I believe you might be thinking of the "72 Hours of Science" experiment, which resulted in this preprint. This was done at the Santa Fe Institute, and you can find the news release describing the project here. As they say, finalizing the topic and organizing tasks took up pretty much the first 24 hours, so also fitting the research and write-up into a mere 24 hours sounds rather difficult.

There was a second 72 Hours of Science in 2017, resulting in this preprint. The project has also inspired the Complexity72h workshop, and possibly other follow-ups.


Ethics of asking a colleague for a citation

If the reference is pertinent, it's perfectly fine to suggest it. "Suggest" is key, rather than "ask":

By the way, I've published a paper on the topic you're discussing in section three. Perhaps you'll find it useful. See attached.


Talking about the topics I have independently studied in my statement of purpose

What you want to do above all is to make your SoP about the future, not the past. Find a way to include your self study in your CV, say in a special section. Especially if you can say something brief but credible about it: online courses, work of authors x, y, z, correspondence with ....

Then, if you have some backup from the CV, and I don't think it needs to be a lot, then you can say in the SoP how that prior study supports your future plans.

Your admission to the program won't be entirely about your past. A large part of the considerations will be about people's predictions about your future and how successful you are likely to be. So try, as much as possible in the SoP to make that case, not your past accomplishments.

Try to balance it a bit between CV and SoP so that each covers what it is intended to cover and makes your strongest case overall.


What does IPR mean on a grade report in Canada?

I am a former lecturer in Canada. As Nate has already answered, it (almost certainly) means In Progress.

I'll add (while this still falls under the "grades not yet available" scenario) that the student could see IPR for a course well after grades are normally available because they contested their grade and it's under review; some institutions may use a special notation for that (mine used GNA).

The professor may also have agreed to give the student an extension on some critical work to account for extenuating circumstances during the term, or delay the exam, while not forcing them to re-register in a following term.

My alma mater calls this IP, and it can be used for a myriad of other reasons:

  IP In Progress – a notation (IP) assigned to a course by a faculty
  member when:

  At the undergraduate level, an undergraduate thesis or
  course has not been completed by the end of the period of
  registration.

  At the graduate level, a graduate thesis, research
  essay, independent research project or comprehensive examination has
  not been completed by the end of the period of registration. The IP
  notation may also be used at the graduate level when a research
  seminar has not been completed by the end of the period of
  registration provided the research seminar has been approved by
  Graduate Faculty Board as being eligible for the use of this notation.

  In the case of re-registration in any of the above courses, the IP
  notation will remain; a final grade will normally be assigned in the
  final period of registration. Where there is no re-registration in any
  of the above courses, the IP notation must be replaced with an
  appropriate notation or grade within the prescribed time period, or be
  replaced by a notation of WDN.


Can you still do a postdoc if you definitely don't want to become a professor? Will your advisor think less of you for doing so?

1) If you are truly interested in the work, then yes, it can be worth doing. A post doc could also be a path to a long term non-professor role in academia, though those positions are quite rare and are definitely undercompensated. You should probably be aware, though, that your time as a post doc isn't likely to count much as "experience" in the non-academic fields unless the work is very closely related to an industry.

2) I have certainly heard stories of students that were pushed through by their advisors/departments at their request after not expressing interest in academia, so maybe this could help you - personally I think that's silly and isn't how PhDs should work at all, but reality doesn't always match the ideal. Have you done enough to earn a PhD in your department? It isn't clear what exactly your conflicts are with your advisor, and whether you are being held back when you should be allowed to graduate or if you have not been productive enough to have earned the degree.

It's also hard to give you advice on this because your current situation with your advisor suggests there isn't a lot of confidence that your advisor has your best interests at heart. That said, at least in the US where I have experience, the reality is that most PhDs in the biological sciences will not get professor jobs, regardless of their desires: the math simply isn't in favor of it when each professor graduates multiple students and yet universities aren't growing exponentially. A good advisor should understand that reality and take some interest in preparing students for whatever they want their post-PhD career to be like. In that context, I wouldn't really be interested in having a PhD or postdoc advisor who could not accept that reality, and from the advisor's standpoint I would expect the same level of productivity out of graduate students and post docs regardless of their career goals, except for being honest with them about the caliber of work that is required for those goals.


I address all cover letters, letters of rec, etc. "Dear Committee Members:" Don't waste your time addressing it to an individual.  The only thing you can achieve by doing that is embarrassing yourself and giving the search committee the chance to have a good laugh at your expense.  If you do it correctly, it doesn't actually achieve anything; why give yourself one more thing to stress about?


PhD thesis - Where to put description of history of applied method?

While there's no "right" answer here, I would put this sort of discussion in the introduction/background as its own subsection. In that section, you're providing the motivation for the research, as well as any relevant information that the user needs to understand the paper. This seems to fit that definition nicely.


How does sending manuscript to new reviewers close the review loop?

To me, a review process has to be closed just like a loop, in that those who comment on a manuscript should assess the resulting revision.

So you submit a first version of the paper. The editors invites some reviewers to submit reviews, and Reviewers A and B accept the invite. When Reviewer A accepts the invite, they have no way of knowing how the process will evolve. They know that they have to submit a review within a fixed amount of time, upon which three outcomes are possible:

accept as is;
reject completely;
recommend to revise and resubmit.

The first two outcomes mean that the process ends there. But consider what happens when the third outcome happens. An amount of time X will pass for the editor to make a decision, and Reviewer A has no way of knowing how much time, particularly since Reviewer B may be late with their review. Then, the editor will give an amount of time Y to the authors to perform their revision. Maybe you, as author, are very eager, and you only use an amount Z<Y of that time. So at some point, you resubmit your revision, and Reviewer A will be invited again to give a review. But X+Z time has passed. When Reviewer A was invited for their initial review, Reviewer A had no way of knowing:

whether any number of revisions would be necessary;
how much time X+Z would be.

Maybe Reviewer A finds themselves overloaded with teaching tasks when the invitation for reviewing the revision lands in their inbox. Maybe they had set a month apart for redecorating their house. This is why reviewers cannot, in general, be asked to commit to reviewing more than one iteration of a paper at a time.

You have run into bad luck to have been confronted with a completely fresh slate of reviewers twice. It is not nice to have to chase after a moving target. The prudent thing to do is to summarize the conflicts in the feedbacks, and send a message to the editor. It is their responsibility to resolve such issues, but they may not be aware that any issue exists. So you should make the editor aware.


How do I decide a field of study for grad school and whether to do a Masters vs a PhD?

In the US, most people who aspire to a doctorate apply to doctoral programs at the end of the bachelors degree. A masters along the way isn't necessary and might even cause a delay (though not necessarily). On the other hand, many doctoral students earn a masters during doctoral study, sometimes just by asking for it and filling out a request. Other times a thesis might be required. But you don't need to apply again for doctoral studies.
As to your studies, I'd suggest that you look for universities that have actual computational biology programs, or at least a few professors who specialize in that. Taking a pure CS or pure biology program might take you afield of your goal.
And no, a doctoral program isn't (appreciably) harder to get in to. In some ways it is a bit easier, since doctoral programs often come with a TA position (and a stipend and tuition waiver) and universities often need those TAs to help in the undergraduate program. TAs are not always open to masters students, nor is tuition waiver usually granted.
But apply to several programs, not just a few. And not just the "top 10" programs in the country. The broader your search the more likely you will find something suitable.


Is it a good idea to write one's own recommendation letter for a postdoc application?

In the U.S., in mathematics, this might be a bad idea. The "voice" of letters of recommendation surely needs to be that of a relatively senior person, writing to the relatively senior people who will be reading the letters.

While it may be true in principle, or approximately, that one knows one's own best features better than anyone else, in practice this is often not quite the case. That is, more senior people may value, and observe, longer-term virtues that are not well understood by a very junior person. At the same time, things highly valued by a novice may be viewed as transient by a more senior person.

(Of course, there is nothing that prevents more senior people from being immature and "clueless", etc., and that leads to unhelpful letters, obviously.)


What should I do if wrongfully approved a manuscript while references were incorrect?

Email the journal. This is something the publisher should be able to easily solve, since it's simply returning the paper to the author. Worst case scenario, the publisher can return a 'revise' decision and let you fix the problem.

It sounds like you've already done this and didn't receive a response for four days. This isn't particularly long - for example, perhaps the desk editor is on short-term leave and Springer didn't assign someone to cover. I would wait a bit. If you're in a rush you can also email the editor-in-chief; however, you write that the status is "pending editor assignment", which could mean that the editor-in-chief has not seen the paper yet.


Why would new teachers' grade distribution consist of more As and Fs than more experienced teachers'?

tl;dr: seems like perfectly acceptable distribution.  Students will try anything to get a better grade, don't mind them too much.

To begin with, with N=43, especially if this is your first time teaching the class, you don't have a lot to go on.  As you teach it a few more times, you'll get a feel for your overall grade distribution.

I personally average somewhere around 20-25% A, 40-50% B, 20-25% C, and 5-15% D/F/W across all my classes.  But I've had some individual sections that were virtually all As and Bs, and I've had one where the D/F/W was a clear majority (!).  No one in the administration complained or questioned my grading/instructional skills in that last one because they were due to extreme absences and not handing in heavily-weighted assignments, and also because I had taught it before with more "normal" (= commonly occurring, not statistically normal) distributions.

As to new teachers having lots of As and Fs, if it fits an inverted bell curve, it's a sign that your class is probably a bit too easy, the As are people that get it, and the F are those that don't, but without more difficult questions, you have no way of discriminating any other levels.  But frankly, your distribution seems fine and unremarkable to me.

As the user autistic notes in the comments to your question, if you're concerned about too many As/Fs and not enough B/C/Ds, you may need to have questions or assignments that include both more difficult (to pull more Bs out of the As) and easier (to pull more C/Ds out of the Fs).

Your ultimate recourse (and resource) is if the course is something that has been taught before at your university by someone who is still there, ask them to look over how you're grading.  If it seems fine to them, then you just got a class that happens to have that grade distribution.  If not, then you may want to make some minor adjustments based on their recommendation.

What I wouldn't do is judge your grading with their other instructors.  Besides the fact that they could just be very lazy students in your class alone, each department within a university will have its own culture of expectations, workloads, and grade assigning.  Those students may have As, but in a department that doesn't demand much.  You may also have students that are surprised at getting an A, if they come from one that is far more demanding.


Author did not make the major changes asked during the review process

There are three possibilities:

The authors think they have addressed your major comment: in this case, since you think they haven't, either they haven't understood your initial comment, or they believe that another change they have done is enough. It might be your fault (because you didn't explain your comment well enough) or theirs (because they didn't understand it). It's ok to point out that you believe your comment has not been addressed, and explain it in a different way, to avoid any possible confusion.
The authors disagree with your major comment, and did not change the paper accordingly: in this case, they should have explained it in the response to reviewers. It's ok to mention that your comment is not addressed, and it's up to the editor to decide whether the authors should comply and change the paper accordingly.
The authors did not see your major comment in the original review, or simply forgot to address it. It's ok to mention that your comment is not addressed, and if you believe that it could be addressed quickly (e.g., some references missing), then perhaps it can go as a minor change for the next version, to speed up the process.

In any case, it's ok to mention that your comment has not been addressed. You might not know the exact reason why, so it's always better to assume that it's just a mistake. The responsibility to accept the paper as such is not yours, it's the editor's. You simply mention that you believe something is wrong with the current paper, you explain why you believe it's wrong, and whether you think it should published without changing it.

A typical response in this case could be: "The new version of the paper addresses most of my previous comments, with the exception of XXX. Indeed, it is not clear how the authors address the fact that YYY (another version of XXX) in the new version."


In what order should I write acknowledgments?

It generally doesn't matter much (though I wouldn't suggest using in increasing order of helpfulness), but if some people deserve special thanks they should be singled out.  I'll often write acknowledgements in this sort of format:

I thank Prof A for encouraging me to think about this problem and Prof B for the realization that it could be approached by X ("chronological order").
I also thank C, D and E (alphabetical order) for useful discussions and feedback.
This work was partially supported by Grant 12345.

If it's a co-authored paper you can separate sentences/phrases for specific thanks from each author.

Generally my advice on questions like this is just to look at a bunch of other papers, see what they do, and learn from that.


Should I include a patent in my cumulative PhD thesis?

This is something you really need to discuss with your advisor. Personally I think it may be very reasonable to include the patent application as an appendix (and the fact that you are a named inventor on a patent application is by itself quite impressive and likely to add some cachet to your thesis), but that's just my highly uninformed opinion. I don't think anyone not familiar with specific details of the patent application and how it relates to the rest of your work could give you very authoritative advice on such a question.

Another thing to keep in mind is that most patent applications are not really "authored" by the inventor. Large parts (if not the entire thing) are usually written by lawyers. So (except in the unlikely event where you actually wrote the whole thing yourself) there would be an interesting question of how to properly present/credit the patent application, and whether it would be covered by any copyright laws (I suspect patent applications are considered to belong to the public domain once they are made public, but that's just a guess). These sorts of issues are some of the reasons why inclusion as an appendix seems more appropriate to me than in the main body of the thesis.


Is there a pre-publication access for ACM journals?

My experience with ACM Transactions publications, as both author and editor, is that they do not generally offer any sort of early access.

I find this rather strange for a computing society, but suspect this may be because they also have fairly liberal preprint policies: authors can put early versions of their article up on arXiv or similar repositories.  Many ACM journal articles are also extended versions of conference articles, so that is another route for accessing information that you may be looking for.


Funding situation if I have passed GATE but lack CSIR-JRF NET

Although I admit that I am not fully aware of this area, here is my 2 cents on the matter based on my limited understanding:

As far as I am aware the GATE exam, is a masters level entry exam. It usually fetches you around Rs.12.4k per month of government funding during a masters degree. While it may be used as an entrance test for a PhD in India, the funding by the government is not available during the a post master level degree. Having said that, universities might sometimes have intakes on individual project based PhDs (where basically they fund you off that project) which might not check if you have a NET score. Again, I say might.
Passing the NET examination indeed does make you eligible for the aforementioned amount in terms of government sponsored scholarship. Ofcourse, you have to send a project proposal to the actual CSIR or UGC to actually get the scholarship.
Funding is usually not restricted by which university you belong to, as long as it is accredited. I am not sure of any written statement that validates this however, but it should be the case.

Please do not take my word as gospel because I am from an Engineering background and things might be slightly different in my area.


I got caught writing my student ID number after the end of the exam. Will I get in trouble?

You are definitely overthinking this: in the worst case, they wrote down on their report that you wrote something when the time was finished. This could result in you getting your mark slightly reduced to account for the additional time.

I insist that this is the worst case scenario: this is clearly not a case of cheating, in all the exams I attended there are always a few students forgetting to write their student number and adding it at the end, some mistakenly writing their names, etc.

It is actually very likely that what you interpreted as a special treatment for your paper was completely normal. In my experience papers are collected in no particular order.

Take this angry frown for what it probably is: just a warning that you should follow the instructions.


How to evaluate the skills that students build while getting to the answer?

Have the students evaluate each other's work

This is focused on the specific example you gave of identifying components in a circuit, but I believe the same applies to most scenarios.

The problem as I understand, is that you are giving them tasks for creating circuits - but without a way of evaluating that they really understood what they did, other than whether the circuit works or not.

One option would be to create a number of circuits and have students draw up circuit diagrams based on what they physically see. While this would allow you to see how well they can identify the components - it will be an enormous amount of preparation for you.

Instead, I'd suggest you have the students make the circuits in one lab lesson. This gives them the initial opportunity to learn how to convert the diagrams into a working circuit and get a physical idea of how the components look and interact.

After this, redistribute all of the circuits to other students and have them evaluate their given circuit. This can include drawing up a circuit diagram as well as evaluating any problems they've found in the circuit or changes that should have been made.

Ideally, you will be able to provide a selection of different circuits diagrams initially, so everybody will be creating something different from what they end up evaluating (e.g. ensure everybody who made circuit "A" evaluates a circuit "C" etc.)

As the circuits will be varying quality, it obviously would not be fair to use this for grading. But it will allow you to evaluate how well they are achieving the outcomes you set, in general. It will also push them to think more about what they are doing (i.e. avoiding pure memorisation) as they are being given potentially badly-made and faulty circuits by their peers.


NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Proposal Requirements

If you are applying as a senior, and not yet even accepted in your graduate program, it is understood that this is a goal.  If you are already placed in an established lab, you can be more precise -- but these are not research grants.  Reviewers are looking for your ability to write out a cogent, hypothesis-directed proposal.

It can certainly be an extension of work you've done.


While this problem is very personal I can offer a bit of guidance rather than an answer to your problem. You have a number of things coming together to bring you to this state. However, it isn't a unique state and others have resolved it in various ways.

I suspect that your advisor is a bit inexperienced at this and is genuinely unable to give you the guidance you need. That isn't uncommon. Some doctoral students in math come up with their own problems and some advisors provide problems to students. I don't know which is more common, actually. I was once refused by a potential advisor who told me he didn't think he had the experience to guide me properly. But he got me connected to a (scary scary) senior professor and it worked out fine. That professor was full of problems he was more than happy to share.

Switching sub-fields isn't that uncommon either. Many students come to doctoral studies relatively "unformed", even with a master's degree behind them. But, working in a field that you like is a big help. For me it was an issue of insight. I had deep insight into classical real analysis and some aspects of topology. But actual insight into algebra was always hard for me. In analysis I knew what I could expect to be true before starting a study. I never had that sense in algebra.

No, you aren't a failure. Whether you stay or go, do it for a reason related to what you really want to do.

You may find a new situation to be similar or not, but you have some control over that. A more experienced advisor in a field you love, could be explored before you make any decisions. You can search for an alternative without making a prior commitment to actually change.


Why do some professors not recommend any text books for a course?

Reasons why I do not use textbooks:

Most textbooks in my experience are bad.
Most students do not read them (probably because they are bad).
They are expensive.
They do not align with how I want to teach the course.
I can provide the relevant subset of content myself.

I can't see a reason to use a textbook in my courses other than for supplemental material (even then, I would much rather point them to some free PDFs/slides from various faculty that are online).


What is standard record-keeping like for a journal editor?

These days editors don't do much paperwork because the editorial management system (EMS) does it for them. The EMS logs all actions, sends automated reminders to reviewers, informs the editor when a review is submitted, and so on. It is usable by multiple people, and an editor with sufficiently advanced permissions can see what other editors are doing or even override them.
There's a list of free & open source EMSes here, don't know if it's applicable for your situation.


Transferring knowledge from one field to another

Computer Science has many subfields, I remember that there was a running gag in NLP that people just took algorithms from the 1980's and pushed papers out like a treadmill.

Other fields like Statistical Machine Learning has a more math oriented approach and you do have to come up with novel stuff most of the time.

However, when you do interdisciplinary research, it is very often that many good techniques just don't get tested because many people do not know how to use them, or do not have the time to understand them very well.

But to answer your question, I think is a pretty valid practice, very good researchers have great papers where what they did was basically apply a widely known math tool to a novel problem that few people were working on.

An example that comes to mind is how Factor Analysis, a widely known CS method (1993) was just applied in 2007 for the problem of discovering Connections in Gene Networks, not only that, people were using linear regression on that just 10 years ago.


Is this OK that I use "doctor (or doctorate) candidate" as appellation on my business card?

Before graduating with an MA (and assuming the BE is a requirement for your current program):

Emma, B.E.
graduate student at University X, program Y

After graduating:

Emma, M.E.

After acceptance into the PhD program:

Emma, M.E.
PhD student at University X, program Y

The exact titles (e.g. M.E. or MA) depend on country and institution.
By the way, I've maybe used four business cards in the last ten years, and I probably might as well not have. (It's nice to read your name on a piece of high-quality cardboard, though.)


Sending a paper which is under review for showing competency in order to find a paid sabbatical leave

I'm not familiar with paid sabbaticals for students. They are normally granted to tenured academics, at least in my experience. But for any sort of leave from your studies, I don't think there is any issue about revealing your "work in progress" to potential employers. Since it is under review you might be interfering with the blind review process but that is really for the editor to manage. The work is yours until you give up copyright to a journal.

But, you should check the policies of the journal. It may be that in submitting, you are implicitly agreeing not to share the work during the review process. If that is the case, however, your option would be to withdraw the paper.

It is also possible that you would consider asking this question of the journal editor and ask for advice there. It might nudge the editor to make a decision, whether favorable or unfavorable.

But prior to publishing the work, it is best to label it as "in progress."


Can I release my drawings with creative common licence before using them in non-open access journal or proceedings?

As long as you still have copyright you can put them under any legal license that you choose. You can later give a different (non-exclusive) license to a journal, if necessary. Editors may not like it that they don't have exclusive rights, but they might swallow it if the overall work is good. As long as they aren't excluded from doing things they feel they need to do you should be fine.

For example, if you use a CC "no-commercial use" license, then the journal may want and need a less restrictive one. But CC-BY alone should be acceptable, and if not, you should wonder why.

But at the end of the day, what they publish is up to them, and what you do with your own copyrights is up to you. Just be sure that they understand that they aren't getting full copyright transfer and that a license is already in place.

It would be on you, not the publisher, if you try to give an exclusive license to work that already has a less restrictive license available to everyone. Anyone taking advantage of your license, who the publisher went after, would put you in the cross-hairs. I think the law (many places) will judge that you can't withdraw a license once given. That is, you can't unilaterally break a contract. "


Can work documented within a manual be published in a journal?

I think the comment is fair, but can be rebutted. I would prepare an answer layered on two levels:

On the practical level, change figures xyz as much as you can. Maybe run some additional simulations, change the plots, legends, colours, etc.. This will show some willingness to the editor.
On the more crucial aspect of whether your work can be considered "novel enough" to be published in the journal: I would argue that

the paper will provide a much more coherent context to the model (as only published articles can), and as such its dissemination will be facilitated;
the guide is subject to be changed in the future, while the published paper is a much more "stable" resource for future researchers;
depending on the model itself, you can argue that the paper will make it possible for researchers that don't use your code to implement the model in their own codes. If this is true, you might reword some parts of the manuscript to focus more on the model itself, which should be the paper's main selling point, than on its implementation in the code.


Can PIs compete for good postdoc/PhDs by offering better salary than others?

This will depend wildly on the setting in question. For example, NIH grants have specific postdoc rates, and while a professor could "tweak" those offers (usually in ways that involve a second grant/account/etc.) they may or may not have the ability to do that.

Additionally, there may be departmental requirements - for example, in my current department, all graduate students are paid a fixed rate, take their preliminary exams and get a slight bump to another fixed rate. There is no flexibility in this, by design.

As for whether or not it's a good of bad idea? I think it's a bad idea for my lab. Salary negotiations create an unlevel playing field among the members of my lab, and that's not a message I'm willing to send by "sweetening the pot" for one postdoc vs. another. The only differential benefits I'll accept is if the "unit price" of something is variable - for example, if I offer to pay for a postdoc's plane ticket when they move to join my lab, I pay for a plane ticket, understanding that someone coming from a state away is likely to be less expensive than someone coming from overseas.


Deciding between cursive and print handwriting

Most professors prefer handwriting that is legible.

I have seen some (asian weirdly, all other nationalities tend to a larger style and there are 90+ nationalities in the establishment) students with handwriting so small it is difficult to read but perfectly formed though.

Some write cursive others like small caps but all are fine when neat and legible.

The issue is always the “spider scrawl” that is not legible and so poor that even the author can’t read it later.


Why is it bad to judge a paper by citation count?

I do not know of any study in this field, but I have a hunch that the following points apply (without any particular order, just numbered for convenience in the case of comments/replies):

Opportunity for citation: A paper that presents the ultimate answer to a problem is probably more valuable than a paper that presents just an unfinished attempt at solving the same problem. Yet, the latter is much easier to build upon (because it still leaves obvious extension points) and thus might be cited much more frequently.
Meaning of citations: There is no rule that a paper needs to be cited positively. If a paper has an obvious flaw, this may give rise to a number of other papers that just cite the flawed paper to point out what they are about to prove wrong or do better.
Citation scope: Referencing a paper does not mean referencing the whole paper, or its core finding. A reference to a paper might mean that the whole paper is pointed out as related work, or it could just mean that the second half of a particular statement in the introduction section is pointed out as related. A citation can well point out a remark that is completely marginal to the referenced paper, but that the citing author deemed to explain the fact in question particularly well, or that made a particularly recent mention of an old topic (to show the topic is still of interest).
Not all citations are equal: The question whether something is or is not cited hinges on its relative relevance compared to other citations, based on the available space left in the current paper format, not on the global importance of the work.
Citation habits differ: Even within one (sub-)field, citation habits differ wildly between conferences and authors. This is in part due to different paper formats and length restrictions (see previous point), but also simply because some authors are much more willing to throw in citations every now and then than others. Such habits can even vary for a single author, based on "strategic" considerations for the intended final target audience of the paper.
Citations can be transitive: Authors occasionally face situations where they can either list several examples of related work, or cite a single overview paper (e.g. a state of the art report), to give an overview over some basics or otherwise related topic. The latter case is clearly more space-efficient and possibly more helpful (as the overview paper is designed to give an overview while at the same time conveying the information somewhat in-depth, which often cannot be done in a single sentence of a related work section), but does not increase the citation count of the works referenced in the overview paper.
Papers are not atomic: There is no "natural" clustering of research questions, solutions, works and experiments. How many or how few findings go into/are allowed in a single published work is mostly a matter of style and personal preference of authors and program chairs. With that in mind, any particular finding may be presented in a single paper (which gets N citations), or split up into N papers (each of which may get only one citation). Thus, while the number of citations in this example may give a hint about the importance of each of the single written documents, it does not say much about the importance of the actual set of research questions.
Citation count is not normalized by field/community: As correctly pointed out by Cephalopod, '"What constitutes many depends on the field". Groundbreaking work in a narrow field might never get many citations.' Likewise, fields where publishing small bite-sized papers at a high frequency is common naturally amass a much larger total amount of citations than fields where publications are very seldom and, when they occur, cover a large amount of progress, discussion and findings.
Citation tweaking: As any metric, defining such a single factor for measuring performance, citation count is prone to abuse. If an author suspects citation count to be beneficial, there is an incentive to self-cite (or cyclically cite each other within an institute), and possibly even break up publications into smaller parts (related to the practice of salami slicing) to have more opportunities for those extra citations. As it can be assumed that some authors are already doing that, this renders citation count even less reliable as a quality indicator, as the "training data set" that would be used for comparison is already skewed.
Citation count ≠ citation count: The citation count itself is not a reliable measure to start with, as different sources will provide different citation counts, depending on what citations (and what kinds of documents that contain citations) are counted:

Citations in a book can be counted by chapter (point in favour of this: If each chapter is written by a different (group of) author(s), every chapter has its individual list of citations), or for the whole book (point in favour of this: A book tends to have a certain focused topic, and - more so than e.g. conference proceedings - all chapters tend to follow a common "narrative", so some central works are likely to be referenced in various chapters).
If possibly predatory journals are included, a variant of item 9 can ensue in which citations in less reputable sources (that are counted nonetheless) are bought, as pointed out by ff524.
Citation counts can include citations from totally legitimate works, which are nonetheless of a vastly different status compared to peer-reviewed publications. For example, Google Scholar sometimes seems to count student Bachelor and Master theses and other documents created while studying if the university's digital library that provides a copy of every such submitted document happens to be crawled by Google.

External factors influence selection of cited works: If there is one particular finding in one particular work that is appropriate to cite, there is no question that that particular paper will be cited. However, often enough, things are much more vague - there are various eligible papers that allude to the same statement in different ways, and it is not at all clear which one is preferrable to cite. At this point, external factors that are rather arbitrary can directly influence whether or not a work is cited. For instance, the older paper might be cited to show the original finding ... but the more recent paper might also be cited instead to show that the topic in question is still of interest in recent works. The older paper might be chosen because it is the original reference, or the more recent paper at the more highly-valued venue might be chosen to make the reference stronger, or yet another paper might be chosen because it contains the more comprehensible explanation. Lastly, depending on the citation style, even space may be an issue - if an author is fighting for the last few lines to stay within the allowable page limit, at least in APA style, a paper by Li et al. has an inherent advantage over one by Miller and Bowman, one by Miller and Bowman has an advantage over one by Erdenebileg and Papadopoulos, and one by Erdenebileg and Papadopoulos has an inherent advantage over a paper by Russell-Rodriguez and Pennington-Kiesewetter.


What to do about an ongoing research project that does not work?

If you are really doing research, then the results are not predictable. However, even when the research "fails" to reach some more or less expected end, you learn something. If all your research reaches the expected end, then you aren't doing research, but just confirming something already known, if only approximately.

To say that some experiment fails to find significance is actually knowledge gained. The relationship between the pre-conditions and the result are, at best, weak. If nothing else, you learn that the methodology wasn't sufficient to establish a connection. But all of that is knowledge and it is worth the effort to obtain it.

Moreover, along the way of doing such "failed" research, you may gain some insight into why the relationship is weak or non-existent. Even a failed proof in mathematics shows you something, even if it isn't as satisfying as providing an actual proof. Maybe the "theorem" isn't actually true in general.

The other issue, of course, is changing topics. If your research shows you that a certain topic is unlikely to bear "satisfying" results, then it is certainly proper to request the opportunity of looking at something else. Do that.

I worked in mathematics as a doctoral student on three problems. The first turned out to be so easy to advance that it lacked substance. The second turned out to be so hard to advance that nothing useful could be learned. Both of these were abandoned. Then I found just the right problem. Hard enough to have significance, but not so hard as to make advancement impossible. Luckily my advisor agreed with me on the abandonment of the earlier problems. But I had to ask and did so in a timely way.

However, don't neglect to keep a "research notebook" in which you record both ideas and insights for research as well as the progress made on failed attempts. This notebook gives you some place to "mine" for ideas in your future when you are looking for something interesting to do.


How beneficial is speaking at non-academic conferences to future computer science career?

That really depends what you mean with "beneficial". One of my junior PhD students recently went (partially self-funded) to a relevant developer conference, and he felt he benefited greatly (probably much more than from an average scientific conference).

He was able to establish great contacts to industry. This included potential partners for studies and interviews (lately a big part of our research), as well as potential internship opportunities. (as a sidenote, this mainly happened because this specific student is an excellent networker - you can't just go to a developer conference and hope that useful contacts will spring up automagically)
He got a lot of perspective on how industry sees the current challenges of our field (as opposed to other researchers). This gave him interesting ideas for his PhD, and also tremendously boosted his motivation, as he saw that many of the things we are working on are actually quite interesting to big industrial players (such as, in our case, Facebook).
He was able to give a presentation about our ideas, and they were perceived really well (much better than he expected, truth be told). This gave him presentation practice, forced him to collect and structure our early ideas, and further strengthened his commitment to the topic.

Now, since you specifically ask whether attending such a conference will be valuable for:

  (applying to PhD and further)

I think you can safely ignore this aspect. In pretty much any career phase, nobody is going to read your CV and think "that guy attended this conference, he must be great". I don't even list attended conferences (of any type) on my CV anymore, simply because it seems so irrelevant to a recruiter.

Edit:

@ff524 correctly notes that you were specifically asking about speaking at an industry conference, not just attending. I am not entirely sure about this, but I would assume that this may be a small positive factor for applications on a junior level (say master of PhD student), depending on the conference:

Nowaydays, many of the industry conferences in my field are organized like un-conferences. That is, everybody can speak if they want to (maybe pending some light review for on-topicness et cetera). In that case, you are back to square one - speaking at a conference where everybody is allowed to speak does not count for much. It maybe speaks to your motivation, but really that seems like a very small and insignificant factor.
If the conference is more like a traditional conference, where speakers are typically either invited or you need to apply in some way for the honour of speaking, presenting may be perceived as a sign towards your esteem, but this really requires that the reviewing professors know this specific industry conference, think highly of it, and know that speakers are competitively selected. I would not count on this to happen, but it surely won't hurt.

For any application after graduate student level, your research credentials are so much more important than any talks at industry conferences that you can safely ignore them for future applications.


Years of experience - how to count PhD and postdoc years

Ok, let's see: First of all, Data Science is a relatively new field, Data Scientists are in high demand in many places, so estimations on salary are difficult to make, statistics found online are mostly not representative as there is not yet enough data.
Next, the fact that you have a PhD should count stronger than the mere years you spend on obtaining it.
And as a third point, the work experience always depends on what you did and what you plan on doing. Imagine you worked five years as a baker. While this is job experience, it might not be very relevant for a job (and salary) as a Data Scientist.
If you think that your years should count as experience, then make that clear, argue your case, show that you actually have experience. Salaries in the industry are usually not computed by a fixed formula taking your degree and years of experience as input but are up to negotiation (inside certain bounds), so if you can convince your future employer that what you did counts as experience towards the job you are applying for you can of course ask for a higher salary; if you yourself are not convinced then maybe you can't; but then again, having a PhD and the basic requirements to become a Data Scientist already means a rather high salary in many countries and areas.


Importance of professional website to search committees

I look for and use the websites of job candidates all the time, and I know many of my colleagues do as well. The reason is that we can find things there that are not on your CV, for example:

Links to the PDF versions of your papers, if you put them there.
Links to pages that provide teaching materials for your students.
Numerous other things that belong on a website but can't be obtained through the CV itself.

So yes, do create a website. As @aeismail writes, take a look at the websites of your colleagues in the field, pick the ones you like best, then imitate that style.

What system you use -- handwritten HTML or a content management system -- is secondary to the content you put online.


Am I allowed to write about a discovery, while pending acceptance of my manuscript on the same topic?

This depends on the field and/or the journal. My understanding is glam-mags (Science, Nature) do indeed tend to prohibit any mentioning of the paper contents. On the other hand, for say mathematics journals it would be common to have a preprint on the arXiv anyway, so for something of particular interest, a lot of coverage can arise prior to the actual publication (see the proof of Kepler's conjecture for an extreme example).


Do you have to be invited to write a review?

As with any submission it depends.  Your advisor should be able to answer this question for you field.

I would highly recommend NOT writing it unless you have either been invited to write one by a conference editor, or your advisor says its common in your field.  Many journals/publications are very hesitant to accept these kinds of papers as any number of experts could write them fairly quickly, and your field likely doesn't need several "survey" papers.

Whats more, any sub-field really only needs one good survey paper published every few years to make sure all its readers know the state of the research.  You're also not the only researcher who has knowledge and interest in writing this paper, so the market is likely pretty crowded.


Describing figures vs letting figures speak for themselves

It is evidently true that figures/images can convey things difficult to convey in words (e.g., see Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information).

On the other hand, the exercise of verbally approximating what may be visually apparent is in itself highly informative in various ways. Among others, your verbal approximation of the visual will partly explain to your readers your own interpretation of it, to which they can add or contrast their own. Or, they might otherwise fail to see in it what you see.

That is, with regard to the latter point, it is often good to "state the obvious", because the notion of "obvious" turns out to be subjective.


Reasonablity of evaluation methods in developed countries for Maths and Sci students

Why do yo suppose that the deciding factor in how programs evaluate student is the economic development of the country? Unless you have evidence to suggest otherwise, I don't think it is reasonable to make sweeping generalizations and judgement about how science programs in developed and developing nations assess their students. Instead, whether a course emphasizes exams or not depends on the nature of the subject and the level of mastery the students possess. For example, for a calculus class, it is very likely that you will be graded on your ability to do computational problems in an exam setting, and few independent projects or presentations will be required. However, in a graduate level seminar course in biology, for example, your daily discussion participation in the class will be more important, because the professors are more interested in your ability to think rather than memorization.


How do I get better at giving talks/presenting research?

One important thing, for both casual talks and more formal talks, is your notes. Too many details and you can't use them without interrupting the flow of the talk, too little and you can get lost.

After some time, I converged to the following solution. I usually prepare one or two pages of main notes, not too densely written, with the main items I want to speak about and large signs for important things to mention at some point. Beyond two pages, I just end up caught in the moment and diverge from the planned path and improvise too much.

Usually there are some points where I could need a complicated formula, a precise statement, or a question might occur that needs one of these in order to be answered; then I simply make a mark (circled capital letters of color) where they might be needed, and write down the details along with the same mark on a second set of more detailed notes. Then I can refer to these when needed.

Another, general advice: be careful of what you do not like in other's talks, think about why, and be sure not to do that. The flaws of talks are often broadly shared, and this can only happen because we do not realize we do exactly what we blame others for.


Sending mail to the Professor for PhD, after seeing his tweet

That is perfectly fine.  The professor chose to use twitter as a medium of announcing the position.  They are expecting responses to that advertisement.  It's always a good idea to explain how you heard about the position.  Your email does all of those things.


Am I morally obliged to report what I judge as self-plagiarism?

This is an interesting case that you cite. I think it falls somewhere between 'standard behavior' and 'clear misconduct' (though I am sure others will disagree). Some thoughts and facts:

In Computer Science, even though both journals and conf proceedings count as papers, it is common accepted practice to submit extended versions of proceedings papers to journals. Typically, journals expect between 30% and 50% new content for such papers.
Realistically, many journals (especially ones that are not exactly top quality) are not super-strict with what they consider "additional content". Describing only their methodology in more detail, without providing new insights or results, is certainly very little new contribution, but I am not sure if that already qualifies as misconduct.
That one of the original authors was missing in the journal version is curious, but there may be reasons for that. Presumably, something a little shady has happened along the lines, but it is impossible to tell from the outside. One realistic possibility is that first author A has submitted the conf paper while at institution (1), with help from B and C. D was the supervisor and contributed little to nothing at all, but was added due to lab policy. Now, before submitting the journal version, A moved to institution (2), and has replaced lab head D with lab head E.
What strikes me as very, very odd is that the journal paper does not make clear that it is an extension of an earlier conference paper by citing it (and saying so explicitly in the introduction). This is the one thing that I certainly agree has a very bad smell to it. If I receive such a "hidden" journal extension for review, it is an auto-reject for me.

  Now, am I morally obliged to contact the editor of the journal where the second paper was published? This is not precisely a double publication, nor are the authors damaging me nor anybody else. Still, I feel they did something wrong. Should I instead live and let die?

In summary, I would say the entire case certainly does not look good. That being said, I do not think that the case is blatant enough that you need to feel required to report to the journal editor. To be honest, even if you did, I think not much would happen. Likely, it is not a paper that the journal feels overly proud of, but I do not think that the case is bad enough to warrant formally retracting the paper.


Must a PI who collected data but did not contribute to its final analysis be one of the authors in the paper?

This doesn't seem to be related much to the fact that the other person is a PI. According to the question, someone collected data, and you have analyzed it.

Unless the data was published elsewhere, you cannot cite it. So you will need to include the person who collected it as an author in order to have a source for the data. It's hard to expect otherwise, if you want to use unpublished data as the source for a paper.

The ICMJE guidelines agree; one of their criteria for authorship is:

  Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND

The other person has met this point through acquisition of the data.

The most gracious thing to do would be to offer the other person a co-authorship, which will then allow them to meet the other three bullet points in the ICMJE guidelines.

The other person can then decide whether to accept the co-authorship, or whether to take a smaller form of acknowledgment for the data collection.


How closely should my research proposal align with existing projects in the department?

This is mostly a matter of funding, which you didn't even mention.
Many PhD students are funded through (project) grants, and they normally try to keep their PhD topics close to what they have to do for the project anyway. But even those on a "Ladesstelle" (position paid by the state) will normally be expected to work in areas in which results can later be used for applying for grants - and it is hard to know from the outside what that could be.
While you could keep your proposal close to one of the existing projects, you do not know if there is any funding for that project left. Normally, that is not the case except in very long-running projects.
Hence, the way to go is normally:

See if there are advertised open positions ("Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter"). They normally list an expected area of research.

If step 0 did not yield any results, reach out to a professor from an area that intersects with your research interests. Write a highly personalized e-mail, listing your demonstratable expertise. Perhaps they have an upcoming project for which they need good researchers? Make sure to keep it professional.

See if step 1 helped you any further.

This answer is not about mathematics in particular. And it's also not for those coming with a scholarship, which is however a rare case in Germany.


After PhD, no support from PhD supervisor

Let me answer the following question out of many:

  What if their supervisor says "you are not an independent researcher, so I don't think you could really sell yourself as an independent researcher?"

Based on the evidence you gave, your supervisor is right. You typically need 3 to 5 recommendation letters and some evidence for being able to acquire funding to get to the next level. If you get no support from your supervisor, these 3 to 5 letters have to come from someone else, and you gave no evidence from whom. As soon as you get a "yes" that these letters can be written, you can get them uploaded to a dossier service and reuse them for your next 100+ applications, but, the way things are described by you, you don't have 3 to 5 "yes", so, you cannot declare yourself independent enough. In short, you are not independent enough from the goodwill of your supervisor, and, since you probably don't have this goodwill, you might probably have more chances for positions that do not require this goodwill, i.e. (unless your internationally shine in your area) no assistant professorhsip positions this time, perhaps even not grants or scholarships.  Maybe later, maybe not at all, but not now.

Otherwise you might simply lose months on writing 100+ applications and get zero outcome. If you sell yourself as independent while you are not, you simply spend time and money on letting others know how immature you currently are.

I would love it if you prove me wrong. I'm sorry for being that negative - I'm speaking from experience.


How to convince a Doctoral Committee to accept me as a PhD student when I already have a PhD in a similar field?

I agree with your advisor that most people would consider that the purpose of the doctorate is to teach you how to be a researcher and another degree isn't going to give you anything you don't already have. And giving the opportunity to another student is a positive good in the eyes of many, possibly most.
Moreover, if your goal is to do research and get paid for it there are better ways to achieve it. You should put your efforts into those instead.
But, to answer your question, about the only way I can think of to achieve this goal is to find someone who has a project and a very specific need for assistance that only you can fill. Possible? Sure. Likely? Not so much. And you would be better off doing a post-doc with them in any case. The pay would be better. You would have an opportunity to learn. Etc.
There is nothing stopping you from learning even outside a formal program. It takes a slightly different kind of discipline, but no more or less than that of a degree program. You can also build a circle of collaborators to help you find interesting ideas that commonly come up in class/seminar situations. You should probably explore that option in any case.


Am I allowed to make changes in the accepted paper before sending it to publication

What do you mean by "bugs"?

Do you mean spelling or grammar mistakes, an error in the reference list, etc.?
Or do you mean actual bugs in the algorithm or code?

If you mean the first one, it is OK to handle this in the proofing stage. Check how the journal does proofing; typically, the journal generates a PDF in their own typesetting system, and you make comments on this PDF with corrections. Here you can fix language mistakes, update references etc. but you should not add substantial new content.

If you mean you have found actual bugs in algorithm, code or results, the ethical thing would be to tell the editor exactly what you have found and let him/her decide.


I feel that the comments posted were really the answer to this question, so I will say it:

You should email the editor to find out the status of your paper. While such online status updates are meant to be helpful, their terminology can be opaque (as you have seen) and they don't accurately reflect the nuance of the peer review process. The change you note could mean that, yes, you paper is going to another reviewer, or that perhaps your paper has been assigned to an internal reviewer among the editors of the special issue, or it could just be a random mistake.

I do suspect that by now the situation has resolved itself, but anyone else who is having questions about online status updates for peer review would be best placed to get in contact with the human behind them if accurate or detailed information is important.


What journals do not allow open access to published material?

This answer to a related question points to http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/, which allows you to look up the policy of specific journals.


Consider following backward design: first, identify your goals; then, determine how you will evaluate them. What do you hope the students can do that this tool assesses? In my mind, it's impossible to say how you should break down your translation exercises without knowing this.
Some possible options...

By the end of this course, students will be able to understand the central idea of a text in a source language and render this idea in a target language.

If this is your goal, the basic unit of the passage to be translated is the semantic one. Tally up the ideas you think are the most important. For example, taking this sentence of Dickens':

“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”

A translation would have to capture (i) laughter is "contagious", spreading easily; (ii) nothing compares to it for contagiousness. You would deduct marks for such mistakes as applying "irresistible" to the laughter itself or saying that there's nothing in the world like a laugh.

By the end of this course, students will be able to reproduce in a target language the idiom and style of a text in a source language.

If this is your goal, the basic unit of the passage is the sentiment: the imagery, the positive/negative skew, the connotations. For example, taking this sentence of Dickens':

“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”

A translation would have to capture (i) the repeated rhythm of "against X"; (ii) the startling contrast between the positivity of the first five abstract nouns and the negativity of "discouragement" that is intended to summarize them.

By the end of this course, students will be able to identify and effect various types of modulation and transposition in translating a text from a source language to a target language.

If this is your goal, the basic unit of the passage is syntactic group: noun phrase, verb phrase, adverbial complement, etc. For example, in this sentence of Camus':

“En entrant, Cottard et Rambert essuyèrent leur front.”
As they entered, Cottard and Rambert wiped their foreheads.

A translation would need to (i) avoid rendering "en entrant" awkwardly as a participle; (ii) make sure the singular "front" ends up as the plural "foreheads".

By the end of this course, students will be able to do all of the above...

Then your rubric (or discrete rubrics for discrete exercises) can capture all those aspects under various headings, or whichever other ones correspond to your goals.


How to make programming lectures more effective and stimulating?

Re: The desire for in-class exercises (code "on the spot") -- One thing I've discovered this semester (teaching introductory C++ out of the Gaddis textbook) is the idea of laboratory exercises with mostly filled-in programs, where the students only need to add a few lines involving the new language structures that you just lectured about. Compared to "write a whole program right now" exercises that I'd used in the past, this goes down remarkably well; fits in the right time slot for everyone, gets their hands/eyes to have typed that structure at least once, raises up the salient points/difficulties of exactly that one topic, etc.

The fill-in lab exercises I'm doing come directly from the Gaddis instructor materials, so that eases my workload a lot. Frankly, I wouldn't have expected them to work as well as they do, but every day there's an important teachable moment that emerges organically. Not a silver bullet for everyone, but it's kind of been a revelation this semester.


IEEE conference not allowing presentation by a non-author: how can I get the organizers to reconsider?

My impression is that how strictly the policy of "paper needs to be presented in-person by an author" is interpreted really depends on the quality of the conference. Third-grade IEEE conferences often accept no presentation at all (as long as the registration is being paid), second-grade conferences often require some sort of presentation, but make due with some "hacks" (let a friend present the paper, play a recorded presentation, allow a Skype presentation). All of those are marginally better than no presentation at all, but they actually go against the spirit of having a conference in the first place (as a conference is mainly meant as a meeting and discussion place for like-minded researchers). Hence, top conferences (which are in no shortage of good submissions) usually do not allow for any compromises and just retract papers where none of the authors can show up.

Hence, I would not say that it is uncommon for a strong conference to be relatively inflexible about this rule, and it is probably not extremely likely that you will be able to make them re-consider. Of course, there is no danger in asking, but be prepared that the answer may simply be "no". The organisers understand that this policy will lead to individual hardships, but they have to be primarily concerned about the quality of the conference - and, as everybody who has ever seen a presentation by a non-author can confirm, being lenient about this is often really detrimental to the scientific quality of the programme.


In computer science, the most important ranking is the one maintained by CORE, the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia. It uses ranks such as A* (=exceptional), A (=excellent), B (=good to very good), and C (=sound and satisfactory).

They make the criteria for the different ranks explicit in a formal ranking description document.

Also, they have an online database with their rankings.


How to write about an area I'm going to study in undergrad research?

In most of these situations, a large part of the "exercise" is for you to grapple with the writing of that document yourself, thinking about the various aspects.

It is to be expected, or even hoped, that you feel you are unable to do this, due to lack of information, and lack of experience.

Then, talk to your advisor for hints and advice, and show them what you have written, _in_your_own_voice_... as the starting point for further progress.

That is, there should be several/many iteration cycles in creating the document, and, yes, you certainly do need your advisor's help... but in refining and redirecting your own thoughts and preferences.

Good that you recognize that you don't really know what to do, having had no experience at this, but a large part of the experience is to try to do a thing you've not done before... and partly fail, get help, fail less, get more help, fail less, rinse-lather-repeat. :)


Bad score in IELTS, should I send it anyway?

If IELTS scores are required, I recommend you to send them anyway. But from your question I understood that it isn't obligatory, so I suggest you rather not to send them or to take an exam one more time because it can be a sign of weakness in your application.


How common is it for grad school admissions to use a whitelist of undergrad institutions?

I think your use of "white-list" is not accurate. Namely, usually it does not mean the exclusion of all others, but only the inclusion of those on the list.

As far as graduate admissions, yes, prior experience with letter writers from a given undergrad institution, especially via the people admitted to our program from that institution, establish a track record for those letter-writers, and for those programs. That's not to say that every individual from a good program is equally good... but that we have data points about the meaning of the letters of recommendation, and about prior preparation.

In fact, our graduate program pays considerable attention to individuals who most likely fall outside the doctrinaire "best undergrad institutions", exactly because we know that many grad programs will under-value them, so that (if we can see a good hint of potential) we have a better chance of recruiting them. So, no, there is absolutely no a-priori exclusion of people from ... odd... places.

But, again, sure, prior experience (for better or for worse) with institutions, their faculty, and their programs, obviously gives us information. Yes, it seems to be true that some institutions are a bit delusional/arrogant, but we don't hold that against their students. :)


Journal paper submission practices to improve review quality and reduce delay

In my experience as both and author and an editor, the number one thing to reduce the review time of a paper is picking the right journal:

A paper well-aligned for a community is likely to get reviewed more quickly than one that is dubiously aligned.
Even amongst good journals, some operate much more quickly than others.  For ones that show: "received, revised, accepted" dates in addition to publication, you can check this directly in their archives.

Beyond that, the next big barrier is finding reviewers and getting them to return reviews on time.  Recommend a couple of people who would be fast and enthusiastic reviewers --- but also leave off some obvious choices. Editors will take some recommendations (and if they're good folks who return reviews quickly, that helps a lot). They will also typically want the majority of reviewers invited to not be your buddies that you recommended, so only recommend a few and leave off people they are likely to think of on their own.

Finally, papers that are easier and more pleasant to read get faster reviews as well.  Pay close attention to the flow of your narrative and the ease of grasping key points from skimming through and looking at the figures.  Good reviewers will read the whole thing, of course, but if you make it easy for them to organize their mental framework, it will go much better and faster and you'll be less likely to get misunderstandings.


Is there such thing as too many references for one paper?


Do grad schools need an official transcript from universities where I was an exchange student for only one semester?

This is likely to be specific to a particular graduate school, but I studied in the UK for a year during my US undergraduate education. The courses and grades were listed on my transcript. The graduate school that I applied to (and to which I was accepted) did not require a separate transcript from the UK university.


What should I do if I accepted a review request based on paper title, but then found out it touches on topics I don't know?

You have two choices, each of which I have done at different times:

You can tell your advisor and the editors that now that you've seen the paper, you no longer think you could do a good job reviewing it.
You can review it to the best of your ability and state clearly in the review that you have low confidence in your review. (Often, this can be indicated numerically.)


Math tutor is evading or giving wrong answers

I don't know about German technical colleges, but in the US and in Switzerland, students do have a chance to give feedback about the teaching. This sort of information is very useful then! It has the benefit of usually being anonymous. But when you do give this information, make sure that it is factual and detailed (so something like what you wrote in the question) so that the professor has a point of entry for the investigation.

If I have an assistant who behaves exactly as you described, I would be very unhappy with the assistant and will be thankful for any student who brings it to my attention.

Now, to answer your specific questions:

How to tell the professor

a. Again, I don't know about the German system. But if you don't want to be confrontational there are often options of bringing this up through the student union or the association of mathematics/statistics students. In some universities there are also student advocates who can act as intermediary for you.

You also mentioned that other "better students" don't know about this. Perhaps you should drag some of your friends to the office hours and show them what is going on. You will get a sanity check on whether your impression is correct and perhaps have more voices to join you in complaining.

b.  Documentation is important. You don't want this to be a case of "whom do we trust more." If you feel sufficiently strongly about this, get the assistant's answers either recorded (audio-visual) or in (his/her) writing. If the assistant also answers queries by e-mail that's one way to provide documentation.

c. Be factual, do not exaggerate. When I answer students' questions, sometimes I would deliberately give answers which, from the point of view of an expert, is incomplete. These can be pedagogical decisions made to guide a student's focus in his or her studies. While I am not claiming that your tutor is doing precisely that, it is important you present his/her answers exactly as they are, and not "interpreted by you."

d. Another option is to make this about the system, and not the individual. You say that the tutor has open office hours during which he/she answers questions from all subjects. Maybe that is the problem! Propose to your professor(s) that it may be more efficient to have tutors divided up by specialty and answer questions in those fields only. (At my current institution we have precisely a system set-up so that tutors will not be answering questions out of their expertise.)
When to tell the professor

As early as you feel comfortable. If I am in charge of tutors, this would be something I want to find out sooner rather than later.


What is my degree if I am still a bachelor student?

In the US system, I would advise to leave it blank. But in some European education systems (and in particular with the impetus of the Bologna process), the high-school diploma is considered a formal degree. In France, it is called baccalauréat, in the UK it's the A levels, in Spain (you seem to be Spanish) it's the bachillerato.

So, if you are in a European system, I would advise you to write bachillerato/*baccalauréat*/A-levels, otherwise leave blank.


ACM-IEEE Proceedings publication notification (2015)

Last year, I was the publication chair for an IEEE conference, meaning that I was responsible (among other things) for working with IEEE to get the proceedings onto Xplore.  Now, more than six months since we turned in the proceedings to IEEE, and nearly as long after the conference was held, only one part of the proceedings is online.  The IEEE repeatedly promises that the rest will go up "soon," but no schedule is forthcoming.  Moreover, even as publication chair, I have do not get any sort of systematic notification about the proceedings.

Long story short: with IEEE, at least, it seems you can't. Maybe ACM is better, but I haven't worked with them on this...


Meet with another professor in our university to discuss a paper that I wrote and her student is co-author with me

It is typical for advisors to want to help emerging PhD students in their efforts to publish papers. Typically, advisors can give a paper a rudimentary review with little time or effort. You would typically recognize this support with an acknowledgement, not coauthorship (in the fields that I am familiar with).

This seems to be in line with what your coauthor's advisor has in mind. I would take the coauthor at their word regarding the fact that the advisor does not wish to be a coauthor.

In addition, you do not want your own advisor to be in the dark about this paper. It is good that you have presented it to him at a prior occasion. Prior to meeting with the coauthor's advisor, you should email your advisor about the paper and let him know you are preparing to submit it. Depending on schedule/your needs, your advisor will likely be willing to provide a brief review of the paper. If he does, he should also be expecting an acknowledgement, not coauthorship.


What should I cut out from my SOP for master's programs?

This is impossible to answer without seeing your SOP (which you should not post here). I'll give some general advice about what's important and not in an SOP.
Your mileage may vary of course, but on average, SOPs are very poorly edited. For the average student in your position, they could keep all the content and save 30% just by eliminating unnecessary detail. Common offenders:

Stuff that's in the CV.
Pointless stories about their childhood
Lectures about their love of their chosen (sub)-field, or pontifications about how important the subfield is
Complicated verbiage (a good editor can really help you here, but can be hard to find).
Technical detail -- choose one or two specific challenges you had and how you overcame them, don't describe everything you've ever done
Therapy sessions about a traumatic experience they had (unfair professor, etc.) -- SOPs are not the place for this

To your paragraphs:

My interest + view on the subject + long-term goal

Your first paragraph should be an attention getter (bonus points if it's humorous). Make sure you aren't pretentious about your "view on the subject." You should state your research interests -- what you've researched and what you want to do next. If your long-term goal is to be a professor, omit this (everyone would like to be a professor in the same way that every basketball player would like to be in the NBA).

Background from college 1
Background from college 2 (I've transferred from 1 to 2)

Good, focus on challenges, in particular program-relevant challenges (lab work, most difficult/enjoyable class, etc.)

Skills and other important points about my background

Skills should be in your resume. "Important points about my background" sounds a little suspicious, but of course I do not know what you plan to say. If you keep this section, it should be about any major accomplishments during college that do not fit elsewhere (teaching, sports, career, etc.).

Research experience 1
Research Experience 2 (I've briefly described the project too.. is it necessary to do that for Master's programs?! )

The project should be on your CV. Here you should describe what you did, what you learned, challenges/highlights of the project, and how it affects your career trajectory (e.g., interest in doing more, wanting to do something else).

Short-term plans

I assume your short-term plan is to go to the master's program, not sure what you plan to say here. Consider omitting this unless there's something really interesting.

Why this particular master's program

Yes.


Any possible solution for this submision mistake?

Explain your dilemma to the chairs by email and ask whether they'll switch the polished version (which you should attach) for the submitted version.


What can I do if I am constantly invited as a reviewer, but don't have the time?

As far as I know, there is no official please-do-not-bother-me-ever-again button that removes you from the reviewer list in a journal's submission system. That being said, I assume just writing the editor a polite email should do the trick. Other than that, you can always continue to refuse reviewer invitations, and I am pretty sure editors will relatively quickly stop sending you invites (they hate wasting their time, too).

That being said, I would personally urge you to reconsider your stance on this. Reviews are an important community service that are essential to the functioning of science, and one review every few months really is not an over-the-top amount. For instance, I review at the very least one journal submission every month, plus proceedings papers for conferences and workshops where I am in the Technical Program Committee. That you recently started your PhD studies should actually only be more of a motivation to keep reviewing, as this is actually a pretty good way to stay on top of your field.


the link should be valid as long as possible

There is no guarantee that Google Scholar will even still exist as a service in a few years, let alone that its URL scheme will stay the same. Who knows when another round of spring cleaning might come?

From the point of view of avoiding link rot, using a DOI resolver seems much better, e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24775-3_5

Related: DOI® System and Persistent URLs

  Is there any DOI resolver that points to multiple sources, including free ones when available?

Citeseer does this, e.g. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1.3819 - but unlike http://doi.org they have made no commitment to maintain this service in perpetuity. And they don't seem to be using standard DOIs, but their own internal ones.


Where to advertise PhD positions without paying a fee?

Euraxess may be an option. Its openings are quite heterogeneous (sciences and humanities). Despite the name, it is not restricted to European countries.

There are other free scholarship aggregators like scholarship-positions.com. If you search academia.stackexchange you may be able to find others.

Also, you may be able to find reddit channels associated to your area. At least in computer science it is not uncommon to see such openings posted there.

Another option is trying to locate a google group where other labs in your field post their openings.


Are there any telltale signs that an academic job interview went well (or badly)?

Even if a department loves you, it's unlikely they'll show any overt signs (especially in an official capacity) because they want to maintain a reasonable negotiating position.

But individual faculty are not always "with the program". For example, it's happened to me that someone said (during an interview) "I really like your profile and will be making a strong case to make you an offer". But while this might be flattering, it also depends on how much power that individual has over final decisions.


How to establish partnerships with a university

I am probably not  qualified  to  answer  this  question,  but    the process  should  start  with you  talking  to other   faculty members and the chairperson of your  debarment   then  the  dean  of  the engineering college  and possibly other  colleges. if    the  college    that  employs you  is part  of a  university. Uou  and  others  need to see  one  or more provosts,   At  some  point  you  need  to  talk  to   one  or more  lawyers.

Tulane  University   has  an   agreement   with  university  in  Cali  Colombia,   or  at  least  the  medical   school  and  School  of  Public  health  and  Tropical  Medicine that  split  off  from  the medical  school in the late  1960s have   an   agreement   that  is 50  years  old  or  older..

I am/was   a Tulane University faculty dependent.  When my  father  had  to  semi-retire in  1976,  he   went  to  Cali  Colombia   TWICE  to  work  with  a  professor  down  there., Tulane  also  has   an  agreement   with  Sewanee  University  in  the  United   States.

My closest  friend     from  college  is now   a  full  time  faculty member  of  a health  sciences  technical university  who is on   several   degree    or program   creating  committees for  that university. She's  also  the  contact  person   between   the university   and   several hospitals. They have   an  existing  agreement  with  the University  of  New  Orleans,  When   her  university   could not hire  someone  to  teach  required introductory level physics  course   for  existing  degree programs,  They  ended up  sending   several   students,  who had  to take  the physics  course  to      to  graduate, to  UNO.

At  some point   you  need  to  get  legal  counsel  involved.

Repeating myself, my  suggestion  is  talk   to OTHER  faculty members     who  have  been there  longer  to  see  who  they may know  or  who  have  worked  with   faculty members  who   are  now   working  at  foreign  universities.  Then  talk   to  the   department  chairman,    the  deans  of  on  or more  colleges  ,  then  people  in  the  university  administration,  one  or  more  provosts.  One  of  the  reasons  for   going  to  college NOW  is to form  foundation  of  professional  social  support  network.    Even  as  relatively NEW  Ph.D.  you  already   should  know OF    other   faculty members   at  other   universities  , including  foreign universities.  If  you  don't know  anyone,  certainly other  faculty   members  who  have  been there  longer knows  or  has  worked   with  someone  else at  a  foreign university.

Do you have  any  visiting  professors  in  the  college   who  also  are   faculty members   at  a  foreign university..   I know  someone  who  now  has  Ph.D. in physics  who had  spend    one  Christmas    vacation  in  Madrid  Spain   because  his  dissertation   adviser    was  in    in  Europe    for   a  scientific  conference...

I  apologize  for assuming  you  are  in  the  United  States.  I know that may NOT  be  true. And  repeating my  self.  but  following  some professors   advice  to  repeat  everything  THREE   times. There may by  typos   I  did not  catch  and  correct.


Article waiting for AE assignment for too long?

You can send a request for an update at any time. You may or may not learn anything. There could be many reasons for a delay, including not sending too many papers to one editor and needing to find another who is suitable.
But an average of 30 days tells you little about the distribution of actual times. There is no real reason to panic unless you have other options for the paper that seem equally good.


I just found out about a better methodology after already writing thesis - how should I prepare for my defense in 3 weeks?

This situation is one of many that demonstrate the key role of an academic advisor and why I would never suggest anyone attempt a research program as a novice without one.

The specific content of your research (i.e., the merits of content analysis vs. critical discourse analysis for your research question) is off-topic for Academia.SE, but at this point you should find an advisor in your field to ask for advice.

If you cannot reach your thesis advisor, then maybe someone else on your committee can step into that role. Your advisor has approved your work, so either they have not read it carefully (and have failed you miserably in their advising duties) or this problem is not as serious as you may think (i.e., your choice can be justified despite your oversight of another technique in the field).


Getting help from friend for literature search

Regardless of the method used in retrieving related articles, the decision to accept the sources and use the information provided in the articles is yours. There is no violation or problem that can come of it, as it is no different than searching for articles online. Is there any other information you are withholding that could make you worried about this practice enough to warrant your asking the question?


Should I apply for a second masters degree (PSI master's program) after already having done a dual degree in physics?

I would say if you apply and are successful then it would be worth taking, I think the program in general is well-regarded but if your worried about it looking weird to have two masters degrees you could refer to one as physics and the other as theoretical physics. The program is very challenging to get into but it covers lots of material in theoretical physics, though goes through this material very fast (and the entire lecture series is online).
You will also get to know all the other participants well which will be good for networking in the future, and you will get to meet a number of well regarded researchers in theoretical physics (and because of the reputation they will probably be more likely to keep an eye on people who participate in the program).
The only thing that comes to mind is that it is possible PSI may be looking for students who don't already have a master's degree, but I have no knowledge of that and it if it is an issue, then its not an issue with respect to your ultimate goal.


In order to apply for an internship in the United States, what exactly will I need to send? The academic transcripts of my grades? The TOEFL? The GRE?

There is absolutely no "recipe" that anyone can give you, since every company will have its own expectations. Some may want just a résumé and a list of references; others may want your transcripts, a detailed CV, cover letter, and letters of reference; and still others may want something else instead.

You need to consult with the individual company's HR information.

(If you're talking about some sort of internship at a university, the same general rules apply.)


Obtain a secondary school teaching certificate?

In the big picture, having a secondary school teaching certificate probably won't make a difference in the hiring process for lecturer positions at the university level. Your teaching experience is what will count (to some extent--really, teaching at the collegiate level will be more important), and you will have that to put on your CV. I highlighted my high school teaching experience (and degree, certificate, etc.) on my CV when I applied to teaching positions, and in the interviews I had it was clear that it helped me land the interviews.

That said, if the certificate is something that will give you a fall-back plan if the PhD doesn't work out (i.e., you can transition directly back into the secondary teaching more easily), it might not be a bad idea to get it.

Either way, having the certificate won't hurt you when applying for future collegiate teaching jobs, and if you have the time now it might not be a bad idea to go ahead and knock it out.


Yes, if you did the work while you were a student at your university, you should list that university as your affiliation.


How to find out the editorial times (for article review) of CS journals?

Once a year the Notices of AMS publish the backlog of mathematics research journals containing inter alia the data you are interested in.

The 2012 one is here:

http://www.ams.org/notices/201210/rtx121001473p.pdf

and the 2013 is here :

http://www.ams.org/notices/201310/rnoti-p1390.pdf

and both do list some journals in informatics including the non-Elsevier ones (e.g. the Springer's Acta Informatica).


My supervisor said they are working on my offer

Nothing is guaranteed until you have a written and signed piece of paper.

(this advice applies to all parts of life!)

Your chances are possibly really good to get it now but there can always be something unexpected (clauses one of the parties does not agree to, financial implications, something wrong in the paperwork, change of mood, etc).


To what extent can I use the concept of "God" in a meteorology lecture without offending anyone?

It's acceptable, but why do you need to use it? It seems to me that you could just as easily use a secular phrase like "looking down from above"?


Firstly, congratulations on finishing! It's a big achievement.

If I were you I would be applying for post-doc positions and/or industry positions ASAP. It depends on whether you want to stay in academia or work in industry.

Think about what you want to do and don't get misled by your ex-advisors mixed messages - if he really wanted to continue working with you, he would help you find funding instead of leaving it all up to you. If you really are interested in staying with him then ask him if he could give you advice on what funding you can apply for as newly graduated PhD.


How do I cite two near-identical papers by the same authors

Cite just the more extensive one.

If this is indeed a case of self-plagiarism (in the ill-intended sense, i.e. artificially increasing one's apparent productivity), you will at least not provide the benefit for giving the authors two citations "at the price of one". At the same time, you provide your readers with the pointer to the more extensive resource.

Note that there are quite some arrangements where authors may publish an extended version of a previously published work elsewhere. Normally, this implies

more than just a short section of additional material (e.g. in CS, the threshold is usually said to be around 30% of new content when publishing an extended journal version of a conference article) and
a reference to the earlier work in the more extensive work.

However, the former may vary by field and venue and be subject to exceptional circumstances (e.g. a "special issue" may aim at mostly repeating an existing work with the primary goal of reaching a wider audience rather than disseminating new material as such), while failure to achieve the latter may be malicious, but may just as well be an oversight.


How has this decision affected my academic career? (1 year gap)

A year more or less makes zero difference for anything that's more than a year removed from the reason to take the break.

You worry unnecessarily about the issue -- plain and simple as that.

(Now, on the question to comparing yourself with Feynman, Erdos, and Einstein: If you want to stay sane, you need to at one point come to the realization that these can be idols, but not a status you can aspire to ever achieve. They lived in different spheres, and the number of people at this level is minuscule. I think a lot of us who consider themselves reasonably successful in academic life had, at one point or another, a small crisis when we realized that our contributions will not amount to much 100 years from now -- and eventually came to the realization that that (i) doesn't mean that we can't have a satisfying life that includes other things we're proud of -- such as raising children, or just inspiring students, and (ii) that most of science is actually many relatively small steps, of which we can contribute many.)


Towards a Stackexchange-like comment/reputation system for research papers

Similarly, why don't reputable journals introduce a comment space for their published papers, where fellow researchers could appreciate/criticise/query the works?

They don't need to create such a space, since these comments can already appear elsewhere on the internet.  Nevertheless, some journals have tried, but they typically attract very few comments, and nobody knows how to create a viable community this way.  See that link (and the blog posts it links to) for further discussion.

  What hinders us from having a reputation system for published papers - something where registered users could vote based on their perceived utility?

One major obstacle is that not enough people seem to want to use such a system.  There have been many attempts to set one up, but none have caught on.

However, there's a deeper obstacle.  In order to get any meaningful results at all, you need to solve at least three problems: ensuring that votes come only from competent researchers, ensuring that nobody can deliberately manipulate the system or cheat, and ensuring that voters have the right incentives even if they are not trying to be dishonest.  In principle, it might be possible to solve these problems, but it would take a nontrivial infrastructure.  However, the more elaborate the system becomes, the harder it will be to get lots of users.  A large majority of researchers won't pay any attention to a system like this, and some of the ones who do care will be strongly opposed, so getting widespread adoption will be an uphill battle.


Applying for postdocs: mention two-body problem in cover letter?

As someone who actually has experience chairing a postdoctoral hiring committee in math in the US (maybe F'x has? s/he is an international wo/man of mystery...), I think the answer is "it's unclear."

I think there's no question that mentioning your spousal situation in connection with a job will increase the probability of you both getting jobs and decrease probability of either of you getting jobs; it's impossible to be sure how those things will balance.   There's an extremely real danger that if a school knows about your situation, they'll just decide they have no chance of getting you and give up; on the other hand, if a school has a reasonable number of positions (for example, the University of Michigan), and you and your spouse are reasonably hot commodities, there is some chance a school will try to grab you both, but only if they know before whatever crucial meeting they have.  That's not a very likely turn of events, but it has happened (note the importance of at least one, and hopefully both, of you being a hot commodity, and of the school in question having a large number of positions; if they have only one position, this won't work very well).

In part, you have to decide for yourself how scared you are of not getting a job vs. how scared you are having to take a job separating yourself from your spouse.  No one on this site can tell you, but maybe your advisor or another trusted mentor can help you work that out.  If you're planning for a research career in mathematics, you should also give some thought to doing the best postdocs possible (maybe requiring separation) to have better leverage on the TT market (I know that sucks, but the two-body problem generally sucks).

If you decide you would like the committee to know about your spouse, you then have to figure out when and how to tell them.  I wouldn't depend on anything being noticed in your cover letter; there are a lot to read, and such a subtle thing will go unnoticed.  As other answers point out, there is some chance of coming off as presumptuous. It's probably more reliable for one of your letter writers to mention it (bonus: this requires you to have a discussion with the letter writer about your situation).  You can also broach the subject with someone you know at the school via email (or ask your advisor to do this).  Another useful trick is to include a link to your spouse's homepage on your homepage (though that could be easily missed as well; still I'm more likely to read a homepage than a cover letter).