How should I deal with a colleague talking on my behalf?

I'd suggest putting in those days - they may or may not be lost, but losses occur*. No use crying over spilt milk. Writing the time down as lost means, you can be happy if something good comes out of them at the end. OTOH, aking a fuss creates a serious risk of a trench war that would cost much more time.

However, I'd also talk to him in a calm minute. I may be taking a line saying that he luckily foresaw the way my opinion went, yet I'd wish him to quickly ask me beforehand in the future.
Talkin calmly may need that you know exactly why you are so angry that you have to post in a public Q&A site.

* partiuclarly in writing proposals. There's a rumour here in Germany that the Bundesrechnungshof once estimated that for different kinds of public grants from a national economic point of view (i.e. including all proposals that are written: accepted as well as rejected) about as much money/effort goes into writing grants as is distributed by the different grant programs (estimates ranging from 1 : 2 to 2 : 1 are mentioned).


Why do some fields care so much more about citation styles?

The purpose of a citation style is to provide the reader with references in a standard and legible way. Using a certain style within a research field makes reading and skimming through citations within the field's publications more efficient.

Uniform citation style within a unit of certain field makes the unit's publications look uniform and adds to the quality of the publication, just as good grammar and otherwise good appearance does.

Arguably, a big fuss is when students are learning the correct ways of citation.


Is obtaining a professorship contingent upon the ability to secure federal grants?

Setting aside all of the questions around DACA, let's focus on the question of how necessary federal grants are to obtaining (and keeping) a position as a professor.

Professorships at research-intensive universities are indeed generally strongly dependent on the perceived ability to bring in funding.  Among other things, without funding it is difficult to support graduate students. Without graduate students, one's research typically progresses much more slowly (excepting perhaps in certain theoretical areas).  Moreover, at some universities successful graduation of Ph.D. students is part of making tenure.  You may be able to do this with private, state, or international funds, of course, in which case you would want to try to demonstrate why this plan is feasible to a hiring committee.

Professorships at teaching-focused universities, on the other hand, are typically much less tightly linked to the ability to get federal funding. While you may face other obstacles there, your primary job would in any case be teaching rather than research, and small amounts of funding from non-federal sources may be much more plausible as an approach.


What can I do when my transcripts have mistakes?

If you can't wait for the school, and the professor agrees that this was his error, ask him for a letter saying so (on school letterhead) which you can attach to the transcript. Ditto for the school itself. If employers have some evidence of the error, and have someone they can contact to confirm the correction, this should be manageable.


I have a Ph.D. in Educational Science from Iran. Do I need accreditation to work in the U.S.?

You would need to be certified if you wanted to teach in the public schools (kindergarten through twelfth grade).  But there isn't anything like this for teaching in college.  It's just a matter of convincing the department that you're the right person for the job, based on your qualifications.

Edit:  I tried to make my first sentence clearer.


Can you present at a conference without original data and results? (First year PhD Student)

First of all, congrats on being invited to speak! Would it be possible for you to give a broad review of the state of the field in your talk? This should perhaps be run by the conference organizers who invited you, to see if this is something they would be interested in. But your comment about:

  The theme is exactly related on my doctoral work, and they really insisted on wanting my expertise because not many people are working specifically on this topic

makes me think that your insights on the state of the field might be precisely what the organizers are interested in. And in reviewing the state-of-the-art, presumably your masters work would be one example, but not the entirety of the talk.

I think this suggestion:

  My advisor suggested that I could talk about the context/background for my PhD research.

would also fit nicely in such a talk.

Regarding your concern:

  I'm hesitant to jump into the methodology part because I don't want this idea to get scooped since I am such in the early stages of my doctoral program

if you choose to do a "review" talk, then I think you can focus on what you see as the remaining problems in the field, and then see how much of your intended methodology seems to be "trivial" or "obvious" given those problems, since it's sharing publicly the "nontrivial" ideas that you might need to worry about. Certainly if there's anything patentable in your methodology, you should discuss with your advisor how to go about protecting the ideas before the talk.

Otherwise, I think presenting (and claiming!) the ideas at the conference might actually be helpful for your PhD work. For instance, you might have some attendees ask you if they can collaborate with you on your ideas, and/or you might get some useful feedback on them (e.g., "have you seen this relevant paper?", "did you consider this challenge?", etc.).


Is it necessary add a nomenclature with a list of used symbols of
  variables, operators and abbreviations?

You should treat this comment like any other comment from a reviewer: It tells you that one potential reader of your paper (and, if the editor did a good job, a qualified one) had a hard time understanding your paper. Hence, you should improve the presentation of your paper in this respect, so you should make the effort and help potential readers. (There may be the chance that this particular journel even requests a nomenclature, but I did not check this…)

  Is there any specific position for this section ?

For this, there are two good answers here.


How can I make a presentation accessible but low on text?

The flip side is that some people are vision impaired and text won't work for them. You don't need to pass transcripts around, but you can make them available for those who would like them. Some conferences have student workers that monitor the entrance to the speaking hall and they can distribute them at the door. You can also announce at the start that they are available after the talk (or online). Many folks will have laptops open during any presentation. Some people may want to record your talk.

But it is a good idea not to have slides that are dense with text. For everyone. If people are scribbling down your slides, then they won't be listening to you.

If you can print only a small number of copies you should probably make them available online as well.


Should I send my mediocre test scores if it's not compulsory to do so?

In general, test scores are only used as the minimum requirement for the scholarship. High scores don't help but a score much below median would likely hurt you. If your application statement was well-written and your other materials (letters, grades) were good, I wouldn't worry. If the accompanying materials were weak, then you have much bigger things to worry about than your TOEFL.


Is it possible to complete a PhD in CS in 3 years?

In theory, yes, it is possible. In practice it depends on many things. Let me try to list a bunch of the variables that have affect the time required.

The minimum requirements that you are likely to find for a doctorate are (a) pass a set of qualifying exams and (b) write a dissertation acceptable to the faculty. There may be a few exceptions but most of the exceptions will add requirements.

To pass the examinations, you normally take certain courses. You may already have the knowledge needed to take the exams from your masters, but many courses are designed specifically to ready you for the exams. If you don't have the knowledge you need to get it (courses or elsewhere) and that takes time.

The examinations normally guarantee that you have a solid but broad knowledge of your field. Research, on the other hand requires deep but narrow knowledge of a small sub-field. The graduate courses are also fairly broad, but also start to take you into the depths of some subfield and many will stress recent advances in some field.

To write a dissertation requires that in a small area of your discipline you become a subject expert - world class. That may require additional course work in the form of seminars with faculty and a few students. If you start out close to the boundary of the known world in the area in which you want to do research then you can move quickly. Otherwise it may take time and study to gain the required focus.

To write a dissertation, requires some knowledge of research process and in some fields that can take time to master. It is less likely to be an issue in mathematics, say, or in some parts of CS. But if you lack the knowledge of how to do the specific sort of research required of you, it will take time to gain it.

To write a dissertation requires a suitable problem. That problem can come from you or from a suitable advisor. But if there is no problem at hand then it will take time and study just to find a problem. Moreover, the problem has to be suitable. If it is too easy to solve or too hard then it isn't suitable. I worked, briefly, on both too hard and too easy problems in my math degree. But disposing of them and coming to the right problem only took several weeks of study. But it is hard to put a time limit here as research, by definition, is an exploration of the unknown.

To write an acceptable dissertation you have to produce some valuable work at the boundary of knowledge by solving the problem(s) posed. You also have to write it up and make sure there are no gaps that might invalidate the work. This can take time.

You have to make your advisor happy. Sometimes this is easy but sometimes not. Usually, however, there is the question of "How much is enough?" This is a value judgement, of course, and you and your advisor need to come to agreement.

Finally, you need, in most places, to defend your dissertation before a committee or the public and you need to handle a fair amount of paperwork. This can take some time, also, but isn't normally a big issue.

Note that lots of these things take time, but most of them require an amount of time that is hard to estimate and impossible to bound. If you are well prepared for exams and research and you have a suitable advisor and a suitable problem then three years is feasible, provided that the problem itself doesn't have hidden traps that aren't apparent at the start. Again, the existence of those traps is impossible to predict since you are extending the known world.


What are the benefits for universities/professors to record online courses?

I record my lectures (when possible) for the following reasons:

Easier access for students who can't attend class.  While I generally want students to come to class, there are valid reasons for being absent (e.g., I'm currently teaching classes to military members who often have duty that preempts class attendance).  I can also point students to a video to review if they ask me questions explicitly covered in class (and also for general review).
Open access.  I think it's pretty cool to live in a world where it is possible to get free access to videos that enhance knowledge.  I feel like I'm playing my little part by putting my lectures online.
Introspective review.  It can be extremely beneficial to review your own teaching methods, although I don't have time to do this for all of my classes.  I have gone back to particular sections to review, and I almost always find something I could improve upon.
(minor) The America's Funniest Videos factor.  I've had clips that have been unintentionally hilarious, either because of something I've said, or because of something students have said. :)

Universities have their own reasons for putting classes online, and you've already listed a number of them.  I'd like to believe that most of the reasons are altruistic, with sites such as MIT's OpenCourseWare and Stanford's Online Courses providing no-strings-attached courses for free.  I would also hope that someone is doing research on these types of course offerings, to see if they are really having benefits to the people that watch them.  I don't believe the bottom line at extremely selective schools will ever be hurt by offering free course material, but if they do start feeling the pinch I imagine they will change their models.

Sites like Courseara are for profit and starting to make money by offering to verify certificates of completion for a cost.

  Why, then, some [Universities] charge enormous fees for attending courses?

The question of college expense is a can of worms that has as many differing answers as there are people asking about it.  Selective colleges charge what they do because (1) it is expensive to run a brick-and-mortar college, and (2) the applications keep rising and kids can still get loans, grants, and other aid.  Obviously it is much more subtle than that, and it would take more than a few free economics courses to get to the bottom of it.


Whenever I am doing a mathematics-heavy piece of writing (in LaTeX, of course), I tend to track the formal notation with two tools:

Every piece of notation (symbol or otherwise) gets its own \newcommand, which is used religiously.
At the first point where formal notation starts to be used, I add a table of notation that includes all of the significant notation.

It is further typically the case that each of these is broken out into its file (e.g., notation.tex, symboltable.tex) that is input into the main document, so that there is no chance for the definitions to spread around into different parts of the document.

There are several nice things about using this approach:

Using LaTeX commands for notation ensure that notation will be consistent
It is easy to change notation by changing the contents of the command
When you remove a piece of notation, you can delete the old command and be assured of errors anywhere that the command remains
The commands file can be used as a checklist for completeness of the table, and the table as a checklist for completeness of the definitions in the text body.

In many cases, the table may not survive all the way to submission (though I very much like to have one, it is an easy thing to cut from an over-length paper), but adding or removing it is just one \input line to comment in the source file, so it can still be very much a part of the manuscript development process, even if it's not showing up in the final manuscript.


What to do when principal investigator publishes your work without putting you down as a coauthor?

The first thing to do is to realize that you are on dangerous ground and that nothing good is going to come out of this situation. Having your colleagues (including your PI) think that you are accusing your PI of academic dishonesty is a major black mark against you, even if your PI has done something wrong.

While it is important to vent, you need to do this very carefully. You cannot vent to any of your work colleagues or anyone who knows your PI. Even a post in a public forum like this is dangerous. Yelling in your closet at home is probably best. Even better would be in a closet in a hotel in a foreign country. I am not kidding, no one can know about this until you can deal with it calmly.

Once you can calmly deal with the issue calmly, schedule a meeting with your PI to ask what you could have done to get authorship on the review. Do not accuse your PI of stealing your work, or even hint that you deserved authorship. Hopefully this discussion goes well.

If the discussion doesn't go well, or even if it does, after a little bit, schedule a different meeting to discuss authorship on all the work you are currently undertaking. This is something that doesn't get done enough, and can cause major problems like this.

At that point you will hopefully have a clear understanding of your PI's policies on authorship. Now you need to decide if they are unfair, or were not applied in the case of this review. If the PI's policies are unfair (or not applied fairly), you need to find a new advisor ASAP. Once you have secured another position, but not before, think about leveeing accusations of academic dishonesty.


Is it okay to defer accepting a PhD scholarship to see if I get accepted into foreign Universities?

There are some variations between countries, but generally when you are awarded a scholarship tied to a PhD program the scholarship is automatically given to you as soon as you enroll. So you cannot defer accepting a scholarship. So you should figure out how the scholarship is paired with the admission process, if you have to enroll within a certain time of having received the scholarship that that's your deadline. You could also enroll and then drop out but in some cases you might have to repay part of the scholarship back, although unusual this could happen. Keep in mind that there's also the ethical side of things, if you don't accept the scholarship can go to someone else, and by dropping out after the program has begun you take an opportunity off someone else.


How disrupting is the use of blockchain for university resources?

The linked article is idiotic. This is an obvious application of digital signatures, not blockchains. The article dismisses digital signatures:

  The problem with using Adobe and Certificate Authorities (CAs) is that there are multiple points of failure - if a bad actor can fool a CA, then he can produce PDFs that look like they were signed by a university, but are in fact forgeries. Plus, the system is expensive and inflexible because it only works for PDFs

Only someone with zero understanding of cryptography would think that digital signatures only work with PDF files or can only be done using a particular piece of software from Adobe. The relevant technology is old, not patent-encumbered, and available in a huge number of free and open-source implementations.

Fooling a competent CA is probably much, much harder than fooling a university. But if some university feels somehow that they are more trustworthy than a CA, they can simply generate their own public/private key pairs.


How to participate in a remote IEEE Conference, due to politics problems in my country?

Contact the conference chair and/or the program chair of the conference as ask how you can proceed. For some conferences this will be possible, and I suspect that IEEE will support reasonable requests. Most large conferences will have the ability to project from remote sources.

To actually present, however, will require some infrastructure on your end, including some sort of video link (maybe just a web cam) and adequate band width for the link. It might even be possible for a prepared talk to be sent to them prior to the conference by digital media. But you can explore the possibilities with the PC or CC. But you need to do it early.

A third possibility is to have you not present at all, physically or virtually, but still have your paper appear in the proceedings.

Happily, digital solutions exist. Sadly political issues make some things hard.


Why are small cap and old style numerals not used in technical writing?

The answer lies in a combination of technology and efficiency. In the old days when all was typeset "by hand" and not electronically, switching between Roman numerals and old style ones was not difficult. When electronic publishing became available, typography as a whole was ruined because everyone thought they now could make professional looking typography on their own personal computer and laserwriter. For a long time the digital typefaces did not include old style numbers because the character sets were too small to include those (E.g. PostScript Type 1) but now with the unicode standard, much more is included in a single type face. Thus, for a long time one had to switch from one type face to another to include these effects. In LaTeX, this was a little easier as you point out than in, say, Word.

The use of old style numerals was thus partly lost through the "digital revolution" but I also think it was lost because they simply went out of fashion. As with everything else typography and ideas within typography changes over time. I am not sure that the loss is entirely due to the introduction of digital tools but this introduction was a sort of final "stab in the back" from which it is hard to recover. In fact we are still seeing the effects of the PC in many publications since everyone is now the typographer without knowing much about the trade.

So to cap off, in the scientific publishing world, where speed is a key ingredient, attention to these details have simply not been considered as worth the time. One therefore must look at publications with more aesthetic goals to find fine typography.


Is there academic research that supports individual over group work for better learning?

I found this study, which is a pretty interesting read: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jbryson/CBRReport.pdf
In the end it is proved that group work isn't beneficial. Most of the students who worked by them selves scored higher than the groups, by showing and explaining there work, but a bunch of others got the question wrong. The groups were scattered in the middle scores, meaning that they got more answers right than the individuals, but the individuals had a better understanding on how to solve the problem. When students work in groups, they get more questions right, but they don't understand what they are learning. This proves that it is better to work as individuals, since more students will understand what they are doing, although more will get lower scores. Also, the groups, probably only got more correct, since the students are collaborating and helping each other, which doesn't show that they understand what they are doing.


Why are there regional differences in research interests in mathematics and similar areas?

It is also conceivable that, in experimental sciences, doing research on some field is impossible without using special apparatuses or organisms that exist only in some specific part of the world.

This is the part where you are mistaken. Access to apparatus is not the only reason nor the main reason researchers like to be in proximity. The reason is that physically talking in person is often much more effective than every other remote communication method for discussing ongoing research. It is a lot easier to work on a field if you can frequently meet with other people from that field, have lunch with them, go to their conferences without it being a huge journey and get their feedback on your work directly. Also, when teaching people tend to focus on their own favorite areas of work, which leads to undergraduates becoming biased towards those areas. Undergrads themselves have a slight tendencies to remain in their own country, in which case they are likely to end up in fields popular there.

So in sum, there is one giant factor which is that in-person communication is very important. There are also many tiny factors that, together, create self-amplifying effect. Being around people with an interest makes you more likely to also develop that interest, and having an interest makes you likely to end up being near other people who share it. Local biases in interest develop as a result.


Do details of my undergraduate title matter?

In the long term it won't matter at all. There might be a small effect in moving to your next position depending on whether you go to grad school or to industry, but after a few years no one will notice anymore. You will be responsible for your own reputation and people will look to that, not to the specific degree you earned - especially its title.

I also studied math, but in the US. Here we have a very broad undergraduate education, studying many things beyond the major subject. At graduation I had qualified for either a BS or a BA and was given the choice. I chose BA as it seemed to me to be more "interesting". I had taken extra courses both in math and in other subjects. But it never mattered. Literally no one cared. For entry to grad school the transcript shows what I had done.

But, you might use the opportunity to think about what you want to do for the next ten or so years. Grad school and academia, or industry.


Can I ask for first authorship on future publications that may come out of my design?

Generally speaking, you cannot "reserve" first authorship on possible papers that may come out of some work that you've done. Depending on the scope of the submission (when it's completed) and who writes/edits the actual text of the paper, you may or may not actually deserve first authorship on it. It would be inappropriate to promise you first authorship on all future papers coming out of the design at this stage.

What you can do is tell your advisor,

  I'd like to start working now on a draft of a paper about my design.

Discuss the planned scope of your submission with your advisor: in particular, whether your paper should include a description of the implementation which has yet to be done, or whether a paper on the design alone is sufficiently publishable. Either way, start working on a draft right away.

Also discuss authorship of the paper you're going to start writing, given the scope the two of you have agreed on for this particular paper, including:

whether you will be first author
whether your advisor will be a co-author
what position the other yet-to-be-named implementer will have (if you decide to include the implementation in the paper)
and what additional contributions are expected from each author in order to merit authorship according to this agreement (both technical, and with respect to writing and editing).

If you discuss this with your advisor, start working on a draft now, write a lot of the text in the submission, and you generally "drive" the project and the paper submission forward, you will (assuming your work meets the standards for first authorship in your field) have a very strong case for first authorship on this paper.

Note that unless you do more work to merit authorship on other, future papers related to your design, they'll only be expected to cite and/or acknowledge your work.


B- in a Major Class Last 60 Credits (Mathematics)

Any advice?

Yes.  Since you have a designated adviser, I recommend talking to them about it.  They can guide you through the rest of your program.  You can talk to them when classes resume, which is fine, because you have  long term considerations in which absolutely no action is needed or helpful over the semester break.

Your question here is not really practical or answerable.  Yes, it is better to get higher grades than lower ones: you heard it here first.  Obviously if you could retroactively increase your B- grade, then your hypothetical PhD application would be at least slightly stronger.  No one B- is going to make or break a PhD application.  If you are having time management issues, then you should take steps to address them...starting with talking to your adviser.  You might consider delaying taking the sequel to the course you got a B- in to shore up your knowledge, acquire better time management skills, or both.  On the other hand you might need to take this course right away in the context of your program as a whole.

Finally, I notice that you seem to have more success with biology than mathematics: compare a likely first-authored publication with a B- grade in an intermediate level course.  If you apply to a program in mathematics, then your math skills will be compared against others whose interests are solely or primarily in math.  If you apply to a program in biology then your math skills will likely be found to be very strong and set you apart from many of the other candidates.

Enjoy the holiday break.


On my CV, what will be the best way to present the 5 months gap since defending my PhD and the official start of the postdoc appointment?

I doubt that five months needs any explanation at all, especially at the present time. But, unless you are in an unusual legal system, "postdoctoral" is a descriptive not a legal term. "Independent researcher" also works.
But a line in the CV suggesting "Independent collaborative research" would seem to me to cover it well and also be positive.
In interviews and discussions you can go in to the visa and pandemic issues.


Is it okay to critique my already published paper?

In short: no, there's no need for that.

Minor errors, like typos, erroneous labeling, coloring and such, sometimes happen and are not a big problem; think of them as printer's devils. If you think that some parts of the paper could be written better (everything always can be done better!), but the paper got accepted, than don't strain yourself on it - it was peer reviewed after all.

If you found something like wrong numbers put in a table, or a formula with an error (but used the correct ones in the research, so the mistake is only in exposition), then you can write an erratum and point out that

  Fortunately, this was only a typing error, and as such it does not affect any results published in XXX.

Examples of minor corrections:

example 1
example 2

Examples of major, yet not crucial corrections:

example 3
example 4

In a more serious case:

If you found that your analysis is flawed, e.g. claimed that X can be used to predict Y, but eventually learnt that it is impossible and the conclusions of the work are wrong, then you should contact the editor, explain in detail what happened and ask what's the preferred course of action. Maybe you'll be advised to write a comment to be published in the same journal, or indeed the editor might decide to retract the work. But this is then the editor's work to decide what's best.

Example:

example 5

Additional reading:

Elsevier retracting 26 papers accepted because of fake reviews
How to avoid the stigma of a retracted paper? Don't call it a retraction
The famous Lancet retracted article linking autism to MMR vaccines


Why is the "citation/reference page" counted towards the maximum limit of pages in many journals and conferences?

Traditionally, one goal with length limits is to reduce costs related to printing, typesetting, and distribution. If that factor is at play, it makes perfect sense to include references and author lists in the length limit. It has some unfortunate consequences (undercitation, in particular), but the journals/conferences have to decide what they value more.

the list of references are growing. One cannot imagine to be interdisciplinary and be stingy on the number of citations.

Unfortunately, I can easily imagine that. Some "glossy" journals even have rather low limits/guidelines for the number of citations allowed.


Math Undergrad Wants to do Master's of Statistics

The good news is that it almost doesn't matter which path you take; you've got sufficient drive and determination, and from your observations about yourself, skill.

You're clearly interested in getting out there and working, which is great. Just remember that the work will always be there (for decades and decades to come), and that your time at school will be finite; try to enjoy it. :)

To that end, I believe Option 2 is a really good option for you, and is the least risky option. TA-ships are fantastic, and if you can score one while being in school, it really helps cut down on financial pressure. Additionally, you're giving yourself time to really develop your own stats knowledge which will help you in either corporate or research environments. Even if your stats department isn't that great, your research is what you make of it; plenty of awesome people have graduated from non-elite universities and have since done amazing things, and it's not unusual to seek a little guidance or insight from people outside your department. Besides, if you're as talented as you sound, being a shining star in a department has its advantages. ;)

Getting to your Question 1, if you finish your Bachelor's while taking extra stats coursework, and then enter the workforce, that's fine, but it then becomes harder to reenter grad school due to various other real-life factors such as having to fully support yourself, possibly getting married (and/or having a kid) which may bind you to some location, and so forth.

Also, maybe your prospective job after Bachelor's will pay for your education, but going to school under those circumstances takes a bit longer, and it also means the school will have to be close to your job (unless it's an online program or whatever). It's just too easy for complications to creep in once you step foot out of school.


Benefit of publishing large articles/papers instead of books

As always, it depends. First of all,

  publishing a book was more prestigious than publishing articles

depends on the area. In parts of the humanities, writing a book is an almost-necessary condition for tenure, but in my area of CS, a book is viewed as best as a waste of time pre-tenure.

In terms of absolute prestige, books and articles serve different purposes. Even a 200 page article might be a technical exposition of a single result. Witness for example the ongoing series of articles on graph minors in mathematics. A book often tries to distill and put in perspective a body of work, and (sometimes) might have educational components like exercises/problems.

A well-written book gives you some cachet as an expert in an area, but a seminal journal article can do the same. It really depends on what purpose you expect the document to serve.

A final point. A book (even a technical one) may not be peer-reviewed in the same way as an article. Indeed, it's not common in my area to have brand new research appear first in a book (I'm excluding simple observations and recasting of results).


Is it OK for a professor to refuse access to individual test marks?

I read (skimmed) through the statues in Japanese law and the associated statutes it links.

Moreover, a legal case called the Toyama Daigaku incident clarifies that universities have large leeway in these matters. Here's the opinion of the Japanese supreme court:

  大学は、国公立であると私立であるとを問わず、学生の教育と学術の研究とを目的とする教育研究施設であって、……一般市民社会とは異なる特殊な部分社会を形成しているのであるから、このような特殊な部分社会である大学における法律上の係争のすべてが当然に裁判所の司法審査の対象になるものではない。

Translated:

  A university regardless of whether it is a national or public university or a private university is an education institution with the objective of the education of students and academic research ... Since these differ from normal society precisely in being founded to be a special type of society, the features of these institutions with respect to this special society, of course, do not fall within the purview of the court to investigate.

While I think it's terrible,  I can find no basis for requiring the professor to supply you with the rationale for the grade you received. If anything, there's wide berth for professors to determine grades.

Your specific institution may have more precise rules but most of the institutions I looked at specified:

60% as passing
15 class sessions of 90 minutes each
grades based on some combination of classroom attendance, tests, and papers

(this is also the same where I am teaching).


What's the real difference between a postdoc and a research fellow? (Which one is considered a 'better' experience?'

Q: It's not clear to me the actual difference between a postdoc and research fellow, especially when looking at the typical academia road.
Correct. Often times there is not a difference.
Titles are institution specific (e.g., universities, national labs, funding agencies) and often sub-division within institutions (e.g., departments, even specific PIs based upon how they hire people with their institution's hiring mechanism).
Sometimes a title including post-doc or similar title (e.g., post-doctoral fellow) requires the person be within X-years of their terminal degree.
Conversely, as noted by others, research fellows or similar title can be permanent positions, be programs or even titles for experienced scientists, or be visiting programs for distinguished faculty and researchers from other places.
For example The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has a Fellowship Program for people (ranging from recent grads to tenured faculty) to gain experience applying science to policy.
You ask about demonstrating Qualities like 'Independent researcher that can design and lead high quality research programs'.
Rather than looking at title, demonstrate these qualities through outcomes.
For example, your CV might include (order the text based upon your CV's target such as a research or teaching school):

Position title, Place Name, supervised by Dr. Smith (2019 -2020)
Developed new widgets theory resulting X publications (depending upon your CV format, perhaps cross-ref here, e.g., Jones et al. 2019, Smith et al. 2020). Wrote grants for $XX,000 and managed the widget research project. Mentored Y peons. Presented results at XYZ. Developed and taught new course, Widget-ology. List other relevant outcomes to the position you're applying for.

Of course, list your grants, presentations, and publications in their own, respective sections of your CV.
Depending upon your subfield, the Place Name and the PI you worked under can be given a lot of weight or little weight compared to your outcomes (e.g., pubs, grants, technical skills).
Sometimes Position Title can carry weight, but these are usual for hard to obtain fellowships that are also captured in other parts of your CV (e.g., a US NSF Postdoc Fellowship that you obtains as the PI would also be listed under Grants on your CV).
Compared to a position's nouns (e.g., titles, places, PIs), actions usually carry more weight.
For example, publishing a first authored paper in Science or Nature would outweigh where you had your post-doc fellowship.


How to find a list of all articles published by a particular journal?

Most university libraries subscribe to many databases. Web of Science is only one. Scopus is another. And there are a huge number of databases that are more discipline specific. In pretty much all these databases you can search the source or publication name field for a particular journal. And they will enable you to export detailed bibliographic data.

Some may place limit on the number of records you can readily export.

But the basic advice is that if one database does not give you what you want, try another. My default is Scopus, but there are many others.


Given the traditional ACM copyright license, is it legal to publish the paper on ResearchGate?

No. Researchgate is a for-profit organization that makes money from ads and job adverts. See for instance http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/12/a-social-networking-site-is-not-an-open-access-repository/.

Also, if you share your paper there, the Researchgate TOS state that you, not them, have to cover all the legal costs in case they get sued (Article 3, comma 5).


Editor says "the paper will not be acceptable within a reasonable number of revisions": is it worth appealing the rejection?

Appeals are usually intended to be pursued when you think there was a serious procedural problem with the way your paper was handled, resulting in a decision that was not properly based on your paper's content.  Some examples I might think of:

Reviewers were not qualified to judge the paper, or their reports were of extremely low quality (suggesting they may not have read the paper or given it serious consideration)
Editor or reviewers have a conflict of interest
Editor or reviewers show evidence of bias or prejudice against the author
Other unprofessional behavior on the part of editors or reviewers

None of that seems to apply here (unless there is something you haven't mentioned).  It sounds like the reviewers read your initial submission and said it wasn't acceptable for publication as it was; it needed significant revision.  You made some revisions but they are not satisfied.  So you still don't have a version which they consider suitable for publication.  If the editor thought it was worth the time to keep revising it, he could let you do that, but he doesn't.  So your paper is rejected.

It sounds to me like this decision was properly made based on the reviewer's opinion of the paper's content, with which the editor concurs.  You may disagree with that opinion, but simple disagreement isn't grounds for appeal - you'd have to show the editor and/or reviewers did something objectively wrong.

So submit to another journal.  But first, go through the reviewers' comments carefully, and make the changes you feel are appropriate.  They might need to be extensive.  Reading between the lines, it sounds like the reviewers didn't think that your revision did a good enough job of addressing their concerns, so maybe you need to think more carefully about what they said.  The reviewers for the new journal may well have the same concerns.


Is it inappropriate to tell my students to check their school email?

At every (US) institution I've attended or worked at, there's been an official school-wide policy that students are expected to check their school email regularly, and that sending official communications there constitutes sufficient notification.  So check your school's policies; if you have such a policy, then it's certainly appropriate to remind students about it.

Moreover, in such a case, you can enforce it: if you send an email to school accounts saying "Please respond by date X if you want Y", and they don't respond by date X (whether because they didn't check their email or for any other reason), you may not be under any obligation to give them Y.  (Disability accommodations could have special rules so contact your school's disability office to check on that.)


Applying for another PhD after dropping out 4 years ago, should I use my previous PhD supervisor or undergraduate supervisor for a reference?

Assuming your resume includes the fact that you spent 4 years doing PhD research and were not awarded the degree, I don't see the problem with asking your former supervisor for a reference. I assume this is the case, because you still need to account for the 4 years in your work history. In that case, your supervisor's letter could be valuable in explaining that you weren't told to leave the program due to other concerning issues; this was for health reasons.

But here's the key: can your former supervisor write a strong letter of recommendation? Ask him or her explicitly whether they can do that. If not, move on to a different reference.

Think about any other references you might be able to call upon in your current position as an alternative. Do they need to be professors? Have you worked with research associates or other professionals who can vouch for you?


Under what circumstances is it beneficial for an advisor to seek sole authorship when their advisees deserve to be listed as co-authors?

In my (admittedly naive) view, it would seem that the advisor would benefit more from co-authoring papers with their advisees than trying to pass the work off as their own, if nothing more than to show (to, e.g., tenure/promotion committees) that they are actively engaging their student researchers in the research activities of the group.

I tend to agree with your sentiment here. The problem is that not every evaluation committee (for tenure, for promotion, for regular end-of-the-year raises) is that sane.

Example 1: in my old university, we had for some time a hard tenure rule that required applicants to have a small number of recent single-authored papers. In applied computer science, basically nobody writes single-authored papers. It is simply not done. I don't know any concrete cases, but I would not be surprised if that rule led to some "single-authored" papers where the work was really done by a master student.

Example 2: I have heard of universities in Asia that base end-of-the-year raises on accepted papers. The concrete amount is dependent on the number of authors, as well as on the place in the author list, making it very attractive to "forget" authors or put the supervisor's name first.

Here on academics.SE, we tend to forget that academia varies more than we think, and just because a certain unethical behavior would not make sense in our university, there is no reason to believe that this is true everywhere.


Is it fair to give zeros to students who missed early assignments because they added the class late?

At most institutions, the last day to add a course is set up by the institution, not the professor.  We have an obligation to honor that, which means allowing students to enroll, with full full privileges, up to the last day they're allowed to.

Giving 0's for assignments they've missed is inconsistent with that.  I prefer to simply ignore previous assignments of the sort you're describing - if their score for that part of the class would have been based on 13 weekly assignments, now it's based out of 11.  (Sadly, this can be a little hard to administer depending how you calculate grades.)  Alternatively, they can be asked to make up the work; it is the responsibility of students to keep up with the courses they've enrolled in, either by auditing them while deciding or making up what they missed, so it's reasonable to ask them to do the assignment on a reasonably short time scale (I usually like two weeks, which should be enough time to avoid excessive overlap with any other commitments, but one week would be appropriate if the assignments are short and it's not an exam-laden week).


Is it wrong to repeat yourself in the abstract, introduction and conclusions?

The three things are doing pretty different jobs, and so should be pretty different in content.

The abstract is an advert for your paper.  Someone might read a list of titles and abstracts (for example on arXiv) and decide on that basis whether it's worth their while downloading and reading the rest of the paper.  The abstract has to be attractive, but not fraudulent ('truth in advertising'!).  When you read an abstract, you're trying to find out: (i) is this paper in my area?, (ii) is it asking a question I care about? (iii) does the conclusion sound interesting?  You don't have to summarise the whole paper, but you do have to answer those questions.

The introduction gives your reader a map of the paper.  By the end of the introduction, your reader should have a pretty good idea of what they're in for, and where they're going to end up.  They should know what sections they're probably going to skip, and which ones they look forward to disagreeing with.  A paper is not a detective novel: you don't need cliffhangers or mysteries.

After that, the conclusion doesn't have a lot of work to do (at least in my experience).  It might be the last thing the reader reads of your paper (that is, unless they care enough about its contents that they'll re-read it), so this is an opportunity for you to frame their memory of it.  "We have shown that ..." is the sort of thing you'd find here.

Key points:

Remember the reader is a human being, just like you – talk to them, as you'd like to be talked to (far far too many people bizarrely forget this).
Make it easy for them to read the paper, and easy to agree with you (that's why the introduction has a map of the paper, to ease the reader's way through your golden prose).
Your reader is asking themself "why am I reading this paper?"  Make sure they have a good answer to that question by the end of the introduction. If you get a colleague to read your draft, get them to answer that question at that point.  If they don't give the answer you want them to, it's your fault; so edit.

There will probably be some overlap in text in the three parts.  That's OK, but it probably shouldn't be cut-and-paste.


Steady meeting room for Zoom office hours, ready at any time

This semester, I was able to join my office hours for a scheduled meeting at any time, even outside the window of the scheduled meeting.
Zoom has a checkbox “Allow participants to join anytime” that may be selected when creating the scheduled meetings. You will get an email notification if someone joins when you are not there. This allows students to join at any time.
Because the meeting ID does not change, this satisfies your link request.
Disclaimer: I do not know if I have a special version of Zoom; whatever the university provides is what I have.


How to request a professor to let you into their class

Lizzie, After reading the details which I asked you to add earlier, I can only come up to this solution: Go and talk to her in person. Being a teacher myself, I find it difficult to ignore the requests of an 'eager learner'. Which in your case is "you". Tell her how important it is for you to take that course and specifically from her and how you have performed in your first quiz. Ask her very politely if it is possible for her to allow you in that course (Politeness matters A LOT) and that you will continue to work harder. Try this and I hope it'll work. Good luck :)


U.S. grading system: Why discrete grades?

I am in favor of using the US discrete grade system. Some thoughts I will address are as follows:

As the OP mentions, in the US, the ABC grade system is relatively standardized and well understood by a large variety of institutions. It makes comparisons among students from a variety of schools more compatible (although, yes, not perfectly comparable).

Beyond this, I feel that the ABC system delivers the appropriate amount of granularity. After all, you have to truncate grade percentages somewhere. In some sense every system is discrete.

One method that I have used for my students in math classes in the US is a clustering system guided by the grade cutoffs. The percentages are guarantees. After that, I cluster students into grade groups, with students who barely missed the cutoff still usually getting adjusted up. For example, let's say that we have the following percentages:

  93.23%, 93.17%, 92.88%, 92.81%, 92.08%

I would give the first four students A's and the final student an A- under normal circumstances. (It is usually more nuanced than that). I feel that the grades I gave my students usually very accurately described their proficiency relative to the stated outcomes of the course.  This was also vastly true when I was a student. In fact there were times where I would prefer to take my A grade than my raw percentage. An 'A' sounds much better than "I got 83% raw, but I was the second highest grade in the course."

In my opinion, the ABC system actually is a stronger system than a raw percentage system. Is a 95% in Dr. Haskin's Calculus I class better than a 97% in Dr. Bodrel's Calculus I course? Both would result in an A grade. Or how would a 97% in Calculus I compare to a 97% in Floral Design? By using the ABC system, we effectively run a sort of "low-pass" filter on the grades. In my opinion this actually allows for a fairer comparison between students.

Let me also add that having a raw percentage system would be awful from the perspective of an instructor. Students already anguish about their grades. Now picture if they had to anguish about not just getting an A, but getting 100%. You would end up having students with 98% in the course worrying about getting 99%. It just becomes excessively fiddly. As a former student myself, I would actually hate a raw system. I was grateful for being able to get an A with 94% in a class without having to worry about pushing it up to a 95%.

I will close by saying that school and grades are not always fair. Such is life. No matter what system you use, there will be drawbacks from one perspective or another. There is no system that is perfect.

Addendum: Several comments have mentioned thoughts on being graded relative to others. Note first that my proposed method never moves a student down a grade, only up. Several comments seem to overlook that.

  @BartoszKP: "You are grading not 'their proficiency relative to the stated outcomes,' but 'their proficiency relative to the stated outcomes and relative to other students.' Did other students doing well make this student suddenly know less?"

How could raising a grade indicate a student "knew less"? It seems that raising a grade would actually indicate a student knew more.

I guess I could grade students solely on their raw scores, 100ths of a percent be damned. Then students would be graded with less relativity to their peers. But wasn't such a "zero-tolerance of rounding up" system one of the named drawbacks of the ABC system? It seems like we are trying to play both ends of the flute here. I can see that it would be patently unfair if I rounded students down a grade. I must say though, I have never had a student complain about being graded "relative" to their peers when I rounded their grade slightly up.

Secondly, to continue the thoughts on being graded relative to one's peers, we need to keep in mind that it is next to impossible to provide students from current semesters the identical exam experience as students from previous semesters encountered. By adjusting scores within semester, this can help control for slight variations in exam difficulty from semester to semester. Note that I do not always have complete control over exams, since they often must be written on teams with other professors. All told, which system seems more "fair," a system that does not control at all for variability in exam writing styles or a system that attempts to account for that?


How to overcome preconceived ideas about social scientists?

I get patronised by the guy whose randomised experiment allows him to
  get away with a t-test. How to react when that happens without
  sounding too defensive?

I think this is the key aspect in your question. Once the "hardsplainer" starts patronizing you, you are on the defensive. And there is really no good way out of this situation once you react by starting to defend your methods.

Sometimes the hardsplainer will realize that his assumptions were erroneous and that you may indeed know more about stats than he.
Or he will in turn get defensive and start nitpicking your methods, probably getting in deeper and deeper water as he is discussing stuff he may not know much about. This is not a good conversation to have at social gatherings.

I'm afraid the second possibility will happen rather frequently, simply because people are not good at revising preconceived impressions.

So I'd recommend that you nip the problem in the bud, by not allowing your interlocutor to, in fact, preconceive the impression of "look, a social scientist, who probably doesn't know anything about statistics". Specifically, when you discuss your work, invest half a sentence to name-drop your analysis techniques.

  I'm looking at how foo relates to bar. Because I only have
  observational data, not experiments, I use econometrical panel data
  models, and I find that...

If you hint that you use advanced models right before the hardsplainer can get the wrong impression that he can lecture you with fundamentals, he will be stopped cold. (Of course, you don't want to overdo it to come across as an arrogant know-it-all.)

Yes, it would be nice if this were unnecessary, because people didn't have the preconceived notion that social scientists are inept in terms of statistics. Unfortunately, this notion does have a basis in facts. I do statistics for psychologists, and I see that while they do get a solid grounding in statistics, they do frequently misapply models, or interpret them incorrectly, or don't understand why p-hacking is a Bad Thing. Then again, some hard scientists do suffer from the delusion that being an expert in some hard science means that they automatically also are experts in statistics.


Major revision and re-submit as a Technical Note

To make it clear to the editor, formally withdraw it from consideration. Then it is yours to do with as you please. They have no hold over you or the paper until you formally sign copyright away. What you have sent is likely enough, actually, but a formal notice of withdrawal leaves no ambiguity.

In most places I think that giving notice is enough and their reply isn't needed. But you need to keep records. Formal mail (sneaker net) with a receipt for delivery is sometimes used for such things. And keep the receipt.


In my own field (neuroscience) I don't think a masters really counts for anything in US PhD admissions (but these decisions are all made by humans on an admissions committee; maybe one of those humans reviewing your application likes a masters degree). Research experience you gain while doing a masters is valuable, however, it just doesn't matter that it's part of a masters program rather than a job or anything else. Sometimes a masters is the best access a recent grad has to research, though.
Unlike what Buffy's answer implies, in my field having a masters doesn't change where you are on the PhD track - you'll have just as many years and courses as someone coming in with a BS.
I can't say whether you made the right choice or if it will work out for you - no one can - but if you can gain experience in research and work with people that can write you strong letters of recommendation then this choice will increase your chances of PhD admissions. Whether it will get you into the program you want (or any program) can never be guaranteed, though.


What is the preferred GRE Writing score for MS/CS student?

There's a reason it's not listed--there is no preferred score, it doesn't really matter.  I am not an expert, but I feel like the writing score is something that can only hurt you, not something that can help you, at least with respect to science or engineering graduate programs.

More concretely, I can see a very low score preventing you from getting into a program, but I highly doubt the admissions committee saying: "Well, he got a great score on the writing section, that really differentiates him from other applicants; let's admit him."

For a foreign student or non-native speaker, doing well in the writing section probably carries a little more weight than it does for native speakers; nonetheless, I believe that the above still holds.


How to choose a proper research topic potential and/or having no strong competition

My suggestion about choosing a research area and topic is to choose something that interests you personally and that you won't mind spending time and effort on. Time and effort for perhaps a significant amount of time. Advisors can be good at suggesting problems worth the effort.

If it isn't fun, it isn't worth doing, personally.

Actually, research in most fields is extremely balkanized. You are likely "competing" with only a few people in a very narrow area no matter what you choose. Math is like that. Better to form collaborative circles and stop thinking about competition. Most of the "millions of papers" are of no interest whatever to nearly everyone else. Some exceptions, obviously.

My own doctoral work was very interesting and significant. But significant and interesting to only about six people world wide, most of them at my own institution. It took years for anyone to decide to follow up on it and more years to find an application. But it was interesting enough that it was remarked upon immediately on publication. So, extreme balkanization.

Moreover, if you do wind up with competitors you are likely to be surprised when it happens and surprised too late to take action. Some people work in parallel at different institutions. I know of a fairly public case in which this happened and two people submitted nearly the same paper to a CS conference based on their independent doctoral work. Their advisors were well known to each other, but no one suspected that the students were working on the same problem.


Are politicians attempting to destroy tenure?

Proposals to "reform" or end tenure are not new—they have been going around for several decades at least (as I remember such stories when I was an undergraduate in the 1990's).

This is not yet enacted legislation—it is merely a proposal that, as far as I can tell, probably has not even had any hearings yet. As such, I would suspect that such a bill would be shot down in committee, as the proposed methods would probably violate at least some sort of labor laws, as the faculty would in effect be judged by students with whom they have never interacted. Such "popularity contests" would pretty much dry up any opportunities for faculty recruitment. (Who would want to work at such a school?)


How many arXiv papers are uploaded in their final (refereed) versions?

It is a lot of work to find out which paper in arXiv has actually the same content as a published paper. However, taking arXiv's journal-ref field as a surrogate indicating which paper has a journal version out, I arrive at these fraction of papers:

So it looks as if the gut feeling that this is field-dependent is true: high energy and nuclear physics have consistently high fractions of papers with journal-ref field set. On the other hand, this seems far less common for maths papers.  Note that a certain drop at the end is to be expected as the preprints may be uploaded to arXiv considerably before the paper is accepted, printed and the journal-ref is updated in arXiv.

Here's the marginal plot over all fields:

So overall, about 45% of the papers have a journal-ref. However, it is set for almost 60% of the 2001 - 2007 papers. Whether this is a real decline or just the lag between preprint and paper publishing remains to be seen (in a few years).

Also, neither the overall nor the subject-dependent trends seem to have a convincing increasing trend, even if the decline due to "not yet published and updated" is assumed to be the sole cause of the decreases.

For the complete picture, here's the development of total number of papers:

and number of papers with journal-ref set:


How can we effect institutional change to make academia climate-compatible?

I can think of two main ways to reach these goals:

Method 1: grassroot campaign

For example it could go something like this;

Create a group of researchers from various fields who share this goal.
This group reaches a consensus for a set of realistic measures that an institution could pledge to apply.
Reach to the most prominent scientists from various fields, ask them to:

publicly  support the pledge
lobby the institutions/organizations they belong to to sign it
boycott the conferences which don't sign it.

Keep the pressure from the scientific community until most major institutions are compelled to sign the pledge. At this stage extend the scope of target institutions to funding bodies and big industries.

Rationale for targeting the most prominent scientists: because they have the visibility and influence, they are on the board of the most important conferences, they can afford to boycott conferences and their boycott could destroy these conferences.

Method 2: patience

This kind of measures are going to be taken sooner or later, when the damage is too obvious to be ignored (recent research point to more death caused by air pollution than by smoking). At some point it will simply look ridiculous for academic institutions and funding bodies to insist on ethics in research while paying travel expenses across the globe for researchers. But that's going to take a while.


In North America, why Medicine not an undergrad degree high schoolers can apply to directly?

In Canada medicine is offered as an undergraduate degree, but graduates cannot practice until they have completed additional requirements (usually a residency, that can last between 2 to 6 years).  There is no BSc or HBSc in medicine that I know of.

Although it is often touted as a doctoral degree and the graduates can use the title Doctor, the full title is Doctor of Medicine or MD and it is not a doctoral degree in the sense of a PhD (or similar) in other disciplines.  Several other health-related professions can also use the title of Doctor (optometrists, veterinarians), although again they do not necessarily hold PhDs (some do).

In Canada education is a provincial jurisdiction so requirements for admissions vary from one province to the next.  The common factor to all programs is the huge demand: there is often 10 or more applicants for every admission slot.

In Quebec you can apply straight out of usual 2-year pre-university (CEGEP) studies required for admission to most university undergraduate programs.   In Ontario your odds of getting in are next to none unless you have completed 3 full years of an undergraduate university degree, often in a cognate field: this is a simple way of cutting down on the number of applications.  It may well be that some schools require an undergraduate degree for application but that would only be for weeding purposes.

These days, given the extremely high demand in some provinces, an increasing number  of candidates are accepted after an advanced MSc degree: even an outstanding full undergraduate degree is no longer a guarantee of getting in.


intellectual property during paid research

I am not sure what discipline you are in, but I have been working on software development with a team of health, social, and computer science researchers and from what I have learned, maybe this can help.

Basically, since the grant paid for your salary it is the institution that has the most stake in for the intellectual property, which covers the PI. For instance, I helped develop and test the software I mentioned at University A, but since then have transferred to University B. I still work with the same team from University A, but any work we do with the software at University B (even when collaborating with the same team from University A), I have to pay University A a licensing fee for use of the software. They do not charge me a lot, granted, but they still require it, because they view it as theirs. Even though, I was a major contributor to the software.

By extension, the PI should have the right to any materials associated with the project. When you mentioned that you used your own software for the calculations, were you asked by the PI to purchase this or did you go out and get it on your own? If the latter, I suggest that in the future, when materials are needed for a project, simply explain to the PI that resources are needed for the work. You shouldn't pay for them out-of-pocket. If you still have questions about ownership of the work, the institution has lawyers that deal with intellectual property that can help you figure out what is who's. I have had to work with them for our software project to make sure that we are in the clear for doing work outside of University A with our product. Hope this helps!


Is it fair to blame authors for exorbitant book costs?

Short answer: both yes and no.

Partially, no they are not responsible, because some of it is a matter of costs and markets.  You're never going to see textbooks offered for the same price-per-page as romance novels, because the cost of creating and curating the textbook is so different.  So the base price of textbooks is expected to be significantly higher.

At the same time, however, authors have a lot of choice which publisher to work with, and some publishers are much more predatory in their pricing than others.  Most significantly, there are a number of university and society presses that can give a book quite good promotion and also a reasonable price.  Consider, for example, the MIT Press, and these widely used books: the CLR(S) Algorithms textbook ($70) and the SICP programming textbook ($49) and also free.  Moreover, academic publishing is a seller's market, unlike fiction publishing: in my experience, big academic publishers are always soliciting for authors to create books for them, and so there is space for an author to select (if not necessarily negotiate).

I would say, than, that any author who has courage of their convictions with regards to education can make a publishing choice that keeps their textbook well under $100 US.  Doing otherwise demonstrates either that the person is not caring about student costs or else that they think like an economist.


Examples of top academics who weren't prodigies

Thomas Kuhn literally switched fields after completing his PhD in physics and is a modern philosopher well known for his work in the philosophy of science, particularly for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Karl Pearson, may be another example. Although he initially studied mathematics and then physics, he proceeded onto other things like law before eventually switching back to mathematics and making his big contributions (like establishing mathematical statistics). I have not been able to find anything immediately obvious to indicate he was a child prodigy.

As an ecologist, I'd hazard to guess that most famous ecologists were never child prodigies, but they almost certainly identified their passions early on in life while playing outside as children, which violates the

  before finding their passion in a field

part of your question.


How do I diplomatically tell my collaborators that I've accepted a different postdoc position?

I certainly wouldn't recommend sitting on the project for a number of years. Science moves on and so do the participants.
But, even if you have to take a different, lesser, role, you can probably move forward with the project.
I don't know if  you need a "diplomatic" response, just an honest one. If you can stay connected with the project, if even as the "idea" person, it should be fine. But you will need to make a commitment that you will do "something" for the project even though you will be busy with the new duties. Collaboration with people from different institutions is normally a good thing.


What are the steps for republishing imagery held in archives?

Before requesting publication rights for images it is best to have an arrangement with a publisher, as most institutions require you to provide details about the publication venue, the type of publication (print or digital or both), the print run and so forth when you are requesting the images. Then you have to make a request to the image holder (provided the copyright is not an issue for your, as you indicated in a comment to another answer) either using a web form or by email (in most cases you should be able to figure out from their website who the contact persons for such requests is. They will inform you about the costs, and then you can decide if you go on with signing an agreement (yes, you have to sign a contract with each institution providing images even in the rare cases when the images are provided for free), and they are expected to provide you with high resolution images after the payment (if they charge a fee, as most such institutions do, at least in my field). You surely can crop and process the images as required for the production of your publication. Keep in mind that in the worst case, the process can take months, so it is best to start it as soon as you reach an agreement with the publisher.


How to accurately digitize plot data from figures available as vector graphics?

This is an amusing programming/hacking challenge, but my guess is that in 90% of cases the best solution lies in the realm of human affairs, and that’s simply
to email the authors and ask for the data.
Why? Two reasons:

When it works (and I expect it would most of the time), you’ll know with certainty that the data you have is exactly what the authors were working with rather than some approximation recovered by trying to reverse engineer an unknown sequence of human and algorithmic processes to convert the raw data into a figure. (Vector graphics may offer the illusion of lossless encoding, but that’s assuming no lossy steps were applied by the human or software at any step along the way — a dangerous assumption to make in practice.)

In the infrequent occasion when it doesn’t work because the authors refuse to share the data, you’ll still learn something useful about how trustworthy their data can be assumed to be (i.e., not at all). You can still try to revert to a technological solution, but in most cases I’d just assume the data is invalid and not worth relying on.


How to list an unfinished PhD on a resume

Don't worry, this is a very understandable situation.  You should just be honest about it.

I don't think the fact that you started a PhD but were unable to finish it due to financial and family circumstances will be counted against you in a professional context, especially if you otherwise have a record of successful employment.

It would be more of an issue for pursuing a further career in academia (either another PhD or academic employment), since the PhD would be highly relevant to the work you wanted to do, and you might not have any other equivalent experience on your CV.  But outside academia, I don't think it matters much at all, particularly since you have been employed since then.


First research proposal for a postdoc application

In mathematics, your situation is very common.  A lot of people don't have any papers written and are still completing their PhD when applying for their first postdoc.  There's nothing "stringent" about "research proposal requirements."  (Are there even any requirements?  Typically, just that something be submitted, I suppose.)  What you'll be evaluated on mostly at your stage is your area of research and letters of recommendation (and possibly your teaching ability, depending on the position).  Yes, people will look at your statement, and you should do a good job at writing it, but don't worry too much about it.

Generally what you should do in a research statement at your stage is:

summarize what you've been working on, and your (partial?) results till now
indicate, in some but not a lot of detail, what are some future things you are interested in working on (these do not need to be things you're definitely going to do)

The point of this statement is:

To see that you can effectively communicate your work/ideas (and possibly to get a sense of how well you understand its context)
To see if what you're doing is of interest to the faculty there
To see that you have some decently thought out ideas for future work


Is there a benefit to registering digital identification via both ORCID and ResearcherID?

These two reseacher identifications fill somewhat different purposes, beside the point that one is more open (Orcid) and one more controlled (both with regard to access and data). Below, I've highlighted the main diffences I see:

Orcid provides a way to connect many different types of "outputs" with your profile, both by manually adding information or importing from a number of databases. Beside article publications you can also add posters, presentations, software, grants etc to construct a more full representation of your output, basically a full CV.

ResearcherID is more focused on connecting published journal articles with your profile, and this is mostly geared towards importing data from Thomson's Web of Science. However, since ResearcherID is connected to a citation database it also provides citation metrics in your profile, and in that sense overlaps with a personal Google Scholar page. Orcid does not provide this functionality (at least not yet).

Since the two identification systems contain different types of information (at least for the time being), it can make sense to use them both, and as you've noted an Orcid profile can be linked from a ResearcherID profile. In terms of visibility it is probably also useful to use both, since their user bases are likely to differ. If you do not want to support ResearcherID because it is a closed Thomson Reuters product, Orcid + a Google Scholar citations page would provide basically the same information (but based on a different citation database), but with the drawback of two separate pages/profiles. I can also imagine that used exclusively, ResearcherID will probably be more useful for researchers from STEM fields compared to researchers in the humanities and social sciences, since the cover in Web of Science is known to be poorer in the latter fields.


As an undergraduate, I always appreciated when profs did stuff like this. It made it look like they actually put some effort into their notes, and a laugh was always appreciated in the middle of a frustrating and hard lecture.


Consequences of quiting a masters program (because of a job) and later applying for PhD program

No, I do not think it would be a problem provided you work in a field close to your PhD area. If you get relevant experience, it helps to get into PhD.

Many university (at least in US) allow direct PhD admission for qualified BS students. So, if you are able to do some good work in your job, it can help you in applying for a PhD.

The reason I am emphasizing "relevant experience" since otherwise you may have to justify quitting the Masters program. The admission managers/professors may tend to suspect your staying for PhD.


How is the PhDs' (in Logics in Math) employment rate?

For mathematics in the US, the American Mathematical Society collects a great deal of data (about employment among many other things) in their Annual Survey of the Mathematical Sciences.

With respect to your specific question, unfortunately they lump logic together with discrete mathematics, combinatorics, and computer science; presumably logic alone would have too few data points to be very informative.  (The inclusion of computer science here doesn't mean the AMS thinks that computer science is one small subfield of mathematics.  That refers, I think, only to people working on theoretical computer science who received their degrees in departments of mathematics.)

This pdf has the table that most directly addresses your question, for 2014-15 doctoral recipients.


Just received a great recommendation letter with one incident of a different student name

No need to be anything but simple, polite, and direct:

  Dear Professor Careless:

  Pardon me, but the second paragraph of your letter has the name of a different student, which I assume to be a mistake.  Would you care to provide a corrected version of your letter?


import all references of a paper into a bibtex file

There would be a quick approach if you know how to code:

Take the DOI of that publication.

Use that DOI to access the OpenCitations API. (Example here.)

From the API, extract all the DOIs that are referenced in the citing field.

Loop each referenced DOI through a DOI-to-BibTeX-converter (such as doi2bib in Python, or CrossCite)


Who owns the laptop bought with funding for student training etc. in a fully funded PhD project?

If it isn't specified in the collaboration contract, ask the funding agency for clarification - this may be determined on a case-to-case basis.

Single data point: I had funding as PhD student via a sholarship that also had an expenses budget.

When I bought stuff that was in between consumables and small instruments (to be precise, VUV-quality CaF2 slides). At reimbursement, the funding agency stipulated that they should become property of the institute.
In contrast, there was no such stipulation for some books I bought from the same budget.


Could I write a review paper as my B.Tech (Bachelors in Technology) final year project, rather than presenting an experiment based work?

You should check the official site of your university and see if you get the solution for your question otherwise you can ask your mentor or guide for research and they will help you for sure.
It is probably possible that they will allow you to write a review paper, rather than doing a final year project because the system is totally based on credits and credits are nothing but the amount of hours you put in to get a credit and writing a review paper is a difficult job and needs lots of hours to do , so I think they will allow you to that.


When addressing academic departmental assistants via email, should I use their first name or just Mr./Ms. X?

My policy : the first time you contact the person, go with Mr. Doe (or Ms. Doe), but sign with your first name. The latter is a signal that you are OK with a "first name email relationship", from this point it will be so most of the time.


What does "NN" mean (submitting a proposal to a publisher)?

Nomen nominandum, "a name to be named" - if you don't know the person's name yet, this indicates that you will supply the name later.

Which sounds a bit more reassuring than a simple nomen nescio, "I don't know the name".


When can a professor refuse to sign off on a committee-approved thesis?

From a mere common sense perspective, this is, clearly, grossly unethical.  However, professors at most institutions are given a huge amount of latitude in making decisions of this kind.  That latitude is intended as deference to the professor as the one closest to the situation and a recognized scholar in the field, etc, etc.  It's not intended to extend to capricious or unethical behavior, but I'm sure your case is, sadly, neither the only one nor the most egregious.

As the professor has already departed academia (and good riddance!), there's not much to be done about that particular individual.  In a few years, though, you will likely be getting contacted by your alma mater frequently as they are very interested in what you would like to contribute, etc.

There might be some opportunity here to ask to speak to someone who will be interested to know why you are unable to donate.  Until they have clear policies in place that prevent the kind of abuse you were subjected to, you can't see your way clear to making contributions to an institution that, through their own negligence, damaged your career while it was in at its most vulnerable point.  Obviously there's no guarantee you will get through to someone who will listen, but it's worth a shot--if they do, it might prevent someone else from going through what you went through.

To anyone else going through this, get everything in writing.  "Why are you withholding your signature?"  Get a paper trail, or it's your word against the infinitely more powerful professor's as to what is going on.


Is SPIE proceedings publication a real scientific publication?

The SPIE proceedings volumes are generally fairly loosely peer-reviewed conference proceedings volumes.  The quality of the peer-reviewing can vary depending on the organizers of each particular conference.

People do cite papers from these volumes and they're indexed by some research databases including Scopus and Google Scholar, but not Thompson's Web of Science (at least not the last time I checked.)  Like any conference proceedings papers, you'll have to take some responsibility for deciding whether the material is good enough to be worth citing.

You haven't explained exactly what you mean by "count as a publication."  Here are several answers:

Will tenure and promotion committees consider these as publications?  Probably not at the same level as publications in top-tier peer-reviewed journals, but they probably will be considered as conference proceedings papers.
Can you submit a paper for journal publication after publishing it in an SPIE volume?  Probably not, unless the journal paper is significantly expanded.  Publication in one of these volumes typically would count as "prior publication."
Should you cite a paper from an SPIE conference proceedings volume?  Yes, if the paper has useful information.  Readers of your paper should generally be able to obtain these papers if they want to look into the references further.
Is the SPIE a predatory publisher?  I doubt that anyone would argue that it is a predatory publisher.


If I saw a research result similar to mine from my PC duties, should and how should I contact the authors?

In my experience it is not a conflict of interest to be working on something similar.  As @TheWanderer said, that's exactly why you end up reviewing such papers.  Nor is it appropriate to use your knowledge of their submission to contact them.

Generally speaking, as a program committee member, you should treat what you see there as confidential, and treat the fact that you are reviewing it as confidential as well.  If you choose to provide comments in your review, based on your own experience, that can help them improve their paper, that's great.  If you feel like your personal knowledge of the area is such that to comment on it you would be revealing unpublished information of your own, you need not include such comments.  You should simply evaluate their work in the context of whatever is public at the time they submit.  If someone else publishes something that makes their work obsolete, and it appears between the time of submission and the time their own work would appear, it's rotten luck but I think they would still need to treat the soon-to-be-published work as having precedence.

The same applies as a reviewer for a journal of course.

In some fields there may be exceptions.  For instance, there are open-access journals with public, attributed reviews.  But in CS these seem quite rare.


How important is outreach for applying to tenure track professor position?

Pertinent to academia, I think of outreach as activities that bring academic subject matter and/or expertise to a community audience, often an audience that is under-served.  Activities might include lectures or presentations to community audiences presented in laymen’s terms about subjects that are esoteric but interesting; interacting with elementary students to make a topic (like programming) more understandable or to engage them in the scientific process; mentoring high school students doing a science fair project.  There are others.
The degree to which describing involvement in outreach might help an application for a tenure-track position may depend on factors specific to the institution and its values; the teaching responsibilities of the assistant professor position; and the degree of prior involvement in outreach.  For example, a university that has a stated commitment to the community in which it resides might place high value on prior involvement in outreach because outreach aligns with the values of the institution.  If the specific department has an outreach program (e.g., it holds regular coding camps or has a formal affiliation with an elementary school) prior involvement in outreach might strengthen the application because it demonstrates experience relevant to the department.  Outreach that has involved interactions with students at any level may be more important when the Assistant Professor position will involve teaching undergraduates because it provides some evidence of prior experience in teaching/interacting (hopefully) positively with young people.  But the outreach should be clearly and unambiguously meaningful.  “I spent 1 week as a counselor at a math camp” probably doesn’t help and may hurt.
Finally, in a space-constrained CV, description of outreach should not displace documentation of specific requirements of the position (e.g., education, research experience, involvement in professional societies, publications/presentations.)
The goal of the CV should be to “market” yourself for the position.  If you’ve documented what needs to be documented and documenting outreach might help your application, include it.


Counting a translation as a separate publication

Regardless of what one might call this behavior -- self-plagiarism, double-dipping, etc. -- your colleague's behavior is an example of gaming the system. It is a common behavior observed by dishonest and insecure academics in response to various metrics that are introduced to measure their productivity and performance. Some examples related to the one under discussion are:

Listing a paper legitimately published in two versions (one as a conference proceedings and one in a journal) as two separate listings in one's publication list and without pointing out the connection. See this recent question.
Splitting a paper into several smaller papers to artifically inflate one's number of publications while possibly decreasing the work's overall scientific usefulness and impact.
Strategically "saving up" work done in one merit review cycle to write it up in the next cycle due to a feeling that one has done "enough" work for the current cycle and feeling insecure about one's ability to continue to generate meaningful output in the future.
Choosing the journal one is submitting to based on Impact Factor, h-index or other arbitrary and mostly meaningless indices.

Not all of these practices are equally unethical or dishonest, but they share the common feature that the practitioner is letting their actions be influenced by factors that are tangential to, and in some cases opposed to, the academic's main goal of advancing scientific knowledge. They can also have the effect of distorting institutional decisions about who is performing good work, who deserves to be promoted or offered jobs, etc., and to the extent that that is the case, in my opinion they cross a clear boundary between ethical and unethical behavior.

In the case under discussion, based on your description there is no doubt in my mind that your colleague is behaving dishonestly. It is fine for him to publish his paper in two languages if he feels that that adds some value, but he must clearly indicate that the two publications are duplicate versions of the same work and not try to claim credit for both.


Explaining a bad exam result at my annual review

I see two possibilities. One is that the exam was just more difficult than it was intended to be and that others are in the same situation and so it won't really affect you much. Sometimes questions on exams are misstated and lead students astray, for example.
My advice it that sort of situation, in general but too late to implement now, is to say something sensible for every question if possible, rather than just leaving things blank. That might be helpful in future.
The other possibility is that you were expected to know/do things that you weren't prepared for. In that situation, there isn't really much to say other than that you weren't prepared and intend to do better it future.
But in this situation, you can also ask for advice from faculty about what sort of actions you might have taken to avoid the problem. They might have some actual advice and know both you and the topic.
And a single failure on a single exam (other than a qualifying exam) isn't disqualifying for most. It happens. You may just have to move on.


Academia vs. Industry in a short graduate program (computer science)

I actually don't think you have to pretend that your choice is firm.  Lots of people leave Ph.D. programs and join industry.  Some of them then go back to their Ph.D. programs afterward.  Lots of people work in industry for a few years and then do a Ph.D.  Some of them go back to industry afterward.  And this is true in lots of disciplines, not just CS (which is rather closer to industry than some others I can think of).

It's a mistake to think that this is a choice you have to make right now and then the rest of your life will be a march down a fixed road.  Careers, and educational paths, don't work like that.

It's also a mistake to think that these kinds of decisions are hugely consequential for one's happiness.  A lot of happiness comes not from choosing the right path for you but from finding the you (as it were) in the path on which you happen to be.  See, e.g., the many Cal Newport posts on the subject, e.g.: http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/09/10/the-danger-of-the-dream-job-delusion/

If I were in your position, I'd apply both to PhDs and to industry jobs, see what I get, and then make a short-term decision, with the recognition that long-term decisions do not necessarily follow.


Use of verbatim quotes in reporting findings in qualitative research (semi-structured interviews)

There is no prescription.

However, it is always nice and useful to convey through your report the 'voices' of the interviewees through carefully selected quotes, i.e. the most significant, revealing or unique.

Hope that's useful.


I am currently in graduate school but need to ask my previous professors for a letter of recommendation. I am worried this will be awkward

If you explain to them that this is part of your stipend contract that you are required to have these letters to apply to the scholarships, I am 100% sure noting that as well as a quick apology will eliminate any awkwardness.


Is it appropriate to submit a previously presented workshop paper to a peer-reviewed journal?

Different journals have different standards for what counts as prior publication.  For example, most computer science journals happily accept "extended journal versions" of existing papers that are intended to supersede the prior publication, as long as there is at least 30% new content and the relationship to the prior paper made explicit.  Some high-ranked biology journals, on the other hand, are so obsessed with "novelty" that they will consider a submission improper even if only an extended abstract has previously appeared.  Check the policy of the journal(s) that you are considering: either it will be listed clearly online, or the editorial staff should be able to give you a quick answer about their policies.


How to merge citations from two different google scholar accounts?

It looks like there is no direct way. You could choose the account with the most citations and then manually cite the other publications from the account with less citations.

Also, you could try to export the citations from the smaller account to your hard drive and deactivate that account. Then rebuild the other scholar account over time.

A person over researchgate asked the same question but there was no definitive answer.


What is the etiquette for thesis acknowledgements that thank God?

There's nothing wrong with thanking God or other religious figures, and it's not particularly unusual.  It could upset people if you use the acknowledgments as a place to expound religious doctrine, but no reasonable person would take offense at simply thanking God and I've never seen it cause any controversy.


Chance of funding while applying for multiple PhD programs at the same school

This answer is coming very late, but may be useful to people who land up on this thread. By referring to different departments, I mean different PhD programmes.

Regarding the PhD application:

Since the same professor is in all the three departments and he is conducting research which are aligned with your research goals, there is no harm in applying to all 3 programs. It may make a stronger case for your selection as well (not a guarantee always, but no negative impact surely). The graduate committee is made of professors who are very well aware of the fact that almost all phd applicants apply to multiple phd programmes, the difference here is that they know where 2 other applications of yours went. They may ask you to set a priority, that's all. Showing interest is different from receiving an offer, professors may be interested in multiple candidates, but due to constraints give out offers to a smaller pool. They should not hold anything against you. If they do, you are better off not joining that programme.

I applied to 3 phd programmes in the same university, and got selected in my second choice. All 3 departments knew that I had applied to the other 2 as well. They had no issues with it.

Regarding funding:

Often different departments in the same university have different ways of selecting candidates and providing funding. In my case, two of the departments gave out department-centralized PhD offers, where we would have to choose our advisor after joining the programme. However in the third department at the same university, funding was through the grants of individual faculty. So the PhD advisor was fixed from the beginning, and the funding was specific to that project's requirements. You would have to ask the graduate programme manager for exact details.


Recommender choice for admission to a MSc program

If possible, it is always better if you can get a good letter of recommendation from someone who has actually supervised your research, because they can directly comment on your promise as a researcher. At the master's level, however, I don't know if it's quite so important as at the doctoral level, particularly because some fields may not require a bachelor's thesis (they may have a senior project, laboratory, or design course instead).

In the present circumstances, this would be one of those times where you should check with the places you're applying and ask if you can submit a third letter of recommendation. Then you get the advantage of having two people who know you well personally, plus someone who can comment on your research.


Should I change my Ph.D. department to better reflect the nature of my project?

While we cannot tell you the regulations of your institution on changing departments, I would like to suggest that it's likely to be not worth the bother.

Every department covers a complex network of subjects, and so having a degree that says "Physics" will not really be any more informative than one that says "Civil Engineering." It's also not at all unusual for a Ph.D. to be something that might be reasonably categorized under multiple departments---in fact, it is quite common for research to be interdisciplinary, and especially for the "home field" of a method to be different than the "home field" of an application area. Finally, departments and degree names are not particularly consistent in their names and interpretations from institution to institution.

As such, people will in general pay attention to the content of your research much more than the particulars of your department.

If you actually find some major impediment to continuing in your current department, that is a different matter, but it doesn't sound like that is currently the case---particularly so early in your time as a graduate student.

In short: don't worry about categorization, worry about executing your project.