Resolving dependency on a senior colleague before deadline

Circumvent that person as a stop-gap. Specifically:

Fix a time shortly before the deadline when you are certain you'll be able to make the submission setting the information yourself.
Guesstimate to the best of your ability what the correct value for the licensing field should be - erring on the side of making data openly available (i.e. something like CC-BY-SA or public domain).
Regardless of how you communicate with the person who's supposed to take care of it - when the time comes, if s/he hasn't done it, you do it.

If that person gets upset after you've applied this stop-gap - you'll be able to argue that it was necessary so as not to miss the deadline, and that you're sorry but you had no choice. You can also say that if s/he believes somethinh else should have been put in, you both can always communicate the change to the organizers and say the original input was an error.

As for an effective way to "prod" this person, I can't suggest something particularly great without additional information, but:

You could talk to someone who's in close contact with him/her, and on speaking terms with you, and get them to try to apply their influence.
You could bring this up in a public forum where s/he is also participating, e.g. a group status meeting.
You could let him/her know about your stop gap in advance. That's a bit risky because they might object and you may end up having to directly disregard the objection.


Should I withdraw my paper because the editor is delaying the report?

The situation is sub-optimal, but not as bad as you seem to think. Remember that being an editor to a scientific journal, even one published by Elsevier, is often a volunteer job. Moreover, the editors have no control over how long the reviewers take to review your article. (which reminds me...) So what they gave you was only a guess. If the guess was wrong, then that happens. What seems to worry you the most was the status of your paper. I would not worry about that. Sometimes editors use these function to track submission and sometimes they don't. If they do, then the status is probably fairly accurate, if they don't then it means nothing.

My suggestion is to think about publishing your article until you submit the article. After that you just forget about it (don't look at the journal website, don't think about it), because there is nothing you can do. Instead, focus on writing the next article. Only when you get your rejection letter, you start thinking about it again, and improve the paper and submit it to the next journal.


Finding a research group where I can work remotely?

It is actually of mutual interest, but really hard to find an opportunity. Although, you are offering your time for free, group leaders are reluctant to take this risk to leave their research somewhere that they do not have direct (everyday) control. Note that you should work on a research project currently funded at that research group. In other words, the group leader should complete that project in the corresponding timeframe. Thus, too conservative to put the project completion at risk in favor of having a researcher free of charge.

Sorry for this negative answer, but IMO (maybe others have better approaches), the only possibility is to directly contacting some research groups and negotiating about this possibility. Remember that the judgement will be merely based on your experience and potentials. Once again, IMO, the only chance is if the group leader can find your profession useful for a part of the project, which is not critically sensitive.

Conclusion: there is no system for this, you need to convince the group leader personally.

Note: Another solution can be finding an independent researcher like yourself for starting a personally funded research project, but I think this is not what you are looking for.


Withdrawing from present studies in order to be allowed to apply for another one? Asking for clarification of a clause in my admission letter

"I confirm that I am not bound to enrolment at another education institution that would require a release."

To me the phrases here "bound to enrollment" and "require a release" seem important; the first phrase suggests some sort of contract, the second suggests that you require permission from those who have you bound to leave this contract. Joining these phrases with "that" suggests that both situations must be true: contract that requires permission from someone else for you to withdraw from it.
My non-lawyer reading is that if, like most educational programs, you can simply choose to leave at the end of a semester without particular penalty, then you are not bound to enrollment and do not require a release. You might be bound if you have an agreement to do some work for funding, and especially if you have tuition remission that becomes void if you leave in the middle of a semester.
However, since the potential fallout from violating this policy could include losing your offer, I think it's worth verifying that you are in the clear. Assuming you can leave your program in Canada at any time, I would still confirm with the program in Australia that your current attendance is not an issue. It shouldn't be too much of a surprise to them because I'm sure you explained your situation in your application. Explain to them any terms of your current enrollment, and your plans for how and when you will leave the current program, and any restrictions or lack of restrictions on doing so.
You also definitely do not want to lie or mislead on any visa application. My understanding that doing so can permanently (or at least for many years) disqualify you for a visa, even if you did not intend to mislead.
You could also have a lawyer interpret the phrasing and give you legal advice, but you can't get personal legal advice from Stack Exchange.


What can I do if my supervisor does not publish my research results?

This seems like a strange situation, since it is very counterproductive for both you and your supervisor. If this is indeed common in your group, I am sure several ideas have been scooped by the time they finally get submitted. Unfortunately, I really don't have any decent idea why your supervisor would act this way.

The most important thing to do is to talk to your supervisor and don't let him/her dismiss the issue. This may seem like an aggressive approach, but you can disguise it as a learning experience, e.g. "Please tell me what is wrong with the current manuscript because I believe it is ready for submission, oh wise one". Whatever you do, remain polite.

A few approaches you can try (all of which are reasonable, so don't be shy):

Send reminders and send them often. Ask what you can do to improve the manuscript. If your supervisor has no further suggestions to change the manuscript, ask where you can submit it to directly. Don't wait for him/her to wake up. This approach may lead to your supervisor turning it into a ping-pong match, asking you to make trivial but time-consuming extensions again and again. In this case, confront your supervisor and explain your perspective.
If you can find an appropriate call for papers, ask permission to send the manuscript there. Calls typically have deadlines and are not necessarily a downgrade in terms of venue quality. This includes conferences and journal special issues. Having a hard deadline might help.


What action is appropriate when co-authors admit that the first author committed plagiarism?

Retract the article.

That's what editors of reputable journals do when an author spontaneously asks for it for reasons of plagiarism.

What other options were you considering? Adding a note saying "The authors admitted to have plagiarized large portions of this article but since our system did not detect it, we publish it anyway."?

It's the duty of the editorial board to execute the retraction, possibly with the support of the publisher. But surely your journal has a standard procedure to handle retraction...

It certainly would help to notify PubMed that will publish the retraction notice in lieu of the article. I suspect this is part of the information that your journal is providing to PubMed by default...


Do I need to contact the author before using data available in supplementary material or open data linked to article?

The future of scholarly research will be based on open data to ensure accountability, transparency and independent replication (e.g. Warren et al, New Engl J Med 2016). Thus, we need to be ready for similar scenarios.

  Do I just need to cite the data source in my manuscript or will I also
  need to contact the authors to let them know I am using their data or
  to ask for permission?

Unless there is an explicit policy you need to follow (quite uncommon indeed), you just need to provide the precise citation to what you accessed. However, contacting the authors could be a smart choice: they could provide you additional data or collaborate with you more actively.


Contacted the head of a group I want to join, but she didn't reply. What to do now?

6 days is not a lot of time to wait. After 2-3 weeks I would send a short followup.

In general, long emails are bad. The advice I try to follow is keep them 3-4 sentences if I don't know the person and they aren't expecting an email from me. Give them the opportunity to either ask for more details or to setup a call.


Yes, the situation is weird. Yes, it could cause you problems with your paper and also with the other paper. But it is pretty hard to say how it would play out as it depends on who sees the paper (editors, reviewers, ...) and the minute-by-minute timing of things.

But the problem goes deeper than that. Two nearly identical papers out of the same lab at the same time is what is weird here. It should not have happened. There is some mis-communication within the lab that should be fixed. I can't say whether it is a general problem or not, but that should be investigated.

My suggestion isn't very satisfying, however. If you want to maximize your future collaborative opportunities beyond your degree then a way should be found so that this doesn't become a zero-sum game.

One way to do that is to put a hold on publication of both papers and a short period of discussion about going forward. One possibility is to merge the papers (along with the authorship). If your field isn't overly anal about who is "first" author then it should be easy to work out authorship.

I know of one case in CS, and know both parties, where two students at different universities did essentially the same work at the same time and submitted their theses simultaneously, both for graduation and for publication. It was really good work that answered a fundamentally important outstanding question. However, the graduation of both students was held up for a year while people at both universities investigated the situation. It was determined that the work was truly independent and so both graduated and have gone on to great careers. I think that both theses were published though they overlapped considerably. But the determination was not only that the work was independent, but that it was not the case that either should have known about the work of the other. That is to say, it was neither malfeasance nor negligence that caused the issue. But still, it took a year.


What is your university's policy on course reductions for service on dissertation committees?

In mathematics in Minnesota, the advisor gets a half-course reduction, and committee members no reduction.

Thus, some years ago, when I taught a crypto class and a coding class that were popular with some engineering dept grad students, and I found myself being asked to be on about 250 Master's and PhD committees within a few years, it was a task that was not literally directly compensated-for, despite consuming significant time. But I figured it was part of my service duty. I allocated an hour or two prior to the actual presentation to review the document, and the presentation itself would take an hour or two.

(My chief benefit was amusement with some of my "colleagues" who apparently thought I was grossly exaggerating, since "obviously no one would agree to being on so many committees"...)


Are the contents of discussion between a University and a student private or public?

You're not obligated to tell them. Whether you tell them or not would be unlikely to have an impact on your future either.

They're probably not going to track you down and find you, and would mostly use the information to improve recruitment in the future.

Imagine if you told them you chose University X instead because you had family there and it was easier to secure housing. That's a sound reason, and unlikely to cause any sort of mark in the off chance they were tracking you.

I would try to avoid saying anything bad about the school, though.


Is it ethical to extract my contributions from a multidisciplinary collaboration ( & exclude my co-authors work )?)

Usually large collaborations have some ground rules for who can publish on what with who as the authors.  Make sure that you're not bound by those rules first.

Second, think whether you have anything to gain.  Is this second paper going to really further your career if it damages your reputation among this group?  What if none of these people or their postdocs and grad students ever want to Co-PI with you again?  If you're asking whether your behavior is OK then you must have some feeling that it is not.

The only reasonable thing to do is to ask all the people involved.  It's not like you're risking them learning something about your project that you want to keep secret because you're already collaborating.  The standard thing is to contact them with your paper idea and ask whether they think they contributed substantially and want to be a co-author.


How does the salary system for faculty in Canadian universities work?

It's actually very straightforward: the salary they list is the salary you get. No 8- or 9-month shenanigans, just what they quote. You might get extra money for teaching (extra) courses, but you don't have to find a way to pay yourself over the summer (indeed, research grant money never goes into the PI's pocket).

Other Taxable Benefits means non-monetary benefits, which might include free or subsidized stuff like memberships (e.g., to a University fitness centre). Senior administrative types (also appointed as professors in some department or other) might get all kinds of non-monetary benefits like a place to live or the use of a car.


Communication difficulties with advisors - starting to impede work

I think the core issue you are describing is relevant for many PhD students. Your mental health may excabate the effects, but does not seem central to the situation to me.
A PhD is a journey through uncharted territory, and that can feel uncomfortable. So in particular for industrious students, there always is a temptation to to not go where the dragons are yet, but to prepare just a little bit better - maybe read another paper for the literature review, revise the project proposal again, those things. But even within a single field, it will almost always be impossible to read all potentially relevant literature. At some point, a PhD student just has to take the leap.
For me in math/TCS, its just my own time which is on the line when doing research. Sure, maybe if I had read another paper I'd have seen that the theorem is already known, or found an incredibly useful ingredient to make the proof easier - but the time I spent trying to proof it still isn't wasted, as I learn from how I tried it. I'll concede that if you are eg doing experiments with animals or expensive chemicals, you do need to prepare well - but the point remains, at some point you need to do.
Polishing aside, you have 100 pages worth of research proposal + literature review. That is an enormous amount for what I am used to - 30 pages already seems pretty extensive to me. For a supervisor, getting a student to take this leap is something you can influence only in a limited way. So I can empathize with your supervisors frustration (although this doesnt excuse the mean remarks).
When it comes to the issue of preferring to have multiple active tasks, and to work on the best match to one's current mental state: I share that preference, and I think it is explainable very well without referring to any medical diagnosis. The moment to bring that up probably is once you have completed your designated task; and you should make clear that you understand that these tasks need to move you forward.


Can the word "subsubsection" be used in a thesis?

One very important point has yet to be touched on. Indeed, subsubsection is not a dictionary word -- and even if it were, it's awfully cumbersome. Saying "section 1.2.3" is neater and more informative, as it tells the reader exactly where to go.

The most important reason to use numbered references is if the order of your text changes. For example, if you move a particular subsection to another section or chapter, any references to it in the form of "the next subsection" will now be invalid. By using numbered references and attaching these to either the subsection header or a key sentence (as appropriate), the numbers will automatically update and your referencing will remain correct.

The above is applicable to references to anything.  It is very dangerous to write such things as "in the following...", "in the previous section we introduced...", etc. Such phrases do not refer to an exact place, and they can easily became invalid as you add, remove, or change parts of the text. Proof-reading will also be more difficult.


If someone conducts unethical research unbeknownst to anybody, but produces positive results, what would happen to the research once discovered?

Unfortunately, history has already forced this question upon us, and the answers are not entirely clear.  The Nazis inflicted widespread and breathtakingly horrifying human medical experiments on their victims during the Holocaust. These yielded quite a bit of medical data, that some want to unearth and apply today.

This has ignited quite a bit of debate on the ethics of using this most obviously and supremely unethical research.  The science may be dubious as well, given the circumstances under which it was performed.  An excellent discussion of the dilemma may be found in the article "The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments" by Baruch Cohen.  In essence, Cohen argues that in certain extreme cases it may be possible to use the data, but only when accompanied by strong condemnation of the methods and only when it concerns information that is both otherwise impossible to obtain and of life-saving importance.

Nazi medicine is an extreme case, but unfortunately by no means isolated, and the judgement of history and science on these studies contains less uniform condemnation than we might like.  The modern consensus, however, seems to be that except in very unusual circumstances, unethical studies should not be rewarded in any way by recognition.


How do I ask a professor to recommend me to another professor to hire me as a teaching assistant?

Before asking for the letter of recommendation, you should ask your new department how TA positions are handled in your new program: you'll want to know

does Prof. Y even need TA's—not all courses get TA's assigned;
who is responsible for deciding who will TA which course;
when the decisions will be made.

If you find that Prof. Y needs a TA and that you'd be capable of doing the assignment, then you can approach Prof. X and ask if he'd be willing to recommend you to Prof. Y as a potential TA candidate.


How do I find research groups that do work in field X?

Well, I find reasonable numbers for research groups focusing on eyetracking by using Google and search operators. Of course, you should add some redundant similar terms (eye-movement, baby,...)

Notice, there are some patterns:

american universities nearly always have edu (actually it's even a domain) in their URL, german univ. uni. So using inurl:edu in google filters out a lot. Non-university institutes like german Max-Planck often have URL patterns too.
further add  -filetype:pdf -filetype:doc -filetype:ppt -filetype:ps to filter out more useless results
add 2010..2012 to be sure the site/group is still active and the topic on their agenda.
add research | forschung (latter being german translation, but afaik nowadays most natural sciences groups in Germany have a english (& german) page)

Some research branches also have a online directory, there exist also internet directories like dmoz (not sure if this stuff is up to date, probably some dead links):

http://www.eurosys.org/directory/

http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Biology/Neurobiology/Research_Groups_and_Centers/

http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/actions/colloq/groups.html

At least I can say that most research groups in Germany will have a english home page and short summary/research topics/open positions on it. So there should be no general problem to find them by some "serious" googling. But don't use too specific keywords, "eyetracking on infants", "dualistic view" is too special imho, use keywords being specific rather to the topic than the exact methodology. They are probably mainly interested in how the visual recognition system adapts and learns over time, this is the bigger thematic picture. You attract master and phd students not by naming a special experimental method, so you will not find these type of keywords often on a group page, where they often try to put in a minimum of time.


How useful are professional society memberships?

In addition to the individual benefits they offer (subscriptions, electronic journal access, discounts, the possibility of distinguished or honorary grades of membership, etc.), professional organizations also contribute to the research community more broadly:

They organize conferences, publish journals, and support other activities, for example in employment, education, outreach, and public awareness.  The academic community would be very different without these services, many of which need financial support.
They represent their field to the outside world, such as government funding agencies, and make the case for its importance.
They intervene in crises.  For example, when the University of Rochester abruptly decided to cancel its graduate program in mathematics in 1995, the American Mathematical Society helped coordinate a very effective response, which led to the program's reinstatement.
They monitor the health of the field and help members address any concerns (for example, by investigating ethical complaints).
They help shape how the field is viewed within academia, through publicity, prizes, leadership positions, invited lectures, etc.

Membership dues help pay for these activities, which are also more effective when the organization represents a large fraction of the field.

Nobody has an obligation to belong to any particular organization, but it's a simple and valuable way to support the field as a whole.  I'd recommend that every grad student join a couple of professional societies.


Switching field from optics to atomic physics?

The importance of a good understanding of optics cannot be understated in (experimental) atomic physics. I did my undergrad in condensed matter and had no difficulty getting a position in an AMO lab. What I would say is more important than direct experience with atoms is that you know your way around a lab, and I'd say your optics experience counts.


Is it reasonable to collaborate with a professor when you are employed by a different professor?

In contrast to F'x's opinion, I think collaboration with people outside your group is not just wise, but actually necessary, at least if you are working toward an academic career.  You must develop both a wide professional network and broad independent research experience.  As long as everything is out in the open, with everyone's knowledge and agreement, there is absolutely no ethical conflict.

This does not mean that you should shirk your paid job; any outside projects must be on your own time and must not interfere with your official duties.  Similarly, you can't use your supervisor's resources without their explicit advance permission.  And your supervisor may be happier if there's some chance of involving them in your outside projects.  But ultimately, how you use your own time is your own business.  (Any supervisor who tells you otherwise, or insists that you don't have "your own time", is simply abusing you.  Run.)


What happens to a professor if too many students drops out of his or her class?

All aspects of university teaching vary so widely across the academic world that it seems impossible to predict how a particular department will respond to a particular teaching issue without much more identifying information.  In this case even the country was not specified.  Usually I can get a pretty good sense of "inside the US" versus "outside the US" but this time I am not even sure of that.

I will speak from my own experience: namely at research universities in the US.  At such a university, being an assistant professor -- which means tenure track faculty unless otherwise qualified, so I will assume this here -- is a long-term proposition.  Although the contract is technically year-to-year, in all of my experience tenure-track faculty members who are not grossly, egregiously misperforming their duties are all but guaranteed to be retained through to the next review period.  Reviews take place roughly every 2-3 years; most commonly there is one such review before the candidate goes up for tenure.

Because of the above, it is very unlikely that any one teaching experience is going to be the cause for drastic action taken against the faculty member.  For that to occur, the "teaching mistake" would have to be something like deciding not to show up for class for the last month.  Moreover, most assistant professors have a lot to learn about university teaching: even if they have teaching experiences under their belt elsewhere, these will in some ways prepare them for teaching at their present university and in some ways lead them into locally ineffective practices.  In my field (mathematics), it is also pretty standard that most faculty members did their junior teaching at institutions with stronger undergraduate students than their tenure-track institution.  If the crowd is sympathetic, a poor teaching performance early on can actually work out quite well, because the faculty member will be able to show significant improvement in their teaching over the years they spend as an assistant professor: a trajectory which starts out a little shaky and corrects to average could be viewed as more encouraging by many than a flatly average trajectory.  (If the crowd is unsympathetic, you'll be nervous no matter what you do.)

All of this is assuming that the teaching performance in this one class was somewhat poor.  From your description it is reasonable, but not guaranteed, that the professor's performance will be viewed in that way.  The number of students who drop a class varies considerably from year to year -- for me, even teaching the same freshman calculus class at the same institution in different semesters I have had more than 30% attrition (which left me with very good evaluations from the remaining students, so there is something of a tradeoff here) and also less than 10% attrition.  However if one instructor's pass rate is half or less than another's, then that will probably be noticed.  The reaction may not be a punitive one, but the department may work to push this faculty member back to the mean.  (I don't even necessarily agree that this will make the faculty member less likely to teach the same course again.  That really depends on a lot of factors.)

Finally, one small point: you claim that the professor was very successful in teaching lower level courses, is teaching an upper level course for the first time, and has an overly "minimalistic" teaching style, not providing enough help and context to her students while demanding (you say) too much from them. That seems slightly odd to me: in my experience, it would be virtually impossible to be very successful teaching a lower level math class with the style described in the previous sentence.  Maybe the professor thought she had to encourage the more advanced students to be more independent and overcompensated in that direction...but in my experience, that's relatively unlikely.  So I have a little trouble picturing the situation.  Oh, well.


What is the proper way to ask for an unpublished paper?

Just ask politely, and with the expectation that you may be reasonably refused.

Researchers vary greatly in their relationship to unpublished manuscripts. The spectrum ranges broadly, from some who are very happy to share anything they consider "not embarrassing," to others are extremely protective. Then there are many who will be just plain unresponsive for any number of reasons.

I would thus suggest that in your email, you say something along the lines of the following:

Where you heard about the unpublished work, and why you think it will be useful to know specifically about this unpublished work and not other recently published material.
That you would be very grateful if they are willing to share, but understand that they may not wish do to so.
That you would also be happy to receive pointers to published work that can provide approximately the same benefits.

Importantly, remember that no researcher has a moral obligation to share work that is not ready for publication.  The scientific community generally holds that work should be shared in a timely fashion only once it is reasonably ready for publication.  You can argue about how to draw that line, but if a researcher really thinks their work isn't yet solid enough to disseminate or submit, then they're usually right.  In that case, you probably wouldn't really want to build off of it yet anyway, since it is likely to change in the near future.


How to structure the Introduction of my Master's thesis?

2W1H

The introduction needs to answer three questions. WHY, WHAT & HOW.

Declare why the problem needs solving, what the problem is and what a solution will look like, and how you have intended to go about the business of getting from the former to the latter. In addition to this, it can be relevant to quote specific earlier research that you will be building your thesis upon. Maybe a reaction path, a lemma, whatever depending on which field it of course is.


Letters of Recommendation when applying afresh to a new PhD program

(Again, for the U.S., especially in mathematics, my field...) Generally, the more recent the basis for letters, the better, by far. For that matter, having 2/3 of your letters be pre-graduate program might make admissions committees wonder what happened in your graduate work.

If you can get an absolutely stellar letter from undergrad, that might be helpful, but also really try to find two solid letters from your graduate program, attesting to your capacity for graduate work, rather than just saying you aced undergrad material.


Author attribution for books used in promotional video?

So I actually emailed my question to Michael Geist, who is a professor of law and happens to be one of the foremost experts in Canadian copyright... in the whole world. He was gracious enough to reply:

  "No.  That sounds de minimis to me and does not require permission or
  attribution."

So the answer is no, they don't need attribution.


Which scientific discipline studies topics?

Sociology could be one consideration. The word “topic” has the ability to shift, what could be considered a “theme” is dynamic, and evolves with societies definition of what it means. Philosophy could also be a major player because you’re concerned with the question of what it means to be a topic, and that sounds like the realm of philosophical thought. To me it sounds more like a question best suited for the social sciences as opposed to the hard sciences.


Typically at larger "more prestigious" institutions, Professors must have their PhD to teach. It has been my experience that some smaller institutions will allow MS holders to teach undergraduate students - but your mileage may vary.

As an example, a friend of mine has currently taken over a Computer Science department at a small institution and only has his Masters. While they would prefer a PhD holder, they can not find one to take the job.

So, technically, yes - it is possible. Although you may not find yourself at a top-level institution.


What are the benefits of a poster award?

In my field the thinking is

It draws attention to posters from conference participators.
It provides encouragements to individuals (students) to make an extra effort
It encourages discussion about "good poster design"

The selection criteria is always focusing on good communication of good science, never one or the other.  Since such awards are given only to students and there ids usually also a similar student presentation award both selected by a set of valued senior scientists, the award should be and is seen as a merit.


Is it necessary to write "United States of America" in bibliographies when describing the place of publication?

It's a good idea to take a step back here, and think about what the purpose of the bibliography is. Ultimately, it is supposed to allow a reader to unambiguously determine what publication is being cited, and further to help them get a copy of the publication.

In order to achieve this goal, I'd argue that specifying the location of a publisher is in most cases an anachronism. Given there is only a single 'Blackwell Companion to Phonology', which I can find in seconds with a web search, I don't really need to know that the publisher is located in New Jersey. We only still do it out of tradition. Incidentally, a far better way of unambiguously referencing a book is to state its ISBN.

However, bibliography styles may require that we include a location. In your case, you are unable to find a single 'correct' way of stating location for your bibliography style. So I would say, do whatever you want. Frankly, even if one of these is 'correct' under your bibliography style, I doubt anyone would notice, and if they did notice, I doubt that they would care. My personal preference would be towards brevity (e.g. Hoboken, NJ, USA).


How can I obfuscate my writing style when I review papers?

It's not worth it. Few waste time trying to unblind their reviewers to take retribution for bad reviews. It's just not worth it. The average journal submitter doesn't have enough power to do damage to a random reviewer.

If you need a strategy, trying passing your text through Google Translate to Spanish and back to English. It'll probably be garbage afterwards, but it'll definitely lose any idiomatic turns of phrase that might identify you.


Employer contributions deducted from quoted salary—is this normal?

To deduct employer contributions from the salary as well as employee contributions would be highly unusual, I believe. (If it were the norm, then there would be no need for a terminological distinction between employer and employee contributions.)

EDIT: Here is my guess about what happened (purely speculation).  Perhaps there are contributions that are classified as "employer contributions" for tax purposes, and the university requires these contributions to be made for postdocs as well as regular employees but only makes the contributions for regular employees, so for postdocs the money has to come out of a grant instead.  This situation has the potential to be confusing, so perhaps your advisor simply forgot about this until you reminded him, at which point he realized that he made a mistake.

In any case, the question you asked him in your e-mail was completely reasonable.


Is it worth it to master LaTeX or MS Word?

This depends entirely on the journal policy, which in turn tends to depend strongly on field.  For example:

In computer science and electrical engineering, many ACM and IEEE journals expect papers to be turned in using a format that is very close to publication and then re-format little if at all.  For these journals, good mastery of LaTeX is a must.
Many biology journals, by contrast, will refuse to take nicely formatted submissions and require text to be submitted separately from figures.  For these journals, you mostly just need to know how to use your citation manager.

Beyond looking at individual journals, I would say that a good rule of thumb is to consider how many equations you are likely to publish.  The more mathematical your work, the more likely that your publication venue is to have embraced LaTeX and the more benefit expertise with it is likely to be to you.


What can I do if the reviewers' comments on my manuscript are not correct?

Whether they are right or wrong, the editors are in control of what they will publish and you don't have any control over that. You aren't likely to be successful with an argument with them.

You have two options, at least. One is to change the paper so that they are satisfied with it. The other is to try to publish elsewhere.

However, I will guess that the comments of reviewers aren't as invalid as you think they are. Even if you decide to publish elsewhere, you should go carefully through your paper with the views of the reviewers in mind and see what you can do to make it better.

No one is required to take all of the advice of reviewers, but generally, they are expert in the field and so have valuable things to say. You don't need to respond to every advice, but you should, at least, consider every advice.

Among other things, I wonder why they suggest a co-author. Is there something in the paper that suggests that it would be appropriate, or are you in a field in which sole authorship (especially by students) is rare?

And don't take the comments personally. They aren't criticizing you when they have doubts about the paper. They are focused only on the work itself.


How to structure of a Ph.D. sandwich thesis?

This is the structure that worked for me and number of my friends throughout western European universities:

Title: A title that reflects your contributions/publications.

Table of contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABBREVIATIONS

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Note on Introduction: Most important of all is to highlight what you want to answer in your research. Also the problem/motivation should be discussed here.

Paper1 ... PaperN

Note On Paper-Based Chapters: The order of them are very important. Order them based on the content not the year of the publication.

Evaluation: In this chapter put both the discussion and results. Try to figure out the benefits and shortcomings of your research.

CONCLUSIONS and Future Work: conclude based on your contribution and highlight the future work.

REFERENCES

Note: Not so many students take time on organizing their references' style. Most of them just copy/paste the Bibtex code and don't look if all their references obey the same style rules.

ANNEXES


Presenting a paper at a conference: Should I use the same figures as in the paper for the presentation

Prepare your figures for optimal use of the medium at hand.

The main goal for your presentation will be to present the content and impact of your research and to advertise your paper to the audience. In my experience, the format of a journal paper figure is usually not the best to convey the most information in a slide presentation, and you also seem to be aware of this.

Since you want to make the presentation as convincing as possible, I would suggest to prepare any figure for the best possible appearance in the presentation, just as you had prepared the original figures for their best possible appearance in a paper. If a paper figure would waste beamer screen space, rescale it for the presentation. If color would help explaning the figure but the journal only has grayscale, add color for the presentation. And so on..

You want to win readers for your paper, and I am sure that most of them will recognize the figures and their meaning later when reading the paper. Those modifications may change the style or layout of the figure, but even then, the content of the figure (e.g. the general appearance or tendency of a graph or diagram) will not change drastically. What will change is how interesting the figure appears to the audience, and you want to benefit from that.


What is the appropriate length and specificity for a teaching statement?

My answer comes from Mathematics, but probably it's quite similar.

1) 1-2 pages is pretty typical.

2) My general advice is to include details and concrete examples where possible (though course numbers are not necessary).  One problem with just being general is such statements feel very generic, and lack any real content in the sense that they don't distinguish you, in the same way many political speeches turn out.


The biggest problem with such repositories is that someone has to maintain them. All the small funding agencies/foundations are usually obscure and will be hard to find on such a webpage.

Anyways, are you familiar with Research Professional? I use it from time to time, set up alerts for funding possibilities in my fields, so I get mails when someone new comes up. Might be worth a try...


How important are teaching portfolios in obtaining an academic position?

This may be useful for someone considering a career at a teaching-first school, but I've never seen such portfolios asked for or even considered at research universities in the US and the larger European countries.


Where can I publish summaries of my research?

Some quick ideas:

If you want to publish just short papers on single findings, there is a new journal called Matters which does just that. You will get a DOI. https://www.sciencematters.io/ Check the scope though, it may not be suitable for your discipline.

If you want to summarise your already published papers in order to reach a broader audience, something like Kudos could help. You won't get a DOI for these summaries, but will get metrics in a dashboard when you sign up and start writing summaries.

Finally, you could start blogging! It's a great way to document the research process. You can sign up for your own blog using WordPress or similar. You might have seen this Vox article recently on the researcher live-blogging her progress: http://www.vox.com/2016/3/3/11148452/science-blog
If you don't want to start your own blog, look for collective blogging platforms like Medium, or something specific to your discipline and start writing. The good thing about blogging is that the informality allows you to write a lot quicker. Promote your posts on social media to attract an audience.


List invited, co-authored conference presentation on CV as student

If you are listed as a co-author, I'd say yes, include it. You could list it in a separate section of your cv below other, more personal work. If you are asked about it, you can describe it as you do here. This is even better if the reason for the invitation was the work itself and not only the stature of the professor.

But it would also be good to get advice from your professor on this.


How to prepare effectively for teaching a graduate course?

I assume that you have something like a syllabus for the course, listing the topics that the students are expected to master. If you don't have even that then you need to obtain one, either from some prof who taught the course in the past, or by developing one yourself, perhaps by using a similar course syllabus as a guide. It needn't be terribly detailed at this stage, but needs a list of topics to be mastered. Secondary topics can be omitted, but noted.

The next thing to focus on in the development of any course is what will be the student learning activities throughout the course. This is actually the most important thing. Choose projects, exercises, exams, or whatever, that will guarantee mastery of the key topics if done well. Lay the timeline of the course by laying out the sequence and duration of each of these activities. Make these things activities not just readings.

With that done you can start to think about what you need to do to make it possible for the students to succeed in their activities. This might be lecture or it might be classroom activities (labs), etc. As you do this you can fill in secondary topics, realizing that you may have to forgo some of them if the students need more on the main ideas, but you will at least have some extra material to insert as needed, depending on how the course progresses.

Find a way to get some anonymous feedback from your students along the way. One easy way is to invite students to submit (anonymous) questions and comments to you on index cards at the beginning or end of each face to face session. These questions should help you determine if the pace you have set for the course is right or not. Be prepared to make adjustments based on what they write. Find a way for the questions to get answered, perhaps in class, and perhaps in some electronic medium, even a mailing list.

Note that the teaching philosophy behind this answer is that it is much more important what the student does in a course than what the professor does. Likewise, the feedback from students is very useful to a new teacher.

Note that if the course is being taught for the first time, as happens in some fields, then some parts of this are more work than otherwise. Syllabus preparation will likely take longer. But in such situations, it is especially important to keep quite a lot of flexibility in the schedule and in the grading/marking scheme so that students wind up with a good experience: hard but not impossible.


How should I cite something that I saw in a famous internet forum (not Stack Exchange)?

In the strictest sense, a citation is exactly that: A citation, not an endorsement. As a consequence, I would find it unlikely that someone would consider your paper any less just because you cite something or someone.
But then you also always have the opportunity to qualify citations. For example, you can say something like the following, which is a pretty strong endorsement of the work you are citing:

In [13], Bayer and Schmidt have previously considered this exact problem and produced an excellent algorithm to solve it. That said, while we know from their work that the algorithm has optimal complexity on average, there are also known cases where it runs for far longer than in the optimal case. This paper addresses this flaw.

Compare this with the following citation:

In preparing this work, we have spent a substantial amount of time on trying to find literature that considers the problem we address here. Very little can be found, with the possible exception of the blog post [42] that presents some ideas -- but few details and no worked out solutions -- of what we do here.

Such a statement makes it clear that you think it is related, but it's not an endorsement because you also make clear that whatever is presented there is not a full solution of the problem. This seems unobjectionable to me: Nobody can be mad at you for citing prior work this way, as you make it clear that whoever goes to that blog post will not find prior art, just ideas.


Should I work an the advisor I "click with" or an advisor at a higher-ranked institution?

There is no definitive answer.

  I'm probably just looking to see what would you do if this were your situation.

My own personal experience (coming from the other side of the question): I recently accepted a tenure track position at a university. I'm very happy with the position.

During my visa application process for the new position, the consulate gave me a letter that the university had sent them as proof of employment. The letter contained details of the hiring process. There I learned that they had offered the position to someone from Oxford before me; someone older with half the publications and one-sixth the citations I had. The letter stated that he was first choice because he had a strong research profile and he was coming from a reputable university. I was coming from a strong department in a "provincial university" in a small country. The other person turned down the position. I accepted.

I was a bit stung by the letter because I read it as an implicit rejection of my background (over which I had little control).

Someone also told me later that in the board meetings, during the hiring process, there was a professor who raised concerns about where I was coming from ... a "provincial university". Apparently the more bureaucratic members of the board were my most fervent supporters: I had a lot of highly-cited publications, I was sure to bring a lot more, who cares where I came from? I wasn't told the full details, but I inferred that some of the more senior professors seemed to be more attracted to the Oxford thing than raw research metrics.

(Of course the hiring process was much more complicated than that; but this was the gist of the letter and the bits and pieces I heard afterwards.)

I'm not sure if that anecdote is useful to you but again there is no universal answer. It depends entirely on your situation.

I would say that yes, in many situations, the university you do your PostDoc in makes a difference for your future career. I don't know the US system well, but I guess it would be even stronger the case there.

But you and your personal publication record are far more important.

My general advise would simply be to pick the university where you feel you would be most productive (in a "healthy" way).


Is it normal as a researcher publishing a new theory or model to keep having uncertainties and self doubt?

This means that you are proud about your work, and know that it is really a breakthrough.

I too had these uncertainties when I was publishing a new model. This was the first time I felt that way even though this was my fifth paper. What I realised is that the previous work I published was not revolutionary in a way that would attract negative discussions and critics. I was simply confirming the theories of others. These were "safe" publications, the kind that would easily be accepted and cited, and could not affect my career. I believe science was build by "bold" contributions, and that the "safe" ones will eventually be forgotten.

Any theory will be broken, sooner or later. Do not worry about that. Insist on logic and rigour when writing your manuscript.


Unhappy with my PhD program in my home country, thinking about applying to another university in UK

It happens that people change their PhD programs (I know a few.)

Basically what you lose is:

Time (usually you need to start from the scratch),
Relationship with advisor (the latter is not always the case).

If, for any reason, the first year was bad, it is rather unlikely that the next ones will be better (I have never met anyone who is enjoying PhD more and more with each year...). Moreover, if you don't like it, maybe your advisor does not like it either and eventually you won't be able to finish at all.

But beware - "grass is greener...". You can experience the same problems in other places. So here are the most important things:

What is not working?
Do you have any reasonable argument that in the target place such thing is better?

(Anyway - if you are very unhappy after one year (of 3-5 more years to come), then just change it to another PhD or to something different (don't disregard other careers). It's better to end up with "wasted" years or a "suboptimal" career than hanging on a tree.)

HOW to do that is a different question (or questions - because it involves both application to a new program and quitting your current one). See e.g.:

current PhD applicant applying to another university
Apply to PhD after expulsion from another
Switching from one area of graduate study to another?


Unable to grade student assignment in blackboard

I believe the "Grade Center Assignments" page is only for assignments that students will submit through Blackboard.  For other graded items, go to "Full Grade Center" and click "Create Column".  You can then make a column into which you can type arbitrary grades.


Recommendation Letter: the final position of a student in the class

The student was "tied for third" place out of 25. That would be the common way to express it in the US (and in most sports). The same would be true if everyone else in the class (but the two top) had 96 also.


How do universities verify your native language?

Actually, there are no universal requirements for waiving testing. For instance, at MIT, you establish eligibility for a language waiver by attending primary and secondary schools that have English as the language of instruction or by attending an American university for your undergraduate education. At Yale, you must have attended an English-language university for at least three years to establish eligibility. Ohio State only grants exemptions for students graduating from universities in Australia, Belize, the British Caribbean and British West Indies, Canada (except Québec), England, Guyana, Ireland, Liberia, New Zealand, Scotland, the United States and Wales.

So this unfortunately becomes an example of "every school is different, and you need to check the rules for each school."


How to deal with an unreasonable reviewer asking to cite irrelevant articles?

From your answer, we can guess that you received a "major revision" decision. In that situation, your job is to modified your manuscript according to the reviewers' comments, not to try to find out who are the reviewers. Taken out of context, the comments you mention do not seem arrogant. Those comments are usual demands from reviewer, but I can't judge, not knowing your work, if they are relevant.

In that context, you deal with those comments like with any other comments:

You accept and make the changes where appropriate.
If the comments are not applicable, you explain why to the editor and let him/her judge.


Is it possible to hire graduate students as freelancers?

While people are, perhaps rightly, poking at your estimate of how long this will take and your budget, yes, its entirely possible to hire graduate students as freelancers. I worked on several projects during my graduate career as a consultant or freelancer. Generally speaking, there aren't great university resources for it, though you might contact a professor who works in the area to see if he or she have any students who might be interested in a consulting gig.


How binding is a PhD application for theoretical vs. experimental physics?

I've heard that I should apply as if I'm pursuing an experimental physics track, though, because it's less competitive, and then transition towards a theory group once admitted. Is this sound advice?

Yes, it is, in general. A very high percentage of people applying to physics PhD programs say that they want to do theory, especially particle theory, but in reality only a very small percentage of grad students end up doing theory.

However, the number of people saying they want to do condensed matter theory is probably relatively small, so the usual advice may not apply to you if you're applying to schools that have a strong, established program in condensed matter theory.

  Still, I am wary about misrepresenting myself and also concerned about getting stuck in a path that I don't intend to be in.

Frankly, at this stage you simply have no experience on which to base any such expectations. That's why nobody really takes statements like this on grad school applications very seriously. That kind of statement is not binding in any way, and I doubt that anyone even remembers it once you start grad school. It may be relevant to your application mainly as an indication of whether you were serious enough about that school to find out what their research areas are. E.g., if you apply and say you want to do quantum gravity, but nobody at that school does quantum gravity, they'll probably circular-file your app.

What will typically happen to people who think they want to do theory is that they start their graduate coursework, and they find that there's stiff competition in courses such as field theory and general relativity. If you want to do a thesis in relativity, for example, you probably need to be the top student in the GR class. For condensed matter theory, the relevant course would probably be field theory, since a lot of the same methods are used.

I don't think it's exactly the same at all universities in the US, but at the grad school I went to, there was this initial sorting process based on performance in coursework, and after that students spent the summer as research assistants, which was a further vetting process.

There's just no way to predict the outcome of this process in advance. As an undergrad, you're comparing yourself to other undergrads at school A, while as a grad student, you're comparing yourself to other grad students at school B. Often it's the experience of moving from being a big fish in a small pond to being just one more fish. That's how it was for me, at least.


Meta-analysis using Google Scholar - are all years equally complete?

Google Scholar has its strong points (e.g. indexing of grey literature that is not available in any regular scholarly database), but data quality is not one of them. Of course, this is not because Google lacks the ability to create a high quality database; it is rather because publishers refuse to grant it permission to create a high-quality database that it distributes for free. Google's index is based on Google Scholar's web spider whose completeness depends on what is available from public websites (Google strictly respects websites permissions; it makes no attempt to index anything where the websites ask it not to do so with a robots.txt entry). I would not be surprised if some publishers restrict Google's permission to index details of some of their most recent publications.

With that perspective, then for any given topic, if there is a sharp dropoff during or after 2017 (its unclear which is the case the way you worded the question), I would not consider that evidence of anything. That is, it is not necessarily evidence that people suddenly stopped publishing on that topic; it is only evidence that Google's index no longer contains that topic, for whatever reason. I know that I've seen quite a few articles that have charts like that and make claims like that, but I don't consider such claims reliable. (And when I peer-review articles that make such claims, I tell the authors so.)

To make any concrete, serious claim about change in publishing patterns of topics, you would need a more rigorous and systematic database source (such as Web of Knowledge, Scopus, etc.) and at least a two-year lag to make sure that all data is complete.


Mentioning advisor qualifications in statement of purpose

It should be obvious from your CV who your MS thesis advisor is, and you might want to mention it again in your statement of purpose as you describe your MS thesis, but I wouldn't mention where your advisor got his PhD.

There are basically two possibilities here:

Your MS advisor is well known in the community.  In this case, there's no need to talk about where the advisor did his PhD since the reputation of the advisor will already be established in the reader's mind.  The reader is likely to be more interested in your advisor's recent research activity than where the advisor got his PhD.
Your MS advisor is not well known in the community.  In this case, mentioning where the advisor isn't going to help much- having a PhD from a top institution means little if the advisor hasn't been active in the research community since getting that degree.


How to arrange a multi-topic academic homepage

My opinion...Perhaps instead of trying to sort the 'topics' or 'content' on the site, you could instead sort by user with a menu bar on the home page.

Have separate tabs/buttons in the menu linking to separate pages: 1 for "Students"; 1 for "researchers/peers"; and 1 for "prospective employers".

That way, you can put exactly what you want that particular audience to see (even if some content is the same across audiences) on individual pages. You will have 1 site, with 3 distinct sets of content arranged by topic independently of each other. On each of those 3 pages, there can then be a specific menu or something for the content on that specific page, for that audience, arranged by either a topic, date, tags, whatever.


I feel I am going to have a heart attack

When you're in a situation where you feel you have nowhere to turn, you need to go as high as possible till you get a fair hearing and positive changes start to happen. In academia, go to the head of your panel or your supervisor. If that doesn't make any difference, go to the head of your faculty or the committee. If that doesn't work, go higher still. If you are certain you are correct, that you are being misrepresented and that you can justify your position, you have nothing to lose by going as high as possible. Write to the director if you have to [you won't, but you get my meaning].
Do not worry about going over someone's head. If you have spoken to your supervisor/PI and they are not seeing the whole picture, you need to go above them. You should be able to justify why you have done this: you cannot perform in your work, you supervisors are not seeing the whole picture, vital information is being overlooked, your mental health is at stake and you are worried for your physical health. You are paying for this education, and this is no way to spend your money or time. Things will just get progressively worse if positive changes don't happen now.
Ombudsmen take a long time to respond. Weeks, sometimes months. And even then they may come back with a "sorry, we can't help" reply. If you hit a wall at the top with your communication, consider leaving and taking your research with you elsewhere. You should be able to justify why you have done at your next institution so if you can back yourself up with emails.
Research is supposed to be rewarding. Challenging, yes, but not to the point where you are worried for your physical health. I know some people think that PhDs and post-docs are everything, but they're not, they are just a part of your life. You need to change your plan of attack somewhat, and you can start by writing some emails to those higher up, but make sure what you say is factual rather than emotional. Try not to say something which you could regret later. State your case fairly and factually, what you have and haven't done, what has led to this point and why you felt writing to them was the only course of action to take. Good luck.


What to do during Math PhD to have options in industry?

Based on my own interactions with graduate students and post-docs, I would suggest:

Develop skills that are useful to potential employers.  This includes basic communication skills and a broad background in data analysis and modeling as well as buzz-word computer skills (R, Python, Deep Learning, etc.)
Develop cultural-competence for the corporate world.  Learn how to dress and act the part, preferably by immersing yourself in the corporate world through an internship.
Have some examples of your work (besides your papers and dissertation) to show to potential employers.


I suggest going to the department secretary. In every department I have been involved with, this is the person who handles the mechanics of things like getting profs to submit a syllabus, grading scheme, calendar, and so on. Simply ask

  Do you have the [missing item] for [course] by [prof]?

If you thus receive what you want, mission accomplished. If the answer is "no, I understand [prof] was going to hand them out in class" or just "no" you can go on to

  We didn't get them in class and I have emailed and asked for them but no reply.

Typically at this point the secretary will swing into action. I've seen profs called while students are standing there, I've seen heads visited, emails sent, all kinds of things. This is what this person does and the ones I know all do it very well indeed.

If the secretary just kind of stares at you in a "sucks to be you" way, you could try

  Is this something I can raise with [head] because I have no idea what the class schedule looks like and only a very vague idea about how grades will be calculated.

You will now get a yes or a no, if it's yes the secretary will set you up an appointment, if it's no then you need to ask why, take notes, say thank you and leave. After you leave the office check to see if you have an Ombud or someone in Student Services who can help you. But I actually doubt it will come to that.


Supervisor does not ask for opinion of graduate student about an undergraduate thesis that the graduate student assisted with

In general, supervisors should "acknowledge" their students more. We often forget to tell people when they are doing well and only point out mistakes.

Your supervisor should have most definitely acknowledged your help with the student. He should have thanked you for helping out with the student and ideally given you feedback about your supervision.

As for comments on the thesis, depending on your official role and the rules of the university/department, he may not be able to talk to you about the grades of other students. That said, he could acknowledge you to let you know that. If he is allowed to discuss the grades, it can be a learning opportunity to talk about the process. That said, grading is generally not a fun part of the job, and he may simply be "protecting" you from an aspect of work. It is not out of place to talk to him about the thesis (either the final product or grade). He will let you know if the conversation goes someplace it should not.

The one place that he should most definitely try and acknowledge you is to the external referee. Something as little as "a lot of this project was managed by my PhD student Billy Jean" can help your networking.


Best way to respond to a request for CV after graduation

Just send a note with 1 to 3 short paragraphs.

Remind her of the work you did together (you are colleagues, brothers in arms).
Give her an update on what you have done during the last 6 months (e.g. papers you published, your thesis, courses you took).
Let her know what job options you are looking at (even prospects). Ask her for any advice on your prospects and whether she knows of any opportunity at her place or elsewhere.
Thank her for the time together and how it benefited you.

And yes, include the CV.


Should I include a research in my thesis which does not have a direct connection to its title?

In many cases, it comes down to your defense and the work you've done, and the thesis is a document for you. You can include, or not include whatever work you want.

I'm speaking from a PhD in the natural sciences in the US, different countries and subjects have different rules and guidelines.


As a PhD student, is it worth spending time organizing a contest for a conference?

Often in graduate school there are an abundance of neat opportunities and experiences; it can be difficult to decide which tasks to pursue. You'll need to consider the short and long-term career benefits of organizing the conference, as well as how it will be viewed within your program. In regards to short term career development, this may be an opportunity to provide an academic service activity for the conference, though there are often less labor-intensive ways to add that type of experience to your CV. However, if you're interested in a career in management or administration and want to gain experience in developing or implementing organizational activities, this might be a valuable long-term experience. Also, if the group task will result in data that you can later use for publications or products, it may be worth the investment; it may even serve as a unique research opportunity.

Whether you pursue this activity will likely also depend on whether your mentor is supportive. If you are concerned that this might delay your research and your graduation date, you will need to decide not only if you can live with pushing back graduation, but if your mentor or program will support that as well. If you are able to pitch this opportunity in terms of career development benefits, products, or even positive publicity your mentor or program may be supportive. They may even provide you with some undergraduate assistance to reduce the burden of coordinating the event. Before you have that discussion, make sure you have a clear picture of the pros and cons, as well as what (minimal) supports would allow you to take advantage of the opportunity at the lowest possible economic, time, and labor costs.


Is it fine to post a paper to arxiv and later change the title and add authors?

Arxiv is just a preprinting service which is [generally] non peer-reviewed. The whole point of publishing there is to just put your idea out there (it gives you the copyrights) and to get feedback from your peers who are eager enough to read your draft. It is very common practice to update the title and author list for final publication in a journal. I have done it personally without any problem. That being said, all authors, who will be on the final publication, should be included in the arxiv submission, and not just the first/submitting author.


Am I being overambitious with PhD applications

The requirements were listed as a 2.1 in an undergraduate degree, which I do not have (I got a 2.2)

You'll receive "desk rejects" from institutes that insist on this requirement. However, since

  I am currently studying for a relevant postgraduate masters and expect to get a good grade.

Your undergraduate degree might be ignored by some institutes, in favour of your postgraduate degree.

Also, rather than approaching an institute, try approaching potential supervisors. They'll know how to navigate their institution's rules.

You should also consider whether a PhD is for you. You don't have the required grades. Perhaps something went wrong during your undergraduate degree; perhaps you'll achieve better grades during your postgraduate degree. This is perhaps something you've already thought about.


Advice on who to ask for a letter of recommendation for phd applications?

I would put this as a comment, but I'm under 50 reputation, so here goes.
The first three professors you mentioned sound like your best bet. Thesis advisors can vouch for your ability to do mathematical research, which is the primary skill that phd programs are looking for.
It is not uncommon for people to ask professors who they only had for a class, though letters that say no more than "did well in class" are not very impactful. It is better if the professor oversaw some extended class project, or even better, a thesis. Remember, the phd admissions committees want students who are motivated and capable of doing research, not just doing well in the classroom.
EDIT: Additionally, I would not worry about the fact you have not kept in contact with your undergraduate thesis advisor. This is surely a common scenario.


Found a major flaw in paper from home university – to which I would like to return

Don't make it personal. Keep it about the science. You can inform them of the flaw and let them fix it or you could just publish a new paper with better results, pointing out the flaw if needed. That would depend on whether you want the new result under your name or are happy enough for it to be under theirs.

If you write, however, and get pushback, evaluate it fully and then publish or not as you choose. But I wouldn't get into an argumentative back and forth about it. And if you just decide to publish it, as a courtesy you can send them your paper when you submit it to a publisher: For Your Information...

The science is the important thing.


Outsider Contributions: Are They Possible, and How?

Most of our audience here are academics and the OP is Not Quite An Outsider, I think I don't need to explain how important peer review is to research results. If the outsider needs the explanation, please use the peer-review to read related Q&A.

Obviously, the outsider has at least two options: submit the manuscript to journals and/or having blog posts of his own.

One of the effective ways to get your paper to be peer reviewed is to send the paper to journals. It is true that some journals tend to ignore papers written by authors without affiliation. I personally have this experience. I am retired and am not associated with any institute. I do have experience that my manuscript was rejected without any explanation. However, the quality of the paper makes the difference. If it is indeed a very good paper, some journals would take it and send to referees. I personally have that experience, too.

The second option for an outsider is to have blog posts. I occasionally come cross blog posts when I search on the Internet (I am a retiree, I have plenty of time). My personal experience is that more than often good blogs are written by good scholars who are insiders. I bumped into many poor quality stuff written by outsiders quite often. They just don't make sense to me at all. I usually read the first couple of paragraphs to determine if I want to continue to read them. Unfortunately, most of them written by outsiders are of extremely poor quality.

Of course, the outsider has another option - arXiv. I think it does not make too much difference with regard to your question.

To me, the key issue is the contents. If you do have something very good, publish it. Somehow, somewhere, your article will be read by others. However, if you never receive college education, I seriously doubt your stuff is good. You do need at least basic level knowledge to do research.


Is getting a PhD position in the US easier with a prior degree from the US?

Yes and no. In principle, the admissions committee doesn’t care where your previous studies were. However it is easier to evaluate qualifications from a university or system that they are familiar with.

US PhD admissions committees will be more familiar with US universities in general. However, it really depends on the specific institution. Non-US universities like McGill, Oxford, Cambridge, ENS, ETH-Z, Tsinghua, Shanghai Jiao Tong, Sharif, IIT-K, etc. all have established reputations for producing strong students. So a degree from them is probably better for PhD admissions than from a weak US university.

Of course, more important than where you studied is what you individually did! A degree from Stanford won’t help you get into a PhD program if your recommendation letters are terrible.


Does rigor/thoroughness of undergraduate program matter (for graduate/PhD applications)?

This would be a great question to discuss with your advisor, or another faculty member at your school whose opinion you respect.

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that the "bare-minimum" 3-year program you describe would be woefully inadequate to prepare you for graduate study in mathematics, and I think most admissions committees would agree.  The fact that you did it in 3 years with a double major won't mitigate that.  A year of analysis is pretty essential, some topology would be very helpful, and taking a significant number of upper-division math electives will be a great way to build what people call "mathematical maturity".

Your 4-year program sounds better, but honestly still a little on the light side.  Keep in mind that many applicants to top grad programs will have taken practically every undergraduate course their department offers, and maybe a couple of graduate courses besides, in addition to often having undergraduate research experience.  You also want to make sure you get to know (and impress) your mathematics professors well enough that they can write you strong letters
of recommendation, and taking more math courses is the biggest part of that.

The physics degree on your diploma will be nice, especially if you are looking to do a PhD in mathematical physics, but it may not go a long way to making up for weakness on the math side.


Planning a course: lecture-by-lecture or topic-by-topic?

Planning it in a continuous way and not lecture by lecture gives you more flexibility in the classroom as questions or other issues might interfere with your planning and therefore your planning doesn't work out anymore. On the other case, there is a chance that you won't plan enough for a lecture, so a continuous plan enables you to "fill" a hole, in case you'd advance faster than you have planned.

A lecture by lecture plan may be helpful as well, maybe not on a very detailed level. But writing down which topics you'd like to cover within which lectures helps in setting up an underlying structure of the course, showing the coherence of the smaller topics.

Going further, I'd like to add, that if you plan to write down what you are going to say, you might ask yourself the question if it is helpful for your teaching or the students learning if you hand out some form of lecture notes at the beginning of the course. I, as a student, enjoy having to take less notes and being able to focus more on what the teacher is saying. As a teacher, with lecture notes, I know for myself, that my lesson is carefully planned and that I have already done a good amount of work for next year. If you are concerned, that with lecture notes students attention may decline, I suggest that you leave out certain type of content, in mathematics e.g. examples.


Publishing a new dataset, based on existing

I would suggest to just make the code available to generate the new features, and reference the data set you've taken from as well as the previously published methods that your code uses, rather than distributing the output.
The code is probably more broadly useful because it could possibly be used with other data, and if new versions of that data set come along your modification will be obsolete whereas your code will not (assuming the structure of the data does not change). If the combination of approaches you've used are themselves fairly novel, it may even be publishable as a paper as well, particularly if you have some results to show why doing these steps is useful in some way.
You could probably find a lawyer to argue that somehow you're allowed to do what you are proposing to do, but I don't see why. Even if technically legally allowed because of issues with considering data IP of any sort, it just feels a bit wrong to take someone's work and make it newly available with minor modification.


The pre-submission peer review seems to cost about $250 USD for a one week turn around. That is not enough money to find an expert in the field to do the review. It is enough money to get someone familiar with the publishing process in a general field (e.g., biomedical research, engineering, humanities) who knows the core components of a paper (i.e., do you need to include statistics, do the methods seem reasonable, is there an introduction that at least pretends to make sense) and can follow a logical argument. Lots of papers get rejected for these reasons so such a review can be valuable. This is especially true if you do not have any colleagues you can pass the paper by. That said, you would be much better served developing a network of colleagues who you can pass a manuscript by prior to submission then to use one of these services.

Prior to using the service, I would ask to see a previous sample of their work. Unlike a predatory journal, which makes publishing somewhere else difficult, using one of these services only costs you money.


What to do when you don't agree with an advisor's comment in your paper

There are a few responses to this but we need a little more context. Presumably this is not for a peer reviewed publication [I only ask this because you use the term 'major revisions']. At the end of the day your advisor is just that, your advisor, and it's up to you to decide how to, or if you should, implement the proposed changes. You don't have to implement all of them, you can defend your paper on those you feel strongly about, but remember that your advisor has a lot more experience than you and it's worth taking into account what they say, and that they may cause you to 'think outside the box' and revise your argument in ways you hadn't originally considered.

6 months sounds like an awfully long time to me between revisions. If you don't agree then say so, but justify your position. But remember that 'major revisions' are exactly that - major - and there must be a good reason why your advisor thinks that your paper[s] need changing to such a degree. I would sit down and talk things through, or if you're doing things over email, state which parts are most important to you and which you do/don't want to change and why.

Don't be too precious about your work. It's a learning experience and good research is generally the work of more than one person. I'm sure your advisor wants the best for you, and the field, so if you detach yourself from your product a little, you may have a better perspective.


MS program in Canada with bad undergraduate result

I'll be blunt, you have no chance. AI is probably the most competitive field in the world right now, and most applicants have exceptionally strong profiles and still get rejected. At the University of Toronto, most people who get accepted have 3.8+ GPAs, and have at least one publication at NIPS or ICML, on top of extensive research experience.

If you're really deadset on grad school, I'd the following:

1) Apply to course based masters instead of research based masters. These are significantly easier to get into. However, you get no funding usually and are expected to pay your tuition fees and living costs yourself.

2) Apply to a field other than AI, something fairly obscure with little competition. You have 0% of getting into AI.

3) Apply to low tier schools. You're not getting into U of T or UBC in Canada for instance. Maybe try Laurier and schools in that league.

4) Your GRE score is exceptionally poor, fix it. You need to redeem your low GPA somehow. Aim for atleast 164 Quant.


I think you'd be well within your rights to take the offender to Small Claims Court for non-payment.


Did the Emperor of Japan really write a paper?

According to the Indian embassy of Japan he did author a similarily titled paper in 2008: link (titled Evolution of Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Japan populations of the
gobiid species, Pterogobius elapoides
and Pterogobius zonoleucus, based on
molecular and morphological analysis), so it is a safe bet that the paper you are asking about is authored by His Majesty as well.

The Internet also confirms he specializes in ichtyological research.


Are summarized reviewer comments a thing?

Is it common that the editorial office summarizes the reviewer comments?

Yes, in addition to the actual reviewer feedback. It basically never happens that the actual reviewer feedback is hidden from the authors, and I don't see a point for doing so. If that happened to you, it's possible that there is a mistake, and you should ask the editor about that.

  Would I have received more complete feedback in case of a conditional acceptance?

Rejection letters are often short, because the reviewers might have particular high-level concerns that make a more detailed assessment of the paper pointless, for example, if the manuscript is either poorly written or out of the scope of the journal. (A good editor would desk-reject such a paper, but that's a different story.)

  How can it be justified that Elsevier doesn't pass on the feedback to the authors? Personally, I review papers ''for the love of science'', not to support a listed corporation.

If your assumption is true, I don't see a point for that. However, take into account that the editor is typically not a representative of Elsevier.


How are British PhDs looked upon in the United States?

I am an American who earned a Ph.D. at Cambridge University. A degree from Cambridge or Oxford is well-respected in the US - I was warned to avoid other UK universities as they are not as well known in the States.  The one caveat is that all of your network for post-docs and jobs will be in the UK, not in the US. It was an amazing experience though so I would not want to discourage you!


Anyone who contacts you to publish is bad news.  My advice is to stick to journals from ACS, APS, and ACerS.  Maybe MRS or IEEE.  There are a few decent pubs in materials from Elsevier and Wiley, but even then you need to know who they are.  Don't submit something to a journal you don't know.

A dedicated conference proceedings is a different kettle of fish (like if this compay was retained to do conference proceedings), but even then I would try to give them some portion of or repackaging of work you publish in "real journals".

I can't find anything on the web from them either.  Which is bad also.  (Although if you included any links in your letter that would help us.)


Some collection of students' theses or dissertations

For British doctoral theses, check out the British Library archive. Many full texts are available.

As Ri49 says, you can see TEL for theses from France...they claim 42000 full texts so far....


Do professors from different universities (but in the same field) contact each other about the students who applied to their programs?

People might discuss the pool of applicants generally—what percent is international, what was the admit rate, etc.—but never an individual candidate's application.

The only time I could imagine an admission committee member discussing a candidate's application is if someone on the committee (or in the department, if it's more decentralized) knows one of the people who wrote the candidate's letters of reference and wants to get more direct information than what's written in the letter.


Code in a conference paper: should I put license terms there?

If you publish something and don't give an explicit license (US, anyway), the default is "all rights reserved". You can provide the license elsewhere if you like, as long as you still hold copyright. But if you transfer copyright to someone else, and it doesn't already have an explicit license, then they own copyright and you can no longer provide a license.
If you do provide a license before copyright transfer then, for most such licenses, the license is "sticky" and can't be withdrawn, even by the new copyright holder. If you do that without informing the new copyright owner then you can be in some trouble, since you can no longer transfer "all rights", but only the limited rights you still hold.
Some publishers, including conferences, will be fine with this. Others not and you could wind up having a paper rejected/withdrawn. I suspect IEEE might be lenient here, but they need to be informed of any prior license to anything they publish. Putting it in the paper itself makes it obvious, of course.
However, it isn't where you provide the license terms (in the paper or elsewhere), but when you detail the license terms, assuming that you can, at all.


Internal PhD thesis reviewer pulled out a month before the thesis due date: Is this allowed? What to do next?

Such situations are not uncommon in academia.  I would caution you against trying to get this person back as a reviewer, even though you have signed papers from 4 years ago.  Simply respect that person's decision to back out, thank her or she for their time thus far, and invest your energies finding somebody that will serve as a reviewer so you can graduate.  Perhaps this sounds like rather odd advice.  Just put yourself in the shoes of a person who doesn't want to serve as a reviewer but is subsequently forced to do so.  You are at risk of getting a very unfavorable review, and the 40 days could become much longer.  You have plenty of time to get somebody on board, and you will certainly encounter situations in your future career that are far more egregious.


Part-Time PhD in the UK? How does this work?

Full-time PhD student here (my office mate is part-time).

As you say, many universities will have a part-time program. It probably is possible to work full-time and do research part time, but it will be even more challenging than usual. PhDs tend to work best if you immerse yourself fully and spend your energy exclusively on research (especially if you want to have some spare time).  My friend finds it difficult to balance a 20 hour workweek and a part-time research position. I've never met anyone who has a full-time job on top of the PhD.

Re funding: AFAIK grants are typically used for full-time studentships. In my group, we have often broken down a full-time position into two part-time ones, but only for postdoctoral researchers. I guess the assumption is at a postdoc level people will be better at juggling all their commitments. My supervisor won't admit to it, but I reckon he would prefer one full-time student as opposed to two part-time ones, as the former is more likely to complete.

EDIT: I spoke to my supervisor. If your day job is related to the research and is likely to help you (as opposed to holding you back), he said he would consider it a plus.


Can I read from notes during an online PhD interview?

I would suggest you answer without any kind of visual aid: you may come across as inauthentic or the interviewer might think you are cheating in some way. Just practice your answers a couple of times until you feel comfortable.
However, you can write down your own questions to your interviewer and read them when you will be asked if you have any questions. I reckon this is highly appreciated.


If I request a paper through my university library, must they pay a substantial amount of money?

You should not hesitate to ask the library for articles like this. The library most likely will pay a fee, but it will probably be less than the $40 for you to access it directly, and is an expected budget item for academic libraries.

There are costs associated with interlibrary loan (ILL) transactions, but they are minimal for articles that can be handled entirely electronically (for things that need to be physically transmitted, like books, and/or processed in some way, like print articles that must be scanned, the costs can be substantially higher). Since you found this article online, it probably falls in that cheapest category.

Many libraries also have agreements with publishers to "buy on demand" some articles that are requested through ILL. This usually happens entirely behind the scenes, so you probably wouldn't know the difference between such an article and traditional cross-library lending. It may cost the library more than ILL, but the library then "owns" the article so any future requests for that article will be at no additional cost, unlike ILL, which costs the same every time.

As an academic librarian, I can tell you that the library almost certainly has a budget for this kind of thing, and if it were my institution, I would want you to use this basic library service to get the materials you need to do your job (almost as much as I want students to get the materials they need). Nothing in a library is actually free*; making information accessible is the reason libraries—and library budgets—exist.

*Of course there are open access journals, donated books, etc., but someone had to pay for all of those, too, one way or another.


Can I study and obtain two PhDs in different subjects simultaneously?

Check the policies and regulations

Answering to your question hugely depends on the policies of the universities where you want to do PhDs and the country and education system where you are located. Some may allow you and some may not. Even, some universities may not also be interested in students doing simultaneous degrees. Moreover, you need to make sure whether your funding provider (if you are not self-funding) allows you to study for two degrees or not. So, nobody can give you exact information on this part of your question.

However, I have a general advice to you:

Don't run, Walk!

Take a deep breath and answer this question: Why do you want to apply for two PhD degrees simultaneously?

A PhD degree requires the student to spend most of his time studying and collaborating with his/her advisor. You may need to take some courses in each program, spend your time searching for topics and current papers and books, read them, find an original topic for your dissertation. Put all these huge academic chores besides to your personal life.

It is not a good idea to study two degrees even if the policies allow you to do so.

Don't leave your interests

However, if you are so interested in both subjects, you can apply for one PhD as your major research path and follow the other path as you second or minor research interest. Read papers and books about it. Even, in your free time, you can talk to a professor whose research field is near to your minor research path. Attend conferences, colloquiums and seminars about your favorite subject. Keep in mind that you simply don't need to obtain another PhD to meet your research interests.


There is really nothing to do. Most likely it wasn't an intentional slight. An oversight, perhaps, caused by stress.
You can get some information about what happened that required surgery and send a get-well note.
Don't overthink it.


The Importance Of Final Year Results In US PhD admissions

Admissions to US graduate programs are generally conditional on final-semester grades. That is, you are required to pass your classes, and in general maintain a reasonable GPA in them. Developing a case of "senioritis" and getting D's on everything could have an effect on your admissions offers. (Whether or not it will depends on the department and the school.)

However, the grades earned in the final semester do not influence the decision whether or not to accept you in the first place; that is determined by your grades up through the end of the first semester of your final year (or the last semester of your penultimate year, if the grades aren't available by mid-year).


Should I present future research directions in a separate section while writing a scientific paper?

Anything is Okay. I have seen the future directions in both ways: mostly I found it in the related section, however it is rare in a separate section. So choice is yours. But keep one thing in mind. Your future direction should not be too long unless your presenting results and discussion are enough to be accepted by the reviewers. Otherwise, reviewers of your paper may feel the future directed works are important part in your present paper and may give a comment like "why didn't you conduct same work for this paper?"


Rather than answering the specific question ("What to write in a chapter of a book?") I'm going to suggest that this is an XY Problem. The real first question is whether this is a real book, or if it's a predatory publisher sending out an email blast to random victims. The limited evidence in the question and comments suggests that it may well be a predatory publisher:

The recipient is not a well known researcher
There isn't a clear and well-described topic for the chapter
The recipient doesn't know the putative professors personally

An edit to the question suggests that the authors may be real people, but with the other red flags that are raised I would still be very suspicious. The professors may not be the actual senders of the letter, or they may in turn be victims of a scam.

It's not impossible that this is a real book, but the odds are very much against it. Please be cautious before doing something that may damage your reputation and career.

Edit since in the comments someone is skeptical that there is such a thing as predatory book-chapter scams:

Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4

The claim in the comments is that book chapters can't be predatory because "You can't have a predatory book". These examples show charges for chapters, but also through selling worthless, low-quality books to libraries.

In general these predatory publishers depend on naive people; that includes people who think "You can't have a predatory book".


How many math PhD spots are offered each year by the top 50 US programs?

If all you're interested is a ballpark number, then here is one way to estimate: At Texas A&M, the math department hires 20-25 graduate students every year. (We make about twice as many offers.) If this was representative, then the top 50 schools would hire 1000-1250 students each year.

Now, A&M is a big department (~85 tenure track faculty). Most departments will be smaller, but in the top 50, most will be at least half the size. So my best guess is that the top 50 programs together will hire ~750 students each year, plus or minus maybe 250.

(And, for comparison: Practically all of our hires have a Quantitative GRE score above 163. This coincides with about the 85th percentile.)


Is it evident whether I am a masters student or a PhD student just by looking at my transcript?

Typically, the name of the degree program that the student is enrolled in is listed on the transcripts. So generally speaking, yes, it is evident whether you are a masters student or a PhD student.


How long is it acceptable for the managing editor (= you) to wait after the first unanswered message to the editor before replacing the editor?

If the lack of contact is unexpected and unannounced, then wait three weeks with weekly email reminders.

If it is expected or announced, then negotiate with the authors.  The authors might prefer to wait out an editor's absence if the editor has suitable expertise.


Getting into grad school with a bad record.

I'll be blunt: having multiple failed classes on your transcript will likely not help your chances of getting into a traditional graduate program. Some B's are usually okay. But getting an F  then a C will not really reflect positively on your abilities to succeed in graduate school. Graduate school in electrical engineering is usually not for students who get C's. That's just the brutal reality. Barring a rare exception (such as the death of a parent, prolonged health issues), most admissions committees will not give much consideration to a 3.25 GPA.

Some possible hope:

If your last two years' GPA is stronger and you did well on the GRE, you could still be accepted provisionally (unfunded) to a graduate program. Become involved in research right now if you can. Build a relationship with some professors. Having a strong letter of recommendation from faculty members can certainly boost your application.


Is it okay to ask a professor if he is going to attend a certain conference

My two favourite techniques for stalking potential business contacts (including professors):

Email them asking questions about their work.  Once you've built up a bit of rapport, then you can move on to asking about meeting in person.
Check conference programmes to see if they are giving a talk/seminar/poster, and visit them in person then.