What should the instructor do about a student who is not aware of their disability?

Depending on the nature of the disability, I'd suggest first talking to the relevant disabilities/accommodation office. First, they may have some paperwork or data about the student which hasn't been given to you; I've had students with accommodations before who were simply uncomfortable or unable to present them to the instructor. Second, even if they don't, they'll have more guidance on what to do here which may be very school specific.


Does it still make sense to reply to not so recent publications? Is there a cut off?

I was sent a reply article like this to referee recently, and I hope my experiences will provide from guidance.  The original paper was in theoretical physics and was published in the early 1980s.  The journal editor who contacted me informed me that, as a matter of procedure, they would normally send the submitted reply to the author(s) of the original paper as well as one or more additional referees.  However, the journal had actually been unable to locate the original author, because so much time had passed.

One of the key questions the editor wanted me to address was whether it was worth publishing this reply article now, more than three decades after the first publication.  I read the short reply and determined that its criticism of the original article was technically correct.  The paper had misstated the precision of an inferred constraint by about a factor of two.  However, I still advised the editor that the reply was not important enough to publish.

The reasons for this were several, and if you are interested in writing a reply to an older paper, I would suggest you think carefully about whether analogous arguments could be made against the publication of your own work.  The first reason was that the error was relatively minor.  Yes, it was a genuine error; but no, the major results of the first paper were not materially affected.  The second reason was that the original paper had not had a significant impact on the field; it has less than five citations, and none of the papers citing it made use of the erroneous result.  The third reason was that, because of more recent work, the old results had been superseded anyway.

If you want to reply to an influential work, which you felt has made some kind of logical or methodological errors, there may be valid reasons to publish your reply, even if decades have passed.  However, if the errors are minor or the original work's influence on the current state of the field is small, I would not suggest that this would be a good use of your time.


Can articles published on academia.edu be regarded as scholarly publications?

It does not matter where it is published, it matters (as someone already commented) whether it went through the peer review process.

There are number of outlets to "publish" your work without peer review, the one I am most familiar with is arXiv. The distinction matters, because:

The research that has not been peer-reviewed may be of poor quality, biased, not up to scientific standards, or simply fake. Note "may be". Scientific conferences and especially scientific journals are assumed to do peer review before accepting the paper.
The review process is time consuming for the reviewers, so scientific community tries to prevent "double submissions" or even double publication. The "publications" with no peer review are not considered scientific publications in strict sense, therefore they are not counted towards "double submission" criteria (at least for the conferences I know).

So the answer is, yes, you can put it in your CV, but the reader may view it differently than you, e.g. the impression may be that you are unable to publish peer-reviewed paper, and resorting to this instead.

Now, specifically to Academia.edu, due to their model as "review along the publication, not before it" makes the point moot. But nevertheless, since you CAN publish stuff on Academia.edu without prior review, no one can be sure whether the work is of high quality or junk just by the fact that you managed to publish it. Granted, sometimes junk research gets through the peer review process as well, but there is reasonable assumption that the research is good, if peer-reviewed at a decent conference or published in a decent journal, while with Academia.edu it is fair to say it is probably exactly the reverse situation: one has to assume it is junk, unless proven otherwise by going to the site and reading the comments (if any).


If my article submission is rejected while my PhD thesis is being examined, do I have to tell the examiners?

The acceptance of a paper is not something that you are obligated to raise to the members of your thesis committee, because it is not a part of the evaluation of the thesis—it has to be considered on its own merits.

That said, if you are asked about or choose to inform them of the status of the manuscripts, you should not lie about its status.


How should bathroom breaks be handled during written exams to avoid cheating?

How do other uni's deal with this?
I've attended courses in two universities and have been an exam supervisor in another academical institution.
In all those cases only one student could go to the bathroom at a time.
A supervisor would accompany the student up to the bathroom door and wait until the student would return.
Sure, the student could hide a book, laptop, anything in the toilet stall.
If it's a good exam these methods are not going to get the student anywhere as a good academical test requires that the student can use his brain, not just reproduce knowledge from a book.
Therefore I think making a big deal of cheat prevention is not necessary.
What's the best solution?
Not allowing students to take bathroom breaks is inhumane. I think the solution I experienced and described above is the best you'll get without exaggerating.


Why did this get moved to https://academia.stackexchange.com/ ?  This is an algorithm question!

Anyway, it so happens some friends of mine have one of the top timetabling algorithms, based on competition wins.  Here is a link to the paper (which will include references to other state-of-the-art timetabling algorithms)

  An automatically configured modular algorithm for post enrollment
  course timetabling Chris Fawcett, Holger H. Hoos, and Marco
  Chiarandini - Technical Report TR-2009-15, University of British
  Columbia, Department of Computer Science, 2009. [pdf]


What does it say about someone that accepts adding their name to a publication without doing any of the work?

No, it is certainly not unethical. You made an agreement at the beginning and you fulfilled it. She thanked you for your courtesy. All is well. The one, perhaps, contribution that she did make was to get you attached to the project idea, from which you will benefit. You are the primary author, in this case, of course.

There are many reasons for including someone on a paper and not all are benign, but I think this one is. I assume the other person is quite grateful, and maybe even a bit embarrassed. She may even not want to insult you by asking to be removed, since you had the earlier agreement.

But judging her ethics will get you nothing but trouble.


How to avoid getting basic facts wrong in an exam?

Exam stress and anxiety is a real thing and is most likely what you're experiencing, despite your subjective experience. By being under pressure that this the exam you're taking is the real thing and not a practice, you're likely to second guess yourself and overthink things to a degree that makes you unable to easily recall the basic knowledge.

An analogy to this is 'red light syndrome' that musicians experience in the recording studio. From Urban Dictionary;

  Red light syndrome: Where a person has musical talent, but once they are being recorded, they fall to pieces. symptoms of red light syndrome include pale skin, cold sweats and frequent mistakes.

You're simply more likely to make mistakes when you're under pressure to perform correctly than when you're just studying or practicing.

Doing exams, like a lot of things at University/school, is something you need to learn how to do properly. You get better at test taking by doing it, much like you'd get better at performing a song in front of a crowd by doing it more often. The more you expose yourself to it, the more confident and relaxed you will become with it.

Replicating exam conditions as much as possible during practice papers is a first step. Go through the motions of sitting down and timing your exam, turn off your phone, don't look up an answer when you get stuck, etc. Doing this can help you feel more relaxed in a real exam situation.


Why aren't faculty applications peer-reviewed?

They are.  Applications for faculty positions are typically reviewed by a search committee, which is made up of academics.  This is a form of peer review.

It is true that sometimes the applicant and search committee may be from the same institution when a job application is reviewed, while funding agencies and journals often do not permit that situation.  The reason is that it is not feasible to eliminate all potential conflicts of interest.  In other words, it is hard to obtain external reviewers for something like a search committee.  Also, the members of the search committee know more about their institution's needs than an external reviewer does.


Why is explainability not one of the criteria for publication?

Coming especially from a biomedical sciences perspective,

  I mean proving something works without explaining how it works.

(from a comment describing what is meant by 'explainability')

this would be an absolute disaster for science. Many results are not explainable according to that criteria; many treatments are known to be successful without being explained (some examples: anesthesia, paracetamol, anti-depressants). If we waited until findings were understood before publishing, science would move a lot more slowly.

If you had a black-box image processing algorithm that, for example, beat the state of the art in tumor detection in processing MRI images, that result would be very interesting and publishable without being able to explain the black-box. In fact, it would likely be unethical to not publish such a finding.

However, that also doesn't mean that everything that is published is "true" and definitive: further confirmation by repeated studies, applying a consistent algorithm to new/independent data sources, etc is necessary to build consensus. Those aspects need not present a barrier to initial publication, however. To the contrary, it's important to publish even negative results to facilitate future meta analyses.

Certainly, a paper which can explain some phenomenon has a lot of merit and value, and is better than work that cannot provide such an explanation, it's just that "explainability" cannot be a required criterion.


Three questions on (finding) permanent positions in France

It's hard to give a general answer, but yes, they are more competitive. CNRS/INRIA positions are nationwide competitions (in the sense that a MCF is tied to a university, while a CR is tied to CNRS/INRIA which are national institutes, so a CR can request of change of assignment and move to another French university rather easily). They are also intrinsically more attractive than MCF positions: you get no teaching duties for the same salary, and you can still teach if you want to so long as the department has some teaching vacancies not filled by permanent teaching staff -- and they almost always do.
It is technically "possible" in the sense that there is no legal obstacle to it. The only way to do this is to get your MCF position, then apply like everyone else to a CR position when it opens. Maybe things are different in CS (I'm in math) but I do not know anyone who has managed to do it, or even expressed the desire to try. Recruiting committees know that giving a permanent position to a postdoc is life-changing, while giving a permanent position to someone who's already got one is only a change of assignment. They heavily lean towards the first.
Yes, it is possible. I have several colleagues who do it.

Just a note, the positions offered by the CNRS and the INRIA are the same, "chargé de recherche", and have the same statutes. It's just a different employer. CNRS and INRIA are both the same kind of legal entity, an EPST.


How to refer to a university that changed its name?

Always use the name of the school that was correct at the time when you were doing something. So, if you mention your first degree, use University A and when you mention your current activities, use University B. If there is a chance that whatever you are writing is read by somebody from outside this university or who joins this university years later and could be oblivious of its past name, use footnotes or parentheses to indicate the name change like this:

University A School of Engineering (now University B School of Engineering)
University B School of Engineering (formely University A School of Engineering)

Furthermore use pronouns and referrers to avoid confusion, when both of them appear close-by, e.g.:

I apply to University B School of Engineering because I already did my BSc at this institution and this was a positive experience.

Unless the university failed to make all its personell and students aware of the change, I do not see a reason to mention the name change on documents that do not leave this university like essays and applications. (In particular the administrative staff is probably rather annoyed by the name change and prefers to be reminded of it as little as possible.)


Is the Octogon Mathematical Magazine still accepting paper submissions?

Yes, the Octogon Mathematical Magazine is indeed still in print.
I was advised by the current Editor-in-Chief to send my paper submissions (in LaTeX and PDF formats) via e-mail.
Here are the Rules governing submission to this journal.
(Edit June 13 2020, in response to Nate Eldredge's questions in the comments:  Per an e-mail reply from the current Editor-in-Chief:)

Dear Sir, we reorganized the webpage of Octogon, if we finished you can see the previous issues. Octogon appears two time /year (April and October) printed version. Best regards MB


How should I approach a Tokyo University professor to join their lab?

For professors in Japan, taking on students is a tremendous responsibility and burden. Unlike in the United States or Europe, professors are responsible for even the extracurricular activities of students (i.e., getting arrested; showing up drunk and groping someone; having an apartment so messy that the landlord complains, etc.). They are also responsible for the student's career after they graduate.

So faculty are noticeably reticent to take anyone on that they do not know or that do not have anyone to vouch for them. It's in this context that letters of introduction from known faculty are extremely important.

This is very hard for outsiders to break into. Your best hope is that one of your professors knows somebody at U-Tokyo, or knows somebody who knows somebody at UTokyo. It's their letter of introduction that will open doors for you.

Cold-calling will not yield many good results.

Without a good letter of introduction, your next best strategy is to enroll in either a study-abroad program / exchange program with U-Tokyo that has open enrollment or to apply to one of their English-speaking graduate programs. Going through their international programs office tends to be much better as the staff are used to international norms for student applications. Unfortunately, most of these programs aren't in engineering, but at least it gets you a  foot in the door.

Edit: From the discussion, it became clear that the OP has already enrolled into an engineering program at U-Tokyo that caters to foreigners. In this case, it's the program's responsibility to find him his advisor, as it is clear from their FAQ:

  "As an applicant for all courses, it is not necessary for you to
  contact a prospective supervisor in advance. Instead, after evaluating
  your application documents, we will allocate you to a field of
  study/faculty member which will be most appropriate for your research
  and research interests. "


How important is institution prestige at the postdoc level?

"choose your first tenure-track institution wisely, since you won't be
able to move to a more prestigious university -- only comparable or
weaker ones."

While I agree to choose your first tenure-track position wisely, I disagree with the reason that "you won't be able to move to a more prestigious university". If you perform extremely well, more prestigious universities may find you quite desirable. I can give you a list of examples of people that moved "up" if you're interested.

"would getting a postdoc job at a lower-ranked university (because I
like the location, because of a good advisor, whatever) prevent me
from getting another postdoc position at a higher-level institution?"

It will not alone (with all else being equal) prevent you from getting a postdoc position at a higher institution. At the same time, moving to a place only because you like the location doesn't seem the best choice (in my opinion, though other opinions are equally valid). If you like the adviser, research project, and other things at a Tier 2 university so much that you would turn down an offer from a Tier 1 university because of it, then it sounds like the Tier 2 university is the right place for you. Just remember that the position at the Tier 1 university will often make it easier for you to move to other Tier 1 universities thanks to the connections you'll make there and the fact that people seeing your CV will know that already you passed the selection process by the first Tier 1 university (this sometimes carries more weight than one might imagine it should). It is certainly possible to do a first postdoc at a Tier 2 university, then a second postdoc or assistant professorship at a Tier 1 university (if you perform well!). It's also possible to go to a Tier 1 university and be the victim of an abusive supervisor that causes you life-long trauma and hate for academia, or you could also fail to survive the hyper-competitive climate of your peers.

"Just to clarify, I'm a non-US postdoc and planning to do at least a
few postdoc stints before looking for more permanent positions."

If you're planning to do "at least a few post-doc stints", then the first one being at a less prestigious place and the rest of them being at top places like Oxford and Cambridge does not sounds like a problem at all. Be careful that after too many post-doc positions you will become much less desirable for tenure-track positions even in non-US countries.
Even if you were to go to a Tier 4 or Tier 5 university, it can in some circumstances be okay: I can for example give you an example of a co-author who did his PhD at UCL (fairly prestigious in England), went to a third-world country to do his first post-doc at a place that I'd never heard of, returned to Europe to do a second post-doc at a respected university in Denmark, then got a faculty position in UK. His work was consistently of high quality, and was published in good journals, so it didn't matter much.
Finally, you ask about the difficulty of being hired for a postdoc position at a more prestigious university after doing a first postdoc at a less prestigious university, and I want to say: In my experience, getting into a prestigious university for a post-doc is very different from getting into one as a student. There's no exams. It's based on your publications, your work, your connections, and perhaps the impression you've made on people at conferences.


I'm writing a personal statement for a Master's degree. The length requirement is about 1000 words. I have written 2000. Shall I shorten it?

If the writing style in your statement matches the writing style in your question, you should just do some creative revising. Cut the fluff and write more concisely; for example:

Currently I am applying for a LLM programme at SOAS and am having certain difficulties while writing the required personal statement. According to their guidance, the statement should be "describing your ambitions, suitability and interest for the programme you have chosen. This should be around 1,000 words in length", but I simply can't even fall under 2,000 words.
So my question is should I post the longer version that describes me better and for which I believe gives me a greater chance to be accepted, or should I simply delete half the text so I could manage their quota?

Much of that is extraneous and overly wordy:
Currently I am applying for a LLM programme at SOAS and am having certain difficulties while writing the required my personal statement. According to their guidance, the statement should be "describing your describe your "ambitions, suitability and interest" for the chosen programme you have chosen. This should be in "around 1,000 words in length", but I simply can't even fall under I'm over 2,000 words.
So my question is should I post the longer version that describes me better and for which I believe gives me a greater chance to be accepted, or should I simply delete half the text so I could manage and meet their quota?
yields:

I am applying for a programme and am having difficulties writing my personal statement. The statement should describe "ambitions, suitability and interest" for the chosen programme in "around 1,000 words in length", but I'm over 2,000 words.
Should I post the longer version that describes me better, or should I delete half the text and meet their quota?

Original version: 99 words. Revised version: 58 words. I've cut your word count almost in half but I believe there is minimal loss in content.
Maybe you've done this already, but I thought this was worth mentioning, in case you haven't. By the way, in the past, when I've had to meet word count ceilings, I've usually been able to do it without eliminating core information.


How important is the availability of funding of a professor as a factor to determine one's thesis advisor?

Pretty important, depending on the field.

In some fields (e.g. humanities), it is standard that professors will have little funding for RAs, while in others (e.g. computer science) it is expected that they can fund all of their students through RAs. It depends on the availability of funding for that field. So one important caveat is that you should compare the professor’s funding situation with the alternatives, namely other professors in the department.

Time you spend TAing is time you don’t spend on research, which is the main purpose of a PhD. A couple of semesters of TAing is good experience, but, if you are constantly TAing due to lack of funding, it could hold you back, relative to other students.

You should also wonder why this professor can’t get funding. It may be a sign of deeper issues. It might signal that the professor’s research is not going well, in which case being their student is a bad idea. In particular, they might be denied tenure (i.e. fired) and their students will be left advisorless.


5 credits/year is a full time undergrad course load - why would a full-time 2-year masters require the student to earn 5.0 credits to graduate?

It's not clear here if you think a 'half-load' of courses is too high, or too low for a Master's.

Here's a perspective from my university. Here, your course work serves two purposes in your masters:

Course work is there to rectify gaps in your background. As a school with a huge international student population, we have a huge amount of variance in skill-sets. As a result courses are there partially in order to help make up for missing background, or to get the students onto more common footing.
Introduction to topics. Here you're admitted without having to declare a supervisor or a topic. The first year of courses serves to introduce students to topics and professors-- possible supervisors.

After two semesters, most students have paired off with supervisors, and have started their research, which will dominate their time for the subsequent 16+ months, until they defend their thesis.


How to cultivate relationships/recommendors as an introvert

This question seems to be incorrectly premised; this is particularly evident in the following sentence:

  I'm realizing that one of the things I'm missing is a strong recommendation from a senior academic that isn't on my committee or a professor I've taken courses from.

Why do you feel that is missing? A good reference is one that assesses your suitability for the post you're applying for. As such, it will need to be written by someone with knowledge of (most of) the following:

Candidate's technical skills/expertise
Candidate's professional experience and achievements

Able to verify key claims the candidate has made on their cover letter/CV about what they did in the relevant role

Candidate's transferable skills (communication skills, teamwork etc)
Candidate's general work ethic and behaviour
Able to verify any extenuating circumstances that may affect the candidate's application (if relevant)

This means that the best formal references are from people the candidate has worked closely and consistently with over an extended period of time, and generally from those in supervisory roles. Your committee are precisely the people best placed to provide act as your referees. In terms of other good referees, if you've been, say, particularly involved with the teaching of a particular course, the lecturer you worked under may also be a suitable referee. Again, it's a similar sort of supervisory relationship, where they'll be able to make judgements of interest to a potential employer.

While it is sometimes the case in academia that referees with a looser connection are used (e.g. viva examiners), particularly to testify to the candidates academic knowledge, I'm not aware that this is hugely common. Most potential employers would expect to see references from supervisors; if those are absent, it's a huge red flag.

The real benefits you want to unlock from wider collaboration stem from the networking opportunities (although your primary purpose in seeking the collaboration should always be the overlap in research interests and potential for a strong shared project). Perhaps they'll be impressed enough to employ you, or they'll point you in the direction of open positions that they know of. They may well be willing to provide you with introductions to other PIs, that might grease the wheels of a job application.


Publishing a paper on research with a previous employer, funded by my current employer

An acknowledgement would be proper: Researcher X was previously funded in this research by Z.

It keeps it clean. While the company may no longer exist, its principals still do.

In general, acknowledging liberally is preferred over being stingy.


What is the formal process for a theory to get accepted by the science community?

There is no formal process. But before much of anything can happen, a new theory needs to be widely seen and evaluated. A period of independent verification of its predictions needs to happen. This was the case even for Einstein.
But self publishing a book is not a great way to disseminate your ideas as it will probably be seen by very few people unless you are already very prominent.
In the case of Einstein, in fact, there were, at the time, more or less generally accepted competing theories and those who held them were resistant to accept his ideas, but were also very powerful. As they "left the scene", his ideas became more accepted by younger physicists, but it also took experimental verification for the ideas to become dominant.
If you want to have your ideas widely disseminated, you need to publish in accepted journals or have them presented at conferences.


What is the type of research study by which one analyses secondary sources to make reasonable predictions?

This sounds like the pre-research step of theory development or theoretical analysis. You are developing a theoretical argument of why A should lead to C. Ideally there would be some measurable implications of this relationship which you could collect primary data on to test your theory.


cross-national and cross-cultural academic collaboration

I don't know if there is such a platform.  It would be a good idea, but a lot of work to create one.

If one does not exist, I suggest you

make a website where you post about your own work, and comments about others' work.  My partner is a physicist and made a primitive website. Believe it or not, strangers find this website and make contact to initiate collaborations.
look on Google Scholar for articles that interest you.  Write to the authors of the articles that really intrigue you.  I have done that.  Rarely, there's no answer.  Sometimes, there's a one-line email and an attached article that is exactly what I was hoping to find.  Sometimes, there is an invitation to collaborate on a specific project!


Is a paper a statement of personal belief (disagree with PI's writeup)?

It's a tough dynamic and there aren't universal rules. I'm not sure how to answer the original question because 'legitimate' isn't defined and the text rambles.

The central issue remains: how do varying opinions add up to a shared compromising publication in situations of unequal power? That describes almost every collaborative paper. There are many resolutions, including changing your mind based on new information. The bottom line is:

The shared paper requires compromise, and PIs have more power. Some of that asymmetry is appropriate and helpful to junior colleagues in the long-term. Some is not. If you're not comfortable adding your name to the best compromise you can find, then take yourself off the paper or don't publish it.

Also see: Can co-authors disagree in their own paper?


Since these are both REUs, I do not think attending school 1's summer program will affect your chances of attending grad school and continuing in academia.  Most REUs are designed to give students an opportunity to see if they can conduct scientific research and / or enjoy it.  Depending on the university and the discipline, they may be considered 'recruiting' camps for people to attend that university's grad school program in your discipline.

Since you have a fairly strong inclination to working in academia, you do not need the experience other than to confirm your suspicions and to make you a better candidate when you apply to graduate schools.

As for what I would suggest --- ask when you think the earliest day / time you would be able to get a response from School 2 on acceptance or rejection, and then from there, try to see if you can eke out some more time on School 1's deadline so that you don't end up shooting yourself in the foot.

You may also be able to talk with your current PI and see if he can hear anything through some back channels as to whether or not you have a decent chance.

At the end of the day, it's up to you.  Consider all your options wisely.


Can individual international scholars apply for US federal funds?

Usually, you can follow links or do a google search to find the original text of the Call for Proposals. The full text of those almost always provides clear criteria for who is eligible. Almost always (probably unless otherwise stated), the PI has to be from a US institution, but contrary to the other answer here, I am not familiar with the PI needing to have any particular academic status (especially not tenured already as an associate prof, and certainly all the kinds of non-TT research scientist positions), provided they have a position which their institution officially lists as being eligible to be sponsored as a PI. Sometimes, a post-doc, lecturer, or adjunct prof might be eligible. Remember, the grants go to the institution primarily, and the PI merely executes them on their behalf. The granting agencies defer the responsibility for administering who is legally OK to conduct the research to the accredited institution. Policies can vary between institution, so you'll need to ask your local administrators.

Certain kinds of award from private agencies or those who work with sensitive information, e.g. DARPA, DOD, or DOE, might require you to be a US Citizen (not even just a LPR), but that should be clearly listed. I am pretty sure that "unrestricted," in this context, means that there is no such restriction on immigration status.

You are always free to shoot an email or call to the cognizant program officer for a particular grant, to ask for clarification. They will expect you to have read the full, original CfP, unless you want to put them in a bad mood that might bias the review of your prospective application!


Do graduate schools have more courses & less of a student-teacher ratio than undergraduate?

I will limit my answer to American universities.

Do you mean more courses per semester, or more distinct courses that are listed in the course catalog and offered with some regularity?

If you mean the former: in any given semester, most departments offer many more undergraduate courses than graduate courses.  This must be the case for the reason you suggest: the number of students taking undergraduate courses in that department is usually far in excess of the number of students taking graduate courses in that department.

But most departments offer largely the same undergraduate courses every year (or sometimes, on a two-year cycle).  Many undergraduate courses at a large university have multiple sections running concurrently.  The most popular courses -- e.g. freshman level courses for non-majors -- are in some departments run in ten, twenty or more sections each semester.

If you mean the latter: yes, many -- perhaps most? -- departments with large graduate programs offer a larger number of distinct graduate courses over the years than undergraduate courses.  Each course is populated by a smaller number of graduate students, but graduate students stick around for at least as long as undergraduates and, unlike undergraduate students -- recall that I am talking about American universities -- take the vast majority or the entirety of their courses in a single department.  Sometimes graduate students repeat courses or stop taking courses at a certain point, but in many PhD programs -- including the one at my university -- graduate students are required to take a minimum (positive!) number of courses every semester, some of which are unrepeatable.

In fact, most departments devote much more thought to which graduate courses they are going to offer in the next year or two years, both in order to make sure to offer enough courses for their students to take, and conversely to ensure that enough of their current students will want to take any given proposed course in order for that course "to make", i.e., to meet minimum enrollment requirements and be run.


citing work that definitely won't be published

Simply cite as you would any other website. Alternatively, you can use the unpublished works citation style. Citations don't have to point to other journal articles.

Do note, though, that the fact that the work you're citing didn't go through peer review and likely isn't as well known will impact how people view the citation. If that particular reference is critical to your paper you may want to search for published literature that supports your argument as well.


Communicate Author or Publisher for asking detail?

The editor and publisher will have no special insight into the contents of the paper.  The publisher doesn't even have any particular mathematical expertise at all.  It is a waste of time to contact either of them.

You speak about "the detail" as if you think that a more detailed version of the proof is out there somewhere, and if you ask the right person they will send it.  I think it's more likely that no such version ever exists.  The author may never have written another version - or if they did, there's no reason to think it exists anywhere besides their own notes.

Asking on MathOverflow was a good idea, and you can also talk to others in your field who may be familiar with the paper or the techniques involved.  But this is more a matter of having them help you figure out what's going on - not a matter of sharing knowledge that already exists.


Is it unwise to start a Ms/PhD program without a stipend - will it upset professors if I leave with a masters to apply to funded programs?

I think that you are more asking, whether it is common to start graduate school without funding. Generally at the MS level, it is not uncommon for MS students to be unfunded. All depends on the school. Most schools that I've encountered would much rather fund PhD students since you get more out of the students.

Now at the PhD level - I would not advise a PhD without funding. Trying to live 4-6 years without a salary is difficult, and most people I've seen try this failed. There are enough schools out there that you should be able to get funding somewhere (unless you really have bad scores/grades and shouldn't be in graduate school).


What are the advantages of serving as an examiner for a MSc or PhD thesis?

Many things academics do do not help them for their career. Many academics believe in expanding knowledge -- examining a thesis is arguably a way to do so.

For other academics, the reason may be that they are asked by their close collegues and it would damage their relationsship to say no (the collegues could decline collaboration or decline to examing the thesis of your students).

Or another reason to do this is that probably the academics had some thesis examiner themselves and they do this to pay forward.

One advantage I could think of: Depending on the involved universities, you might get invited to examine the thesis defense and thus get to stay and collaborate with their institution.


Writing to a professor who contributed to my research paper

Just say it as you have here, I think. It seems perfectly reasonable. It also seems like a good idea to reconnect for future projects.

But you don't say why you were contacted. Either you were listed as a co-author or were given an acknowledgement. Some journals get permission for all acknowledgements from all parties. It would be good to know beforehand which case it is, and what your feelings are about how the professor included you.

But you gain nothing, now or in the future, by staying silent.


Informing a university about an offer from another university

We can’t predict the effects of your telling B about the acceptance to A. This can depend on small details, including the precise way you phrase your email to them.
However, broadly speaking, departments try to recruit the best students; have some flexibility to offer better terms to some applicants than to others; and use that flexibility in a strategic manner based on information that they have about the applicants’ situation. The knowledge that you were accepted to A is certainly relevant to that sort of strategizing, and can in theory affect department B’s decision on how attractive of an offer they want to make you. In some situations it could lead to a more generous offer.


How to reference/link to an online code repository, whose location may change in the future

The first thing to check is whether your institution already has a policy for this. Mine for example maintains both a GitLab instance and a database of software written by research teams. We can use to the first for permanent links, since they are institutional. The second feeds directly into our annual reports.

If there is no policy, but there is an institutional Git service, then it is usually possible to create a repository specifically for your project (if your team doesn't already have one). I recommend creating a specific project, rather than mixing in with your personal project: it costs nothing more, and provides the best long-term stability. You can always update the README for the project or the repository to point to a different one, later on.

If there is neither, then you could create a specific project on gitlab.com (or equivalent). Same recommendation as above: create a specific project to contain the repository (again, unless your team already has one).

You mentioned PLoS Computational Biology so possibly there might be some experimental data or analytical output that you would like to provide. A Git service isn't appropriate for this, even with LFS, but an open archive like Zenodo is an excellent choice.

As a final note, if your project happens to be funded by the EU, then it should already have a data management policy.


What can I do when anxiety causes me to perform poorly in oral exams and class discussions?

I'm not a mental health professional, but it sounds like your anxiety is interfering with your performance in this class.
You may be eligible for some accommodation to immediately triage your grade. If your university has a center for students with disabilities, talk to them and see if there's a process to get you started to talk to a doctor and get a diagnosis about whether your anxiety is serious enough for accommodation. They may have some kind of form you need to bring to the appointment, and can otherwise help you with bureaucracy.
I would also talk to your professor. While you are likely meant to get better at public speaking in this class, many profs will work with you to meet you where you're at and find additional ways to assess your comprehension of the material independently of testing your public speaking.
Also I agree practice will help in the long run, but that doesn't mean you need to fail the class in the short run! Ask for some help and see if people will work with you. No university class should feel this hopeless. You should be able to get better in the timescale of the class if you put in work. Ask for help if the conditions seem insurmountable.


Planning to retake English language test for PhD admissions in the UK, but listed previous average in my CV - should I contact professor to explain?

You should definitely contact the professor. English is just a trivial component in your application, so you should not worry about it. Especially, you will likely have an interview if you are shortlisted.

When I applied to Oxford, my IELTS score was only 6.5, while the school required 7 (and no band is less than 6). I contacted the professor, and she told her assistant (who collected the applications) that it was OK for that position with 6.5.

I was later rejected, but it was due to my lack of research experience, not my English score.


Why isn't it common for papers in pure and applied math (and other related fields) to be modified/corrected after it has been published?

The primary reason is that journals are "publications of record". They just record a specific version of a paper, namely the one that actually gets printed, along with important data such as who wrote it and when it was submitted.
You are of course free to put corrected versions onto your website, or maybe onto preprint servers. But in the end, that's not the "version of record" as you can change whatever you want on it -- you can add and remove authors, etc., and it's hard for anyone to track down when exactly a particular change was made if a dispute should arise who came up with an idea first. It's of course true that journals today could just do that on their websites: allow newer versions of papers to supersede older versions, but then that would require some kind of editorial process that journals are not equipped to handle.

Completely separately, though, I take issue with your opening statement: "very few reviewers now have a complete picture of any single field. Thus it should be common for more mistakes to be published". I don't think that there is proof that that is true -- science was difficult 50 years ago, and it is difficult today. I don't believe that authors or reviewers or editors are any worse equipped today to assess the contents of papers than they were 50 years ago, and so I see no reason why we should expect more mistakes.


Efficient ways to find the original paper which introduced a novel concept/algorithm?

Here's the (horrible cheating) method that I use: if something is so well established that people don't bother referencing the original paper, then there's a good chance it's got an article on Wikipedia or Wolfram Mathworld or some other reference site.  The references of such an article often include the original paper, but even if they don't they usually include something close enough in time that it does actually reference the original (or at least something closer to the point).

In many cases, however, you may not actually want the original: as the original becomes better understood, its presentation is often made much clearer and more succinct, and later textbooks or reviews may actually be the right source to point people at.  For example, consider the difference between Newton's calculus, and calculus as it is now taught to undergraduates.


Code plagiarism by teacher at renowned university

Before you step into a potential minefield of accusations and possible blowback, I'd suggest that you just discuss it with the professor, raising your concerns about citation. A fraud accusation would be very serious and possibly unwarranted. You don't know whether the professor has discussed this with the team that created it. Also their own materials only ask for citation if you "use it in a scientific publication". The funding agencies (INRIA, for example), may require fairly loose restrictions on use. I didn't investigate the BSD license, so it may be restrictive or not.

But delay serious steps from which it would be difficult to extract yourself until you know more.

I'm sure many people have turned some of my work into student exercises (not published outside the course material). I would, myself, never object to that.


Sharing data (not a data set) with a research paper

e.g. experiment parameters, results, etc.

In the past, I have shared this kind of data from a conference paper in any of a few ways:

Create an extended tech report version of the conference paper, that includes all that data in appendices. Refer to the tech report in the conference paper.
Put the data on a lab wiki, and include a link in the conference paper.
Put the data in a Github repository, and include a link in the conference paper.

I choose between those based on the nature of the data, i.e. which format seems most natural for it.

I've never used Figshare for this, but that would be another idea, (if you wanted a DOI for it, for example.) You can put any kind of "research output" there.


This isn't my field, but statistically speaking, you will possibly invalidate your study if you change the parameters mid stream.

However, you can gather the extraneous data, since it is cheap to do so. But isolate it and use it only as a guide to future work and, perhaps, to give yourself confidence (not statistical confidence) in the outcomes.

If this is dissertation work, then knowing what you could have done differently is worth exploring and maybe including. But let the experiment you designed be carried out faithfully. Otherwise, at best, you will just confuse yourself with the results.


Why would an international applicant with a perfect GPA and an undergraduate thesis get rejected from 16 grad schools?

I can suggest two possibilities and a possible solution.
First, your English writing seems awkward, so possibly you didn't express yourself well or made many misspellings. It is Fields Medal, by the way. This might have blown up your statement of purpose, which can be quite important.
Second, it is possible that the "famous mathematicians" wrote you mediocre letters of recommendation. I wonder how well they know you and your work. What they say about you is probably much more important than who they are for these purposes.
You can address both of those issues in various ways, but I also suggest that you simply broaden your search. Send a few applications, tailored to the individual institutions, but cover the full range of R1 universities (and maybe even some R2 places), not just the top of the range.


Can a researcher get his full salary from a European Project?

So, after quite some time spent on reading the paperwork and talking with helpful staff, I finally understood how this system works. There are different amounts involved:

S: the salary of the researcher, corresponding to the gross amount, i.e. before tax. For instance, 50.000 euros per year.
r: the overhead asked by the host institution, which basically corresponds to the indirect costs of hosting the researcher (renting the office, paying the admin staff, etc). This is an agreement between the host institution and the european commission, usually calculated as a percentage of the salary. For instance, where I'm working now, it's 67%. In some places, it can go up to 100%.
T: the travel and equipments expenses. It basically depends on the expected number of conferences to attend per year, the meetings organised for the project, etc. For instance, based on 4 conferences per year, 2500 euros per conference, that makes 10.000 euros.
C = S + rS + T: the total cost of the researcher per year. For instance, that would be 50000 + 33500 + 10000 = 93500.
Req = 0.75 * C: is the requested amount to the commission (assuming the host institution belongs to: profit public bodies, secondary and higher education establishments, research organisations and SMEs, 0.5 otherwise). So, for the example, we would request 70.125 euros per year.

Note that the request amount is 10.000 euros above the gross salary of the researcher (deducting the travel costs). In other words, one could consider that the 25% the host institution has to pay are indirectly paid by giving an office and proving staff support (who, in general, would be paid anyway, EU project or not), and therefore it does not necessarily mean that the researcher has to find another funding source for the missing 25%.


How do editors assess urgency of submissions?

There are some journals which try to guarantee expedite review and publication processes -- typically less than one month, even 1-2 weeks, for the review process -- for short papers which can have a significant impact on rapidly developing fields.

In physics, examples of such journals are Physical Review Letters (PRL) and Applied Physics Letters (APL). The word letters in the titles aptly recalls the above qualities.

From the About section of PRL, we can read (emphasis mine):

  Authors gain high visibility, rapid publication, and broad dissemination of their work.

and

  If presenting a new technique, or methodology, it should play a pivotal role in future physics research, and make apparent its immediate consequences for physicists.

From the Criteria For Publication section of APL we can read:

  Timeliness: One of the questions on the reviewer's checklist is: "Is the paper especially important, interesting, and timely enough to warrant rapid publication in Applied Physics Letters?" A fraction of papers, which report new results but in a mature field, do not fulfill the condition of timeliness required by APL, and should be submitted for consideration as a Communication elsewhere.

Thus, for instance, one might not have much chance in publishing on PRL a work about classical mechanics, which is a well established and no longer rapidly developing field, but might have a much better chance in publishing an innovative work on, say, quantum point contacts.

If your submission was sent to such kind of journal, the editor, on the basis of their knowledge of the field, might have decided that your work would have not had an immediate impact on the field, and it would probably fit better in a journal with standard reviewing and publishing times.


The title of a work is the first thing that people will use to decide whether to read it or not.  You want it to say as clearly and lucidly as possible what it is that you have contributed.  If you title something "On XXX of YYY", then that says you've done a loosely coupled collection of investigations regarding the relationship of XXX and YYY.  If, however, the important conclusion of your thesis is more specific, it's good to say that in your title.

To make up an example, compare:

"On the diet of Antarctic seals": this document studied diet exhaustively, and came up with very thorough data but no particularly big surprises.
"Antarctic seal diet dependent on frozen pizza": this document studied diet, and found something rather bizarre that clearly needs more study.

In sum: short is good, but unnecessarily vague is bad.


Unsuccessful job search with an MS in Math degree

It's good you're wondering about this now, before you commit another 3+ years to doing a PhD after which you might face the same questions but after paying a much higher opportunity cost. Questions such as these are what I consider paramount to ask before applying for graduate study.

The good news is a Masters degree will open up at least some doors. There are things that you can do with a Masters degree that someone with only a Bachelor's cannot. The bad news is that there are fewer of these positions. Because you're more highly qualified, you can also overqualify yourself out of entry-level positions since the employer assumes you'll move on quickly and they would waste their efforts training you.

Regarding what you can do, I wouldn't usually start with which companies are interested, but rather which jobs require a MS math degree. A quick search on monster.com turns up results such as this and this. By extension the companies posting these ads are interested in you. As you look through the ads, think of all the things you learned that you might be able to apply to the requirements listed. For example you say you have coding experience. The Data Scientist job specifically asks for familiarity with SAS, R and Python. Do you know these things? If so, you're in business.

If after responding to lots of these ads, nobody still wants to talk to you, then chances are your application isn't very good. This could be because of your cover letter, CV, transcript, or a multitude of other factors. Talk to your alma mater's career center, if they have one, or ask on Workplace.SE. It's not that different from applying to 10 different graduate schools and getting rejected by all of them. Diagnose why, fix it if possible, and apply to another 10 graduate schools.

You can also look at jobs that require a PhD in math. If you find you like these jobs a lot more than those that only require a MS, that's a good time to think of doing PhD studies.


Will pass/no pass grades in an extracurricular affect graduate school admissions?

It is highly unlikely that these grades would affect you in any particular bad way. As the commenters under your question have stated - 'no one will care'.  Specifically:

As you stated, you have a great GPA - this means you have demonstrable strong abilities in your 'core' subjects - presumably of the topics that relate to the programs you are applying for.
You also stated that these P/NP courses for the most part are labelled as 'Independent Study' and a very interesting sounding one from the philosophy faculty. These don't really reflect the subjects that are related to your main focus - they are extracurricular afterall.
As you stated, you passed them all and your institution's documentation would most likely show that these are pass/no pass courses.

If anything, these could actually work in your favour - demonstrating that you show initiative with continuous Independent studies and a willingness to expand your mind with the logic course.  But, as stated here and in the comments, they most likely not worry at all about it.

What could help allay your concerns is to read the school's documentation - many institutions have information about how the P/NP option would affect the GPA - for example, this one from the University of California, Santa Cruz states:

  The grades P and NP both appear on your official transcript, but are not calculated in your GPA.

This would be known (at least accessible) to the admissions folks at your graduate school as well.


Guidelines for When to Acknowledge Research Assistants

I think it's best to err in the direction of being generous with attribution.  Firstly because it's hard to be accurate about how important someone was (which both applies to you potentially underestimating your contribution, or the RA overestimating their contribution) which can lead to hard feelings.  And second because it's just a few words and the power to make someone feel good about their contribution outweighs the cost of those words.


would employers look at
  it and be understanding that it might be difficult to be far from home
  or that I have at least gained valuable skills despite no papers as it
  was less than 2-3 years?

They do not automatically understand. You need to convince them.

There can be multiple reasons for 1.5 years without a paper. A big project that requires a lot of engineering effort is a perfectly reasonable reason. In this case, a letter of reference from your postdoc advisor is very important. You may help her to sketch out what she needs to write:

Your responsibilities and skills needed to perform in the project
Your contribution/achievements after 1.5 years
...

IMHO, you should not mention "be difficult to be far from home etc". It sounds like an excuse for poor performance, or at least it gives an impression that you are not able to overcome difficulties.


Workaround for Horrible Thesis Title on Academic CV

You could use a summary statement like the one you've proposed as your thesis topic - and I'd assume that it was for brevity and clarity rather than because you hate the title.

That being said, that title is far from the worst paper title I've read today, let alone something in need of outright hiding from the world.


Will my cancer ruin my chances of going to graduate school in math?

First of all, I’m happy you’re doing better! It would take a truly heartless committee to ignore the circumstances. In the US it’s illegal if I’m not mistaken, but from a recruiter’s perspective I would definitely see the fact that you overcame adversity and managed to graduate with a good GPA as a point in your favor.

Mention this in your statement of purpose. Don’t be melodramatic, just state that you had to take a break from your studies to fight cancer, and then got back into it once you were done. I’d see that as a sign of fortitude and perseverance!

Good luck!


Is there a way to influence research in multiple areas of a field?

I think most researchers want to influence and possibly work in different areas, but we can't all be revolutionaries in several fields.
There are two opposing issues that one needs to balance at any stage of academia (or that pesky thing called life):

Doing anything significant usually takes real time and effort
Each individual has limited resources, such as time and effort

As research has progressed over the past centuries  things have gotten more specialized and there indeed has been a necessary tendency for researchers to focus on more and more narrow aspects of science.  However, the branches of science are highly interconnected, and fundamental work in one area often has ramifications in many areas (which the original research may or may not be involved with).  Recently, there has been more emphasis on interdisciplinary research, which it sounds like the kind of thing you are interested in.  So this opportunity is certainly available for researchers who are interested.

However, interdisciplinary research is easier with certain specialities than others.  (If you run a lab with lots of specialized equipment, you will be limited by the capabilities of the equipment.)  For instance, interdisciplinary work seems to be pretty common with people who do mathematical biology, or more generally applied math/statistics.  They often collaborate with different specialists in different fields/subfields who want to apply mathematical techniques/models to their problems, and in the process learn something about that particular subfield.  My suggestion, if you want to go this direction, is look for an advisor in graduate school who does (and if possible, whose students do) interdisciplinary research that you find exciting.

Another way to influence people in different areas is through teaching, giving lectures and writing textbooks.  Yet another way is by working for a grant agency or as a policy advisor, to help decide what research gets funded.  Working for a scientific publishing company, as you mention, is also a possiblity, but journal editors are professional researchers.  Similarly, university administration is run by professors.  Thus there are many options, but these typically require specialized knowledge, so the preparation is the same as becoming a researcher.


Sponsoring a non-academic collaborator to attend a conference

Is there any provision for my collaborator's university to pay for my travel costs as well?

While not strictly impossible, this sounds rather unlikely to happen, at least through formal channels. Travel budget is restricted, and there are often even administrative restrictions that prevent faculty to give it to people who are neither employees nor students of the university.

That being said, if your collaborator is sufficiently commited to making you go, as well as sufficiently crafty to bend the rules in the right way, (s)he may cook up an arrangement with the administration of some sort. Note that this will likely be (at best) semi-officially, and will burn some real or political capital of the faculty, so (s)he won't just do it to be nice. There has to be some real benefit to them that you are at this conference.


How to prepare before going to grad school

Prepare financially. Grad school is not cheap. Make sure you can afford it. Even if you're going to be funded, you're probably not going to be well-paid, so the money you can save now, while you still have a job, will be precious. By having a reserve available, you can mishaps like this one since even if funding runs out you'll be able to self-fund.

Prepare a fallback plan. This ties in with #1. Do your current job well. If you manage this, then if you go to grad school and find you dislike it (happens quite a bit, e.g. see this question) you can still hopefully return to the workforce seamlessly. Perhaps you can rejoin your original employer, perhaps you can join a competitor; either way you have a lot to gain by achieving a lot in your current job. Your employer might even be willing to fund you through grad school.

Start worrying about how to find a position. After having done the two things above, start thinking about where you're going to study. Which universities are you going to apply to? Which professors do you want to work under? What topics do you want to learn? Do you want to take courses or do you want a research-only Masters? Here's where money can come in handy again, because if you're able to self-fund you'll have a wider pool of potential universities to look at.

After you've identified a university/professor, the next thing to do would be to write to read some of that professor's papers, write to that professor to make contact, possibly discuss some aspects of the intended work, and apply. If you are accepted, then you can ask the professor about what to study before attending.


Publication issue of a journal article in Elsevier

If Elsevier customer support is the same person as the journal manager, this would be weird. But there's a very good chance that they aren't the same person. Elsevier customer support is likely looking at a high-level overview of what the status is, and doesn't know the details. The journal manager would know it's the 2nd typesetting stage, but presumably the status is still reported as "typesetting" (which is, after all, what it is) and therefore also what Elsevier customer service tells you.

If you're already in contact with the journal manager, ask him/her for the status, not customer support.


How much time to invest in reviewing a paper that is clearly below the bar?

In my experience, it is perfectly valid to reject such a paper on the basis of an inadequate review of the literature and/or limited relevance compared to the state-of-the-art. However, you may (understandably) have some reservations about rejecting the paper outright. In this case, I suggest considering adding something to your review along the lines of:

  The authors do not clearly establish the relevance of their approach given the state of the art (e.g., Article1, Article2). Therefore, at this time, this reviewer recommends resubmission only after addressing (if not directly comparing against) the state of the art.

At the end of the day, your review is a recommendation for the editor. They can choose to take your suggestion or not. But it sounds to me that your assessment (that the paper as currently written is ignoring a large chunk of recent & relevant work) would be quite helpful to the editor.

Regarding how long you should spend on evaluating the actual method - I think you should at least do your due diligence to make sure you've understood the method and the overall novelty/impact of the paper. (It sounds to me that you may have done this already.) As part of the review, you should include a summary of what you've understood about the paper - this helps both the editor to grasp the significance of the work and also conveys to the authors that you've shown them the respect of honestly trying to understand their contribution, and yet you still feel that something is lacking.

A helpful guide here discusses "Rejection After the First Reading", among other things.


How can I judge reputation of a publisher? Any rankings?

There are no rankings of publishers I'm aware of (what criteria would you even use?); however, my experience is that academics also barely care about the prestige of the publisher. If there are any publishers at all whose names carry weight, it's CUP and OUP.

Just make sure not to publish with a predatory publisher and you should be set.


How to read Eigen factor and AI for a journal in specific field?

Look at the entire list of journals in the field Information theory, where this journals belongs. There you see that ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction is at place 53 out of 248, ranked by AI. By combining this number with knowledge of the field you can probably draw some conclusions.

In general, both eigenfactors and the Article influence score (AI) are reported by Thomson ISI as well, so they are well known. Look at the FAQ at eigenfactor.org and read the wikipedia article on eigenfactor for more info. In general, AI is more comparable to the impact factor, while the eigenfactor scales with the number of papers published in the journal. Also have a look at SNIP and SJR if you are interested in journal metrics, info can be found at journalmetrics.com.


"Poster presentation" vs "poster only" in academic conference

A poster presentation generally means that before the poster session you get a short (~3 min) slot to summarise your poster to the audience.

A poster session (poster only) implies that you only want to display your poster, not speak about it to the audience (you should still stand near your poster to answer people's questions about it as they walk around).


How to download a database of bibliographic information for all published scientific papers?

Probably the closest you can get is the Open Academic Graph, a graph-based database of about 321 million papers (I don't think the actual papers are stored, but all the information you want is there). You can download all the 143 GB of data from the above link, but do note that because it's a merge of two existing graph-based paper databases (Microsoft Academic Search and AMiner) there are going to be a lot of duplicates.


What is the function or role of a propaedeutic diploma (in e.g. The Netherlands)?

The propaedeutic diploma is awarded after completing all the requirements for the first year of studies. Not all universities in the Netherlands award it, and its importance seems to be less since Bologna has introduced the bachelor/master system in the Netherlands. Before it was the only diploma/certificate until completing the full four or five years for a university study. Obtaining it in reasonable time could be seen as a sign that normally one should be able to complete the full studies, and hence nowadays it is also used as a selective tool, as is mentioned in @cag51's answer.

It does not carry much value and is not seen as a terminal degree. The only exception is for students studying in professional education ("hoger beroepsonderwijs", in English these institutions normally call themselves "Universities of Applied Sciences"). In that case, the diploma can be used to be admitted to a university. To understand this, one should know that in the Netherlands, from 12 years old secondary education is split into four different levels, and only the highest level gives access to universities.


Can professor terminate student's stipend at anytime?

What both the professor and the student can do will be specified in the contract / agreement or conditions.

If the professor is within those then yes he can cut the stipend: continued poor performance after a warning may well be relevant grounds...


How to decide between submitting to a conference and a Journal?

It is allowed, and it is a good plan.

More specifically, sometimes, conferences and journals will state, on their website, what proportion of the work you submit must be "novel." (How this is quantified is usually vague but it should give you an idea.) As long as you observe their rules you should be fine. Do keep in mind that it is likely for the same people to be reviewing papers for different conferences or journals, and if you end up sending insufficiently original work to multiple venues you may upset them.

Presenting research at a conference and submitting an expanded version to a journal is done very often in many fields. There are also many cases of journals inviting authors to contribute papers based on a previous conference presentation.

Regarding your more general question of "how to decide between submitting to a conference and a journal," I can offer the following strategy:

Go to Google Scholar.
Find the Metrics section.
Go to the "top publications."
Pick your category (e.g. Engineering & Computer Science) and possibly subcategory (e.g. Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition or Artificial Intelligence).
Start from the top of the list and move down until you find a relevant venue with an appropriate deadline.


First things first: don't feel bad. I was among the top three students in my country and I still got rejected by all the top schools I applied to for undergraduate study. It's a great big world out there with lots of highly intelligent, highly motivated students with excellent applications, and it's only going to get more competitive the higher up you go in academia.

Second: now is not the time to worry about what you might have done differently because it'll just make you feel worse. But in six months' time, if you're still unaffiliated and want to apply again, then would be a good time to read the paragraph below.

  Remember that you can't just apply to top schools. You could easily be rejected everywhere. You should also apply to schools which you are confident you'll be accepted in, as well as schools which are 50-50. Then, come decision time, you'll at least be able to go somewhere and not have a gap year to fill. "Somewhere" might not be as good as "dream school", but it's still better than "nowhere".

Third: what to do next is the most pressing thing to figure out. Doing nothing is not ideal - that makes you a burden to your caregivers. If money is at all a concern for you, I advocate getting a job. You might not be able to commit for very long (although you can delay grad school for two years or more too) but you still might be able find a temporary job. Working has many great advantages that can change your perception of grad school completely. At the very least, you'll be on a more solid footing financially when you attend.

If money isn't a concern to you, and you're dead set on doing PhD studies, then you can use the intervening year to learn more mathematics. For example you could stay put at your current institution for a year taking extra masters-level courses that you didn't take because of time constraints. You could do an extra research project with your current supervisor. You could look up the job requirements for jobs you want to do, and take the year to self-study those. You can do all these while preparing for another attempt at the Math GRE. You could even take the gap year to travel the world, which like getting a job will be a transformative experience that will teach you things you cannot learn at a university. See this related question for more suggestions.

In short, getting admitted to a PhD program isn't everything. Shake of the disappointment of having been rejected at all your top choices and you'll find there're lots of things you can do, not all of which might be related to studying but will nonetheless lead to personal growth.


Use 1st or 3rd person for university webpage description?

I think that it depends on whether the web site is written from a personal or an institutional perspective.

Personal perspective: On my own web page, I use first person because I have formatted it as a web page about me personally and about my personal work.
Institutional perspective: A close colleague of mine has formatted their page as "Name Laboratory", and it includes description of both themselves and of all of the students and postdocs in their group.  Their web page is written in the third person, including their self-description, because it is from outside perspective of the group as a collective, rather than their own perspective.

Just as in most questions of writing and tense, either can be correct, and I think the question is really about which you feel most comfortable doing.


How to approach my PhD advisor after failing a qualifiying exam?

You should talk to your advisor.
It's completely natural to feel embarrassed if you have done badly in an exam where everyone was expecting you to do well. It's also natural to feel you have let your advisor down, especially as it sounds in your case they recruited you specifically.
However, from what you have written, I'd say you have more positives than negatives to take away from the situation: you have started a PhD during a global pandemic and passed half your exams with flying colours. You note yourself that you only failed the other exam because you did not study one topic enough -- that shows great maturity and awareness of what can be done to rectify the situation.
Furthermore, everyone fails exams (or does worse than they were hoping or expecting to). I'd wager you're not the first of your advisor's students to have failed an exam -- or even the tenth. Any advisor worth their salt will not take this personally -- instead, their reaction should be "how can I help my student to succeed when they retake the exam?". If their reaction is to drop you as a student due to one failed exam, I'd say you're better off without them, frankly.
So, I counsel you to talk to your advisor, stating what you have done here. You can write it in a email first if that feels more comfortable. State what you plan to do to ensure you pass the exam next time around and ask if they have any advice. You can also ask if you should continue to focus on research over the summer or switch to studying for the retake (this might depend on when you will resit the exam -- is it before the summer?).
The key to any successful collaboration in research, and especially a successful student-supervisor relationship, is communication. Keep an open dialogue from the beginning and you will hopefully not run into problems further down the line.
Don't be afraid to ask your advisor for help: that is what they are there for.


Is it better to cite a PhD thesis or an article under review?

Do you know if his article will be accepted? Would you know so soon enough? If there is a chance that it will be rejected (there always is but you may have a feeling of the quality of his article) I'd cite his thesis.

In any other case I'd cite his peer-reviewed article with Smith et al., under review or Smith et al., submitted to (name of journal). Papers are usually more accessible and perceived to be of higher quality than theses and it would also give him one citation on his article already.

Or, as Pont pointed out, cite both: Statement in your paper (Smith 2016 [this would be the thesis], Smith et al., under review [this would be the pending article]).


Would successive rejections of different papers by the same journal lower the probability of acceptance of the next submission to the same journal?

My guess about the situation is that your prior rejections will not significantly affect the editors' opinions on your new submission.

However, the fact of your prior repeated rejections is evidence that you are misjudging the suitability of your papers for that journal, either the aptness of the topic(s), or the level and quality. Thus, if I had to wager, I'd bet that you'll be rejected again... not because you were rejected before, but because the factors in play that led to your prior rejections will most likely manifest themselves in the present case.

So, really, you should get more-specific advice from an advisor or mentor about appropriate venue(s) for your papers, as well as possibly critiques of the writing style.


What is the best way to retain learned materials

This is problematic for students who aspire for higher learning because much of the material or understanding is accumulative.

Actually, that's precisely why it's not problematic.  If you had to memorize random trivia, it would become more and more difficult as you had to remember more unrelated things, but academic studies work in the opposite way.  Because it's accumulative, you are constantly practicing and applying what you learned before, which helps you solidify your understanding.  Furthermore, the more you learn, the more connections you can see, and these relationships help you organize and retain knowledge.  Of course you'll still forget some details, but you'll forget less than you expect and recover it more easily.

My impression is that severe forgetfulness in students typically occurs when they are studying ideas in isolation and setting them aside as soon as the class is over.  Instead, it's important to play with ideas constantly.  How are they related to your past studies?  To other interests of yours?  Can you think of further applications or connections?  This can help bridge the gaps between how you learned these ideas.  This sort of exploration is almost essential if you want to do research, and it's a useful study technique in any case.


Should I ask my research advisor for extra hourly work as a gap-year research assistant (not a student)?

There's nothing wrong with asking.  However, I suspect it's unlikely you'll get it.  Such work is often restricted to enrolled students only.


Can I put a preprint of a paper on arXiv without informing my co-authors?

First, no you should not upload the paper when not all co-authors agreed (and also not submit it to a journal).

On how to deal with the situation: If I understood correctly, there are four authors, one is your supervisor, one is you and there are two more. I think the way to go is, to get the other two authors involved in the process. For example, if you think that you supervisor has irrelevant requests for you, forward the requests to the full group of authors (including your supervisor) and ask about opinions on that matter. Be polite, focus on facts. Do not give the impression that you want to overrule your supervisor, but that you want all authors to be involved in the process. I should add that this approach may not work well with every supervisor, but I can't tell or guess what will be the case in your situation.


How much does it hurt one's application to try the GRE again?

The first score will very likely not matter if you do better the second time.  Most programs look only at the best score a student has on their record.  Officially, that's what my program does.  Unofficially, if you had a really low score the first time you too the exam, it would raise a red flag, and we might go looking for some other reason not to admit you.  However, an 82 percentile on the first try, if you take the test again and do better, is not going alarm anyone.


Counting the the number of publications citing all of a given set of publications

You could probably use Europe PMC API for that. It would be limited to biomedical publications though. Using this module you should be able to construct your query and find intersection programmatically. Alternatively you can combine the queries on the website using Boolean logic, e.g. here is a search for a paper citing three particular publications.

Disclaimer: I work for Europe PMC


How to cite a book when both the first and the latest editions' years matter?

What you are asking is somewhere between an annotated bibliography and a normal reference list. I'm not aware of a formal way to do this.

However, this is the APA way to cite a republished book:

  Doe, J. (2002). On the Fooing of Bars (6th ed.). Washington, DC: Baz Publishers. (Original work published 1982)

For your purpose, to indicate not the orignal edition but the first edition in which a certain proof appears, I suggest to adapt it this way:

  Doe, J. (2002). On the Fooing of Bars (6th ed.). Washington, DC: Baz Publishers.
   (The proof first appeared in the 2nd edition, 1982)

In both cases, the in-text reference would be:

  (Doe, 1982/2002)


Can I still publish my thesis elsewhere if I publish it "closed access" with ProQuest?

Here's ProQuest's author rights agreement for the "closed access" option (linked to from here). As you can see, they only ask for non-exclusive publication rights. So yes, using this option would leave you free to disseminate your thesis through other avenues. In my opinion, if you can host your thesis in some kind of stable repository (e.g. one provided by your university library) for free, there's no real reason to pay ProQuest for open access publication. Of course, if you want to, or can get someone else to cover the fee, there's no harm in redundancy. However, as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem to appreciably affect discoverability through search engines.


Should I bring materials for teaching demonstration?

How can you demonstrate your teaching without your teaching materials? I believe that you should for the duration of the teaching demonstration treat the search committee as if they are students. I doubt this would be condescending to the committee because they asked you to teach to them rather than actual students.

Off course the committee will not actually do the assignment but it will give them a chance to see what you do as a teacher as well as the quality of your materials. It also allows them to see the interaction between the materials and your teaching.

If you are really nervous, just ask them before the demo if they actually want the materials. If they say no you wasted a few bucks on photocopies. If they say yes you were ready and thoroughly prepared.


Are there usually consequences for attempted duplicate publication?

Good question. First of all, as far as I know, there is no penal system in academic publishing. Reputation is everything. (BTW Many of us have made big or small mistakes when we were young and ignorant, learned our lesson, everyone moved on.) Of course, a journal could always shun authors "indefinitely", if they attempt to violate codes of conduct. There is not much more a single publisher can do. In cases like yours, the responsibility falls back entirely on the academic community - whose members are also editors and referees like you - and the control power of one's reputation within it.

In your particular case, as you said, the editor presumably consulted with the editor-in-chief, which shows it is not a trivial problem to handle, and they decided to proceed as they did. If the journal had rules in place, such as that they would have to refuse future submissions from the same authors, they would inform the authors, but that's obviously not the case.

You did not specify if those authors are known in your field or obscure. If the editor knows the author personally (which I doubt in your case), the dynamics is different.


Should I provide references to a function which is used as part of a programming language?

In this case I would opt to cite the paper in which Canny edge detection was introduced. Citing OpenCV as a whole is more appropriate than referring to a specific function, e.g. "we obtained our results using OpenCV [Bradski00]". Since you use OpenCV, you should also cite the related paper.

I would only refer to a specific function in a software package if it does not implement a known algorithm and therefore requires special attention.


Ontario College Advanced Diploma (OCAD) what is equivalent in US?

First, it is important to recognize that there is often no such thing as "equivalent" between different nations.  That said, this sounds like it might be considered as somewhere between an Associates Degree and a Bachelor's Degree in the US system.

My recommendation is that you should expect people in the US to not know what the degree is, and to include a sentence or two in your CV / resume that explains its nature and what it means about your education.


Teaching mathematics at the college level,

It is my understanding that secondary mathematics certification and community college teaching are "disjoint sets," such that having the certification is neither required nor directly helpful to teach at a community college.  I am confident that having such a certification will not disadvantage you in any way, but that's probably not what you're asking.  If you mean "Can I teach a college level math course at a community college with a secondary mathematics certification instead of [something else]?" then the answer is: maybe not, but if you are interested you should probably ask.

I have only indirect knowledge of the community college teaching community, and my understanding is that the parameters of the job vary heavily by region and institution.  For instance, in some parts of the country most community college faculty have terminal degrees (generally a PhD), whereas in others this is rare.  The requirements to teach one course may well be different from those of full-time faculty.  I would expect that having a master's degree in a related field would be sufficient for you to teach college-level math courses at many community colleges.  If you only have a bachelor's degree, then that might not be enough...or then again it might.

At my large state research university (UGA), we often find ourselves wanting to run a few more sections of precalculus and calculus and having to hire temporary (or "adjunct") faculty very close to the last minute.  It is my understanding that the necessity of covering classes can result in a flexibility in terms of hiring.  So I think that there is a good shot that someone who looks competent to teach course X will eventually get to teach course X at some community college if they are sufficiently persistent.


Is it normal for a graduate student's fate to depend on the success of a breakthrough idea?

Might not be the best response but here I go:

Sometimes, it's better to think of a PhD as a process, rather than as a product. A graduate student's success is never solely dependent on a breakthrough, noble peace-winning result. Rather, it is dependent on a multitude of factors.

Will you lose your PhD should this result not work out? The short answer: Probably not.

Will this impact your 'status' at the university? I don't know, I don't think having 'status' is a good thing personally, as I think it creates disjuncture and limits our ability to produce good research when we get so tied up in politics (but I digress).

The PhD is not going to be your best work should you continue with Academia. Having a masterpiece, or breakthrough result will of course, heightened your prospects (should you be credited appropriately) but this is rare and not expected. The PhD is about fine-tuning your critical thinking and research skills, and prepares you for that road to noble peace winning, but it is not expected that you are producing amazing research at this level. If you do, it's a welcomed bonus. Many academics that I meet look to their PhDs 5-10-20 years down the road and laugh about them.

To help you not feel so stressed, my advice to you is:

1. Don't measure your self-worth on the success or fail rate of this project

2. Consider your PhD a process and not a product, and remind yourself that the PhD may be your best work (TO DATE) but will not be your best work in 5-10-20 years down the road.

3. Try to avoid viewing your PhD as something that has to be perfect, amazing and groundbreaking. This isn't to say that your research wouldn't relevant, interesting or groundbreaking in its own right. It just means that it might not be something that extends our knowledge to the point of receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. That also doesn't mean you won't get there either, you've got plenty of time :)

4. Stay informed about politics regarding status if this is going to impact your employability at your university or other potentials, but try to remain an observer as opposed to some who partakes. Doing so will keep you grounded but aware.


Pros and cons on commenting on public review papers

I would try to answer this from the standpoint of a cost-benefit analysis.

A private conversation with the author will benefit you in that you now know the answer, and can harm you in that if your question is completely boneheaded the author will think you're an idiot.

A public conversation has the added benefit that you and other people both benefit. This is somewhat of a questionable added benefit, as oftentimes the question being asked isn't relevant to most people, but still, added discourse is often a good thing. Public discussion also has the added cost that more people can see your boneheadedness. While typically this wouldn't be a problem, as most people wouldn't ever encounter the discussion, anything on the internet can go viral, even if only within a smaller community (such as your research field). Personally, that cost strongly outweights the potential benefit. I would definitely stick with personal correspondence.


When should I appropriately use adjectives and adverbs?

This advice, taken literally, is absurd. Adjectives and adverbs are perfectly reasonable parts of speech, and there is no inherent reason to avoid them. If you pick up any piece of academic writing, it should be clear that nearly every sentence includes them, and could not reasonably be expressed without them.

I count four in your question itself: "academic", "another", "specific", "proper". I can't imagine how you would express your question without any.

It is generally good advice in academic writing to write concisely and avoid unnecessary words. And it is a little easier to add unnecessary adjectives and adverbs to a sentence than some other parts of speech, so they may deserve some extra scrutiny. But avoiding them altogether? Nonsense.


The school's guidance on SOP doesn't match to what I know about it. What should I do?

I assume this is for a PhD or research-oriented Master's program.  Almost certainly the admissions committee will care about your past research.  Here are some possible reasons why they don't explicitly mention it in their description of the SOP:

They don't assume that you've already done research.
Someone wrote it without much thought or experience.
Presumably any past research would play a role in your desire for a further degree, so it is implicitly covered.
They were just expecting this information as part of your research statement.

Also, regarding your comment "This contradicts to what I know on SOP": different departments (and different committee members on the same committee) look for different things, so this place may not look at community service at all.  Answers on this site are not infallible universal laws.


Can I add my middle initial to my author name in preceding articles?

In the modern day of vastly intelligent computer software and important internet presence, it is highly unlikely that a missing middle initial will be the cause of "nonrecognition" of your name. As Stephan wrote, a bigger problem is name confusion; it is definitely a good idea for you to start including your middle initial(s) in future publications. I'll answer here focused more on how to make sure the names are "linked".

My Google Scholar profile, which is compiled entirely by a computer (my only contribution there was identification of duplicate entries and removing them), even picked up some of my undergraduate term-reports which I put on my website many years ago (and which are now no longer available). Of my published papers, I've listed at various times my name as

Willie Wong
W W Wong
Willie W Wong
Willie W-Y Wong

and I don't seem to have had much trouble*.

If you want better control over the articles associated to your name, you can always register for Web of Science researcher ID and/or an ORCID which are both designed to help alleviate the problem of name collision and name changes throughout the career of a research scientist.

For fields which encourages the use of arXiv, the author identifier also helps group all of your pre-prints, and allows you neat things like a Javascript widget for your own website showing your recent pre-prints.

For mathematics, the AMS maintains author profiles (they recently upgraded this!) to which you can also submit corrections to include omitted paper or to exclude misattributed papers by other authors. (The AMS author profiles are only accessible through a MathSciNet subscription.)

I am not that familiar with other fields, but you should look around to see if your scholarly society provides a similar service to help maintain a comprehensive publication record for authors.

*With Google, at least. Microsoft Academic Search has some trouble coming up with my complete list of publications.


How many manuscripts should I agree to handle as an associate editor?

I would start by asking the journal rep how many manuscripts (MS) other have agreed to, or what is typical. I would think that is what the journal reps would consider "normal". You probably have a sense of whether they need you for something very specific, in which case a lower number might be quite acceptable. Once you know what they tyically load on their editors, you should think hard about whether you find the workload acceptable. There is usually no guarantee that the workload is evenly distributed unless all editors are able to handle pretty much all submitted MS.

As editor you will likely need to at least browse the MS when you receive it, chase after persons willing to review, read the reviews and the MS carefully to provide feedback to the author, review the authors revisions, poissibly run the MS around again and then make a suggestion or decision on accept/reject. All this is within some time frame and chasing late reviews and authors who do not return revisions will take some time. I can also add that it will be the problematic papers that will take up most of your time, the good ones usually are not difficult to handle. You thus do not know how much time you will spend on any particular MS. A really good one could take half a day in total; a poor may take at least a day or more. So having slightly scared you with this, I will add that the work also has potentially tremendous rewards (reading brand new research and getting in contact with new persons).

So, in short, how many MS per month is really impossible to answer, it will strongly depend on how you feel about the work and how you think you can accommodate the workload in your own time. I will leave you with this slightly unsatisfactory answer, but urge you to try to get a sense of what the journal expects and what they consider normal. You could also ask to how much time they think the workload corresponds.


In which universities are permanent research positions common?

None that I know.

What differentiates a university from a research center is the presence of students. So teaching is part of working at a university. Moreover, universities are typically (to some extend) self-governed. The freedom we enjoy at a university can only exist if we are the ones that make the decisions. You cannot have one without the other. (That does not mean that there isn't any room for increasing the efficiency of that process, but that is another story.)

If you earn a Nobel prize or a Fields medal, you can probably negotiate something. Alternatively, it is sometimes possible to get a position with a "normal" amount of other duties and then apply for funding to get these duties reduced for a couple of years.


An academic who died over 50 years ago still has Google Scholar profile with verified email. How can this be?

Verified email just mean that the user has done the confirmation in his/her inbox. It means in that case that the person that created this profile has an email with the domain "@melipona.org".

Usually, people will do this verification with their institutional email, adding credence that this is the right person, but technically, anyone within an institution can do it for anyone else inside that particular institution.


Is it disrespectful to write very similar emails to multiple people?

It is not disrespectuful per se to send bulk e-mails. Academics get them all the time: conference announcements, field-specific mailing lists, automated e-mails from submission systems. If it is appropriate for what you have to do, there's nothing wrong with it.

However, I consider disrespectful the way you want to use them. If you just want to know if something is already well-known in the field, start by contacting one researcher. Writing to 100 of them means unnecessarily wasting their time.

Also, it seems like you want to put the introduction of your paper in an e-mail. Don't do that. Keep it short. Your paper should already contain an introduction with motivation and previous research (to the best of your knowledge).

Similarly, for the same reason of not wasting people's time, you want to make sure that your paper is readable to people working in that research area. Make sure that you know the basics of the field and use accepted notation. If your paper looks like it's written by a crank, most recipients will file it directly into the recycle bin.