Research on practices in addressing faculty bullying/harassment in academia

This is just some examples of preventative actions that I have encountered as an Adjunct in an Australian University.

One method employed by my and many other universities is for any existing or new member of staff to undergo training, of which anti-bullying and anti-harrassment modules are undertaken, an example is from the University of Western Sydney - the page has the modules, but also includes a workplace agreement page and information about the procedures are if you find yourself being bullied.  These procedures are linked with the state/national legal framework already in place, such as Australia's Fair Work Commission.  Another example is from the University of Western Australia and a very extensive policy document from the University of Adelaide.

Many Universities have adopted a 'zero tolerance' policy, such as in the anti-bullying document from the University of Newcastle.

An example of a 'best practices' guide, is the University of Western Sydney's document UWS Workplace Bullying
Prevention Action Plan
2014 - 2016, in response to

  In 2012, the University conducted a staff engagement survey on a range of management and
  human resource practices. Although 62% of staff agreed that UWS was adequately
  responding to bullying and abusive behaviours, this was highlighted as a potential area of
  organisational risk for the University

In Appendix A of the document, they extensively outline the 'Best Practices' for preventing bullying at the University, through evaluating and controlling the risk of bullying, which must be done in a clear an unambiguous way with a core emphasis on preventative measures.  As it is a new document, no data is yet available about its effectiveness.

Another example is the University of the Sunshine Coast's Responding to Workplace Bullying - Procedures page, where specific procedures are laid out in accordance to health and safety and fair work laws.

Research into the effectiveness is hard to come by, according to the article Workplace Bullying: An increasing epidemic creating traumatic experiences for
targets of workplace bullying (Farmer, 2011), the reason why a full analysis of the effectiveness is in part due

  Currently, a gap in the
  literature exists concerning the participation of “bullies” in many of the research studies published to date.
  Future research could look to include “bullies”, in such avenues as focus groups when looking to discover
  why workplace bullying occurs. If recommendations such as those noted above, ranging from zero-tolerance
  workplace bullying policies, education and training, and advocacy and awareness are continued to be drawn
  upon in the fight against workplace bullying, then it is the hope with the persistence of researchers and
  advocates, workplace bullying will one day reach similar status to policies which prohibit sexual harassment
  in the workplace.

As with all best practices, it is incumbent on people to implement them and to follow them - and to report when something goes wrong.


Why is the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship only for 'experienced researchers'?

Funders are allowed to make their own rules. Typically they try to be as fair as possible, but there will always be some 'edge effects' where the rules have unintended consequences.

In the case of Marie Curie grants, there is an explicit intention to draw in people from across the entire EU (and beyond). As such, the rules need to accommodate the wide variety of different systems, norms and expectations found in different countries. The clearest point of synchronisation is the date of award of the doctoral degree, and this is what has been chosen in the rules.

Some additional advantages:

If applications were allowed before the doctoral degree was awarded, there would inevitably be cases where someone didn't complete the degree before their fellowship was supposed to start.
All applicants should have a concrete body of work that can be used to assess their suitability for a fellowship.

Finally, while I don't know the statistics for Marie Curie specifically, in general success rates are skewed towards more experienced applicants. It may well be that the people impacted by this rule are generally not competitive for the fellowships.


Should I always provide my current affilition and address when a paper got accepted?

This comes up a lot when professors visit other universities, actually.  In mathematics it is common to use footnotes on the front page to cover grants and visits.  So in the author list you might have

  John Q. Public1
  University of Wheresistan

with a footnote saying

  1This author was partially supported by NSF grant 12345.  Research was conducted while visiting the University of Whatsitville.

The exact formatting and content is something that will ultimately be determined by the journal in question, and your particular circumstances.  The note may also include a thank you to the hosting university, or it may be split up (one footnote for the funding, another for the hosting/thanks).  You can probably find several examples like this just by surveying (the first page of) current research articles.

So I'd suggest using an author footnote on the first page that includes the pertinent information.  Use your current contact information and use the footnote to briefly mention the role played by other institutions and grants.  You can consult the journal's style guide--and if you're still unsure, ask an editor--to see if they have any specific requests or instructions for this sort of entry.  I believe most journals are fairly generous in what they allow here, and leave it up to you to make sure the proper thanks are given.


Can a person write a thesis years later if illness set in?

It is probably possible, but would depend on the university and an advisor. Unfortunately, some places have time limits and old courses don't count anymore. But in the case of illness, it might be possible to get exceptions to such rules.

But it is a question for a particular place and a particular advisor.

But that is assuming you want a degree. You can, of course, write anything you like and possibly get it published even without a degree.


Sponsoring scientist for for NSF postdoc fellowship

I'm assuming you are referring to the math postdoc.
Unlike regular career grants, the postdoc grant is tied to a specific location (usually, the mentor's home university).
I guess that working with someone else inside this institute should be OK (I think that formally the mentor will need to approve your reports to the NSF), but switching institutions is a big thing, and this will require an approval of the NSF (which have been granted in the past in several cases, at least that I know of, but you should not consider this is a regular thing).

You should really think about your application (in the sense of who is the mentor and where to apply), as your number one pick for post doc (well, I guess if you will get a Veblen instructorship, you would probably pass on the grant, but otherwise...).

There are several reasons for that:
First, If you get the NSF, in most cases, the host institution will usually offer you the prestigious instructorship position to complement it (it goes by various names depending on the institute, Veblen (Princeton), Dickson (UChicago), CLE Moore (MIT), Szago (Stanford), etc), as the NSF itself does not finance the whole 3 years. Moreover, you get the answers for the NSF application right before the first round, so you can negotiate with other institutions if needed to.

Second, If you get the NSF and choose to pass, in most cases, the NSF won't offer the grant to the next candidate (it has to do with their guidelines and also the coordinates offers rounds in math), so basically, this money is wasted.

Regarding the timing, now it is definitely the time to work on NSF applications.
Remember that the schoolyear is about to start in most places, so people are busy, and unlike regular postdoc applications (where your future mentor just need to email the hiring committee), here your future mentor will need to write down a letter to the NSF (so he would actually need to read your full application at-least a week before the deadline).

So you should work on both sides - finish your application (this not a wasting of time, as many of the materials will be used to your regular postdoc applications on mathjobs), and contact future mentors to see if they are willing to sponsor your NSF application.
Regarding who to contact, which order, and how to approach, this depends on the personality of the future mentor, and I think such considerations are better discussed with your adviser in person.

Good luck.


Is it fine to make a poster on a topic in which I have an article under review?

Typically this would be okay, because the poster is not published.

If in doubt, contact the PC chair of the conference to make sure.


Accepted subject to minor revisions. How should I list this in my CV?

The following apparently does not apply to theoretical mathematics, see comments and other answers for detail.

From my experience, during the time between acceptance and publication, you list the article as "in publication". This indicates that you have gone through the work of writing, submitting, responding to feedback, and the article has gone through peer review, been accepted and is just waiting to be published.

I've seen other qualifiers as well, including "in submission" for those going through the submission process, and "in preparation" for those that you're writing but haven't submitted. I strongly recommend against listing any papers in either of these categories, as until they're accepted they're not really "peer-review articles", they're just "ideas you have that you hope someone will publish one day".

Your case falls in the "in submission" category, and as such I would not list it.


Can an image from a paper by author A be used in a published book by author B?

Check what licences apply to the paper by author A. In particular, look at the top left-hand corner of the first page of the paper. If it says (c) the publisher, then you'll have to check with the publisher. If it says (c) the authors, then there's a good chance one of the creative commons licenses apply.


How to conduct IT based research in developing countries where we don't even have enough datasets for reference and analysis?

There are ways to get research done on publicly available data.

However, I would be silly to not mention that I left the UK for Germany to conduct my research, because the UK, as optimum as it is, wasn't the best in the world for the specific type of science I wanted to do. More importantly, it wasn't nearly as well funded for my particular area of science (its much better now though). Transferring to greener pastures is not only recommended, it's extremely normal in Science.

What did it take to get into a top German institute? Knowledge and determination. And I know for a fact that Nepal, Bangladesh, etc have plenty of knowledge and determination, because students from these countries are working side-by-side with me.


I found a published paper that looks dodgy. What to do?

A good way of posting comments, anonymously or not, with a good chance that other people will read them and react is Pubpeer. Although not all fields are covered, you can post your criticism on many articles. Sometimes authors react, sometimes publishers take action, sometimes nothing happens.

  what leverage is usually in process for a retraction to happen?

A good list of the cases where Pubpeer comments lead to retraction can be found on the Retraction Watch website:

http://retractionwatch.com/?s=pubpeer


I distrust it for an entirely different reason. I once wanted to download a paper, and could only do it if I signed up. I signed up by logging on with my facebook account... Well, academia.edu took my profile information, and, without me knowing it, created an academia profile. With my picture, publications it could find via search engines, and a list of interests that were half right and half ridiculous. I'm a neuroscientist; it listed me as being interested in marketing, among other things. I only discovered this profile about a month later.

Apart from it being entirely unprofessional, I simply do not trust information that is on there, as I have first-hand experience that information on me was wrong.


The impact factor is calculated over the two previous years (the 2013 number is based on referencing for 2011 and 2012). A high IF indicates that many papers are referenced very quickly (within 2 years of publication). This indicates high turnover rates for the journal. If the longer term value is lower, it could mean what you describe but can also mean that work published has very limited life span. In many fields where publications are slow to produce, in my case they may involve field and longer term experimental work, it is hard to gain many references very quickly and hence the longer term indicator becomes more important and higher. This is also true for small fields where the number of publications is too small for a regular IF to make sense. In field that I am familiar with the five year factor is higher than the ordinary IF bit it will likely vary depending mostly on the nature of the field; if publications have a long or short time span.

There is another factor called the Cited half-life (The median age of the articles that were cited in a year) which in my field often exceeds 10 years indicating the longevity of publications.

For further reading look at Journal Citation Reports


What should a faculty member outside of the US do to move to a top-tiered American university?

As discussed here (Is it more difficult to score a Tenure Track position in the US when applying from outside?), getting a US tenure track position from e.g., Thailand might be tricky. JeffE pointed out that it is not necessarily impossible, however, your friends would likely need to be on the top of their fields in that case. Your friend from Singapore seems to be a different case, as the universities in Singapore (at least NTU and NUS) have an excellent reputation around here (something that can, unfortunately, not be said about universities in Thailand or Indonesia).

In any case, my tip is to try to get a postdoc position in the US first. Postdocs are often reasonably easy to get into (at least in CS, can't really say for social sciences), and can act as a step ladder of sorts to faculty positions. Anyway, your friends need to be aware that the academic job market is no piece of cake in the US. Hence, no matter what they do, they need to expect that getting a professorship at a top university may simply not work out, so they should have a fallback plan to account for this case.


Why are there no standards for awarding PhD degrees?

There are certainly standards for awarding PhD degrees. I think you mean to ask why are there no grades? It's a subtle distinction perhaps but an essential one.

If somone holds a PhD, what does that tell you? It tells you that the university awarding that PhD feels that that person is capable of pursuing independent research in the area of the thesis. Different universities may have different ideas on how to measure that, but typically a PhD will have to have published at least one peer-reviewed contribution (often more, sometimes many more).

  However, at the end of the day, the degree is the same, Doctorate of Philosophy, it does not mention anything special for those endless sleepless nights of analysing data and being able to pull off amazing statistics, as compared to a student of any other field.

Your degree does not mention anything special (e.g., a grade). If you work harder than your peers, you may end up with the same degree on paper, but your head will contain lots of special information useful for lots of jobs, and your publication record will show lots of papers with lots of citations useful for lots of jobs

In other words, your grade is your demonstrable research output.

How else would you propose to grade or differentiate or categorise different PhDs? How could those grades be compared across different supervisors, different examination boards, different universities or different areas?

  So my question is, why bother going the tough route when it makes no difference at the end of the day, unless there are careers out there outside of academia, that specifically asks you, what type of PhD do you have?

A PhD is a requirement of many jobs in academia, and some research positions in industry. Typically PhDs are competing with other PhDs for positions, hence holding a PhD in-and-of-itself, is just the entry point. After that, candidates will be judged on what they did during their PhD and afterwards. If you spent "endless sleepless nights of analysing data and [pulled] off amazing statistics", you'll have lots to talk to the hiring committee about.


Is it possible to get a PhD with personal research?

Some universities offer the option of a 'PhD by published works'.  See this question for more information.  Is that the sort of thing you're looking for?


What do you think of the reply and do you think he is interested in me and my application?

It's a completely neutral reply. I write these emails to qualified candidates about once a week myself. It is, in essence saying: "You've contacted the wrong guy. I'm not making the decision about admission. We'll talk again if and once you've been accepted and here."

In other words, I don't think you can draw any kind of inference from the email -- neither positive nor negative.


Is it correct to call oneself "Doctor/Scientist/Mathemathician" simply because one has a PhD in that field?

It's not the individual word that matters. Calling oneself a scientist is not unethical, no more than it is unethical to call oneself a musician without being in the Top100 charts. What is unethical is deliberately representing yourself in a way that causes people to assign you an authority that you do not have.

This is an incredibly gray area because it is entirely dependent on context. As an example, answering "I'm a doctor" to the question "so, what do you do?" would be misrepresenting yourself if you are in fact a mathematics PhD who now works in insurance. However, answering "I'm a doctor" to the question "how well-educated are you?" is perfectly reasonable.

The difference in understanding of a topic between someone who left a field a few years ago and someone who is currently still researching in it is probably not too huge, when it comes to science popularisation efforts. I'd also take issue with your characterization of "just" a PhD - PhDs are the frontline researchers of science, the further along you get in your career the less time you have to actually put your hands on the science. Professor is mostly a management job.

That said, you shouldn't be so impressed with someone that you defer uncritically to their opinion based on just a title. Every field has its marginal cranks, even actively currently practicing ones.


Probably not what you want to hear, but... There's the option of submitting it somewhere else?


What happens if a paper with same topic gets published while writing undergraduate thesis?

As far as I know, in Germany, Bachelor's theses do not necessarily have to be "research", so novelty is not mandatory to graduate. Reproducing existing research would be fine, as long as it is noted and no plagiarism occurs (and the effort is commensurate: there will probably be implementation decisions to be made, etc.).

I have seen several bachelor theses on subjects such as "implementing PCIe communication" "writing a linux device driver" "build a softcore processor for the open-license parts of the ARMv4 instruction set" which have no novelty or research value but significant engineering effort. If the B.Sc. student has no ambitions for an academic career, this type of thing is perfectly appropriate and in line with their future professional work.


Can I put a tuition fee remission on my CV under scholarships?

Ph.D. studies are fully funded in many countries such as the US and Canada. If you receievd a merit-based scholarship/fellowship then you can certainly put it under the "honors/awards" section of your CV. However, if this scholarship was not awarded on a competitive or merit-based basis, and it was merely the standard package received by most Ph.D. students, it probably does not warrant a line in the CV.

(This answer assumes you are talking about Ph.D. studies based on the number of years mentioned in the question)


What should I recommend for a foreign student with problems on the country language?

He needs to improve his language skills fast...

When I studied in France (and this was engineering, which means a different vocabulary), we watched tv, worked with our French colleagues (ie other students), we helped them with English and they helped us with French... Total Immersion was what we practiced - limiting our use of our mother tongue to increase the French as fast as possible.

We also did evenings where we provided food & beer / wine to increase opportunities for conversation as well as getting our work checked.

Also, watching France V England at rugby was good for a laugh... :)

Are there any courses in the institution he could enrol in? but these courses need to be accelerated...


How hard is it for a graduate from Canada to find an employment in the US?

Not exactly an advice, but just based on what I know of my friends working in US.

I am not familiar with international visa issues, but I have at least 2 Canadian friends (as far as I know they don't have US citizenship) who graduated from Canadian schools and now work for Google and Twitter (actually one of them has BSc). So I agree with scaaahu's comment to your question, that it is much more important to have the skills that your potential employer wants.


Is not including a letter of recommendation from all of my research advisors in grad school applications an automatic red flag?

It is not a requirement that you include letters from every research advisor you've ever worked with as part of your graduate application. Since you already have letters from multiple research advisors, you can choose your third letter accordingly. If you believe the letter from your academic advisor is more helpful to you, then you should continue to use that letter. For example, your third advisor could more helpfully comment on your teaching abilities, if that is something you feel is important in your application.


What are some strategies for dealing with feedback from multiple people?

It's a tricky question and I think the best strategy will ultimately vary from person to person. Nevertheless I have two concrete suggestions that has helped me a lot throughout the writing phases of my manuscripts and thesis.

Get feedback in "rounds" instead of "continuously". When you have a version of the text on which you want feedback, send that to all involved parties at once. That prevents people commenting on each others suggestions and making a mess out of everything in the markup.

Once you have feedback from multiple people, you can iteratively go through the feedback and add/ignore the changes on the master document. This is rather contradictory to the accept/reject change function on MS Word, but in my experience that's not really sustainable when you have a lot of cooks making a single soup.

After the "round" is done, remove most (if not all) markup from people, have a new version of the document with whatever else you want to add/remove. If more feedback is needed have a new round.
If there are co-authors who are more superior to you in the academic ladder and you are concerned about how to handle any contradictory/problematic comments, define one of your superiors to be the "alpha" and ask that persons help to try and settle disputes. It should be relatively easy in some fields where the last author usually has the ultimate responsibility for the project.

Alternatively, if you have a supervisor/mentor who's gonna be a co-author but not the last; you can try to reason with that person to settle disputes. I have ended up in that situation where one of our co-authors decided to contradict with her own comments from before, and had these endless iterations of comments and changes. When I couldn't take it anymore, I talked to my supervisor and which point he took over the reigns and defined a new, final version prior to submission on which he asked all co-authors to have their final remarks.

It might appear as a bit totalitarian solution, but at that point the alternative was me completely dropping the project based on this one co-authors unexplainable and unbearable behavior.


Applying for PhD admission at more than one department in the same university

You have to ask each university.

I don't believe there are any ethical issues with applying to more than one program.  Moreover, I think it's rare for graduate admissions committees in different departments to share information about applicants.  (In the US, that sharing might even run afoul of FERPA, but interpretations of FERPA vary wildly from one university to the next.)

However, at some universities, it is not possible to apply to more than one department.  At my university, for example, all graduate applications go through a central web site that forces each applicant to choose exactly one program.  Yes, I think this is stupid.


In your question, you mentioned that you "wrote the full paper and then realized that it is possible that the particular journal requires experimental validation of any modeling results."

In other words, you seem to be missing a key piece of content in your manuscript that a full-length paper would be expected to have. And now you want to explore the possibility of trimming your paper down to submit it as a Letter, in the hopes that a shorter paper might help you to avoid having to do any experimental validation of your models. I could be wrong, but it seems that you might have the wrong idea about what a Letters paper is all about (at least as far as the IEEE is concerned).

Thus, before answering your questions, I think it will be a good idea to look at what the IEEE says regarding the Letter format, and what their intended usage is. [Also, since you commented on the possibility of submitting to the IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems (JMEMS) in particular, I will incorporate that venue in my answer below.]

From the IEEE JMEMS site, we find that:

  The Letters format is meant to encourage rapid publication of original and significant contributions that are limited in length (three or fewer journal pages), but appropriate for early dissemination.

Further, from the same IEEE JMEMS site above, we find that those seeking to submit their Letter are required to do the following:

  All submissions to JMEMS Letters are required to include an accompanying submission letter that puts forth persuasive arguments supporting the need for rapid publication. Possible supporting statements for these arguments might be built using: 1) references to recent literature that illustrate how the Letter addresses an already existing and pressing problem, and/or 2) "impact" statements outlining timely ramifications of the work, and/or 3) clear arguments supporting the case that the Letter points the way toward significant and meaningful changes in previous technologies, materials, or designs.

Note that nowhere in the information above do we find that the Letter format is suitable for those authors who are simply looking to trim down their full-length paper worth of research findings because they do not have key pieces of expected content for a full-length submission.

So, let's get to your questions:

  Do you think the requirements for publication of a letter is more lax compared to a full article?

No, the Letters option should not be viewed as an easier path to publication. (Surely, if it were easier to publish in the Letters format, then everyone would do it.)

In fact, as noted above at the IEEE JMEMS site, authors submitting Letter manuscripts are expected to justify why their work should be rapidly disseminated, and this required justification is on top of having a manuscript which makes a coherent case for the research findings presented, is a good fit for the journal, etc.

  If I were to submit it as a full paper, and it gets rejected because it doesnt have sufficient amount of experimental validation, will I still be able to submit as a letter?

If you were to submit your manuscript as a full paper, and it was rejected, say, because it doesn't have a sufficient amount of experimental validation, I doubt that submitting it for consideration as a Letter would be successful.

Why?

For IEEE publication venues in which full-length papers and Letters are both handled by a single venue (e.g., the IEEE JMEMS), the full-length paper and Letter submissions are overseen by one Editor-in-Chief (EiC).

Thus, if you submitted your full-length paper and it was rejected on the grounds that your paper was missing key pieces of expected content, we have to assume that the EiC (for IEEE JMEMS, in your particular case) would already be aware of your manuscript's submission-and-rejection history.

Surely, any EiC at any journal of reasonable quality would view this course of action on your part as an attempt to "game the system," and they would thus frown on this strategy rather heavily.

Going forward, I suggest the following course of action:

If I've totally misjudged your situation, and your paper really is a good fit for the Letters format (as outlined above), then go for that.
Else if your manuscript is better-suited as a full paper, then either work on the experimental validation of your modeling results, or find another venue where such validation is not seen as a requirement for publication.


Your question sounds like you're asking about a math paper.  Definitions in mathematics are a bit of a strange corner case for plagiarism issues because they're not supposed to be "in your own words."  My understanding of normal behavior is that you would never put a definition in quotes (unless you're writing about history), that you can nonetheless reuse definitions verbatim, but that you need to either cite the original source or say that they are standard definitions.  A typical way to do this would be by saying "We recall some key definitions from X."


What makes a MSc in Computer Science difficult for someone who has no specific background but 10 years of experience as a programmer?

It sounds like you fell into a couple of common traps at the same time.

Trap 1:

I am good at front-end web development, I am surely good at computer science as well

As you likely learned by now, it is possible (quite common, actually) to be a terrific programmer and still struggle with fundamental CS topics, such as algorithms. There may have been a time when programming was really applied algorithms, but today the skills required to write your average web application is relatively disjoint from what you learn in CS 101.

Trap 2:

I did decent in (undergrad) maths and physics courses, surely those (master) CS courses will be ok.

This is a combination of multiple fallacies I have seen. Firstly, you may have not taken into account that master-level CS courses are, well, for students on master-level. They assume a strong command of the basics, which, by the sound of it, you lack. Further, doing ok in maths and physics is a good indicator that you'll do well in maths and physics, it by no means qualifies you directly for a CS master.

Trap 3:

I know what I need to know, I just applied to the master because I need a better degree.

You say that:

  [I] figured it would be great to have a degree so as to look like a more legitimate programmer than what my anthropology B.A. degree might imply

I find this statement very concerning, as it seems you are more interested in getting a degree than in learning CS. If that is the case, you should seriously reconsider whether the degree is actually worth the trouble. Frankly, for most programming houses I am in contact with, 10 years of experience count for more than a master's degree anyway.

Now to answer your concrete question:

  If you were me would you quit the program? I'm not sure if it is a lack of a background in undergraduate computer science, the fact that I am an older student who is nearly 40, or a lack of aptitude for this subject.

I would not assume that you are just "not good enough", and the age shouldn't really be an issue either. It definitely sounds like you are lacking background, and the fact that you are doing the master part-time surely isn't helping either. All in all, that does not make for very favorable conditions.

Nobody but you can tell whether you should quit, but given the information, I would re-evaluate whether (a) a master is achievable for you, and (b) whether getting a master's degree is actually worth it for you.


is there a usage called "Full Professor"?

Yes. The highest level of professorship is "Professor". The title "Full Professor" is often used to distinguish from other lower rank positions (Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, etc).

(Edit after Henry's comment)


Should I include extra information in quiz questions?

It is always a good idea to offer authentic questions or tasks for assessment. So, if this additional information is authentic part of the problem, it is good to include it.  For example, if you would put it in the Introduction section of your paper on the topic of the quiz, you can include it in the quiz.

However, from the reading point of view it makes it harder to process, particularly for language learners. Any unnecessary bits should be left out.

Ideally, you should find the right balance between these two contradictory factors.


Master thesis: emails to a dissertation supervisor

This is better handled in person, rather than by email. You will get a more useful answer and be able to explore options. I would only use email if there were no face-to-face options available. Bring a printed CV to any such meeting in case the professor wants more information on your background. Mention in the CV any projects you have done. And make sure you know at least a bit about the professor's research interests before you meet.

But if you need an email structure it so that you give some information, but don't make it difficult to read or necessary to read everything. First ask, then say something about yourself and your background and interests. Try to keep it short and it will be more likely to be read. Anything very long (like a CV) can be an attachment, but probably isn't necessary for an initial contact. I assume that the professor will, if interested, ask for a face to face meeting in most cases. Again, make sure you have an understanding of the research interests of the professor and that they match your own.


Junior faculty position - course development

I think this is a false dichotomy. In the US, you are generally expected to be able to teach a course your first semester. You shouldn't need to have the course fully prepared in order to start teaching it, though. You can prepare as you go.

Also, many departments in STEM fields back off on their standard teaching load for junior faculty during the first year to give you some time to prepare your first courses, so you might get a 1-1 your first year instead of the usual 2-1 (or whatever). This kind of thing varies quite a lot from department to department, but there is usually some sort of consideration given to let you ramp up some classes.


What texts describe a desired behavior when a personal conflict could affect a professional decision?

While I am not aware of any formal universal code (there's not much formal universal anything in academia), the generally accepted scientific ethics is that a person with a known conflict of interest should not be involved in reviewing another's scientific work or proposal.

Most scientific organizations where this might apply have explicit policies to this end.  For example:

Grant reviewers for the US National Science Foundation are not allowed to be submitters to that same call for proposals, and must recuse themselves (i.e., leave the room) when there is discussion of any recent collaborator, co-author, or person from their institution.
Journals typically ask authors to name people with known conflicts of interest who should not be asked to review.  Reviewers are also asked to declare conflicts of interest and recuse themselves, and editors are (occasionally) responsive to well-founded complaints of prejudice.
Conferences similarly ask reviewers to exclude themselves from any papers they have a conflict for, and prevent reviewers from seeing information about any paper they have a conflict of interest for.
Double-blind reviewing of any of these is intended to mitigate the effects of personal conflict, though it is often possible to identify an author anyway due to their topic and approach.

There is no responsibility to collaborate with a person you have a conflict with though, nor to ensure civil interactions at conferences, etc.

All of these systems are quite flawed, of course, and there are a lot of ways that personal conflict does leak into decisions, especially since in many cases it is difficult to distinguish from legitimate intellectual disagreement.


How to withdraw a paper (under review) from fake journal

Simply let the editors know that you withdraw your submission. Tell them that you do not grant them any right whatsoever to internally keep or externally distribute that paper.
Publishing occurs on the basis of a bilateral contract. If one of the parties – in this case: you – does not agree with the agreement's core performance (here: the publication), there is no contract. No obligation arose for you.
Things, however, may get complicated: It is possible that the publisher will claim that a contract was initiated through your submission (and with the help of some hidden agreements and terms of services). In this case, you can argue that entering into that agreement occured "under a mistake as to a matter of fact essential to the agreement". Make sure to list any evidence that would qualify that publisher as predatory, that is, any evidence through which you were misled about their identity. In many laws around the world, there are explicit provisions about contracts being voidable if it was agreed upon under an erroneous belief about the identity of the contract partner.
But let's hope that no argument will arise. Otherwise it would help to know which publisher you are talking about, and which country's law is applicable in your case.


How to tell my PhD supervisors I want to publish without them?

Based on your account, I am surmising that you have already completed your PhD thesis, and obtained an academic position independent of your former supervisors (well done!). That being the case, you are under no obligation (whether legal, pragmatic, or ethical) whatsoever to involve your former supervisors in publication plans for work to which they did not make an author-level contribution. If you feel that (and, now that you are a Doctor of Philosophy, you should have some confidence in your academic judgement) you will advance scholarship more effectively by publishing alone or with different collaborators, you should have no qualms about doing so.

By the way, in my humanities field (in which sole-authored publications are the norm), it is perfectly acceptable, even encouraged, to publish without your PhD supervisor while still a student. I have two excellent supervisors, but it has never occurred to any of us to pursue a joint publication. In fact, funnily enough, I have recently completed a sole-authored book-chapter for a collected volume in which my principal supervisor just happens to also be writing his own sole-authored book-chapter (on a different topic, although relevant enough that I actually cite a few ideas from his chapter in mine).


The fine line between academic research and applied industry research?

My own experience suggests that the academic value can be quite orthogonal to the needs of the business. The company wants to build a product and "ideas" are secondary to that. For the academic, the ideas are at the front. But the work to build and refine the product often gives a researcher ideas that can be developed independent of the product development. Time constraints may require that exploration of those ideas needs to be delayed, but in most cases they can be developed.

You already suggest one such idea in your question. Keep that idea in your research notebook and develop it as time permits. You may need to abstract it a bit for confidentiality reasons, but you probably want to abstract it in any case to make it more interesting and more general.

There is no real conflict other than time, assuming that you can present the problems in a sufficiently abstract way that you don't infringe your contractual obligations.

Spin Off is a big idea. The formal project is a "mine" for ideas. Dig them out.


How to adopt flipped classroom strategies without student complaints?

As a student who has experienced a flipped learning method and especially one which was done horribly, I'll throw my two cents in. The way the flipped classroom was executed at my school was to have the students read an interactive textbook online before classes (this course was finance 1) and come to class to do some practice problems. The strategy that my professor used, whatever that was, failed horribly. There was petition at the end of the semester to remove the format signed by over 1000 661 students and the idea was pretty much scraped for the second semester.

The following points are ones that I feel are important to having this work successfully.

Classroom size
Lecture material
Difficulty of quizzes and tests related to the amount of lecture material
Make it worth their money

Firstly, it is incredibly important that you are present at all times especially if the classroom size is big. The students are hoping to come to your lecture to learn from you and to learn from your experiences in the subject. Therefore, being there and always lending a hand is very important. Furthermore, if the size of the classroom is too big then consider getting many  TAs. The consequence of not always being present or not being helpful usually means that students stop coming to class because they feel it is not worth their time. I believe the classroom attendance steadily dropped to less than 15 - 20 people per class out of 100+ students across all sections.

Secondly, if you don't want students to object to this teaching style then make sure the teaching material provided to students is sufficient to study from. If the course is technical then a couple of handouts will not be enough. Students need a concept to be explained a number of times in numerous ways using multiple examples. This is how they will study for quizzes, tests and exams. Furthermore, embed your personal experiences and neat tricks/tips into handouts. If you are going to ask students to learn from just Khan Academy videos or something similar then I can guarantee that students will hate it.

A follow up point to this is the difficulty of the quizzes, tests and exams. If you don't want your students to grovel over the course then make sure your quizzes, tests and exams are representative of the material that you have handed out. One of the main reasons a petition was signed at our school was because of the results. Whether the fault was with the teaching style or the students, that is difficult to say. However, most if not all of the students blamed the teaching method. At the end of the day, most students care about their grades and they will blame the most recent change which in our case was the change in teaching style.

Lastly, make it worth their money (time). It is important that you explain to students either via hardcore stats or some other method that this is worth the money they have paid for the course. In our case, most students felt that the professor was being simply lazy by not teaching and felt they were losing their money.

I hope this was helpful! Good luck!

EDIT:

@JessicaB suggested that I didn't say explicitly where the professor went wrong so I would like to elaborate here.

The professor did not provide adequate learning materials. Finance 1 is heavily quantitative and therefore, most students require lots of examples and in-depth reasoning as to why things work. The strictly online textbook the professor used was not thorough enough to explain some of the problems students were having. Furthermore, the practice problems were not at all indicative of the midterm which was given. To draw an analogy, picture learning only how to solve equations of the form ax+b and then being on the midterm to solve equations of the form ax^2 + bx + c.
The professor made no effort to provide students assistance even in class (which is the entire point to the flipped classroom concept). The professor usually had one TA which he would, literally, point to whenever we had a question. He made no effort to help students and would simply stand in front of the class. This pretty much made most people believe (and no evidence to the contrary was seen) that he was lazy.
He did not have office hours. If the student was not comfortable asking questions during class then tough luck. He refused to answer questions via email or during office hours.

Hopefully that is explicit enough on top of the points already provided before.


Choosing my name for my first publication

@Buffy's and @user2768's answers raise good points to consider when choosing.

I'd like to recommend in addition: Get yourself an ORCID and use it. An ORCID is a unique identifier that you can keep, however you may later on decide to change your name again.

ORCID allows several names, they say the only one really required is the first names (which can also be multiple first names) in order to also work for cultures like yours. So you could leave surname blank and actually keep your name as it is.
You can also specify how you'd like to be cited (I'm not sure how many look this up, though. But literature data bases should hopefully get that right), and you can even give also-known-as names.

As a side note: while it's good to think a bit which name you like to use, it's not that you cannot change it if it turns out not to work as well as you thought. If you use an identifier like ORCID, this won't even lead to confusion whether it is still you.
(And people in western culture do change their surnames as well, e.g. when getting married or divorced.)

It's not that western cultures don't know patronyms (usually with some change, e.g.  prefix or suffix meaning son/daughter, diminutive or genitive). In many western countries they meanwhile became family names but AFAIK in Iceland it is usual (and Denmark  possible) to give children a proper patronymic or matronymic name. They put the patronym/matronym as surname - so if you don't know the name of the parent, you don't notice the difference between a proper patonymic/matronymic or one that meanwhile became family name.


Can a teacher to refuse to follow their late work policy?

I doubt anyone can state conclusively that it is wrong for a teacher to change their policies in the middle of the semester. However, I think many can agree that a teacher does not want to be perceived as whimsical or mercurial by their students. If a teacher develops a habit of arbitrarily changing policies in the middle of a course to the detriment of students it can create a lot of ill-will between the teacher and the students.

Sometimes it is necessary to make changes. Examples include a true oversight by the teacher that needs to be addressed, obvious abuses by students of a policy, etc. Becoming more lenient is always popular while become more stringent should be in response to inappropriate behavior.

Whenever a change is necessary it must be communicated to the class clearly with some form of explanation. This is as a courtesy to maintain a productive learning environment. If this is neglected students will search for ways to fight against what they believe is unfair changes through such as methods as complaining, low course evaluations, or even academic dishonesty.


Do you have a phone number for the candidate?

If you contact them by phone you will know whether or not they received your communication, rather than email where, as you say, you don't know if they may have experienced extenuating circumstances preventing them from responding.

If they are indeed waiting for other responses, they might be more likely to mention this on the phone rather than in an email.


Is it okay to let body text follow immediately after intermediate level headings?

In my view, it is perfectly acceptable. It often helps readability, and logically it makes sense (a good example is the "introduction before subsections" that you cited).

That said, some people hate it, and I have already encountered referees who wanted me to change it. I haven't been able to infer a reasonable motivation up to now, so I would be interested in reading arguments in its favor.

Academic papers typically have no table of contents, so there is even less motivation for enforcing a strict tree-like structure.


How to get the address of a journal's editorial department and use it in a cover letter

On the bottom of  Computer & Graphics,

Click  "Editorial Office" button.

You get their e-mail address, if that's what you're looking for.

If you want their physical address, click "About Us" button on the bottom, you get Elsevier address.


How to reduce amount of language proofreading of my revised paper?

I am a native English speaker, this is based off my experiences proofreading papers for others in my lab who are not native speakers.

Changing even a small section of a paper can have repercussions throughout the rest of the paper in unexpected ways. Also, as important as it is that the English in the changed sections is correct it is also important that those changed sections flow appropriately with the rest of the paper.

To help with both of these issues it is best to have the entire paper proofread again. Even as a native-English speaker, I have others proofread my paper after revisions because of the above issues. It can be helpful to somehow mark the changed sections and request that the proofreader be aware that those areas were changed.


Dealing with adversarial grant committee members in interviews

I am not in your field of work, however, as one of the comments to your question pointed out, this type of scenario can happen in other fields and situations.  The best first step is to acknowledge the debate and the limitations of your own study.  However, frame your response such that regardless of the debate, you will still learn something new.  For example, my response might be something like:

"Clearly there are two schools of thought as to whether quz or bar is the correct assumption, however, that question cannot be answered in a single study alone. By funding this proposal to do work under the assumption of bar, we can answer questions X, Y, and Z.  An additional outcome is that we will be providing more information about phenomena surrounding bar, thus providing more information that may ultimately help to answer the question of quz versus bar."


Selecting Journals or Conferences to publish research work

In general if you are looking for a journal where to publish a specific type of manuscript do a survey of the material you have referenced. Where are those articles published? You should pay special attention to articles that are multidisciplinary such as yours. The next step if you are uncertain about the appropriateness is to e-mail the journal editors of journals and ask if they consider multidisciplinary articles. I do not think you should send the manuscript to them because they usually do not have time to read anything substantial just to answer a question but do paste in your title, author list and abstract.

As of conferences, I cannot see a patented answer. If a conference is a recurring event you can always go back to collections of abstracts to see if other multidisciplinary papers have been presented. Another option is to see if you cannot organize your own session at a larger conference that permits sessions.


Is it possible to run two postdocs simultaneously if one of them is "independent"?

It is hard to predict what is "possible". Your contract(s) and policies may stipulate expectations.
But to be safe, I would suggest, only do this with everyone's knowledge and permission. I doubt that it would be given, I guess, but you could suffer if you do it "on the sly". If you do a good job in both and no one learns of the deception then you might be ok, but that certainly isn't assured. And, working it out in advance will help make expectations clear and avoid any legal issues.
Also, it is good to sleep, occasionally and to have an actual life.


Short papers at computer science conferences

The value of short papers at CS conferences (I guess this holds true for other subjects, as well) is that they provide you a way to discuss early results of a study in a venue of people who have similar interests.

You receive feedback before the "real thing". Some conferences in CS do also publish short papers in their proceedings but many of them do not. Under the publish or perish viewpoint regular papers carry more value.

On the other hand, a short paper is ideally followed by a regular paper, after some time. After all, you would make use of all the feedback received to produce the regular paper at another venue.

You ask "Would it of been better working on 4-5 short papers instead of 1 long paper?"

It depends on what you need to achieve. Five publications are likely better than one publication. But short papers often are not published. Even if they were: how much time would it take to have 5 papers peer-reviewed and accepted at X conferences, instead of a single 1 in a single conference? With a regular paper only, you have more time to move to the next thing!


How to remove a co-author from an article published on arXiv?

Yes, technically one can modify the authors of an arXiv article. See the replace instructions on arXiv. See also this answer on Quora. But, as far as I understand these instructions, the previous version with the initial co-authors will remain on the server.

Note that it was no good scientific practice to initially associate a co-author to the paper that didn't contribute to it. Regaring the claiming of the authorship by X after removing his name from the paper, I have no answer.


How important is the country of academic experience in applying for US academic jobs?

To answer your questions:

They do not require, but they will usually prefer someone who is familiar with the academic system that they use. For example, small liberal arts colleges will usually prefer people with experience with small liberal arts colleges.
Perhaps not "not competitive" but certainly "less competitive" unless you are in a Tier 1 school in a nation that is known to have competitive tertiary education.

People have already noted in comments that there are two types of deans at American academic institutions:

Academic deans who are heads of units (the Dean of the Graduate School, for example).  These are usually promoted from within the current faculty body but on rare occasions are brought in from outside.
Non-academic deans or deans of student services (the Dean of Career Services, for example). These can be promoted (or laterally transferred) from the faculty body but are more often hired for that particular role and specialty. Non-academic deans are much more mobile -- for better or for worse. They move from institution to institution, hopefully moving up the ranks.

I would say that in your case the possibility of moving into an academic dean slot are very small.  You do have much more hope for a position as a non-academic dean.

I should note that one option that is open to you is to apply for a senior faculty position in a university with the intent of becoming Chair, then a Dean within that institution. There are often job postings listed for departments that explicitly want senior faculty -- including senior faculty who are willing to immediate Chair the department.


Can I send my accepted research paper to IEEE conferences?

I think 3 published papers in reputable journals (though you do not
say which precisely) should more than enough to get you in a PhD
program. Dome people are happy to get as much with their PhD work.
But that may depend on the field.

However, publishing twice the same result, even with some cosmetic
changes, is a good way not to get accepted for a PhD program, or for
an academic position.

People publish far too much, and waste each other's time. We have to
strive for quality, not quantity.

Now, you did not specify you field, and thing may somewhat differ
according to scientific field.

In some fields, conferences are considered publications, sometimes
harder on selection than (some) journals. In other fields, it is more
acceptable to republish in conferences as conference papers play a
minor role and are more intended as topics for meeting with
colleagues, and giving introduction to your work.

The former will have more importance for your publication list, but is more demanding on originality.

The right thing to do, that will avoid any problem, bcause they will
be dealt with by the program committee of the conference, is to be
extremely clear as to what is already published, to make it visible
and to have in the references your previous relevant publications (as
well as those of other people), whether already accepted or only
submitted. Then the program committee will let you know whether your
submission is appropriate or not.

But do not abuse relying on the program committee, they have considerable work to do.

And always be very careful when using twice the same research results.


Submitted to arXiv with a different title. How to make Google understand this is the same paper?

This may not be the answer you're looking for, but one solution would be to update the arXiv paper so that its title agrees with the published paper.  (You can change an arXiv paper's title by submitting a revision.)  Maybe you prefer the title from the arXiv, but using different titles causes enough hassle and confusion that I can't really believe it's worthwhile.

It's not just a matter of convincing Google Scholar.  If they supply a link to a paper with a different title, some users will assume it's an error without looking closely enough to detect that it's really the same paper.  The same issue will occur whenever anyone runs across the arXiv paper, since the first heuristic most people use to decide whether two papers are the same is comparing the title and authors.

If you really want to use a different title, you should take every opportunity to clarify the relationship between the papers.  For example, the arXiv abstract page and the first page of the article should explicitly state that it's the same as the published paper (and give the citation).  But even if you do that, readers will be confused and perhaps a little annoyed.  They'll naturally wonder why it has a different title if it's the same paper otherwise, and they may wonder what else you have changed compared with the published version.  If there are nontrivial changes, then you should warn the reader, while if there aren't, then it's not good to let readers wonder about that.


How do you deal with your Rate My Professor ratings?

I am not a professor. Perhaps it would be useful to you to understand this from a student's perspective. I am a PhD candidate and did my undergrad at the same school I'm in the PhD program for. This has given me some unique insight into the difference between what is put on a review, and the actual person (one of whom I work with closely) in reality.
RateMyProfessor encourages extremely harsh reviews. From a professor's perspective this is simply noise in the channel.
As a student RateMyProfessor became virtually worthless after I got through the middle of my undergraduate courses. Early undergraduate courses tended to be a grab-bag of instructors and professors. Some of them not even in the same field they are teaching. You will find that as course numbers increase and topic becomes specific (implying higher difficulty) the ratings skew heavily to the negative. The conclusion here, I think, is obvious. Student's want easy grades. But the explanation for that is not simply "students are lazy". As a student I didn't really get time to enjoy my classes. In order to graduate in 4 years I had to stay focused entirely on two goals: (1) minimize time spent studying (because I had several classes to worry about as well as a part time job) and (2) maximize my grade. I got out of my CS program with a 3.7 GPA which given that I took several hard classes really amounted to a mixture of actual work ethic, careful selection of professor, and time management.
You might say "well that's quite contrary to what I'd expect of a PhD-worthy undergraduate!" given that I am a PhD candidate. But truth be told, it wasn't until my last semester of undergrad when my course load was low that I really got to enjoy my classes for what they were. Until then, it was simply a game. Optimize the parameters of the equation whose solution is your graduation. The crushing weight of both expectation (get a good job) and retaking classes costing significantly more money made this equation my single greatest concern. Though you didn't say you were in the US I am speaking from a US standpoint. This is absolutely a consequence of extremely high prices for classes (where failure isn't a financial option), the unspoken requirement of a college degree for a good job, and the time crunch to get into industry to make some actual money.
Knowing this, take these things with a grain of salt. Know that especially if you are teaching undergraduate courses your students are adversarial. You could be a bad teacher, that is certainly a possibility, but more likely you have screwed up their solution to the equation required to graduate. Keep this in mind and seriously evaulate whether you are a measurably bad professor or you are teaching a hard subject and students who misinterpreted your presentation (as in you, personally) are upset you screwed up the game they are playing.


How to find a reviewer/editor for my paper?

Your best bet is offering a graduate student a lot of money.  In most cases this is going to be an unpleasant job.  In most cases, the paper will be some combination of incorrect, incoherent, and uninteresting, but the author will usually be very resistant to hearing that.  (I don’t know you, hopefully this doesn’t describe you or your paper, but whoever you hire also isn’t going to know you or your paper.)  So you’re going to have to offer a lot of money to compensate and offer it to someone who doesn’t have a large salary.  Something like $100-$150/hour with the first two hours paid up front would probably be enough for a graduate student to overlook that it’s likely to be an unpleasant job.


I was sexually assaulted by a professor writing me a LOR for grad-school applications. What should I do?

That's really awful, and I'm so sorry someone whose job it is to help you instead put you in this difficult position.

When you applied for your masters program did you have strong letters from professors at your undergraduate school?  While all things being equal it is better to get letters from people who have interacted with you more recently, having one letter that's only a year or two old should be fine.  Since those professors already wrote you a letter, there's a good chance that they'd be able to update it and resend it easily.  This may be more practical than getting a totally new person on such short notice.  It also seems clearly better than only having two letters.


Many of the OSF preprints are postprints. OSF is a platform that unites several preprint servers, and the posting rules may vary from one provider to the other. You can check it here: https://osf.io/preprints/
Also, I can suggest checking individual servers. You can find a comprehensive community-curated list here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17RgfuQcGJHKSsSJwZZn0oiXAnimZu2sZsWp8Z6ZaYYo/edit#gid=0


Taking a break between master’s and PhD in Physics

Many people find it more difficult to pass their PhD exams if they take a significant break.  It can often be helpful to have things fresh in one's mind for the exams.  However, this, of course, can vary by the individual.


Why would a small paper (10 pages) with an important result take over a year to get accepted?

There can be many reasons why a paper takes a long time to be published. The `official' reason is that the paper needs to be carefully reviewed and considered before the result can be accepted for publication; the more prestigious the venue, the more care is taken in reviewing the results. However, there are other factors that come into play

This is in my view the most important: reviewers take a long time to get to finish their review, especially in high-quality venues. One should remember that reviewing is unpaid labour that academics provide to the academic publication industry for (what is apparently) the right to publish. There is no real incentive to review; there are meta considerations, like standing in the community, that depend on how much you do it, but I know several successful academics that do the bare minimum.
Good results in bad packaging: even a groundbreaking set of results can be poorly structured, which would result in delay in publication (if not outright rejection).
Politics and names do have some (minor) effect: having prominent authors/friends on the editorial board can result in a slightly faster turnaround. However, I have not heard of cases where editors have unethically accepted the work submitted by their friends, or rejected/dragged on the review process for the work of competitors.


Are there any publications that explain the origin of conventions of authorship order by field?

I have found two works that I think are interesting and relevant.

First, there is a sequence of three papers by Beaver and Rosen from 1978-79 on the history of scientific collaboration: "Studies of Scientific Collaboration" (Part I, Part II, Part III, unfortunately all paywalled by Springer).  These articles document a relationship between co-authorship and "professionalization" of science, noting that although co-authorship has a long history of equal relationships, it surges when it becomes tied to access to facilities, money, and power particularly as judged by peers within the scientific community.

Ubiquitous co-authorship only emerged in the mid-20th century, and given the scientific economic environment in the US and Western Europe, there seems to be a plausible relationship to the three main authorship traditions that have been observed:

Biomedical research is very dependent on judgement of scientific peers, and thus would be natural to have the highest co-authorship and most complex and hierarchy-driven interpretation of author order, distinguishing "primary contributor" (protege) from "senior author" (patron).
Mathematical research, on the opposite end of the spectrum, requires little in the way of funding or access to resources, and thus has the shortest co-author lists and most egalitarian traditions for interpreting authorship.
Engineering research, although heavily funded and often strongly dependent on access to facilities and equipment, is less dependent on peers and more dependent on providing near-term results to government or industrial patrons, and thus it is unsurprising that it ends up in the middle state.

For comparison, then, we may consider the second paper, "What is authorship, and what should it be? A survey of prominent guidelines for determining authorship in scientific publications", a 2009 comparison of 10 different society authorship policies, which range from NIH setting forth a biomedical canon in which only the "corresponding" author really counts to the American Statistical Association, which says that the convention chosen for author order should be explicitly explained (no mathematical society is included, unfortunately).

Now all of this might be snapshots and "just-so stories" that are not the actual causality and history, but it's at least an interesting starting point for interpretation and investigation.


Is there such a thing in the academic world as "common knowledge"?

Some people will agree with, and some will oppose, the idea that some things are so obvious they don't need to be cited. Here're two essays on Wikipedia about whether one should cite that the sky is blue.

Wikipedia:You don't need to cite that the sky is blue

It's pedantic.
There is no need to verify statements that are patently obvious.
It leads to over-referencing where sentence flow is interrupted by excessive citations.
"The purpose of a citation is to guide the reader to external sources where the reader can verify the idea presented, not to prove to other editors the strength of the idea."

Opposing argument: Wikipedia:You do need to cite that the sky is blue

Apparently simple facts may be disputed, e.g. the sky isn't always blue, it's black at night.
It's reassuring to readers, even if it's obvious.
Not everyone has the same "common knowledge". For example it may be common knowledge to Americans how many states there are in the US, but not to the rest of the world.

Suffice to say, there's no consensus on this. General guidelines then would be:

If the material is likely to be challenged, cite it.
If in doubt, cite it.


You are in a tough position because 'offers' cannot be guaranteed until you have an official letter in hand.  And, when letters are sent is really specific to a department and university.  For example, when I was accepted to graduate school, the acceptance letter and funding were part of the same letter.


How can I make my papers available on Sci-Hub?

"Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers and books, without regard to copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls," source: Wikipedia. "Sci-Hub obtains paywalled articles using leaked credentials."  So, it seems, Sci-Hub focuses on papers owned by corporations, rather than individuals.
There's surely less interest in providing access to papers owned by individuals, since those individuals can simply make their papers publicly available. Nonetheless, let us suppose that Sci-Hub takes an interest in making more works available. Then you just need to make papers available where Sci-Hub looks.
Even technical report repositories such as arxiv may forbid Sci-Hub from redistributing papers. So, there isn't much of an incentive for Sci-Hub to move into this space: They create trouble for little reward.
Sci-Hub could start looking at personal websites, but, what's the reward? The material is already accessible. Sci-Hub could also start allowing authors to upload content, but, again, what's the reward?
I don't really see why Sci-Hub would invest in making papers owned by individuals more accessible.  Their niche is elsewhere.


When should you move on from a postdoc position?

"Discussion" isn't really how SE is supposed to work. However, I think the answer to your questions are relatively clear-cut (at least to me):

  you are offered a postdoc position in a second-tier research group. Should you consider taking it, in order to broaden your academic horizons?

Why? You have a broad horizon, you have seen three top institutions before even becoming a faculty member. Go if the new position offers you something you are currently missing (such as a nicer place to live), but I would certainly not move just for the sake of it.

  [you are offered a ] a faculty position at the second-tier institution?

If I like the place, I'll take this offer without a second thought. Expecting to become faculty directly at one of the five top institutions seems too much to ask for.

  a postdoc position at one of the first-tier institutions you've already had an association with?

Did you like it there better than in your current job? If yes, take the offer. If no, stay.

  a postdoc position at a first-tier institution that you haven't already had an association with?

More or less same answer as for the first bullet. You have seen a lot of places already, you do not need to change jobs just for the sake of it. If there is something you think the new institution will do better, then go for it. If not, stay. There is no life achievement for visiting each top institution in your field.


Your above assertion truly postulates about the lack of appropriate trace for any effective and bold philosophical studies or research within your previous degree.

Composition of a coherent and powerful SoP sounds indispensable for you. You must pinpoint your motivation to switch from painting to philosophy, at first. Then, as Ph.D. studies and research in any field do need a robust background from the fundamental subjects, you could mention your self-studies within this territory to convince the admission committee upon your rather-structured mental background for pursing the new path.

In my estimation, the more functional approach would be digging into the other Master degree in philosophy, to construct your background in a fully-persuading fashion, and then taking the attempt into account for the Ph.D. admission.

Best of luck..


Can a Computer Science Post Baccalaureate Student get Graduate Assistantships?

Depends on your profile. If you are expert in a specific track and the faculty realizes that you might actually be able to assist the students, you would easily get a GA/TA/RA. An alternative to that can be tutoring, I've tutored all through my grad school. It actually pays almost all of your living expenses.

Of course any and all students are eligible to work on-campus for 20 hours per week during the school session and 40 hours when the school is not in session. This applies to international students too, if they are on F1 visa.


I don't think anyone is going to be able to give you a straight answer to this question. It will depend on many factors, which only you can really answer:

Do you prefer to live in UK or Spain, and also the city in particular both countries are big and diverse.
The research groups involved and/or the research project (this also includes obviously the supervisor)
The details of the position (salary, possible benefits, etc.)

I probably missed other important factor but the point is this is a personal decision where no one but you will have enough information to answer.


What is normally not acceptable to budget in a grant

First of, Marc has it right - these things need to be defined in the grant rules / grant agreement. There is no universal truth in these matters. For instance,  European Union funded projects almost always contain travel budgets, which can be used for project meetings or research-related trips (e.g., conferences). The  Austrian Science Fundation (FWF), on the other hand, explicitly disallow travel budgets for conference trips and claims that these expenses need to be covered by overheads. Contrary, the Swiss National Science Fundation (SNF) works very similar to FWF, but allows for travel budgets.

That being said, typically only costs that are specific to running a project and which would not have been accrued without the project are covered. Besides personnell costs, that typically includes buying special hardware that is essential to the project, but which is not usually used in the rest of the PI's research. What is usually not covered are indirect costs that stem from hiring any researcher. This includes mundane things, such as the office space for the researcher, desks, telephony costs, coffee (if you work in a place that buys such things for employees), and IT equipment.

As for the "why are CPUs covered, but not entire computers?" case - I presume that your grant does not allow you to buy just any CPU from your grant, but it should allow hardware specific to your project (e.g., buying or renting a powerful server or cluster for number crunching in relation to a computationally intense project). It will likely not allow you to buy just a regular desktop CPU, just as it would not allow you to buy the entire desktop computer.


How to publish a corrected proof for a claimed mathematical result?

I had a similar problem with one of my conference papers. We posted a revised version on arxiv, specifying in a footnote what the mistake was and how it was corrected. The correct proof made it official appearance in a journal paper that was partially based on the the conference one.


Fun fact: I once read a legal paper whether self-plagiarism is right on wrong. The conclusion was: it's hard to say.

In my opinion you should let your instructor know of your concern.

Personally, I think you should be OK, especially if the problematic assignment really depends on the previous ones. If a student approached me with this kind of problem I would rather enjoy that he has seen the connections between the problems. If you were to submit other people's work as your own, that would be problematic. However, it's always academically wise to mark the places that are based on your prior work as well.

As a personal experience: when I was studying at the uni we were once tasked with a problem and I said aloud: "Great, I can submit my solution from other class". Instructor's answer was: "The assignments that can be submitted to pass different classes are the best. I once submitted same solution to three different instructors". YMMV, but I think you'd be on the safe side if you make your instructor aware of the circumstances.


How good is the International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics? (http://www.ijpam.eu/)

To try to make this answer generalizable, here's how one can investigate in general:

The first thing to do is to ask more experienced researchers for their opinions, which is exactly what you've done here.  But you may run into the problem that you can't find people who know the journal.  For example, I don't recall having heard of IJPAM before, but it's not clear what that means.  IJPAM is certainly not a famous or prestigious journal, but there are a lot of journals out there and nobody has heard of all of them.

Beall's list is a list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers."  The publisher of IJPAM (Academic Publications, Ltd.) appears on this list, which is a bad sign.  You have to decide how to interpret it - maybe Beall has made a mistake, or maybe your criteria are different from his - but it's an important sign that you should investigate further.

You can then take a look at the actual papers and see what you think of them (or ask faculty members at your university).  In the case of IJPAM, I found it quite worrisome.  I looked at the most recent issue and found several papers that don't look like research papers at all: Sudoko: the new smash hit puzzle game and Odd and even number cultures.  This suggests IJPAM will publish nearly anything.  If you've written a research paper, having it appear next to papers with no research content would look bad, so I recommend against publishing in IJPAM.


Although some people might reasonably think that "pure math" courses are irrelevant to your larger goals, I would claim that the popular distinction between "pure" and "applied" math is both scientifically meaningless, and potentially hazardous to people trying to get started.
Having fluency with basic ideas of abstract mathematics ("algebra", "topology", and such) is inestimably useful. Illiteracy in these things makes it impossible to really know what the substance of many "applied" conversations may be.
The ideas in "pure/abstract" math are not at all disjoint from "the real world". They were all motivated by the desire to understand things. Yes, some self-styled "applied math" people pretend that all they need is computer time, and some self-styled "pure math" people pretend that whatever they do is disconnected from reality, and is practically useless. This is all silly, in my opinion.
In particular, having a basic grounding in "abstract" math will make you a far better candidate for any reasonable math program, whether eventually aiming at something "applied" or "not".


How to politely remind a Professor to re-review my application?

I'd probably wait for some more time. The professor probably took Christmas holidays as a chance to have some time off to spend with her family or doing other things. Don't put pressure on her, let her have another week to carefully look at your application and reply to you with no hurry. In case you don't get a reply by next monday, then it will be appropriate to write an email.


What does 'substantial similarity' really mean?

It seems to me that they have decided, for whatever reason, that they could not justify publishing both papers. The two papers are are too 'similar', the alternate method is not sufficient to justify publishing the same result twice (and it is really hard to argue agains this even in the case where the difference between P1 and P2 is significant and offers some interesting insights).

It may be simply poor/unclear presentation on your part or their failure to see the 'difference' you describe (Maybe you needed to `convince them' by giving explicit reasons on why both should be published, and why both methods are interesting).

Perhaps, depending on the field and topic, they were more or exclusively interested in the 'end result' and the 'interesting' background and detail regarding P1 versus P2 was beyond their interest.

It is possible that you could have chosen one or P1 and P2 and briefly discussed the other.


The best way to refer readers to other paper(s) for more details

I would try to work the references into your text and include why you're referring  the reader to them. I might write something like:

  Smith et al. [1] provides additional background on flying monkeys and their use in underwater basket making.

Or

  Several recent articles review flying monkey [1, 2, 3].

Or

  Recent tutorials and overviews of flying moneys exist for readers unfamiliar with the their background and use [1, 2, 3].

As a style note, I would not simply refer to the number inline (e.g. see [1, 2, 3])).

For more inspiration, I would skim and read recent articles in your target journals.
I find reading to be a one method for improving my own writing style.

Here's an example from my own publication:

  For readers who are unfamiliar with IPMs, recent overviews, introductions, and tutorials of integral projection models exist (e.g., Ellner and Rees, 2006, Ramula et al., 2009, Ellner et al., 2010, Merow et al., 2014).


Is re-using parts of one's own SoP (or research statement) considered self-plagiarism?

It is very unlikely that anyone would consider either of these problematic. An SoP isn't published formally, for example.

People reuse their own words in other contexts all the time. But self plagiarism arises when you publish something that is based on or contains elements of something that you published previously without citing the original.

The reason that this is a problem is that a person reading the new work wants to know the complete context in which it was developed. This is why you cite other works. But it is also why you cite yourself, rather than just reusing your words.

The original publication, itself has a context, not only what it says, but the references it cites. If your new publication doesn't point to that, the reader will find it hard to know the complete context. Scholarship builds on earlier scholarship. Lack of citation cuts the chain of context that is essential for the complete picture.

But the two cases you point to don't require the same chain of evidence to be maintained, so there is no issue.


What tool or process can I use to see revisions on papers I am grading?

At my university, our agreement with Google is designed to make sure the content is hosted in the US so that FERPA-covered materials can be posted to it (I think. I know it's true for Gmail). This includes shared Google Docs which would have the full change history. If that works for you, then you could easily go with that. I'd check with your university-wide, central IT department (if you have one) to see if this option is available to you, too.


Should I point out typos on students' important forms that I am signing?

I would point out the error, especially if you have a reason to believe it will be taken into account in some nontrivial way.

I don't really understand why doing this goes against the student's "self-reliance".  I point out errors of this kind in papers that I am refereeing, for instance, and when people read my own papers or course notes or whatever, they sometimes point out my own typos including spelling errors.* I don't think that either I or these other adult academic professionals are failing to show self-reliance.

*: I do all my writing on a version of LaTeX with disabled spell-checking, so I have to spell my words correctly "the old-fashioned way".  Mistakes do sometimes creep in.  I could be setting things up better, but anyway the New York Times occasionally has spelling mistakes.


Corporate branding of chair professorship

You are asking too many questions in one post and most ask for opinion! Brief responses to each:

Usually faculty accept named professorships because of the increase in prestige (named-professorships are a scarce commodity and operate as such) as well as the increase in salary or research funds that usually attaches to these. Cynical people would say the latter is more important.
Usually (almost always?) the endowment would carry an increased salary at the very least and typically additional research funds  but I have not found any statistics on the average and sd of this delta. One way to explore this is to look at the public salary data available at state-run universities in the United States and compare named vs. non-named professors at the same rank in the same department. This is left as an exercise for the reader and doesn’t account for research fund deltas.
Yes, in that most person-based named-professorships are named after a person who most people do not know  whereas corporate names are more familiar (for example:  Prof. Mark C. Elliott, the Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History at Harvard versus Prof Sheldon Garon, the Nissan Professor in Japanese Studies at Princeton). And thus while neither Mark Schwartz nor Nissan Motors influence the work of either faculty person, the perception is worse in the second in that we've heard of Nissan and can attribute ulterior motives to it. And as dmckee notes in the comments, humans are mortal -- while corporations are immortal.
Note that there is a third category of alumn-class-named professorships: Cornel West, the Class of 1943 University Professor in the Center for African American Studies. These are essentially crowdfunded by a class cohort. I should note that some named fellowships are also crowdfunded — they are named in honor of so-and-so. Often the benefactor is the spouse or children, but occasionally the departure of a very-loved professor motivates students to donate. There is also a fourth category where a named professorship is created by the trustees of the university (or by the state or national government) in honor of or recognition of someone or something.


How should I choose the name of my past degree in application when the options do not not exactly match my degree?

By "I see things like," I assume you mean "the options are," i.e., the list of options you have given is exhaustive. I shall also assume that you are an engineering student, with a degree at "Bachelor of science" level and you are currently studying at "Master's of science" level. The question about academic background is looking for your highest qualification, so I would list "master's of science."

You could call the university to confirm!

EDIT. I do not agree with compass's remark that a UK MEng degree is provided in lieu of a Bachelor's and has the same study length: UK BEng degrees are typically three years, whereas UK MEng degrees are typically four years. It is possible that compass is attempting to compare Bachelor's degrees between different countries.


Is it possible to get into a top-10 engineering graduate program without publications?

The admissions process for graduate school is complicated. I am not aware of any admissions committee that requires prior publications to be accepted. Admissions decisions are not so much based on the presence/absence of publications but on the extent to which the application demonstrates an ability to conduct research. Prior publications can demonstrate an ability to conduct research, but do not necessarily guarantee it. The lack of publications does not mean you cannot conduct research, but does mean you need to demonstrate research potential in another way (e.g., letters of recommendation).


I would say, yes, n.d. is correct.
Background: The AMS Style Guide is based on the Chicago Manual of Style (see the Preface at p. ix), so let's take a look there (at chapter 17.119):

When the publication date of a printed work cannot be
ascertained, the abbreviation n.d. takes the place of the
year in the publication details. A guessed-at date may
either be substituted (in brackets) or added. [...]

For the "guessed-at date", the Chicago manual provides the example of (Author [1750?]).


How to reply to reviewer's positive comment more naturally?

For this sort of reply, I personally like to keep it short and sweet:

  Thank you!


Where can I donate print academic journals?

Most US institutions have subscriptions to the most important journals that include online access of past content -- so they will generally not have any interest in stocking yet more paper in their archives.

This is different for developing countries where space is less expensive than journal subscriptions. I've had colleagues will connections to third world universities to which they always took boxed of books donated by colleagues every time they went. I suspect that if you ask around enough, you'll find colleagues who know someone in Africa or Southeast Asia who would be interested in taking books and journals -- but you may have to pay for shipping.


How to deal with inactive students in undergraduate projects?

Here's a view from the commercial side. I have been interviewing CS graduates since about 1983. Allowing CS students to be graded entirely on exam scores and group projects causes real problems for the students after graduation. The majority of MSCS graduates I have interviewed were unable to program AT ALL. They were passed through CS course work without ever being required to independently produce working code. Reality hits when they go to a technical interview at a selective employer and spend 45 minutes trying to solve the warm-up problem. I used to be frustrated with the candidates. Now I'm angry with the CS departments who sell worthless graduate degrees to unsuspecting students.

Shortly after I graduated from Carnegie-Mellon in 1979 they found that despite completing the introductory CS class required of all engineering students, most could not produce a simple working program. In response they instituted a practical final exam. Students were put in front of a terminal and given a couple of hours to write a working program to solve some simple problem, something that was probably ten or fifteen minutes work for a competent programmer. If the program didn't work, they didn't pass the course.

All CS programs should, as early as possible, ensure that students can independently produce working code before allowing them to advance. It's cruel to hand out degrees, leading students to believe that they are ready to work, when they are not and likely never will be.


How to format code in a thesis (Word document)?

You should create a paragraph style with the appropriate settings—a monospaced font for one thing, probably some indentation—and use that.

When using Microsoft Word you should resist the temptation to change any properties of the font at all manually. (Ideally remove the font bar from the ribbon altogether.) Instead you should create paragraph and character styles and apply them as you go along. Then they can easily be edited globally later.

If you really need syntax highlighting, the "best" way would probably be to write a macro that tagged the different parts of the code with a different character style for each code element, and then adjust the colours in the character style editor later. Then run the macro on each code block. I suspect such a macro probably exists somewhere.

The "quick" way would be to copy and paste from another program where the text is already coloured.


You have reason to be concerned about the reasons you give. It is possible to keep in touch. It is also possible to publish some things while you are otherwise working, but it is very difficult.
I doubt that teaching secondary school will give you any advantage in a doctoral program unless it is in a school of Education or in a program that is otherwise focused on producing teachers. Such exist, of course.
You can "fall back" to secondary teaching even without the prior experience, so that doesn't seem to be an advantage.
If your long term goals include a doctorate and you have the means to do so, then I think it is a (big) mistake to put it off unless there are other considerations not raised here.
Most places (not all) the cost of a doctorate is paid in some way. In the US, most students are TAs. In other places there are other arrangements. Also, in the US, you have some time at the start of a program to decide on a specialty.
You lose noting by applying and exploring the options directly, even if you do so in parallel with other possibilities.
But if your goal is really teaching secondary school, then an MST (Master of Science in Teaching) is a good choice.


Should departments have a policy regarding updating online resources?

Fundamentally, I don't think this problem has to do with the shift to a paperless format. Even with a syllabus on paper, my experience has been that a professor may well change it, often for good reason (e.g., shifting to make room for an excellent guest speaker, extending a deadline on a lab that many people are having problems with).

I think that the real problem here is that the faculty member has made a last-minute change that makes life harder for the students.  Student who thought they were done with the assignment have just discovered that they have more work to do, it may be interfering with their other plans, class or non-class, and it just plain doesn't feel fair.  Perhaps a good policy for that would be that no assignment can be made more restrictive once it has "started"?

There is also a place where the electronic aspect can enflame or mitigate the issue, and that may also address your original question.  Online documents offer the potential for making a "sneaky" change that is not announced directly to the students.  That seems to me to be something that should definitely be prohibited, and might be handled automatically by having the system send an announcement to all of the students whenever a course document changes.  I don't know Moodle, so I don't know how hard or easy it would be to set up automatic notification; even without automation, however, you could certainly regulate that all non-trivial changes must have a notification sent to students.


How/when should I ask my supervisors' for a reference letter?

Inform them about your plans now and let them decide what works best for them.

You may be right that they will have forgotten you by the time you apply (depending on how much you worked together). But on the other side, the best LORs are specific to a position you are applying for and should be tailor written, "generic" LORs may not be as good, and some people may not want to write one without knowing what they are going to be for.


Counting the number of peer reviews in the CV

I have served on several search committees lately for faculty members, and, honestly, I haven't seen one CV structure the peer review section in this fashion.

In my personal opinion, doing so looks like CV padding. We all know that the reviewing process can have multiple read throughs and comments, so I do not think it is necessary to include the number of times you have done the process for each individual manuscript.

Just my two cents.


When should one opt for a one-year master's program in the US?

One-year master's programs in computer science are usually terminal course-based degrees.  They are essentially useless for a future research career, because they do not include time to do research.  (PhD admissions committees care about your research potential much more than your grades.)  Put brutally, professional MS programs exist for the sole purpose of trading tuition for the promise of a higher salary.  The advantage of these programs is that successful graduates (at least from my department) actually do get higher salaries, and the program only takes one year.  Also, if you work for a particularly enlightened employer, they may be willing to (help) pay your tuition.

Two-year master's programs in computer science are more research-based.  In addition to classes, most research master's students write a thesis describing original research; that's why it takes two years instead of just one.  That's also one of the advantages of the program; you have more time to learn outside the formal classroom environment.  You may also be able to secure funding through research or teaching assistantships; these are almost unheard of for professional master's students.  The disadvantage is that if you're not interested in research, the program takes two years instead of one.  On the other hand, a research masters seems to have the same effect on salary as a professional masters, in part because it's impossible to tell from a resume what type of MS you have.


Recommendation for creating a graphical timeline representation

A simple way is to use the SmartArt feature in various Microsoft Office programs (e.g. PowerPoint) to create a timeline. Google Slides can also be used (Insert -> Diagrams -> Timeline). See e.g. this guide for more details and inspiration. Alternatively, as henning states in a comment, you can just use a generic drawing app.
TeX solutions also exist, and have been described on other stacks. See e.g.

How to create a timeline with LaTeX?
How do I develop a complex time line?
How can you create a vertical timeline?