Taylor&Francis. If nothing else, it likely has taken a load off their backs, since they now no longer have to keep track of subscriptions and access.

EDIT: See the "Buy now at Brill" link at the HSS website? That should confirm it.

EDIT2: None of this should be read as a defense of giants swallowing academic (university- or society-based) micropublishers. It's just something that works in the current environment, for reasons that themselves would probably make a good question. I wouldn't be surprised if money is moving around under the table here, but at the same time I expect at least some of it being due to the increasing difficulties of handling subscriptions, payments and access controls when writing for a worldwide audience (GDPR and US export controls are but two things that come to my mind). I think we're going to end up with a bipolar publishing scene, with commercial giants on one side and OA on the other.


What to do if I find actual exam marks higher than the marks I made for my exam?

Options:
Re-scale the grades by multiplying a student's score, x, by 20/15. Thus a score of 12 out of 15 (which is 80%) would become 16 out of 20 (still 80%).

Just give them five more questions. Did you plan to get more data for grading purposes? You can always get more.


How to prove that papers were presented when conference programs are not in English?

Not everything on your CV needs to be verifiable via an Internet link.

I have many items on my CV that would require some interaction with a human to verify: degrees I've earned, summer research students I've mentored, seminar talks I've given, classes I've taught, etc.

As long as you can, on demand, provide contact information for someone who can confirm your presentation (e.g. conference organizer), I don't see why this is a concern.

If you want to provide a link to the non-English conference program, go ahead; someone who is sufficiently motivated can surely get it translated.

(I'm sure this goes without saying, but since I've seen a shocking number of CVs that say "Presented at Conference X" without further information I'll say it anyways: you must include the full details of each presentation, including its title, co-authors if there were any, full name of conference, date, and city.)


How important is the grade for a course I took, if I want to pursue graduate studies in that field?

Much of this will come down to what types of schools you want to apply to and what type of funding you hope to receive for graduate school.

In the case of the graduate students we review at my school, GRE is an initial filter for classifying applicants as "acceptable" or "not acceptable." After that we do not look at GRE scores much. This means that a high GRE score gets you in the door and essentially nothing more. Letters of recommendation and grades in relevant classes are much more important to us. Your GRE scores are quite high. Unfortunately, graduate school success usually has little to do with how well you can perform on a single 4 hour test. Grades are a better reflection in my experience. (Especially subject-specific grades).

I will be blunt: A C+ in a highly relevant course is not a good sign. There is no magic formula to overcome this. Admission committees will not really look highly upon a candidate who gets a C+ in a machine learning class because they could not learn Python. If you couldn't do it as an undergrad, what indicators are there that you will suddenly be blessed with the gift to learn Python and SK-Learn as a graduate student?

Understand that I'm not trying to be overly harsh on this. I am conveying the questions that an admissions committee must ask.

I will add that sometimes we will admit an MS student who pays his/her own way. This is usually done in the case where we see a person who has potential, but not a lot to show for it. If their grade issues persist as a graduate student, it's not really a huge issue for us. They usually self-select to drop out of the program.


How to handle getting offers from two PhD supervisors who know each other?

I recently posted a question about being on the other side of this scenario - a professor in my university offered to take on a student who had already agreed to work with me (and had been working with me for the previous year already).

You'll notice from reading that question and its responses that while I was a bit annoyed with the professor, I wasn't upset with the student. In fact, I advised the student to choose the advisor he thought would be best for him, and gave him a good recommendation to the other professor in case that's what he chose.

That's because the student is supposed to act in his/her own best interest (while still being responsible and professional, of course). It's not being selfish, it's being smart.

The first professor shouldn't get upset with you for pursuing an opportunity that is better for you - if he/she does, then you really don't want to work with someone like that, anyways.

So, go talk to the second professor: "I was thinking some more about your offer to advise me on my thesis and I have reconsidered my original decision. Is the offer still available?"

If he/she says yes, accept the offer and go talk to the first professor: "I really appreciate your offer to advise me on my thesis, but I've decided to work with X instead. Thanks, again."


I want to quit PhD after 4 months. Should I?

It's impossible to advise you what to do. But I would consider to give it more time, e.g., a year, before quitting. You may still be effected psychologically by the change of place, weather, geography and location; you are still not adjusted to the new place. So you feel anxious and perhaps panic. But it may not be a good strategy to haphazardly decide on quitting the PhD while in this position. So I would advise you to wait more time and see if you adjust to your place and perhaps start enjoying your project.

(Also, PhD is never easy, and so mild depression while completing a phd is quite common.)


Considerations When Serving on Thesis Committee

Internally within the committee, asking the committee chair is the best option. The chair should be able to fill you in with the procedure and what kind of angles the questions usually take. Be aware that the chair may still insist that you should decide what kind of questions to ask. And from my experience serving in committees, they did mean it.

Externally, since your institute is in the same city with the host, why not go attend a public defense there? That way you can also get the tone right. Do know that, however, tone/attitude can still vary greatly within an institute.

As for what to ask... first, I'd say don't ask any structural questions that would destroy the student's work. Those should be cleared up before the committee signed off the student to present. Second, unless it's for clarifying some question in the results or data, use open-ended questions. From my experience, I usually ask 1-2 clarifying question (e.g. on a limitation they suggested, etc.) and 1-2 "what if's" (e.g. what would you have changed if you can redo this work?) or "how should this work be carried forward", etc. That's just my style, I like to start by making it feel like the candidate is a student answering questions to end with treating the candidate as a new expert who can make recommendations and broad takeaway.


non academic job opportunities for mid aged PhD

Age here matters much less than the perceived seniority a PhD will grant you.

I graduated at the age you plan to, and have had a straightforward time finding employment opportunities. Certainly, at all ages, having a PhD limits some entry level opportunities, as you are seen as better fitting 'senior' tracks. For these, you may not have sufficient 'real world' experience. If you have interest in rapidly transitioning from individual contributor role to management, this may not be a bad thing at all. The key, for me, has been being open with employers and flexible about role.

Notably, this may somewhat depend on the culture in your field.


Serious error in published journal paper by a faculty member

Initially the question read in a way that the answer was obviously "this is how science works, no need to make a big deal, just do your project."  It was then clarified that the errata to paper B was published before paper A.  Which makes things a bit more complicated.  Here are some thoughts on the matter.

It's all about the timing

Possibly the timing of the review process and publication for A as well as those for the errata to B made it essentially impossible for A to be aware of the errata and to take it into account. This should probably be your default assumption going forward until you have solid evidence to the contrary.  In this case, the answer is "This is how science (and peer review) works, no need to make a big deal; ideas and methods get updated and discarded for newer ones all the time".

At some impossible to define threshold, though, when the errata for B appears sufficiently long before A, then we have a clearer problem: A should have known about the erratum, and failure to be aware of it constitutes a deficit and failure in the research for paper A.  Unless you have compelling and clear evidence that this was actually done intentionally by A's researchers (e.g. "We don't have the funding to fix it, so we'll pretend it doesn't exist and hope the reviewers don't notice", or "The erratum to B undercuts our research program and beliefs, so we will ignore it in order to minimize the damage to ourselves"), you should still not make a big deal of this.  You should point it out (in the prior case, as well), but do so dispassionately and "scientifically".  Don't denigrate or insult the researchers, simply point out the flaw, cite the erratum and possibly other relevant works that make this flaw clear, and then put it behind you and write the rest of your paper as independently of it as you can.

The worst case scenario

If you have compelling evidence that the failure to account for the erratum to B is because of unethical research practices, or fits into a long running pattern of such omissions/mistakes, then you've got a potentially serious problem.  Consult with your advisor, but avoid getting emotional and personal about it.  They might have more information and perspective that you are lacking that might paint a less negative picture. If your advisor echoes your concerns, then they may know what steps to take next and may take them for you (assuming they have tenure, they have a lot more job security than you do).  Your university should have an ombudsman or other person or office that is specifically concerned with the monitoring and enforcing of ethical research, and this is who you would go to if you feel you still need to take action.  From there you could conceivably elevate things to the deans, but this is a very severe action with no guarantees the dean(s) will side with you, and even if there are legal protections for you in this situation you may still find your career negatively influenced.  You may wish to consult with a legal professional before going to the deans (possibly even before going to an ombudsman).


"Under review" for nine months is normal in some disciplines

  Do you think I can stop the reviewing process and send it to another
  journal?

No. This will most likely delay the process even further.

  What if I sent it to another journal at the same time?

No. This is (most likely) prohibited.

  Or, would the reviewing process speeds up if, e.g. I pay for the open access?

No. Open access is entirely independent of the reviewing process. The former is handled by the publisher, the latter is handled by your peers.


You found out, so apparently there is enough information present in the article to see what they were doing. So that in my mind rules out fraud.

Whether or not it is correct, normal, or misleading depends on the finer details. There is also another possibility: it is simply a mistake. Researchers are human after all.


I've reproduced a paper: where shall I share the code and findings?

In the field of Computer Networks, there is the Reproducing Networking Research blog, which allows anybody to contribute replications of networking experiments, or original research in a form that allows it to be replicated:

  This blog is a collection of network research stories, each of which includes full instructions to replicate experiments. Our goal is to kickstart a discussion of repeatable research in the network systems community, by showing that “runnable papers” are indeed possible, today. If every result in every figure of a paper could be replicated easily (by anyone with a local or EC2 VM), it would be much easier to build on prior code, results, and scripts, understand the concepts behind them, and most importantly: put them to practice in the real world.

If there is no such equivalent in your field, consider starting one. You can do what Nick McKeown did with the networking blog - seed the blog by teaching a class in which students are required to reproduce a published result as an assignment, and invite them to contribute it to the blog.


Does the ND (NoDerivatives) clause forbid the distribution of any form of text or data mining based on papers with such a license?

According to the Guide to Mining CC-Licensed Material  (mirror), the answer may depend on what you produce with the text/data mining.  If you run some calculations and then write a paper describing what you learned, then that paper would not be a derivative work.  If you produce a data set based on the mining, then that data set might be considered an adaptation of the original work.  The guide does not propose a test for distinguishing between these possibilities.  If it matters to you, I expect you would need to consult a lawyer.

Incidentally, I wouldn't take Elsevier's table too seriously.  For example, it suggests that the CC BY-NC-ND license allows distributing a translation (since it doesn't have a "not for distribution" note there).  However, that just isn't true: the license (mirror)  explicitly lists translations as being adapted material that cannot be shared.


I realize I made a huge mistake in my thesis and am not sure what to do. I'm defending very soon (days away). What should I do?

The thesis and thesis defense is less about having the results you wanted to have, and more about demonstrating that you know how to do good quality research and can work on that somewhat independently.  It's about figuring out what questions to ask and what methods can be used to find the answers, and then applying those methods to come up with answers.  What the answers actually are is not as important [for the purposes of passing a thesis] as the process you took to get those answers.  Your discovering this issue and taking prompt action to fix it shows attention to important details and integrity in the knowledge-discovery process.  Sure, it would've been better if you'd caught that earlier, but you've caught it now, before your defense, and you're rewriting the discussion and conclusions to reflect your best analysis of the data.

In my opinion, your having found this and your efforts now to promptly fix it say more [positively] about what a thesis is supposed to evaluate than most completed theses.

Don't panic.  Talk to your supervisor and committee.  Tell them what you found.  Revise your document to reflect the new understanding.  Maybe you'll have to delay the defense a bit, but more likely you'll present at the same time and talk about what you found; the committee might require you to deliver a revised document [some weeks after the presentation] reflecting that before they sign off.  That might take you some time to do but it should be OK, and will leave you with work you can feel is more solid.

Kudos to you for finding the issue and having the integrity to stand up for it.  This should help you in the long run and the core evaluation at issue here, at the cost of some extra work to revise and maybe some scrambling to re-practice your revised presentation.

Edit: Congratulations on passing!


Submitting the same research to multiple conferences

According to the Committee on Publication Ethics Guidelines on Good Publication Practice, the term "redundant publication" is defined this way:

  "Redundant publication occurs when two or more papers, without full cross reference, share the same hypothesis, data, discussion points, or conclusions."  In addition, it states:  "(1) Published studies do not need to be repeated unless further confirmation is required.  (2) Previous publication of an abstract during the proceedings of meetings does not preclude subsequent submission for publication, but full disclosure should be made at the time of submission.  (3) Re-publication of a paper in another language is acceptable, provided that there is full and prominent disclosure of its original source at the time of submission.  (4) At the time of submission, authors should disclose details of related papers, even if in a different language, and similar papers in press."  Note that (2) states that it is generally acceptable to present a paper in a conference and then later publish exactly the same paper in a journal, as long
  as you mention to the editor that the paper has been publicly presented.

According to the paper Science journal editors’ views on publication ethics:
Results of an international survey,

  "Breaches of publication ethics such as plagiarism, data fabrication and redundant publication are recognised as forms of research misconduct that can undermine the scientific literature."  It also stated that redundant publication is an unethical practice.  Of 16 ethical issues studied, redundant publication had the highest severity (that is, it caused editors the most concern---more than plagiarism or data fabrication).


Computer Science: Workshop paper in top conference vs. Paper in mediocre conference?

Both previous answers are misleading in this specific scenario, where the choice is between CVPR (main conference) and an ACM conference.
Both conferences require submission of a full paper! The only difference is that CVPR will decide after the review how your paper is presented, whether as long oral presentation, short oral presentation, or poster. Independent of this, all accepted CVPR papers will be published in the conference proceedings without mention of the presentation type. You cannot submit your paper to both conferences, this would be in breach of CVPR ethical guidelines, and likely ACM as well.
Regarding impact or prestige, nothing will currently (2020) beat an accepted paper at CVPR, no matter the type of presentation, if you are working in computer vision or deep learning related to computer vision. Having a CVPR paper under your belt would be great for graduate admissions.
That being said, on the flipside this also means that getting your work accepted in CVPR is likely to be much more difficult than to get it accepted at a normal conference. If this is your first submission to any conference, and you are doing most of the work yourself, then I'd wager your chances of getting accepted are in the range of 10-15% (If you submit an average paper that is written reasonably well, of course if your work is really outstanding, then disregard this rough estimate).


Can portions of my PhD thesis be later submitted to conferences?

In computer science in general, you can submit thesis extracts to conference just as freely as you would submit them to a journal.  In both cases, the principle is the same: a thesis is not really a peer-reviewed publication, so your submission would still be the first peer-reviewed publication of the material.  You must, however, cite your thesis and clearly acknowledge the source of the material as being adapted from your thesis.


Difference between bursary, scholarship and fellowship

These three terms essentially mean the same thing. Bursary is the term for scholarship used in the UK. Normally, a bursary is given based on need which is not always the case with fellowships/scholarships.  In my personal experience in America, the term bursary is rarely used. Instead, we often use the term "grant", which is a synonym for bursary.

Fellowship is also another term for bursary/scholarship. However, fellowships are usually awarded at the graduate level whereas a scholarship can be awarded at either grad or undergrad level. In addition, fellowships are often considered a highly prestigious award.

As you can see, there are minor differences in these three terms. Determining which to use will mainly depend on the context of the situation


Dealing with a coauthor whose contribution was not used in the paper

Based on what you write they did not contribute to the manuscript or the results described therein either due to lack of ability or due to laziness. I also assume they did not contribute any useful ideas. Thus, they are not a coauthor. It's as simple as that. The ICMJE criteria are useful for assessing if someone is an author.

In principle, this is independent of any considerations regarding their conduct in the course project. However, you should have reported their lack of useful contribution to the teacher since they would probably benefit from repeating the course. The problem now is that they could claim to be a coauthor since you put their name on your report and didn't tell the teacher. If the teacher sees the publication they could indeed assume academic dishonesty. Thus, I see two options:

Include this person as a coauthor and ask them to make a meaningful contribution since you probably have to rewrite most of your project paper to make it suitable for publication.
Explain the situation to your teacher, so you can move forward without getting in trouble with your school.

They chose to not make a valid contribution. Not being a coauthor is a consequence of that choice. Why do you care if that offends them?


How to politely point out an issue with a cited paper?

I think, the principle

Show, don't tell.

applies and suffices. You don't need to point out flaws and drawbacks, you just show the points where you made improvements. State facts, back them up, avoid opinionated statements and you should be fine. This way "being polite" is not necessary, since you will not come near some "impolite" statement.


How should I reference a repository of data and resources created to accompany my publication?

Short Recommendation: Include the URL in-text followed by a full citation and end of text reference. If using someone else's repository, do the same, and probably also include a citation to the accompanying paper, unless the authors request otherwise. Place this citation in a prominent position in the method. If the open repository is a big part of the contribution of the paper, consider also including the URL in the abstract.
Longer Answer
Researchers in my field of psychology are starting to use the Open Science Framework as a repository for archiving data, code, and other materials. These repositories include a short URL that is meant to be stable (e.g., https://osf.io/5krfq/ ).
When referencing these repositories, I have read papers that just include the URL, and others that include a full citation. For example, the full citation for the above using APA style might be:

Wynton, S. K. A., & Anglim, J. (2017). Abrupt Strategy
Change Underlies Gradual Performance Change: Bayesian Hierarchical
Models of Component and Aggregate Strategy Use. Retrieved from
https://osf.io/5krfq

So in summary, I don't think the standards for data and repository citation have been formalised sufficiently yet.
I think there are a few considerations:

If there are any questions about the stability of the repository URL, then you need to provide more information. For example, if the repository is hosted on a standard university website, then it is quite likely that the URL might change over time. Even in the case of something like the OSF, it might still be safer to include additional information. References work well because there is redundancy.
In general, providing a URL in the main text makes it easier for the reader to see that the repository is readily accessible.
In many performance evaluation systems, citations of papers are counted, whereas citations of other resources may not be. This may be changing, but it is worth thinking about.

Referencing existing repositories by other authors
If you are referencing an existing repository that other authors created, then you should look to see what requests these authors made. For example, they may want you to cite a particular paper that is linked to the repository. More generally, there is a arguably an ethical and professional obligation to acknowledge those providing the repository by using a full citation.
Referencing your own repository that accompanies a paper
If you are creating your own repository that is linked to the paper you are writing, I quite like the idea of including the  URL in text as well as the end of text reference. E.g.,

Data and code is available at https://osf.io/5krfq (Wynton & Anglim, 2017).

And then you include the end of text reference as above.
This has the benefit of making the URL very clear to the reader (e.g., encourages the reader to click the link) but it also has the benefits of full citations (e.g., the reference is more robust, creates a practice of citing data and code as equal to citing papers).
Note about blind review: If you are submitting your manuscript to a place that does blind review, you need to do another step during the review process to prevent disclosure of author identities. One approach is to put a black mark over the author names in the in-text citation and end-of-text reference. OSF also has the benefit that you can create a custom-URL that provides a read-only view of the repository with author names removed. When such a feature is not provided by your repository service, you might need to instead attach anonymised versions of the materials and black out the link.
Where to put this citation/reference? There is another issue of where to put this reference. E.g., Abstract, author note, first sentence of the method, some other section of the method, etc. There are several considerations:

More people will see it if you put it in the abstract. The author note is another relatively prominent location. Thus, if you see the repository as fundamental to the contribution of your paper, then you may want to include the url in your abstract, and then include the full citation somewhere in the method.
Some journals have conventions regarding this. e.g., some journals have badges for open data or open materials, some journals ask for a section in the method with a label like "Open Practices". If so, then it makes sense to follow these conventions.
If you want to draw some attention to your open data and materials (but putting the url in the abstract feels excessive), then I think the first sentence of the method possibly under a section heading like "Open Practices" is a good option. Thus, it will be clear to any reader that gets to the method that these materials are available.
If you think the repository is not that important, then it could be placed in whatever section seems most content relevant (e.g., end of the participants/data description section or somewhere in the section discussing the data analytic approach).

Personally, I like the idea of "Open Practices" (or something similar) becoming a  standardized section in manuscripts where the authors explain what materials have been made open or are made to justify why they are not open.
What name to give to repository reference: Another issue, which I have not yet resolved, is what is the best title for repositories that accompany a paper. Possible titles:

Identical title as accompanying paper
Related title to accompanying paper: e.g., "Data and code for [insert paper title here]" or "Supplementary materials for [insert paper here]"
Something very descriptive: e.g., "Data and code examining ..."

If you use the identical title as the accompanying paper, this creates the potential for ambiguity when people cite the paper or the repository. However, it might make it easier for people to find. And if getting citations to your original paper rather than the repository is particularly important, then it may be the case that citations to the repository will get counted towards the paper depending on how the citation engine (e.g., Google Scholar, Scopus, etc.) matches articles. Such repositories can also often host a pre-print of the article. In that sense the repository becomes almost a landing page for the actual publication that is not behind a publisher's paywall.
From a descriptive perspective, I think that something like "Data and code for [insert title]" seems better. It makes the link with the accompanying paper very clear, but also makes it clear that it is a distinct academic artefact.


How good is phrase in letter of recommendation describing my smart but unorthodox solutions?

If I were reading this statement, I'd take it as quite positive.

Clean, well-commented code is a very good thing, especially in a young programmer
Smart solutions are good
Unorthodox could be good or bad, but going into an academic context it's probably more good than bad.


Is it common for professors in France/Europe to accept students for PhD positions but ask them to arrange their own funding?

Its certainly normal in the UK. Very few universities fund any PhD students themselves (where would they get the money from?). Most students are funded on government scholarships. How these are awarded varies from field to field and I don't know what the norm is in mathematics. In biology they are awarded to centers called Centers for Doctoral Training (CDT/DTPs), which often cover several universities. Each year professors  compete for the right to recruit a student, which they will then advertise for.
Until now, these scholarships have only been open to "home" students (that is British or EU students). Any overseas students have to obtain a scholarship from their own government, or an NGO or charity of some sort, or pay themselves out of pocket. Most profs will take most students who can bring funding/pay their way.
This year things are changing. CDTs/DTPs will now bed allowed to offer up to a third of their scholarships to overseas students. BUT, they will only pay "home" fees, which are generally less than overseas fees. How this difference is handled is varying from Uni to Uni. Some will say that they will charge full overseas fees to overseas students recruited to these scholarships, and the student would have to find the difference (on the order of £10k a year). Other universities are offering to waive the extra overseas fee.


Asking a colleague for his submitted paper

If he is a colleague, he is unlikely to think that. Just express your interest and ask for an early look. If something in it seems interesting to you contact him again and see if you have the possibility of collaboration on an extension or similar work.

It is how collaborative relationships get formed. Just do it.


Why do professors obfuscate their email addresses on their websites?

It's most likely to avoid Email address harvesting. There are bots that scrape webpages to pick up email addresses for spam purposes. An easy way to avoid this is write your email in a way that's harder to read for a bot that's scanning for email addresses.


Yes of course you can move from a PhD in NZ to a postdoc in the USA if you publish good work in good conferences/journals. You could potentially study for part of your NZ PhD in the US on a scholarship such as the Fulbright. If you have a PhD offer in NZ then presumably you have some idea of what subject you'd be researching - does that field excite you? Your decision should be primarily motivated by interest in a particular field of research rather than by country (IMO).

A PhD in NZ/Australia/UK is much shorter than the US (3-4 years compared to 5-7 years in my field at least) and generally doesn't involve coursework - you'd also be adding an extra year on top of the US timeline to sit the GRE exam. One final comment: that you have a PhD offer from NZ and are considering waiting a year to sit the GRE and do a PhD in US makes me think you aren't that interested in taking the PhD offer in NZ - there are few things in life I would discourage as much as doing a PhD without a passion for the subject.


I agree with Wrzlprmft that, assuming the names are trademarked, mere use of the names as hypothetical entries in a database would not constitute trademark infringement.
And names cannot be copyrighted.  See Circular 33, US Copyright Office, "Works not protected by copyright" which states on p. 3 that "The name of a character" cannot be copyrighted. Online at https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf
But suppose that somehow, somehow the GoT people found your thesis and sued. Your thesis would instantly become internationally known. You can't buy publicity like that. ;-)


Submitting a rejected paper to the same editor in a different journal

There is no problem in resubmitting the paper to the same editor, but to a different journal. I've seen and done this more than once.

My advice is the following. Take the first set of reviews and address them as best you can. Then prepare a response to reviewers as you normally would, addressing all the points and stating the changes you made. Then append this to the cover letter of the journal you are submitting. The fact that the editor is the same may work in your favor since they have already seen the material, and will see that you are following on their advice.


Returning to academia after 6 years in industry

In your case, consider this: what do you have to gain from the additional courses taken? Are you going to apply the knowledge gained in your current job, which you do not find so interesting?

Typically the purpose of universities is to allow students to study for degrees. In your case, that degree would be PhD, but you already ruled it out. If your feel bored in your professional life, the professional life would not support the PhD degree. In practice, you will have to terminate the uninteresting employment to obtain PhD. The other option will be to only take some courses without studying for a PhD, which may be possible too.

Are you planning to take temporary study leave from your current job, or to terminate the employment completely? Check your local laws related to study leave. In Finland, two years of part- or full-time study leave is allowed after 1 year of employment at the same employer, and after 8 years of employment (not necessarily at the same employer), you get adult education allowance which will financially support the studies.

To me, your situation sounds like you have not found the right job for you. I also work as a software engineer, but in a research-oriented environment at the research laboratory of a major telecommunications equipment vendor. I have found the job so interesting that I'm now studying for a PhD related to my dayjob using a part-time study leave.

So, my advice to you: keep looking for new job opportunities! It definitely sounds like your current job is uninteresting, and the problem solution is to find a new job, not to flee back to the university. I have had uninteresting jobs as well. But, to find the right job for you, you have to find out the root cause of the current job being uninteresting. In my case, it was lack of research orientation. If you find the right job for you, you may very well find yourself in the case that you have enough to say in a PhD thesis.


Ethics of contacting potential post-doc mentor in mathematics

Yes it's good idea, but the point is just to make them aware of your application.  In particular make sure the application is already posted in mathjobs when you send the email.  Keep your email short and don't expect a reply with any content.  You want to say your name, your advisor, a sentence about what you work on, and a brief expression of interest in working with them.


Should I feel guilty for quitting postdoc due to immigration status?

Being a postdoc is a job. You are not a slave for academia, nor is your reasearch so important (no offense) that you have to continue it no matter what happens to your life. (Nobody's research is.)*

You are a professional and should act as such. There is nothing to be guilty about. Any reasonable person knows and understands that there are reasons which end one's participation in a project even if there is no "outcome" of the project. Probably your supervisor would feel more guilty if you feel the need to stay just because of them.

I do not mean to be harsh -- it is only human to feel guilty about such things. What would you do if your were the supervisor?
Talk about your feelings with your friends -- emotional questions like this are better discussed with trusted people than on the Internet.

*Just for completeness, given the recent situation: If you were an absolute key person in the research of coronavirus and countermeasures, maybe it could be argued that you should stay until you transferred all your knowledge.


Accepted paper at conference but not presented

There are two possible cases here:

(Default case) Your paper has not been included to the conference proceedings
volume. In this case, your paper is unpublished. It might still be possible to cite it, e.g. by uploading it to arXiv and referencing it as an arXiv preprint, but this citation would have to leave out the name of the  conference.
Despite your absence at the conference, the paper has been included
to the conference proceedings volume. In this case, your paper counts
as published and you can cite it.