Which section to start with when writing a research paper

There's no 'right' order. Starting where you feel able to do so is far better than not getting started. I usually write lots of sections concurrently, or start writing and work out what the sections are later.

On the other hand, it will make your life somewhat easier if you can work roughly in order of dependencies, so you don't have to keep changing what you wrote earlier. From example, it might be helpful to write out some of your notation before you start using it. The introduction will often come late in the process for this reason.


Can one pursue multiple degrees via distance education mode in India?

The Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Development, Government of India says,

It is up to the concerned academic institution/university to recognize the qualification including certificate diploma, degree, etc. for the purpose of academic pursuit, i.e. continuing education for acquiring another academic qualification, with it. As regards recognition of academic qualifications for the purpose of employment, it is the prerogative of the concerned employer to take a view on the recognition of the degree, diploma, etc
(Last Updated by admin on Tuesday, 19 April 2016 - 12:27pm)

My interpretation of this is that it is up to individual institution/employer to recognize the multiple degrees.
According to Times of India Feb 2, 2013

According to the decision of the DEC communicated to UPRTOU. vice-chancellor Prof AK Bakshi, while a student cannot pursue two degree programmes simultaneously, he can do the same through distance or combination of distance and regular modes from the same or different university institution in various combinations.

So, I think the answer is, yes you can.
However, please double check this with the government in India so you can get an official answer. Please do not trust the strangers on Internet. Instead, trust your government.


How to save my academic career after ending up in a deeply problematic lab for PhD?

Deciding to leave one university for another is in my belief, beyond the scope of asking strangers on the internet. However one thing stood out.

  The lab I am working at has several issues and there are many deeply unethical things going on.

If things are as egregious as you claim, you are beyond, "should I leave" territory and cross into "what are my country's whistle-blower laws"? Is your lab injecting subjects with unknown substances or diseases without their knowledge? Is it stealing or utilizing funds in an unscrupulous manner such as buying personal items?

If things aren't as serious as claimed, I don't see why you couldn't have a sit-down meeting with your researchers and inform them of your dissatisfaction and hope things turn around. If it comes to applying to another program, you can always inform your potential institution of the shortcoming of your current situation.


I had a student come to me trying to get back "lost points" on an exam, because the lost points dropped hm below what was needed to get an A, and he got an A- instead. This was in spite of the fact that his answers were demonstrably wrong.

When I spoke with him, he said that he needed to have the top grades in the class, because he didn't know how else he could demonstrate that he was a "good student." I had to explain to him that the degree to which he was insisting on a regrade (effectively demanding that he be awarded the points, even though they hadn't been earned) actually could hurt him in the long run, because it turns people "off"—no one wants to work with an inveterate complainer. And, ultimately, if he wanted to go further in either the academic world or in a professional career, what he needs are good letters of recommendation from people who are willing to vouch for him and support his career.

My reason for including such a long-winded anecdote here is that the underlying issues are the same: don't worry about little issues here and there. (That doesn't mean don't complain if there's a big problem—clerical errors and mistakes do happen!) Small mistakes are a part of life, and we learn more from those mistakes than from successes.

Nobody is going to think poorly of you because you make small mistakes. Just keep doing what you're doing, and try not to stress out about it when taking exams and doing your work. Worrying about perfection is a good way not to achieve it.


How to get priority acknowledged, when a paper in mathematics is a special case of your own paper, but it does not cite your work?

I agree with @Dan Romik's answer.  I also want to say that in this set of circumstances, it does not really seem necessary to take any heroic actions in order to acknowledge priority: since the OP's paper was published more than a year earlier: okay, as the record lies, the OP has priority.

I agree that the OP should make sure that the community knows that s/he had the stronger result first, and that contacting the authors of the later paper is a good idea.  But I think the OP should do this with a winner's grace: this is going to be much more awkward and painful for the authors of the later paper.

I also want to mention that this kind of thing happens in mathematics all the time.  For instance, a few days ago I found out that the main result in a paper I published a few years ago appears, in much stronger form, in some "Lecture Notes" from 1974 (that were apparently never formally published: they are not listed on MathSciNet).  Well, gosh.  I haven't decided exactly what to do about this, but please be assured that I am not rubbing my hands greedily at the thought that my too-complicated-partial result has "priority" in some formal sense.

Added: Concerning the author's

  I have often seen journals publishing short notes with the title "Acknowledgement of priority", in which it is explained that a published result was already proved by someone else, but I have no idea of how it works.

I did MathSciNet searches for "acknowledgement of priority" and "acknowledgment of priority" and got 62+25 hits.  When you remove double counting, false positives and papers analyzing priority disputes from long ago (e.g. Euler versus d'Alembert), you get about 70 genuine instances of the sort the OP describes.  Restricting to theoretical mathematics over the last 30 years, I found 9 genuine acknowledgments of priority.  Moreover, among the entire group of 70, only a few are written by someone other than the author of the original paper.

From this, I would suggest that "the way it works" is that the author herself must be moved to make an acknowledgment of priority, but that this is done only in a small minority of cases.  As I said, above, I am myself considering writing an acknowledgment of priority.  If I do so, then in view of the above numbers I will be a world expert on the subject, and I will add more details to this answer.


How common is it for a professor to agree to review a bachelor thesis outside of his subfield?

I don't think it really matters if it is common or not. If the professor feels comfortable doing it then he will do it. If not, than he will tell you.

As Bryan said, it depends on what you are defining as outside his "field". If he is an art professor and your thesis is in math, than he probably won't do it.

I was in a similar situation to you. My undergraduate thesis was about how to choose landing sites for rovers on Mars, but my professor had never done anything like that, however he was a geography professor who used satellite imagery (something that I would use a lot of as well) so there was at least some overlap.

I'd just go and talk to the professor. If you like him, and feel he's a good guy than I'm sure he'll give you an honest answer and won't hold anything against you for asking.


Are citations in abstracts considered bad style?

It is not entirely unreasonable to include a citation in an abstract, if the reason you are citing it is because your paper is a major extension, rebuttal, or counterpoint to the cited article.

In that case, however, you do have the responsibility of providing the reference within the body of the abstract. For example,

  We extend upon the results of Smith [Journal of Very Important Results, 1, 374 (2012)] to include the effects of a doohickey at the end of the thingamajig.

In such a case, the abstract remains self-contained, with an important citation included. (This is especially essential if an author is well-known for multiple papers, in which case the reference can be used to distinguish the varous works that could be intended.)

Large numbers of citations, however, should be avoided, as should "secondary" citations. Only the most critical literature for a paper should be cited, and that should normally be limited to one or two. Any more than that, and the abstract becomes hard to read.


can I take parts from my thesis (different language) to be used in a paper without paraphrasing?

Reference them as normal - plagiarism is not limited to words but ideas so proper attribution is the way to go.


How to ask other researchers to share their datasets?

Email, unless they happen to be at your university.

Just introduce yourself, and the possibility that their data might be useful for advancing your project. Leave open flexibility about the possibility of acknowledgement/authorship (depending on the effort you're asking them to go to), IRB approvals, data sharing agreements, etc.

Be prepared for rejection, but I've had something like a 60% success rate with this approach, and birthed several really productive collaborations.


Pursue a German PhD with a Masters from the USA?

You can compute your prospective salary yourself: http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/c/t/rechner/tv-l/allg?id=tv-l-2020

Typically, TV-E13 but only 50% or 65% depending who funds your position. Whether that is enough is up to you and your wife. A career at the German university is a high risk gamble, and it take quite a while before you know whether you make it or not. If it does not work out, then you will have invested a lot of time in a career that did not work out.


Do US universities use GPA according to transcript evaluation services or internal evaluation?

As far as I know, American universities do not rely on "transcript evaluation services"; they ask you to convert your GPA to whatever system they happen to use, since there are so many of them out there (5-point versus 4-point systems, A+/A/A- versus A/B/C, and so on).

You could of course provide the results of such an evaluation service, but I would not expect it to carry any weight with admissions committees, who can accept or ignore it as they please.


Do master students stop getting funding after 2 years?

There is no general rule that graduate students get funding or that the funding has to stop after two years. This is university- and lab-specific.


Separating academic identity from social identity

Here are a few considerations:

Using a common name in place of a unique name will look unusual, since people who choose to publish under a variant of their name typically go in the other direction, to make it easier to identify their papers.  Everyone who learns about this will assume you either made an unwise decision about which variant to use, are trying to avoid prejudice based on your name, or are trying to disguise your identity.  In any case this change may attract attention, which is the opposite of what you want.

To separate your identities, you need to use your professional name in all professional contexts.  I.e., your university web page should use it, your colleagues should call you by this name, you should use it when you give talks or attend conferences, etc.  To have a successful academic career involving research you need to develop a scholarly reputation, and that can't happen unless everyone connects you with your publications.  That means either they connect the two identities or they know you under the name from your publications.  (In particular, it's not enough for you to be able to prove that you are the author.  In order for you to have a successful career, in the long run everyone must already know you are the author.  This is not such a big issue for graduate school applications, but it's a major factor in getting tenure.)

I wouldn't worry too much about proof of authorship.  This is not so easy to determine from the name anyway: even if you published your under full legal name, how would anyone know you weren't claiming papers that were written by someone else with the same name?  One big clue is your letters of recommendation.  If the letter writers discuss your papers, then everything will be fine.  (While if they don't discuss your papers, then that's a problem regardless of the authorship issue.)  At that point all you need to do is include a sentence in your publication list saying "My publications are under the name X."  You don't need to explain why, just to clarify the facts so nobody is confused.

Once you have started publishing, substantially changing the name you publish under is highly disruptive.  It can be done if necessary, but it may hurt your career by fragmenting your reputation, and the only way to combat this is by loudly and publicly connecting the two names.  This means you should try your best now to choose a variant of your name that you would be happy using for the rest of your career.

It's worth thinking about whether you need to do this.  In my experience, academia is tolerant of eccentricity and impressed by confidence.  If you treat this situation like it's no big deal, then I'd guess that most people will ignore it and anyone who tries to gossip about it will risk looking provincial or small-minded.  However, this of course could depend on the details of your situation.  (And there's also the issue of students: first-year university students are on average quite a bit less mature than faculty.)


How do I research about the latest developments in a field?

Actually, I think you method isn't that bad in practice. I do something along the same lines. I'd just tinker a bit with your approach. For example:

Narrow your area. "Computer vision" sounds quite broad, focus on something more specific ("object recognition", "object tracking").
Pay attention to the citation count of a paper you are going to read and use it as a quick way to prioritize your reading.
If you opt to read highly-quoted papers only, it will greatly reduce your effort. You can read less-quoted papers later when you decide that you are interested in the specific problems they address. ("Less quoted" doesn't mean "bad", it might mean their authors study some narrow domain/problem, and the odds are that you don't need it at your current stage yet).
Use references in the papers you read as your "time machine" to uncover important papers you miss. Very often I see that the same reference constantly pops up here and there, but I miss it because it's too old to make it through my Google Scholar filter.
If you really want to get a broad view of a domain, read at least tables of contents of all major conferences/journals in the field for the past few years.

When I study something new, my first impression is always the same: "oh, lots and lots of papers, impossible to track and read them all; and all the problems are apparently solved here". However, in a week or so I start noticing that everything isn't so rosy, and there is a lot of work to be done, and many topics barely touched.
I must say though that "topics of higher potential" might be or might not be what you want to study. Consider, at least, your personal preferences (after all, you are going to spend much time working on a topic), and your existing skills/talents. It is possible that you can achieve more in a topic that might not be stellar, but fit nicely into your personality and background.


I need an efficient way to catch up with all the work done in my field of interest

the following points are based on my experience, on how to start learning about a research topic from scratch:

Common Knowledge: First thing you do is to learn the common knowledge. This is the basic that makes sense of the whole field and logically true. For this, you can read general available resources, such as books or Wikipedia. For example, if I want to start to do a research on operating systems in a distributed setting, I go and get a book about Linux, and a general book about distributed computing. Then moving on to computer cluster for example or something else, I see what my interests and curiosity takes me.

Note on 1: Don't think you are not reading research so you are not progressing. Common knowledge now was a research topic of the past, and you must learn them pretty well.
Earliest Resources(s) You Can Find: This might take a little time, but you need to find the first resources to the field. You should see how and for what this field is started.
Important Papers of the Last 20 Years: Find the 'top 20' papers of the last 20 years. See what they cited and what they contributed.

Note on 3: The last step will definitely take you for a ride for some time. And this is the whole point. You need to learn how to read and write research in a field during a Ph.D. and therefore this step is very important.
Day to Day Updates: You can join different mailing lists of different research topics, and also you can use online services, that let you know automatically via email, based on your specified keyword(s).

Conclusion: Learning the research topic and its history takes time; however it is essential to make you a good researcher who can contribute in the field. These things can be achieved by the following mentioned points.


Is it problematic to not include a reference letter from home institution?

Its better to have atleast one letter of recommendation from your home institution as you might have completed the course work from there. And therefore better to have someone who can tell about your performance during studies.


How to find journal title abbreviations? (in general)
There are various sources of abbreviated journal titles, and though most of the time they agree, there are definitely cases where they do not. So:

Check the citation style of the journal you're writing for (if any). They may specify an authority on abbreviations, or specify that journal names are not to be abbreviated.
For example, the American Chemical Society style guide says to “abbreviate the name according to the Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index (CASSI)”. Chicago style forbids abbreviations.

Then, see if the journal you're looking for is included in the authoritative list.

If it's not covered, then then the best source for information is the cited journal itself! How do they abbreviate their own name, e.g. on article page headers/footers, or in citation to articles from their own journal?

An alternative is to look into one of the very large citation indexes, such as Web of Science; they maintain a list of journal abbreviations for the journals they index.

What about Engineering?
Well, that's not an easy case. First, it's a very low-profile journal: despite its claims that it is “indexed by several world class databases”, I don't think it is. Let's take ISI Web of Knowledge, which they cite as their first example. It indeed has a journal named Engineering – London in its index, but a quick search reveals it is another journal entirely, published between 1969 and 1994. Moreover, the citations given as justification in a screenshot by the publisher of the modern-time Engineering cannot be found on the journal.
So, the journal is not present in the ISI index, and does not given information about how to abbreviate its name (it does not use journal abbreviations in its succinct style guide). In other engineering journals, the word Engineering is usually abbreviated as Eng. So, either go with that, or use the full name and let the copyeditor worry about it.


When to reject a manuscript for publication?

First, I'll take the position that if a paper can be salvaged, then the author should have the opportunity to try to salvage it. However, some situations are beyond help.

Situations that call for rejection

The paper is out of scope for the journal/conference. But usually an editor will recognize this and send it back.

The results of the paper follow trivially from well known facts.

The result itself is trivial. That is, not worth the paper it is written on. Obvious. Sometimes the question, itself, is trivial.

The author seems unaware of recent work that impacts on the results. Here, it may be a judgement call about how much was missed. Naive author.

The methodology is unethical.

The methodology is inadequate to answer the question posed.

The results don't follow from the methodology.

The results can be shown to be wrong. Or dangerous.

If revision has been offered and the author is overly argumentative about revisions.

Plagiarism or other ethical lapses.

However

My personal view is that poor expression/writing should not be grounds for rejection as long as the author can find a way to make the presentation clear enough for a professional reader. However, writing can be so poor that the reader can't make a connection between the methodology and the result. If you can't understand the paper as a reviewer, you may not be able to make any helpful suggestions. Then, you may be forced to reject.

I might have missed a few cases, of course, and it depends on the field. But generally, leave it to the editor to make fine-grained decisions.

Note that I don't think the answer to this depends, really, on the level of the journal. I think the "scope" qualification covers that aspect pretty well.

I don't think that there are a lot of "questionable" cases here.

The implication is that one prefers to suggest revision unless one cannot.

Actually, I think a much harder situation is one in which a paper seems "obvious" for rejection but has some gem of insight in it that requires tweaking out. This might imply a truly huge revision and acceptance of something in the future. These are hard to recognize, of course, due to the limits of the review process.


What can I do, one week before admission results drop, to improve my funding situation last minute?

Nothing.  If you do not like the results, try again next year.
Successful application to doctoral programs at US universities requires many months of advance planning.


How much do bench skills matter for a postdoc?

I'm not hiring a postdoc, but:  Bench skills/experience matter a lot.  PIs want to hire someone who can use the existing lab to produce data without training.

That said, it is difficult to anticipate what skills PIs will be looking for at the moment you need a job.


What is the minimum number of research articles that must be cited to write a review article?

Your article needs to be interesting, the number of articles is secondary. If a field is very new than a review of a few articles could be interesting. However, if there are only 20 artcles it could also mean it is just too early to take stock, and your sub-sub-field is not ready for a review article yet. The purpose of a review article is to find partial answers on which there is some form of consensus, and identify open questions and new directions of research. Is your field sufficiently ripe for that?

Also look outside your discipline. It may be that there is a longstanding research tradition dealing with that issue in another discipline.


What should one look for in a statement of purpose (from the admissions side) in mathematics?

Good question.  I worked on graduate admissions at my math PhD program (at UGA, in the US) for several years, and after a few years off I am the new Graduate Coordinator, so I will shortly be wading through a sea of applications and personal statements.  Here is how I see things at the moment.  I'll modify my answer if upcoming experiences change my mind.

  Is it normal/reasonable to essentially ignore the content of SoP unless you are looking for specific information on something unusual in the student's application?

You could put a more sugary coating on that for public consumption, but: quite reasonable and probably rather normal, I think.

  What other things should a reviewer look for as positive or negative signs?

A statement of purpose is a great place to address things that are out of the ordinary.  It's really the only place for that.  There are a lot of math PhD programs in the US, and most of the applicants to most of the programs (i.e., not Harvard/Princeton/Berkeley/Chicago/UCLA...) have applications which are "uneven" in some way.  Giving context and explanation for the weakest part of your application could be helpful for many students.
I look at the personal statement first as a writing sample, second as a very broad measure of (mathematical) cultural awareness and sophistication and third as a chance to show that the applicant received a decent supply of rope and managed not to hang him/herself.  You are right that there is a lot of cluelessness and ignorance displayed in personal statements...but usually of a rather standard sort that just means that the person is not yet in a math PhD program so has quite foggy ideas of what such a thing is.  However some kinds of clueness, ignorance, stubbornness or hints of anti-social behavior are less common and could be red flags.

One of my favorite stories about a personal statement was told to me in a departmental information session when I was an undergraduate applying to grad school, by the head of the CS department at the University of Chicago.  (I think it was Lance Fortnow, but I am not completely confident of this.)  He said that he once got a personal statement that said that the student wanted to go to grad school in CS because he thought that any other career would involve a lot more work, and he was trying to take it easy.  This put the department head in a bit of a pickle.  As he proceeded to explain, this was exactly what he did not want to hear in a personal statement.  But how seriously does one take the personal statement?  Maybe the student was trying (and failing) to be funny.  Because the application was very strong in all other respects, the applicant was eventually admitted.  He failed out of the program less than a year later, because he was not willing to do any work.  The department head said that he had learned his lesson: the next time a student said something like this in their personal statement, they would not be admitted.


Complementary to your own suggestions and the ones in the other answers, you could consider creating an ORCID (or of course any other unique researcher/author ID) and using it in all publications. The benefits here:

By adding a unique identifier to your name, the name collisions can be resolved.
If your change your name at a certain point (e.g., if you decide to change your name as you suggested in the question), the ID will remain the same. Therefore, you even might be able to postpone the decision whether to change your name.
Since you mention online identity and SEO: At least ORCID comes with a profile web site (I am not familiar with other ID systems), where you can add your personal information and even maintain a list of your publications. Usually, a link to this profile is added to the publication, so readers can follow it. As to search engine optimization, I am not expert here but I would guess that the outcome of those algorithms improves if there is a unique ID that groups your contributions together.

Of course, all those ID systems are quite recent and might not be accepted (yet) by the journals and/or researchers in your field. Nevertheless, I would give it a try since it comes at no cost (which I presume won't be the case for changing legal documents).


How to write a reference request for a candidate that I see unfit for the application?

Here's how it typically works (at least in the U.S.).  First, you should warn him that you don't feel you can write a strong enough recommendation for him to get this job, and that you're convinced he'd be better off with another recommender.  You should try to explain why, so he can learn why you think this position is not a good fit for him.

If he insists that he wants to apply and has no other options for a recommendation, then you should try to write a supportive but honest letter, typically by taking your previous letter and strategically modifying it to fit this particular job.  By "supportive but honest", I mean making the best case you reasonably can under the circumstances, but being honest about any weaknesses and not endorsing him in any way you'd regret.  Often, instead of saying "I don't recommend hiring him" you can instead say something with enough qualifications that anyone can read between the lines.

For example, suppose an excellent teacher is applying for a job he simply doesn't have the research accomplishments for.  You can send a letter that comments in detail about his teaching and concludes by saying "Although Bob does not yet have any peer-reviewed publications, I'm confident that his work in progress will lead to a publishable paper.  When combined with his excellent and enthusiastic teaching, this makes him a good candidate for a faculty position that prioritizes teaching over research."  If you send this to a faculty search at a research university, they will read it as an automatic rejection, without your having to say so explicitly.  (Note that if Bob actually applies to an appropriate teaching position, then you should not send this text, but rather a more enthusiastic version with fewer qualifications.)

Of course you may not want to set up an automatic rejection, but rather just to make sure the hiring committee is aware of your concerns.  Another possibility is to conclude by saying "Bob is in many ways a strong candidate for this position.  My one reservation is..."  If the hiring committee agrees with you that this is a concern, then they will reject him, but at least you gave him a chance to find out whether this issue worries the committee.


Using home address when submitting an article with no affiliation?

I did a quick search to see what other independent researchers do for Nature journals, which include an author address.Specifically, I searched Google for

  site:nature.com "author details" "independent researcher"

I found that authors who are independent researchers sometimes list just their city for their address, or

  Independent researcher, City, Country

See for example here and here. Some do appear to give their home address, e.g. here and here.


PhD or postdoc salary in Denmark according to the cost of living. Is it OK?

Cost of living is high, particularly in the Copenhagen area: rent, food, transportation, etc. But already with a PhD salary you will get by no problem and you will have plenty of extra money at the end of the month. Two salaries will allow you to rent a nice small apartment, so no problems. People with kids do PhDs in Denmark, so that should give you an idea, if you have no kids it's plenty enough.


Should you include your main supervisor as a co-author?

ASK THEM.
Academia is a very 'political' and 'incestuous' environment.  If it is common to do that, then in order for you to succeed there, you might should do what they do.
  si fueris Rōmae, Rōmānō vīvitō mōre; si fueris alibī, vīvitō sicut ibi (“if you should be in Rome, live in the Roman manner; if you should be elsewhere, live as they do there”); which is attributed to St Ambrose.

If you don't, and they expect it, then you might just piss them off.  They may never mention it, but they might take it out on you in ways you could never prove. Retaliation likely won't be something you even see - not getting that scholarship, journal, presentation, etc.

TL;DR - Ask them what to do, then do it.


Should you send refined version of manuscript to editor three months after initial submission?

I would not do it. If the referee is happy with the submitted version, you should add the changes when you send a revised version, explaining what you did with the utmost detail.

Keep in mind: if the changes are significant, and only to make the proof nicer/easier to read, it might not be worth doing it. Perhaps just add a remark explaining how to do it in a nicer way, or something like that. If you change the manuscript too much, you risk the referee to be very annoyed that he spent a lot of his/her (free) time reading and understanding the paper, and now he has to do it all over again. This is, of course, if the editor is also not very annoyed.

Minor changes are expected and very common, but major unrequested changes might not the best idea.


Is it necessary that the the chapter introduction be made up of just one paragraph?

No, it is not necessary to limit your chapter introductions to one paragraph (unless your university has some ridiculous formatting guidelines that require this).


Using open source code in my final year project

It is not plagiarism as long as you clearly write something to the effect of "I downloaded this code from this github" in your paper and cite the paper in question. Plagiarism would be to pretend that you wrote all the code from scratch.

(On a side note, the code on github is most likely under an open source license, but you should double-check this before you upload your modified code to github. If there is no license present in the project that explicitly allows it, it would theoretically be a copyright violation to publish your modified code. This doesn't affect the paper, which you can publish even if you can't make your code public.)


Do any statistics program provide funding for masters students?

Apply to PhD programs that can or will award a master's degree after you pass your qualifiers.

This way you have funding and you may find that the funding is enough to continue even if other financial constrictions happen. You don't know for sure that they will happen or that other circumstances may mitigate the problem.

It might also be possible to ask the department for a leave of absence (for a year or two).

In a worst case scenario, hopefully you can finish with a master's.


Do people write research papers differently nowadays?

Making an answer out of some amplified comments, which I deleted...:

Prior to slightly-modern typewriters such as IBM's "Selectric" and some proto-computerized typewriters, mostly too expensive for individuals to buy, staff typists did not "add value" much (except for faculty who could not type), because they could not literally type special characters, which then had to be drawn in by hand by the author, by reference to the original hand-written thing. The typist would leave approximately the right amount of space to draw the characters. As you can imagine, making a boo-boo drawing characters onto an already-typed page was both all-too-easy and very annoying. In principle, one could make photocopies, but (let's say early 1970s) photocopies were much more expensive than now, and were typically much, much worse quality than a directly-typed page. (One could also type onto "mimeo masters", and draw characters on them, but this was incredibly messy, smelly, crazy. Mimeos were the closest thing to "private publication", but one could only make 30 or so copies before the "master" wore out...) The "white-out" of the time was not very good, either: it would often fall off the page.

For submission for publication, the hand-drawn Greek letters were typically to be underlined or circled in red, Fraktur with green, stuff like that.

Yes, the revise-and-retype cycle was burdensome. In effect, errors could easily be introduced by typists, and new/different errors the next time, after the author proof-read.

Since there was usually only a handful of typists per department, even the people with some seniority would have to wait a week or two or three for re-typing, adding another delay. But most people were reconciled to these delays, especially since learning to (genuinely!) "type" was not so typical in those days! That is, in high school in the U.S., people studying "business/secretarial" stuff, not planning to go to college, would learn touch-typing and shorthand. People "going to college" often did not learn to type at all, and possibly did not possess typewriters at all. For such people, there was no real choice but to give hand-written manuscripts to typists, even if the whole process was slow and crazy-making.

With the advent of the Selectric and such, and especially proto-word-processors that could treat non-Roman characters and do corrections and remember things, typists did add value, even for those who could type, because they'd have those machines, which were too expensive for typical individuals to afford. Serge Lang was an exception: prior to 1977 he had his own Selectric, and was an excellent typist (unsurprisingly). The hitch in using those things was "changing the balls", because not all characters could be available at one time. So this slowed things down quite a lot. The usual trick was to leave spaces for exotic characters, and go back and fill in by ball-swapping... which lent itself to the same annoying boo-boos as with hand-drawing characters into blank spots on a page. And not all characters were available... And any diagrams would still have to be drawn by hand.

With the advent of widely-available desktop computing either provided by math depts, or, eventually, cheap enough for individuals, again staff typists no longer added much value except for those who couldn't really typ, and the possibility of revising-without-completely-retyping changed everything. I note that pre-word-processing, seniority determined access to and priority with the limited staff typists, and wait-times for typing or retyping could be weeks. And as recently as 2005 I observed a senior colleague giving dictation to one of the few staff who could take shorthand, to type up a letter, and the person giving the dictation would make the now-almost-forgotten editorial marks on the typed copy, send it back for retyping. There was/is "status" in giving dictation or having typing done by others?

Formatting was not really possible either, except at publishers' houses. Sure, one could hand-draw, but they'd re-typeset everything, so any visual effects an author came up with were a waste of time. Perhaps the ugliness of mathematics manuscripts in those days (as in early SLN's) reinforced the quasi-Platonic mythology about the mathematics itself, since it sure didn't look so beautiful when clumsily drawn in by hand on the page!

The several years of the availability of desktop computers but without anything resembling TeX (mid 1980s) allowed much time to be wasted typing things up in file formats that were obsolete by the next year, etc. That was irritating. The desktop computers of the time had tiny memory, were literally slow, were unstable, and the daisy-wheel printers took a couple minutes to print a single page. And jammed. And...

Some faculty seemed not to mind demanding endless revisions from typing staff, but to me this was awkward, and just doing it myself was easier, since I had learned how to type. A significant number of the grad students at Princeton did type their own theses in the 1970s, but many did not. But the quality expected was really very low, so that lack of what nowadays would be minimum-allowed-quality was ignored.

All that effort expended to create even a crude document did distract from the content, yes. Cutting-and-pasting and moving things around and search-and-replace were really infeasible, not at all worth the trouble unless there'd be a major disaster otherwise. Just getting a reasonably correct thing onto the page was already a considerable accomplishment. Whatever had been more-or-less correctly typed so far was "frozen".

Thinking about it, it seems to me that there was much less self-critiquing done in those times, because it was so difficult to create an easily-readable document, typed or handwritten. That is, it was simply harder to subject one's own writing to careful scrutiny, because the typical copy would be (perhaps semi-legibly) handwritten, many cross-outs, pieces of paper taped on, white-out, ... In particular, the "notes" were much less an incarnation of mathematical ideas, I think, since they were inevitably a crappy version thereof. In contrast, nowadays it is possible to have "notes" that other human beings could read, etc. :)

Even before today's set-up, some people (including me) did try to skip the hand-writing step to the extent possible, exactly because hastily handwritten text was almost automatically not-really-readable by anyone else, and because typing prose could be much faster than hand-writing it, even with old typewriters.

A large difference seems to me to be in computations. "Long ago", of course all computations were first handwritten, and errors and revisions were a horrible mess. In contrast, nowadays one can typeset the first attempt to make it legible if not correct, and iteratively correct it, rather than repeatedly starting over, etc. This possibility, of iterative computation via typesetting, was absent in the dim past.

Also, getting other peoples' opinions was of course crazily slower: time-lag for typing-up, and then actual physical mail, further impeded by "campus mail" at both ends... in contrast to emailing a PDF. In fact, international mail ("air mail") often failed entirely... :)

So... "yes". :)


arXiv has guidelines for how to publish a translation of someone else's work, and I assume this would be similar.

You, as editor, should submit with your name in the "Author" field, but include the original author's name in the title; e.g. "Lise Meitner's Notes on Uranium Decay".

Of course, there is a separate issue of making sure that either the copyright has expired, or that you have permission of the original author (or their estate), which is also mentioned on the link above.


How do I get records proving that I was an Erasmus exchange student?

I ended up contacting the Academic Services / Student Requests Information Team by email.

They said immediately they would provide a document, and they delivered; Pretty much professional and very attentive people.

They found my records from 20 years ago, but not my grades. Fortunately my dissertation grade is not so important, as I have it in another set of documents.

I already have the document in electronic form, and they also sent a paper copy.


Is it okay to report classmates cheating on exams?

As an instructor, I want to know if there is an environment that allows cheating. Even if the student can't provide proof or only told me afterwards or anonymously, I can take action on future exams by better proctoring, exam versioning, and seating charts.

So telling the teacher afterward would protect individual students but improve the quality of the course overall, which is a win-win.


Is talking to a professor about personal issues acceptable?

Obviously, how you approach this will depend on what your relationship with the professor is like. That they have personally asked how you're doing is a great sign that you aren't an anonymous face in a large lecture hall. In many ways, having yet another person to talk to---even if it's just a brief session to unload your worries---is hugely beneficial. Pain festers in isolation! I would wager that most any professor has seen the gamut of student depression and other life circumstances. You will not be the first student they've had who has struggled. From their comments, it seems like they suspect something is troubling you and want to check in and see what support they can give.

However, there are some power dynamics at play that are worth acknowledging and considering.

Particularly in the US, professors are considered mandatory reporters. As such, they are required to notify the appropriate people in some circumstances (e.g., Title IX violations, crimes, imminent self-harm, etc.). Be aware that they may not legally be allowed to keep your conversation confidential.
Outside of mandatory reporting, know that professors have to strike a balance between being compassionate and caring versus the needs of their other students and university policy.
Professors will often be aware of resources that you are unfamiliar with on campus---from counseling services, to support groups, to tutoring services. This also cuts both ways: professors are not licensed therapists and cannot supplant the role of one. They are, however, genuine humans with human emotions and compassion.
If outside circumstances are impacting your classroom performance, then this is an excellent reason to reach out to your professors. I would much rather be alerted early, even in vague terms, that there are external factors at work, than learn at the end of the semester after I've assigned grades. It is much easier to work out a proactive plan (such as meeting regularly, building a schedule for catching up, or even filing an incomplete grade) when there is time left to work with. If you think you're falling behind, talk to your professors as soon as possible. Many are very accommodating and receptive. That being said, this should not be considered an expectation and professors must always balance what is fair to the entire class.
Choosing whether to reach out via email or in person (during office hours or similar) is highly dependent on you. If the idea of talking about your struggles in person is overwhelming, then a vaguely worded email can be sufficient to clue your professor in---never feel like your are forced to share more than you are comfortable with! It is not your professor's job to decide whether your problems are "bad enough." If you just want to let them know that you're struggling and need help, then don't feel pressured to say anything more than that! However, if they seem receptive, even general details of what you're dealing with can help steer the conversation and course of direction. If you're up for it, having a face-to-face meeting can be more productive (again, doubly so where your professor has strongly hinted that you are welcome to come by even if you just need someone to talk to).


In a computing/software paper, is it acceptable to talk about alternative tools in a literature review?

If your work should be compared to a software tool, then you should compare it to that software tool.  Actually comparing, however, can be tricky for a couple of reasons:

Closed commercial software often hides its workings, such that it is difficult to tell how it actually operates.
Live software projects are a moving target, and features today may be gone tomorrow.

Thus, for example, if you were comparing a contextual text search to the methods used by Google, it would be very difficult to do that just in a "related works" section because their methods are hidden and constantly changing.  Instead, you'd need to take experimental data on its behavior in some period (or cite somebody else who had).

For this reason, whenever possible it is generally preferable to reference a paper about the software rather than the software per se.  Most significant academic software will have an associated website with a section on "how to cite this" or a list of associated papers (e.g., this "further reading" section for TinyDB), which will give you appropriate sources to cite in your discussion.

If there is no such citation available, however, or if the existing citations are not appropriate, then you can cite the tool directly: there are established conventions for citing software tools.  I also sometimes cite both a key paper and the live tool, when the tool has expanded well beyond the associated literature.


What can a professor do about an exam that was too long for the allotted time, after the students have completed it?

This is an excellent example of when a professor may choose to grade on a curve.  Grading on a curve normalizes the exam against observed performance rather than an absolute standard, and is a good way to re-normalizing when an exam proves unexpectedly challenging.

Your professor, however, might not choose to do so, or might choose to set the curve in a way that doesn't help you as much as you might like.  The key is what's happening in the class relative to the actual educational goals of the professor.

If the exam was harder or longer than intended, and the professor believes that the lower grades reflect that, rather than the knowledge of the students, then they are likely to grade on a curve.
If, on the other hand, the students are showing evidence that they do not understand things as deeply as they are required to, then the professor may not curve or may adjust with a curve less than you hope.

It's really impossible to know which case without knowing the details of the exam and peoples' performance.  A "long but easy" test sometimes is testing for deep facility that allows people to be extremely fast.  For example, think of the arithmetic exercises sometimes done in elementary school, which can only be solved quickly enough if the student has effectively memorized and internalized arithmetic, rather than working out answers from first principles (e.g., counting on fingers).  The same principle can sometimes apply in undergraduate and graduate education as well.

Bottom line: maybe the professor will choose a generous curve, but there are reasons that may argue against it as well, depending on the circumstances.


Can I put details of evaluations results in the Appendix?

I think your advisor gives good advice.
But if you are sole author, you can probably write it as you like and wait for the response of reviewers of the conference papers. But if you are too far off the "standard" you risk a quick reject rather than a suggestion to change it.
If you are only a co-author you need to negotiate it, of cours.e


Meaning of undergraduate, graduate or post-graduate in US

Part of the confusion may be that these adjectives are used in (at least) two different contexts: to describe degrees and to describe students.

An undergraduate degree generally means a bachelor's degree (B.S., B.A., etc): a degree requiring about four years of university-level study beyond high school.
A graduate degree or post-graduate degree is any higher degree that has a bachelor's degree as a prerequisite, such as a masters or doctoral degree (M.S., M.A., M.F.A., M.B.A,. Ph.D., etc.)  Depending on context, this term may also include professional degrees (J.D. for law, M.D. for medicine, D.D.S. for dentistry, D.V.M. for veterinary medicine, etc).
An undergraduate student (or simply an undergraduate, or colloquially, an undergrad) is a student who does not yet have an undergraduate degree, but is studying to earn one.
A graduate student or post-graduate student (or colloquially, a grad student) is a student who already has an undergraduate degree and is studying to earn a graduate degree.

So in general, the adjectives graduate and post-graduate are synonyms.  This may seem contradictory (since you might expect post-graduate to refer to something after graduate) but that is how it's used.  I understand this as coming from the fact that a post-graduate degree is something that you work toward following your graduation (i.e. the moment when you earn your undergraduate degree).

My impression is that people within academia generally prefer the term graduate to post-graduate in both contexts; the word post-graduate is used more often by non-academics, to whom the word graduate is more likely to seem ambigiuous.

So you could say you have an undergraduate degree and two graduate degrees.  You could also describe your degrees as post-graduate degrees for further clarification, which would normally be needed only when speaking to someone not intimately familiar with academia.


Disputed territorial claims in academic submissions

Definitely point this out. The whole point of soliciting a review is to identify issues in the paper. You should not assume the editor knows the map on page 7 is inappropriate, just like you shouldn’t assume they are aware that step 5 of the methodology is unsound. The editor may choose to ignore your comment, but that is up to them. They should not be annoyed by a legitimate comment like this.

There is no justification for using scientific articles to advance territorial claims. If a political map is included, it should be clear when borders are disputed -- it's factually inaccurate to only present one claim. And one also questions why a political map is needed in the paper.


What is expected from a mathematics student bachelor's thesis?

What is expected varies dramatically between different schools. In my experience, bachelor's projects in math can vary from trivial to nontrivial, and also from expository to original research, and the two scales are somewhat independent.  I have supervised both trivial and nontrivial expository papers, as well as several undergraduate original research projects.

The concerns you have about being able to do research are common, but they are somewhat misplaced. You can almost certainly do more research than you believe you can do.

Here is an anecdote. In the 1980s, U.S. math departments began to offer "Research Opportunities for Undergraduates" (REUs), summer programs for undergrads to work on research. At the time, these were viewed very skeptically by many mathematicians. I have heard personal anecdotes that the NSF and NSA gave out a few initial grants on a purely experimental basis, not expecting to see very good results. But the projects flourished! Now there are many math REUs, and grants that allow schools to offer them are very competitive. The math community went from doubting that undergraduate research was possible to embracing it. Many math faculty are now required, or at least strongly encouraged, to mentor in undergraduate research if they expect to get tenure. See "Undergraduate Research
in Mathematics Has Come
of Age" from Notices of the AMS, 2014.

The key thing is to find a good project - which means finding a good advisor. Your advisor is responsible for finding a question that is accessible to you, for pointing out the background that you need to learn, and for mentoring you as you go. You still need to work on the research - we won't do it for you - but we don't expect you to operate as if you have already earned a PhD.


What background is necessary to do research in computational linguistics?

Linguistics Ph.D. admissions is unusual in that no particular background is necessarily required.  The reason is that many institutions do not offer a linguistics major, so the pool of linguistics majors is small.  In addition, linguistics is highly interdisciplinary.

To answer your question more specifically, if you want to enter computational linguistics, some programming ability is essential.  A bachelor's degree in any of the disciplines you mention may be sufficient.  I would also add psychology, anthropology, and foreign language backgrounds as potential entry points for a linguistics Ph.D.  You must also be prepared to learn statistics.


Guidance with publishing a conferences paper alone

I think it's almost impossible, if not truly so, to do your first publications without assistance (assuming those publications are to be in legitimate, reputable venues). You say your only option is to publish by yourself without guidance; my advice is strongly to say that path is not likely to be fruitful and suggest that you reconsider your other options.

I don't know what you have to do or can do to get an advisor at this point, but do that. If you were an undergraduate looking for a graduate program, I would strongly advise that you choose a program that shares your interest in doing research, and make sure you will be supported in that research. Since that choice is in the past, your options are limited, and you'll have to consider what makes most sense for you...

It might mean working through your program's staff to help connect you with someone if people aren't responding on their own.

It might mean reaching out to professors who teach courses you take and asking them for advice, if not on your research directly then on finding an advisor.

It might mean rethinking the specificity of your research interests and instead working on problems someone else finds interesting. Only tenured professors have the most opportunity to choose their own problems.

It might mean finding a collaborator outside your institution.

It might mean changing programs.

Things in most places are pretty messed up right now and these do not qualify as ordinary times, especially in NYC; your best options might include some patience and waiting for things to return to a more stable setting.

Too many possibilities and too many unknowns/factors specific to you and your current institution to give any specific answer, but the process of research, not just the contents, are difficult enough with help. This is not a good time in your career to venture out alone prematurely.


How to convert a grade in Italian scale to the UK grading scale?

there are resources online that do some approximate conversion like Scholaro. You will have to use your exam grades (look on your diploma supplement) for your GPA, not the final grade. I'm Italian too and used similar services myself when I was looking for Master's programs in the US. To access the selected program you then typically need a certified translation if the official language of the school differs from your degree, i.e., Italian diploma English school. Depending on the school, they might also require you to show a fourth year of university education, e.g. Master di primo livello, as US and UK programs often follow the 4-year format. But this is not a general rule, but it happened to me.
As a side-note, if you graduated from Marconi University in Rome, you can ask for a US-diploma free of charge at graduation, or 200Eur (I think) after that. Marconi is a special case as it has an International branch in Washington which is approved by the US department of education.
Hope it helps :)


Survey or original article: Which one is more important to get postdoc or tenure-track position?

There's no simple answer to this question, because there are a lot of variables left undefined. I think this is what we can call an example of a "false dichotomy." For instance, consider the following examples from physics:

A first-author "original" publication in a journal such as Physica A might not be as useful as a first-author review paper in Reviews of Modern Physics.
Being third author on a review paper in Reviews of Modern Physics might not be as useful as first author on a paper in Physical Review Letters.
The stage in one's career also makes a difference in some fields: a postdoc might not be asked to do a review in some fields, but might in others. (Tenure-track professors are a separate category in this respect.)

So I think there are a lot of issues to be considered in this process. However, if one is a postdoc, this is also a conversation to have with one's research supervisor. In general, such articles would be written with their involvement and participation.


With a background in mathematical finance and desire to apply for a mathematics PhD in another field, do I need a second master's?

I would say the answer depends on your background in mathematics, and from the information you give, I can't tell how extensive that is.  It isn't so important what the title is on your degree; it matters what you've done and what you know.

To start a US-style PhD in pure math, in which the first couple of years are coursework, you should have the equivalent preparation of a bachelor's degree in mathematics.  It should include, for example, about one year each of proof-based real analysis and abstract algebra.  You should be very comfortable with reading and writing mathematical proofs.

To start a European-style PhD, you are expected to be ready to begin working on research.  You should have completed graduate-level courses in algebra and analysis, and be very familiar with fundamental material in your subfield.  For an area like stochastic analysis, for example, I'd say you'd want to know the majority of the material in a textbook like Karatzas and Shreve, and be able to work through the proofs and solve the exercises.

One question is - what was the level of mathematical rigor in your courses up to stochastic calculus?  If it wasn't high, that's likely to be a problem.


How many graduate credit hours are generally required teach in a department?

In the US there isn't a standard requirement.

If you have a PhD, you could potentially become a professor. If you have a master's, you could potentially be an adjunct or instructor.

Although, I have seen smaller schools and community colleges advertising a requirement of X graduate credits to be an adjunct, where X is rather small (e.g., 6 classes).


How do interim or partial transcripts work for application, and is it possible to have an admissions decision reversed based on the final version?

You need to explore this with the institutions you apply to.

And you need to read the correspondence carefully. If you get accepted, then you are probably accepted except in rare circumstances. But if you are "conditionally accepted" then you need to meet the conditions, whatever they are, to assure acceptance.

Acceptances are generated based on more that GPA, of course. Someone needs to make a prediction of success before one will be issued. But no prediction is perfect and students fail out even after enrolling. Universities know these things.

Tips and advice: Work hard. Don't let the bad things happen.


The key word in that statement is assumed. That means that they believe that your submission and their acceptance of your manuscript implies that you have agreed to transfer the copyright to them. They are basically saying "you don't need to send a form transferring copyright, because you did so by allowing them to publish.

If there is a reason this is not the case—for instance, all the authors are US government employees, so that the work is in the public domain—then the publisher should be alerted for guidance.


How to thank a potential supervisor's email?

Do not overthink this (and do not write a very long text). Just write

  Dear Prof. NAME,

  Thank you very much for considering me as a PhD student.

  Best, NAME


How to improve chances of acceptance of a paper with an atypical structure?

I struggled with this very issue for my first couple of papers. I'll bet it's the middle part (Methods, Results, Discussion) that you feel doesn't fit the paper you're trying to write. That may because your view of the type of thing that goes into those sections is too narrow.

First, it may help to approach the writing a bit differently. Forget about the sectioning for the moment, and just write, in any order. Make the points you want to make. Add in the arguments or experimental results that you need to support those points. As you're writing, you realise that there are things your reader needs to know in order to understand your paper, so write that as well.

Now you can start to think about the order that the information should be presented in. So rearrange what you've written into logical paragraphs, and put them in a sensible order.

As you're doing this, a natural structure for your paper should emerge. There's stuff that the reader needs to know in order to understand your paper. That goes at the beginning, in the introduction. You'll also want a short summary of your main points. This will go in the conclusion. You might want to suggest areas for future research.

You may not need any acknowledgements in your paper. Ask your supervisor. You obviously need references.

The abstract is a summary of what the paper is about. I tend to write the abstract last, because it's only then that I know exactly what the "story" the paper is trying to tell is!

But it's the middle part (Methods, Results, Discussion) where the structure can be a bit confusing, especially if your paper isn't about a typical chemistry experiment. This seems to be the area where there's the most difference in structure between papers. For example, the results and discussion of those results might be combined into a single section, typically called "Results" or "Results and discussion".

So let's think of those sections a little more generally. You need to explain how you approached the problem. If your paper is an argument for something, then you need to explain your underlying assumptions, and how you reached the conclusions you reached. This is the sort of thing that goes into the "Methods" section -- although you may want to give this section a different title.

For an argument paper, it might be difficult to separate the "Results" from the "Discussion". So perhaps those sections could be combined into one section that presents your argument. Look for some papers that present arguments, you'll get ideas on structure.


What percentage of the code should be yours in a final year computer science project?

If I change that code with my variable names and create functions and add that code into those functions would that be a problem ?

That seems like blatant plagiarism: Taking code and changing variable names surely only serves plagiarism. Creating new functions from existing code surely only serves plagiarism too.

what do I do ?

Use as much external code as you like. That code should appear as-is, with any ownership, copyright, and licensing information intacted, where ownership information is missing, perhaps add it, at the very least, document the fact that code isn't yours.
Write your own code that uses external code. That's your contribution.
Occasionally, you may use an external code snippet within your code. Mark such code with comments, e.g., /** BEGIN: Code from xyz **/ and /** END **/.
Ultimately, your goal should be to achieve your objective with minimal code.


Will the January 2018 government shut down affect the NSF postdoc awards?

The NSF recently changed its accounting practices, so that money for awards are committed all at once, rather than year-by-year. So, that means that the funding for your award should already have been “available” when you got the notification. Unfortunately, a shutdown means that no further processing will likely take place until it ends, so there may be some delays in the start of your award. But I can’t imagine a scenario where the NSF cancels awards it was planning to make because of the shutdown.


Query regarding the academic journal submission

You want to provide maximal useful information. That should include funding sources and a current address.
Your friend should provide the journal with all that information. They will decide how to use it. A paper I wrote years ago needed three affiliations. It started with

The footnote read

That was in the days before email. Now there would be a current email address.


How do professors choose their summer salary?

I suppose this could depend on the funding agency.  For the NSF, your summer salary is determined by your academic year salary and you cannot receive more than that, although you could receive less if the program officer cuts that part of your budget.  I believe this is standard for U.S. funding agencies.

This situation is of course not fair to those who hold lower-paying jobs that do not reflect their achievements (but rather state budget priorities).  Like many things in grant funding, there's tremendous bureaucratic inertia and no hope of changing this aspect of the system.


Do Indian journals represent the quality of Indian universities?

Scammers appear in all nations, I'm afraid.  In addition to the Indian predatory publishers, I receive lots of spam from Chinese, German, and American predatory publishers, plus I'm sure from many other nations that just aren't coming to mind.  Just as I wouldn't judge American scholarship from the spam I get from American publishers, or from the diploma mills that operate there, so I would not judge Indian scholarship by the fraudsters of India.  It's just a large nation with an open society and a good information infrastructure, and so a certain fraction of scammers are to be expected.

Now, there are other aspects of the Indian school system which merit concern, but the publishing scams should not be the basis for any opinion that you hold.


How to determine compensation for developing new course for community college?

I think you're going to find that they want to pay you their adjunct rate for teaching the course, which might be $3,000 or so.  If you want to be paid more, you will probably need to negotiate a list of deliverables, which would then allow someone else to teach the course next time.

I believe there are two motivations for being an adjunct instructor.  Some people make a living at it by piecing together adjunct appointments from two or more institutions.  Others do it for the love of teaching; they have to have day jobs to support their teaching hobby.  I got paid about $2,500 to develop and teach a course in web applications in 1997.  Now I am retired from the day job I had then, have a full-time faculty appointment, an office at school, and everything!

Edited to add: I missed that it is a community education course.  You might get a few bucks more for that, or extra pay for classes over a certain size.  It will still be a four-figure amount.


If your article is in press, don't contact the editorial board. Their role of handling peer review is over. What's left is for the publisher to publish the paper, and they're the ones who can fix this. You can fix this, and any other minor issues you find, when you receive the proofs from the publisher.


When should a student attempt unsupervised research?

It is a common thread - see "Go rogue too soon/too late" in 10 easy ways to fail a Ph.D. and Going Rogue at The Chronicle of Higher Education. An excerpt from the first:

The advisor-advisee dynamic needs to shift over the course of a degree.
Early on, the advisor should be hands on, doling out specific topics and helping to craft early papers.
Toward the end, the student should know more than the advisor about her topic. Once the inversion happens, she needs to "go rogue" and start choosing the topics to investigate and initiating the paper write-ups. She needs to do so even if her advisor is insisting she do something else.
The trick is getting the timing right.
Going rogue before the student knows how to choose good topics and write well will end in wasted paper submissions and a grumpy advisor.
On the other hand, continuing to act only when ordered to act past a certain point will strain an advisor that expects to start seeing a "return" on an investment of time and hard-won grant money.
Advisors expect near-terminal Ph.D. students to be proto-professors with intimate knowledge of the challenges in their field. They should be capable of selecting and attacking research problems of appropriate size and scope.

Personally, I have a lot of experience with unsupervised research (yes, usually wasted a lot of time for no results), starting from high school.
Sure, doing advisor's project is much safer (as, in some sense, (s)he is responsible for the big picture, references, judging which result is good enough) and allows to forget about doubts (for good or bad) and concentrate on work.
However, what I've discovered after 1.5 of my PhD (mostly "going rogue") is that there are two important things:

asking experts (or peers), and
day-to-day collaboration.

Sure, you can have an expert and a collaborator in the same person of your advisor, but as long as you are not afraid of talking to other people and have some knowledge in the topic, it shouldn't be hard to ask experts appropriate questions.
When it comes to collaboration - it may be trickier (but not if you locally have people with an interest overlap).
On contrary, working alone for months on a theoretical problem, with little feedback, may be very hard (both technically and psychologically). I've learnt it the hard way. It is not a problem for one research line, but it is when all research is done alone (may be inefficient and depressive, perhaps unless you are in a deep love with it).


Is it undesirable to publish a 2019 paper in a 2020 issue?

In the present day, publication year is essentially irrelevant.  What matters for the job market is the acceptance date.  Usually publishers put the article online within days of acceptance.  At this point people begin citing it.  If the paper is not assigned to an issue until the next year, the only effect will be that people citing the paper will be annoyed by copyeditors asking what the publication year and issue are.


How should a teaching assistant explain his absence to the course instructor?

The best way to handle this is to acknowledge that you've screwed up, and to explain how you're going to make sure that you won't miss any class meetings and other events in the future. If there's a justification for why you missed the event (for instance, if you had an examination for a class you were enrolled in overlapping with office hours), you can mention that.


Is it worth going to a conference [IEEE UEMCON] to get my undergraduate thesis published?

If you see yourself in an academic setting in the future, this could help you. It's no guarantee, but it is very likely. This is a merit in the academic world. If you are coming from computer science and going into industry right away, and are done with academia, the published paper will not matter. CS people get jobs anyway without much trouble.

You'd need to try and see this as an investment into your future career IF you want to work in academia. Otherwise it's a cool item on ones resumé, but it won't nessecarily add much after you've gained some work experience which I'd like to guess will carry heavier weight than the paper.


Holding positions in industry while being a professor

Many possibilities:

Sabbaticals,

leaves of absence,

some Universities have "close" contacts with industry and some faculty have combined teaching / research roles...

Some engineering Universities really value faculty who have actually done real work and students appreciate that as well. Nothing like having someone talk about sensors and issues with sensors like getting temperature readings from a brake disc that is glowing red while spinning at 10K rpm... Compared to those "academics" that only ever push paper...

Some Universities even "use" final year engineering students to do funded research (their final year project) for particular issues using University machines as they have helped purchase said machines etc


Individual contribution to PhD thesis as a part of bigger project

If it is acceptable to your institution, then it is acceptable. I think that in a lot of lab sciences people in a given lab collaborate with each other quite extensively to contribute to the overall goals. Doctoral theses arise in this environment just as you say. Some one (PI?) hacks off a piece of a larger problem and passes it to a student to develop and report on. If it has "acceptable" significance then the student has a thesis. Hopefully it also advances the larger goals of the organization.

But this is largely due to the fact that, to do anything at all in such fields, that collaboration is required, along with the PI who provides the lab through grants. It can be quite different in other fields, but they have their own standards and processes.

Of course, the student could see an opportunity for a smaller problem in the context of the larger one, just as the PI can. I don't mean to imply that it is always the PI that initiates it. Usually the student will check with the PI whether it is good to pursue the idea.


How to reference a PDF document found on a website

Since this is a book, you will probably be asked to give the book citation instead of the link. In this case you reference the book as indicated by the journal and refer to the page inline.

e.g. We used the water attenuation as a function of frequency from Book_Author, year (Table 2.7, p. 41).

In the references use the journal's style, or for your report, use the style you reference papers. Then use the publisher of the book instead of the journal name (e.g. Cambridge University press)

This is usually done because a link might be broken after some years and then the reader won't be able to find the reference. In science, links are usually used when referring to some online extra material (e.g. videos, tables, codes, datasets) that the authors uploads to their own webpages, besides the online material provided to the journal. This is usually done because they want the data to be publicly available and the online material on the journal webpage might not be.

Even if your question is about a report and not a scientific journal, the best way to approach this is to learn to proper way to do it and stick to it. This will make your texts more professional and when it comes to papers you will be less likely to have cited, captioned etc something in the wrong way. The latter will help you have shorter referee report with less corrections.


Should I mention the awards I won to a potential masters supervisor?

Yes, you can (and should) mention that you already have research experience (did you also do the writing yourself?). This is an appealing skill when choosing between master students who want to do their thesis project with a senior researcher. However, I would formulate it more humbly. For example, "I already have some first experience with academic writing and conducting research, so I hope this will benefit the work for the upcoming thesis project. I attached my first manuscript to give you an idea of my previous work."


What to do if a discussion letter/paper is rejected because it's not an original research article?

The first step to take, if not already done, is to answer back to the Editor in Chief, politely explaining that the status of your submission (discussion letter) seems to have been overlooked. Stress again, politely, that the policy of the journal allow explicitly such letters, and that it would be better for everyone that they either enforce this policy (and not reject letters on the ground that they are not full research articles) or remove it from the guide to the authors. Given the answer you get, there are several possible follow-ups if your letter keeps being rejected.

You can contact the authors and see what they have to say. In fact, it would be something to be done before any of the propositions below. They may acknowledge the mistake and publish an erratum by themselves, acknowledging you, and this would make things right in the best way. If they do not answer in a satisfactory way, at least they will have been warned and your case will be stronger.

You can appeal to an ethics committee on your field, if one exists, disclosing both your letter explaining the error, the written exchanges you have had with the journal, and the conflict of interest you spotted for the authors of the original paper. Do not make assumption, just present the fact and let the committee judge for itself.

You can try to publish your letter in another journal, in order to make the official record straight. Depending on the existing venues, you may have to add some flesh to your letter and grow it to a full paper, even if short. You are right in your principles, such mistakes should not be let unknown, and a blog post is too personal and too unofficial to make it right. People should get the information on the mistakes you spotted while using the databases usually used in your field.

But, given you are a PhD student, before you take any step I very strongly advise you to ask your advisor (or another senior researcher you can trust) about it. Depending on your field, your situation, the stature of the author the work of who you criticize, you could end up in pretty bad situation if you do not beware. I cannot tell from the information you gave, but you also have to protect yourself, and unfortunately this is not always achieved by doing the right thing.


How to attract student attention in difficult/technical topics

First of all, you can't expect that all students are interested in the same manner. Concentration has its ups and downs over time. Also, some things are dull and will remain so, no matter how good a lecturer presents or how interested the audience is. This doesn't mean that you should skip it on the exam, students just have the choice to absorb it in class or later by themselves.

You seem, however, to face that the majority of students is uninterested. You could try to change the dynamic of class, for example, by going over the "heavy" parts at the beginning. That may include that you pace your schedules so, that that particular part of the curriculum comes at the beginning of the next class. If the "heavy" part is too elaborate, try splitting it into meaningful blocks, that can be intersected by "lighter" material, of course in a meaningful way. Ideal would be blocks that you can cover in 20-25 minutes.

Being a good lecturer is not only about the eloquence of talk or the skill of rhetoric, it is also about understanding that how to "pre-chew" the material for a given audience to keep their attention but still convey the knowledge. Dull things must be included, you can't change that. You can, however, change how you approach them.

PS: I don't think forbidding cells, laptops, youtube, etc. would help very much.


Are nonfiction writers, that avoid the use of footnotes/endnotes, respected by the academic community?

I don't see an issue in many (most?) cases. Especially if they are writing for a popular rather than academic audience. The question is the tradeoff between readability and the need for specificity in such works. Let me give an example.

While I'm a mathematician who taught CS until retirement, I read quite a lot of books on anthropology and archaeology. I don't read scientific papers, but try to follow advances as reported in the press as they occur.

There are two kinds of books. One in which an author will give a narrative covering what is known about a topic (say early humans in what became North America) without inline citations. These can be very readable, I find. There is no danger of assuming plagiarism since the author(s) give the further reading section which lists the source. Most of the ideas presented are "in their own words" rather than copied from sources, and most represent a scientific consensus along with some information about where the consensus breaks down.

Other authors, writing on the same topic use a large number of inline citations, with footnotes or (usually) endnotes. I find these to be much harder to follow and it is often necessary to go to the endnote as more is presented there than just the source, such as a few additional ideas. They may be a bit more precise, but for the audience, not essentially so.

So, in some sense, your question is, whether popularizers of science are respected or not. Some are, others not, of course. Great story tellers are valued, I guess. But it is a choice that an author makes. The ones I read are careful not to plagiarize, but are a bit less specific about which ideas come from which source. However, once a scientific consensus is achieved, even with some dissent, it seems less vital for these types of work. The "further reading" gives you a sense about how the consensus arose.

But if you are writing at the edge of the known world, the rules about citation are much more vital, since a consensus has not yet emerged.


Prospective PhD contacts potential supervisor but receives no answer after 2-3 emails, what to do?

To try to make a clear point: there is a range of opinions about how to respond to "cold calls" from people I don't know, etc. I myself find it easy to make a one-or-two-sentence response politely thanking an inquirer for their interest, but (if so...) that I "have no open positions in my group at this time" or whatever is suitable. For me, although I get a good number of these of various sorts, it takes less than 5 minutes a day, and I take the viewpoint that it is a good professional-social gesture to make that quick response (perhaps more worthwhile than yelling over the phone at phone-solicitors on old no-caller-id phones).

At the same time, at the other end, I know many people who take the viewpoint that sending them email no more obligates them to a response than do credit-card offers and other advertisements. And, indeed, given the ease with which we can mass-email, even with customizations, this is a fair, not unethical, not harsh reaction. Perhaps if my in-mails of this sort reached 10+ per day, I'd give up "trying to be polite", but my own current scale of "spam on behalf of earnest beginner in the business" is pretty low, so I can easily afford to be (superficially) "gracious" enough to respond.

In case people don't reply, I'm afraid you can't hold it against them, even while we admit that it would be great if they did respond, ... because there just isn't a general social principle that demands a response to all possible inquiries one may receive. Yes, it'd be nice, but it is simply not required.


Is it okay to submit a paper from a master's thesis without informing the advisor?

Under no circumstances can it be ok to submit with his name on it but without his explicit consent. This wouldnt be ok if he'd be enthusiastic about your research, and if he is not particularly fond of it, this will quite certainly end badly.

If you are confident that your advisor did not contribute to the planned submission in a meaningful way, the default course of action should be to sent him a message informing him of the planned submission and thanking him for the guidance received. That way, if he disagrees on not having contributed, there is a chance to fix stuff before they blow.


Moral dilemma in unwittingly being paid to complete a student's work

I think you should take the money, try to retain as much of my copyrights as possible (the law may help you do this implicitly rather than explicitly, which may be helpful), and refrain from doing anything else until after the student misuses your work.
Why? Consider that:

Plagiarism is not a crime.
Copyright violation is a crime.
Neither has occurred yet.
You have done the work in good faith.
You are not responsible for preventing others from plagiarizing your work.

Refunding him and keeping the work would be unfair to you because you have already done the work. You have every right to keep the money for the work you have done.
Refunding him and keeping the work would be unfair to him too, since he has every right to obtain the work from you that he has paid you for and waited for. Even if you refund his money, you can't refund the time that he has spent waiting for you to do the work, so you would arguably be liable for damages too.
If your work is actually plagiarized, then you will have a basis for complaining academically and/or legally, and it will be more difficult for your client to view you as a "snitch", etc. if he violates your copyright.
If you let his institution know before the deed occurs, then I'd argue you're doing something morally wrong: you're getting him into trouble for an act that he has not even committed yet. (This might be fine for dangerous actions, but this isn't one.)

Clarification:
I should clarify that my answer is only intended for a "generic" freelancer, not someone who has something else at stake too.  For example, if you yourself were e.g. a professor/graduate student/public figure/etc., then you could earn yourself a bad reputation among your colleagues by giving him the work even if most other people would consider what you do to be entirely ethical/moral/righteous. In that case, the wisest career move for you may not be the same thing as what a typical freelancer might or should do, so keep in mind I'm not addressing such situations.


Is the minimum GPA required for Graduate school a cut-off criteria or a general guideline?

There's no absolute here—it really depends on the program in question. Some departments are stricter about cutoffs than others. It depends a lot on the number of applications they receive, and how selective they need to be. However, I know that many good departments don't screen on GPA alone.

However, even if you're GPA is not "elite," that's not the end of the world, so long as you have the research experience and the letters of recommendation to support you. (A student from our department was recently admitted to a top-10 engineering program in the US on the basis of his research experience—his GPA was pedestrian at best.)


How would you write to your in-class team, that you are going to drop the class, leaving no hard feelings?

Your suggestion looks fine.  I would consider making an offer to bring them up to speed on anything you have been working on that could help them out.


How does the COVID-19 crisis affect durations of peer review and editorial handling?

I am an associate editor for two journals, and although the situation is fairly new, I expect to have no substantive change in the time for me to handle papers.

The reasons for this are:

Pretty much everything is handled purely electronically anyway, so there's no physical interaction to be disrupted.
Reviewing is typically a sparse activity by people who are mostly always overloaded anyway, and it's always fairly low triage for people.  As such, I don't anticipate the availability of reviewers to particularly change: if people have more time, they'll fill it with things more important to them; if people have less time, I'll just have to ask a few more to find a full reviewer set.
The time to review is typically dominated by the time that a manuscript ages quietly on the reviewer's desk before the review deadline arrives --- actually carrying out a review often does not take all that much time, by comparison. The number of weeks we give our reviewers isn't going to change, so that dominating time won't either.
Because of the preceding factors, there's already a lot of stochasticity in time to review. Even if it does go up a bit, I doubt it will be readily detectable against the background of stochasticity.


Making additional changes to manuscript after the refereeing process is completed

I always make minor edits (unrelated to the reviewer comments) at the time of doing revisions, and make a comment in the response letter, e.g. "we have also made minor changes to improve the readability of section 4.2." It's in the interests of the journal to have a well-written article.

Depending on the journal, you will probably also have a chance to make very minor revisions during the copyediting process.


Error on FastLane (NSF) letter of Reference System for the NSFPF

Screen shot and date stamp every attempt to do this operation until it works. Call the helpdesk 800 number back every hour during business hours until someone answers the phone, but don't just leave message after message if it goes to voicemail. If you haven't already, send invites via email personally to each of your references so that they know the request from FastLane will be coming eventually. Tell each of your references about the problem so that they'll be prepared to take alternative action if NSF gives you a workaround. Keep good records of all your attempts.

If you can figure out who the cognizant program officer is for the specific fellowship you are applying for, write them an email Monday after you have tried to get in touch with the FastLane user support folks again with a short explanation of your problem and ask them for options.

FastLane being down on broken is usually a great reason for NSF to give you an exception to a deadline.

As noted in the comments, there is some upcoming Fastlane downtime due to the NSF financial system upgrade, but that shouldn't be the problem today or for the rest of the week. The FastLane user support team is usually very responsive, but with the financial system update going on, they may be swamped.

Finally, you might also try talking to the Sponsored Research Office/Office of Sponsored Projects/etc. at your current university. They work with staff at NSF all the time, and may have contacts that can help you.


Thesis reviewer requests update to literature review to incorporate last four years of research. Do I need to do this?

The criticism is that you're not up to date on the current state of your own field of specialty, and it is not a light matter.  If the "reviewer" is some sort of committee member that can throw a wrench into your exit process, you should address the criticism.

The real issue is how to address it.  My assumption here is that your defense will be "typical", with a formal presentation followed by some sort of closed session.

You have a very limited amount of time before your defense, and you need to use it wisely.  To start, I'd pick the five most relevant citations to your work that you have, and search them forward to see who cited them, and read those papers-- there will probably be less than 20.  If nothing earth-shattering has happened, you will eventually add those to your reference list, and all should be good.  If there is something earth shattering and pertinent to your work, you probably have more research to do at this point.

How will your reviewer know you did it?  Well, for the closed session, you should have a slide in your rack entitled "review of recent literature".  In closed session, make the opportunity to say "in review, a criticism of how up to date my knowledge of the field was came up.  This was accurate, and this is how I've responded...  I think I've covered this, and will continue to stay up to date with the literature".

To add, they may require a bit of a rewrite-- that's actually fairly common-- but worry about that when the time comes.  The strategy is to to convince them that you've done the work, and you're ready to do that rewrite.  You don't have the time to do it between now and your defense, and my experience is that the document is largely sealed until it's defended anyway.  You're trying to set things up so your revised dissertation will be signed off on without a thorough going-through.