Will my exchange study grade influence my graduate school application?

Will it be really bad for my graduate school application?

You need to be clear about the policy of the program under which you undertook the student exchange. These programs differ widely, and so do their effects on your transcript. In my university alone, one exchange program allows students to undertake courses with NO EFFECT on their transcripts while another program requires students to undertake courses for credit equivalent purposes consistent with the original degree programs in their home university. You need to be clear, because the same two universities may be operating a number of exchange programs simultaneously at the level of the faculty, school of department.

  Is there any way I can avoid the bad influence or can I not submit the transcript of the exchange university?

If you've determined that there is a credit-bearing grade policy in effect, then there's little you can do about this, because the credit exchange occurs automatically between the Registrars of both universities. If you are in a position to lodge a mitigating circumstances claim, then you might do so under the policy of the exchange university. However, once the grades have been approved by the moderating body, then only procedural irregularities may be the only reason for a review of the grade. In this case, you will need to be clear about the assessment policies of the exchange university, which are probably an order of magnitude more complex than the policies for exchange.

To be clear, under particular policies, you can't simply choose to not submit the transcript of the exchange university for two reasons: (1) the results may be incorporated within your transcript or (2) your transcript will contain fewer credits than is usual. Either way, a graduate program admissions officer will spot the discrepancy easily.

If you're really worried, you might choose to mitigate the effect by turning to your statement of purpose. You could use that to explain under what circumstances the 3.3 GPA was received. Be careful, though, because placing it on the SOP will call attention to it and, as @ff524 states, 3.3 really isn't all that bad.

Good luck to you.


What to do when a referee wants to criticize someone else through me

In my opinion, having a proof that a method is incorrect and keeping it to yourself due to diplomatic/social concerns is neither the scientific nor the friendly thing to do.

If I was working in a group which uses a method frequently I'd expect a friend knowing that it was flawed to share his/her concerns with me in a constructive and friendly manner, knowing that the next researcher who discovers such flaws might not be friendly about it. I'd also hate to be putting time and effort based on something flawed.

Once that was done by that friend, we could find out between us whether the method is really flawed. If it is, I won't be offended if it's published in a paper he wrote.


Aiming for graduate school in applied math with weak math grades

Your situation might be better than you expect. I'm in a math Ph.D. program with many faculties doing applied math research. My overall undergraduate GPA and math GPA were both worse than yours for similar reasons(e.g. a C+ in honor real analysis). In addition I have other unfavorable factors in my applications.

In the end you'll have to decide what programs to apply, here I assume you want to get into math/applied math program and you are concerned about your grade.

One of the reasons people look at your grade is to make sure you can pass through the coursework/qualifying stage of the graduate program. That is, they don't want to admit many students that will eventually drop out by failing too many courses or qualifying exams. To convince them you can do well in that part, you should

Get high subject GRE grade.
If your low math grade is on early stage and you do better after that(e.g. I got C+ in my first real analysis and A in my second real analysis course) then in SOP mention you understand the importance of those core courses and you work hard to make up the deficiency early on.
Related to 2. but more important, for any program you apply, take a look at all their requirements to graduate, and think about how you convince professors you will be able to finish those requirements.


Do online courses and certificates actually count toward University credits?

If your online sources are accredited, and your certifications are germane to the work you will be asked to do, then absolutely they will help you get the job you desire. But, since degrees are bestowed by Universities, only they can determine what (and whose) credits are transferable. My first year was spent at a community college (for personal reasons), but even so, I had to have my (desired) academic path laid out, to avoid wasting time on unnecessary courses. Of course, some classes are taken for the sheer joy of attaining knowledge, but know your goal, and keep it in mind.
I looked at your link provided, and note with interest that the University of California accepts some credit transfers for 'exceptional' students. I would verify statements like that, tho' I'm not disputing it. These courses seem to be for a 'leg up', which is good if they help you be in the top of your class. But I don't believe that is what you are asking.


How to ask for a shift in graduate assistantship from research to teaching?

Let me suggest a few things. First, having some teaching experience is useful for most beginning academics. So a TA has value in itself. It shouldn't be hard to "sell" that. However, the professor now funning you has no input into who is a TA. That is normally a department decision. You apply there for a position, not to a particular professor. You may have little control over your schedule as a TA, but it will be fixed, at least, so perhaps you can work around that.

Next, your relationship with the professors needs to be managed separately. They are probably depending on you for important work. If you just quit the project they might be unhappy enough to negatively affect your future, at least in the short term. But having family responsibilities is a reasonable enough reason for changing things around. But you should, I think, negotiate an exit, leaving the project in a good state. You want their attitude to be "Sorry to see you go, but we understand."

I would talk to whoever in the department is responsible for TAs first, so that you know whether a position would be open to you. In some fields (math) there is usually a need for lots of TAs. But you would probably be assisting in lower level courses, which might be a bit boring. That might be good, or not, depending on your other responsibilities.

And these are the kinds of discussions/negotiations that need to be done face-to-face, not by email.


Strategies for getting involved in students' work during labs?

From your post it appears that the labs are already highly interactive. Students are engaged working on the assignment among each other. From an education perspective the current learning environment is student-centered, which is often the ideal.

However, one common drawback to an engaging, student centered environment is that the teacher is not the focus of the learning. This can be somewhat un-stimulating for the teacher but the goal is always for the students to have maximum involvement.

One option for dealing with this situation is to shift from trying to lead the students to provide expertise when necessary. When students have questions be available to answering them. Another useful strategy is monitoring. This involves observing student progress and providing additional unsolicited support.


The golden rule of citation is that you attribute everything that you did not invent yourself to the right person(s).

The golden rule of boring writing is to repeat yourself as often as possible.

Just make sure that it is clear what came from whom. If you say: "In the following paragraph we describe the main ideas of [2]", you do not need to repeat [2] in that paragraph, but if you compare two approaches it might be necessary to mention the papers/people more often.


Change of Affiliation before Publication

You can have multiple affiliations on a paper. When transitioning from one institute to another while working on a paper, it is common to list both institutes as affiliation. You should list all those places where a significant amount of work has been done. That is, if you run a study at institute A and write the paper while working at B, list both A and B.

If you are currently without any affiliation only mention your former place.


How often are lectureship positions just for one year?

I'm in the humanities in NYC, and I think I know the institution you're talking about. (I have friends who teach in similar places, at the very least.) Usually a lecturership in a school like that is a term-limited thing. You might get a one-year contract, or a two-year contract, maybe you'll even get lucky and get the opportunity to renew that contract a second time. But it will be made very clear in the contract you sign that the contract is not open-ended. That means that if they're going to have to pay more money for you in year 5, in terms of benefits, or negotiated salary increases, then your contract will not be renewed for year 5.

If an open-ended position does come open, the dean, or the chair of the department, or both, will want to conduct a national search to hire someone for one of those open-ended, tenure-like positions. The fact that you have taught at that school, and have relationships with those faculty will mean absolutely zero in that search. You'll be competing against several hundred faculty, most of whom will have not only PhDs but an increasing number will even have prestigious publications.

There's not really a way to sneak into academia through the back door, especially in a geographically desirable location like NYC. You might be able to go somewhere rural and find a community college type job without a PhD, but even those are increasingly competitive.


How do I reassure my students that my grading really will be “strict but fair” when the university has an “official” grading policy?

Dealing with the university "standard" is much easier than it seems, since they don't (can't) determine what a "point" is. So 90% of the available points is meaningless.
There is a form of grading called "cumulative grading" (maybe some other terms apply). Decide that the course as a whole is "worth" 1000 points. Create student exercises/exams/whatever that total to 1000. For example, Project A is "worth" 300 points toward the goal. When a student does an exercise they get a certain number of points up to 300. (See below for refinements.) Every piece of graded work has a value, possibly all different, and they add up to your total.
The list of tasks and their individual point "values" are listed in the syllabus. Students get to see the big picture, up front.
You can penalize for late work as you like.
The students always know exactly where they are. When they earn 700 points they know that they have a C or better - guaranteed. The University is satisfied and the student knows absolutely.
An additional element/benefit of this is that some students have many things to do and my class may not be the most important thing. They might be satisfied with a B if it gave them time to work on other, higher priority, things and they could do so without risk.
Important Refinements.
I always let students repeat/refine their work for regrading. They couldn't earn full points on regrading, but, say, up to 90% of the points lost at first grading could be returned to them if they improved the work sufficiently. This means, essentially, that if they got 270 points on that project, missing out on 30, that they could earn back 27 points leaving them only 3 points short of full marks.
Re-grading gave two advantages. One is that I never got whiny complaints about points. Second, when I thought a student (or team) really needed to revisit their work, I could give a relatively low score on the initial submission. They thus had more incentive to improve it.
You may not want to do the following, depending on your load and your students, but I didn't limit the number of times a student could re-do a piece of work. I made exceptions only if it got excessive as the down side, for a few students, is that they obsess over some early work, falling behind on the new. So it takes balance.
In computing summary grades, no student ever misses a mark by an insignificant amount. If someone is ten points out of a thousand short at the end of the term their grade is "rounded" up. This is perfectly justifiable as there is likely some (hopefully small) subjective element to any grading of projects and the like. I gave up on "objective" exams a long time ago, since they measure only poorly and can be greatly affected by other things such as student stress, etc.
Finally, at the end of the course, I looked at the grades overall according to the above measures. I asked myself whether this seemed to be a fair measure of what the group as a whole learned. Usually it was fine, but once in a while it turned out that the grading itself was somehow off, and the students were better than the curve suggested. I'd make an adjustment. No one ever questioned this, nor would they have any reason to. Tenure is a great thing, however, when you want/need to do something that the University frowns upon. At the end of the day (term) you need to be reasonable.
Note also that I had a reputation around the University of being very hard/strict/demanding. But the students always had a reason to feel good about themselves and how they did. This is, in some ways, nearly as important at the technical (Computer Science) things I taught them. Actually being more gentle than your reputation is a plus.
Also, note that the philosophy behind this whole scheme is "You aren't here to prove to me that you don't need to be here."


Should the table of contents of a thesis include beyond heading level 3?

In general, tables of content shouldn't span more than two pages, otherwise they lose their utility of being a quick guide to the structure of the content.

A good keyword index at the rear of the document can handle many of the issues in their stead. That is, if you want people to be able to quickly see where you described the laser engraving process, then "laser engraving" can have a keyword in the index. Or if you make an argument against Talcott Parson's sick role, similarly you can note both "Talcott Parsons" and "sick role" at the back.

(note: I do encourage my grad students to CREATE extremely detailed tables of contents that lay out their entire argument. This helps them write their dissertations as it gives a roadmap and structure. But when it comes time to submit their thesis to the university, or revise for publication, they should strip their table of contents back down to a minimum of one or two levels).


How to write the data section when data is reused from a previous work?

If the context is that of a three-paper dissertation, my opinion would be to refer to the earlier paper which has the thorough description. You should ask your supervisor to be sure, but a collection of essays allows that. A monograph type thesis is much preferable.

If the context is that of a journal submission, then each paper must be stand-alone and the data must be described in according detail. A self-citation is allowed, and some common phrases will save you time, but you cannot self-plagiarise and some rewriting is necessary. You can have one paper being more detailed than the other but the less detailed paper must still contain enough information. So yes, you should describe your data twice.


Is it rude to write in a journal paper "the proof is left as an exercise to the reader"?

There are two separate issues here: omitting the proof, and calling it an exercise.

It is relatively common to omit some proofs in research papers. In particular, proofs that are long but routine, or that re-use the same method as other proofs in the paper, are often abbreviated or removed. It depends on the intended audience for the paper, to some extent. You will get a sense of this by reading more research papers. But caution is needed: one of the first places to look for errors in a paper is in results where the proof was omitted!

The question whether to call something in your paper an "exercise" is more difficult. I wouldn't be surprised if some people do it -- but some people don't write very well. The audience for a paper includes your peers, and you are not really in a position to assign them homework. There are other ways to indicate that a proof is easy besides calling it an exercise: "the following theorem follows directly from definitions", "the proof of the following theorem is routine", "the proof of the following theorem is similar to the proof of Theorem 1.3", etc.   Giving a small hint of how to prove the result can make the paper stronger, and it helps any readers who are not experts in the area.


Thinking about quitting the Ph.D. because I feel depressed in this town?

Don't commit to anything until you know your options. If you can find a more "suitable" position then you can decide at that time.

But evaluate all the aspects, including the support you get, and the support you might get. Not just financial support.

One advantage of your current situation is that you aren't going to spend more time on the degree than needed and you aren't going to be distracted by nightlife and such.


Is there something about the American system that makes people not reply to their emails?

I've spent my education and career in the American system (including California) and haven't had any particular problems with people being unresponsive to emails.  This is probably specific to your institution and/or the individuals involved.

That said, in your academic life you will certainly encounter more people who don't respond to your emails, so you need to be comfortable with other forms of communication, and to have strategies to handle such cases:

Call by telephone
Visit in person
Talk to an administrative assistant
Find another person who can help with your issue
Escalate to a superior
Ask a colleague if there is a particular reason why the person might be unreachable (e.g. sabbatical, leave of absence, vacation, has quit, medical problem, is dead, etc)

And as mentioned above by Anyon, it is also an important skill to write emails that minimize the effort needed for the recipient to read, comprehend, and respond.  This also will improve your chances of a useful response.


Identifying the common online source of mathematical work

From a comment:

  The solutions the students turned in are basically just equations with
  no surrounding explanatory text.

Ask student A to produce the explanatory text for the equations in the common answer. If A indeed worked out the answer independently, A should be able to explain the reasoning leading to each equation. If A just copied down a solution that only contained the equations, that is less likely.


PhD student I am working with as an undergrad may pursue something similar to what my senior thesis is on, is this a conflict of interest?

No.  One of the criteria for a problematic conflict of interest is that the conflicted person has power.  The PhD student does not have any power in this situation.
In general, collaboration is good.


When can a museum be considered an academic institution?

My answer is "localized".

In France there is a distinction between museum of arts (arts in a broad sense, antiquities being arts for instance) and museum of natural sciences (biology, paleontology, etc.). The latter is considered an academic institution: part of the people working there have the title of associate or full professor, and they can have PhD students.
In some european countries (France, UK, belgium at least), some museums are part of a university, so I think we can say that they are academic places.

The real question may be then "are you an academic if you work in an academic institution", and I guess the answer is no.


As best as I can gather, a “formulated CV” contains the same basic information as a tabulated CV, but in narrative form. This allows you to explain anything that might look unusual in the standard tabulated form, and also gives the foundation an additional “standard” writing sample that can be more easily compared between candidates.


Education gap in Between Graduation and Master degree

I started my PhD in 2002, having completed my master's degree in 1975. I can assure you, from personal experience, that a 27 year gap in education is not too long.

I prepared for my resumed studies by reviewing material that would have been covered in a bachelor's degree program in my subject, computer science. I found a sample curriculum - in my case the ACM guidelines - and then looked up the various topics on-line. I purchased a few textbooks, but mainly I did on-line reading and tutorials. If I it had only been a couple of years since my bachelor's degree I would have used the textbooks from that rather than buying new ones.

I also did a lot of practice GRE tests to prepare for the application process.


How to decide if a paper should be accepted?

First let me say that I work in a field (pure math) that is closely related intellectually but for which approximately zero percent of papers are published in conferences.  In this case I don't see how it matters that it is a conference rather than a journal except possibly to reduce the timeline until the decision (though some journals in my field are starting to ask for reports within a few weeks!), so I will answer based on my own experience.

The main problem here is that your expert opinion has been called for on something that you do not feel like a fully fledged expert and that (as is most often the case!) it is not practical for you to fix this by substantially increasing your expertise.

So I think your first task must be to decide whether to referee the paper at all.  If you for instance you didn't understand the paper at all then certainly you should not be a referee.  If you've already agreed to do it, that makes backing out of it more socially awkward, but it could still be the right decision, as it may take some reading of the paper to find the stuff you don't understand.  If you vaguely understand it but really not enough to evaluate it in any meaningful way, again I think you should not referee it.  If you like, you can explicitly offer to referee something else instead, and I'll bet the chances are good that a different paper could be found.

If you feel that you can or must referee the paper but really feel shaky about evaluating it, then you can write a report in such a way that your evaluation will be minimized, e.g. by explicitly writing something like

  I was asked to review this paper, and so I will.  But I want to be clear that it lies outside of my core area of expertise, so my recommendations about its suitability for the conference are tentative.  I hope that more weight will be put on the other recommendations.

And then you can give a "weak" recommendation, which should then be drowned out by the others.

However, your question suggests that you are sufficiently qualified to referee the paper that the first alternative is not appropriate and the second one may not be either: you write

  The paper is so so, not too strong, not too weak. It would be a straight reject in some top-tier conferences, but might be accepted/weak accepted at some other lower rank conferences. How do I make a decision about this paper for this particular conference?

[Point of order: a paper can't be "weak accepted" by a conference.  It must either be accepted or rejected.  So here you are doing a bit of what other people have brought up: conflating the referee's recommendation with the editor's decision.]

Rather importantly, you don't say why the paper would be a clear reject at top conferences.  (Not the assertion is surprising: presumably the vast majority of submitted papers in your field fall into this category.)  Knowing that means that you have some information and insight about the paper (and more than you've told us).  In fact it might be helpful for you to tell us how you came to this conclusion.

Probably I don't need to tell you that if the paper does not contain any correct, novel work that is of interest to someone, it should not be published anywhere.  Conversely, if it does meet these requirements it should be published somewhere.  If you don't know enough about the standards of this particular conference, you can work around that by explaining you would recommend rejection in venue A but recommend acceptance in venue B (this is rather common information in referee reports, at least in my field).  Then the editor can decide where the conference lies with respect to the data points you've provided.

If you feel qualified enough, then at a certain point you do have to impose whatever standard you feel is most reasonable.  If you don't know the field very well and the paper is not interesting to you, then [assuming you've decided to go ahead with the referee job] you should recommend it for rejection: what else?  On the other hand, if you find the paper to be at least somewhat interesting you should act so as to leave the door open for the paper to be accepted, in particular by writing that you would recommend it for acceptance at journal or conference X.   Ultimately you're leaving a decision to the editorial board that they would have anyway: among papers that are publishable in absolute terms, do they want to publish these papers or those papers?  If they get a whole bunch of reports of the form "The paper is okay; it could be published somewhere in between heaven and hell; I don't really have strong feelings about it" then they're going to have a problem....but who is to blame for the problem?  Them, of course: they did not find the right referees and were not clear enough in their standards.

Let me end by saying that I have found myself in similar situations more than once: namely, I get asked to referee a paper by a journal I've never heard of, in a subfield of mathematics different from any of the ones I've thought deeply about.  And in fact I have usually done more or less the above: sometimes I turn it down (and I have learned to be decisive about this; if I gave some choice to the editor, it always turns out that they want me to do it anyway), but if I can do it I often take the job.  A paper should certainly look novel to the relative outsider if it will look so to the expert, and in some cases I have rejected the paper for not making clear progress over (even) its own citations.  More often the papers have been a bit interesting. Sometimes I have found significant mistakes: I can't remember a situation where the mistake was so bad that I outright recommended rejection, but there have been situations in which revisions have been necessary in order for the principal results to look correct.  (I don't know how this plays out for the shorter timeframe of a conference: presumably outright rejection becomes more likely.)  In fact the most common outcome is that I understand the paper well enough and think it's somewhat interesting and novel, though certainly not the kind of breakthrough to be published in a higher tier journal.  In these cases I have recommended the paper for acceptance and included in my referee report an honest depiction of the situation: e.g. if I am unfamiliar with the journal, I say so.  I believe in every such case the paper has been accepted.  This has been fine for me, since having been an author many times and an editor never, fundamentally I am more sympathetic to the situation of a solid paper being rejected than to the plight of a journal that publishes a good paper rather than a great one.  "A tie goes to the author," I feel.  Given the number of papers I've refereed, this attitude seems to be okay with the editors, who do in fact once in a (great) while cheerfully reverse my recommendations.


Mathematical proofs in non-math paper: What if they are wrong?

I think you are probably right: it seems unlikely that mathematical statements and proofs included in the supplementary materials to a psychology paper would receive much scrutiny.  Even if the editor took the time out to get an extra, mathematically sophisticated referee, the fact that you received no comments about this part of the paper (right?) indicates that even if "read" it was not regarded as an important factor in the evaluation of the paper.

What is the upshot of this?  In a nutshell: for better and/or for worse, probably this mathematical work of yours will receive little or no attention.  I don't know any mathematicians who regularly read psychology literature.  Since you have just been admitted to a PhD program in mathematics, the time for people to scrutinize your undergraduate research has already mostly passed.  By the time you graduate, you should/will have much more relevant material for people to focus on.  It is debatable whether you should even list this paper on your CV at the end of your graduate career: I would say you probably should, but in a separate category from all of your math papers.

If I were looking to hire you for a post-PhD academic position, I honestly would not even consider reading a psychology paper you wrote as an undergraduate.  I would not expect such a paper to have any substantial mathematical contributions, I would expect to be entirely unable to evaluate the significance of the paper as a work of psychology, and -- more honestly -- knowing that you put some theorems and proofs in it as an unassisted undergraduate student, I would expect this material to be a bit callow/superficial.  Most undergraduates have not begun to independently engage in research-level mathematics in any way, so it is hard to hold against them whatever they put in papers.

Viewing this as a teachable moment, here are some possible takeaways:

1) I agree with Kimball and Nate Eldredge: you should do what you need to do to gather confidence in your work before you publish it.  By professional mathematical standards, yes, it is a mistake to publish a piece of mathematics without soliciting the opinion of at least one mathematically qualified person.  If you happen to be in a similar situation in the future, you should show your work to teachers and mentors in the mathematics department.  You may have to wait what seems like a long time to get a fairly quick reading / reaction from them, but even an instantaneous reaction is valuable.

2) On the other hand, just because you're worried doesn't mean you actually did anything wrong, and it certainly doesn't mean that you did anything terribly wrong.  A large percentage of papers contain minor errors.  E.g. just yesterday I got an email from a collaborator informing me of a typo in a published paper (on the same subject as our collaboration, but he was not a coauthor).  There was a missing "+1" from several formulas.  This really doesn't distress me at all: I will make the change on the copy of the paper on my own webpage, and that's that.  And by the way, I have made worse mistakes than this in published work (and in my PhD thesis): ones that do bother me a bit, but much more me than anyone else.  In the realm of honest mistakes, I can't think of what you could have done in an undergraduate paper in a different field that would be so bad so as to place any clouds in the sky of your academic career.

3) Let me not completely neglect the possibility that you did something right: maybe your paper has a real mathematical contribution.  If that is the case, you should not drop the matter but try to continue, improve and refine the work, with the goal of publishing it elsewhere.  Again, mathematics hidden in a psychology paper is very well hidden indeed.  Maybe that's not what you or the mathematical community wants.


Can I correct a typo in my published paper if it doesn't affect content?

What is the best course of action here?

Don’t do anything. The confusion and irritation caused by having a corrected version linked or mentioned in your CV is much worse than the typo itself.
Readers of your CV might wonder what exactly you corrected, why this did not happen in the journal version, or why you bother that much about a typo (depending on how you present it). While typos in your CV may be subject to enhanced scrutiny and have an increased impact, typos in papers referenced in your CV usually don’t. Other readers are very likely to read the journal version of the article, so besides your CV your correction benefits only a very small audience.

You can also apply a calculation of time wasted and saved similar to the one in this answer of mine:

Supposing that your typo costs the average reader one second.
Suppose it takes you five minutes to fix the typo and upload the fixed version.
Suppose that readers waste no additional time with being confused about the additional version and downloading it.

Even in this very optimistic calculation, three hundred readers have to read your corrected article to make the endeavour worthwhile.


Attitudes towards External/ Political Motivations for Technical PhD

My concern is, if I interview with potential future advisors with this kind of story, even if the political problem I'm focused on has a long, 1-2 decades timeline for resolution, a future advisor might find this kind of attitude "disloyal" to a field or otherwise unacceptable.

Importantly a PhD in a given field really is just a piece of paper signalling you are capable of independent and novel research. It's sort of a baseline expectation for a researcher and nothing more. Kind of similar to how your BSc simply qualifies you to speak intelligently about broad topics in your field.
I'm not aware, personally, if any situation where switching fields/leaving a field would be seen as a negative. In my field (Computer Science) it's not uncommon at all to see researchers publishing in broadly related fields such as math, engineering, economics, or really any other place Computer Science is used. Though, to be fair many more stick to their specialization.

This model of thinking about one's career, "If I'm successful the problem will be solved and I can quit my job" contrasts the life-long academic model. At the same time, I feel that's how many people are motivated to enter research, not from the perspective of "I'm interested in X technology" but "I want to solve Y problem".

10-20 years is more-or-less a career (using your numbers above). I don't think anyone would look at you negatively for quitting at that point.

"I'm primarily motivated by recent, specific political circumstances" may not sound very dedicated coming from a student entering a new field for them, even if all signs point to this problem staying around for decades. And for certain issues, like defense/ security, advisors may object to training students with this motivation because of their ethical views.

Political motivations really depend on your field. I can only speak for my field but if it wasn't for a need for better computing technology in WW2 the field of Computer Science may not be what it is today!
However, importantly your political motivations must necessarily align with your advisor's. If your advisor does not see your problem as important it will likely be disregarded. Your goal during your PhD is to learn how to do research under the guidance of someone with significant experience. It's approximately equivalent to a journeyman position in labor but for academia. Your advisor is there to help you find topics that will get you out of your PhD on time and hold your interest for 4-6 years. If you get a read from your advisor that what you want to do is ethically/politically contrary to their beliefs you can either accept this and do research with the end goal of contributing how you want after your PhD, or attempt to find a new advisor. Your PhD is not your entire career. If you get your PhD you'll have plenty of time to do work in things you enjoy.
In general your post gives off a small sense of superiority. What will sink you is this sense you seem to have that you will solve a major problem in a field. It's an honorable thing to think about but to use a direct example - if I told my advisor my goal is to solve P =? NP in 20 years I would probably be told to seriously evaluate whether I understand what research actually is.
Keep this in mind when broaching this question. It's good to have aspirations of greatness but remember to keep them in check. Research is incremental. Reframing your thoughts, and the way you broach the question to advisors, into something like "I am extremely passionate about XYZ and I want to advance the body of knowledge in this field during my career" will both make you look humble and intelligent.


Dealing with late assignments as a teacher assistant

Follow your stated policy, and follow it to the letter.

An important aspect of teaching, particularly with regards to assessment policies is that you have to be consistent in how you assign your grades. A main reason for this is that if questioned, you can draw upon the stated policy (especially if this was made clear to the students prior to the assessment).

In the case you described, as @ff524 stated in the comment, grade the mandatory part as normal, and apply the lateness penalty to the optional part of the assessment.

Essentially:

Mandatory part mark + (Optional part mark - lateness penalty applied to the optional part only) = Overall mark

(Note in the equation above, the equation in the parentheses has a minimum value of zero)


Can you submit the same grant proposal to two different funding organizations?

You can propose for the same topic/ideas. But the EU and UK application process (even applications within the same "country") are different and they look for different things for you to submit. So you can and should reuse old proposals (as no one has the time to make completely new proposals for every submission) as a "base" but they do need to be tailored for each submission. For instance the relative amount of space you have to write about method/novelty/timeliness/impact etc as well as practical things like page limits, page format, supporting documentation etc.
Given most proposals are also for different lengths of time/number of people proposals gain differences even if they cover the same area.
There can be limits about whether you can have multiple applications at the same time, but applications will be explicit about the limits in the supporting documentation. If your not sure ask your university research grants team as they know the details inside and out.


How to discuss job search with your advisor when your career plans differ from what your advisor wants you to do?

I think a lot of how to approach it depends on the reason that your advisor things you should be heading for a traditional research career.  It's likely one of two things:

Your advisor thinks very highly of your work and doesn't want to "lose" you from the research community.
Your advisor is afraid that not placing students "highly" will reflect badly on their tenure case.

Neither of these is a good reason to choose a career path that you aren't interested in.  If it's the first, maybe you can get your advisor to listen by explaining that you really do want to embrace a teaching career.  If it's the second, then maybe you can explain that it will look a lot better on their tenure case to have an advisee placed at a well-respected teaching institution than dropping out of academia altogether.  At the end of the day, though, it's your choice and not your advisor's.

In either case, however, I would strongly recommend also seeking out other faculty members or external colleagues who understand you better. If you can find such other allies, they will be important in helping back you for the career that you want, whether or not your advisor comes around.


According to this: http://tubularinsights.com/youtube-copyright-ownership/

People / Entities / Conglomerates still retain at least some rights to their own videos most of the time.

So yes, if you come across any licensed material, for eg. grabbing frames from videos of movies etc without seeking permission first and the original owners find out, then you could get into trouble.

You could handpick videos / create playlists that you want to scrape making sure that their content is not commercially licensed or is used with permission of the original creators (I think you typically do this with the publication that follows / describes your dataset, if you choose to do that)


Is it a breach of privacy to list the names of past interns and supervised students on your academic website?

The governing federal law in the USA is FERPA - the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Under FERPA a school may generally disclose what is identified as "directory information," things such as names, email addresses, photographs, etc. However the student has the right to request that their directory information be excluded from public disclosure, so it's possible that they are not covered here.

Note that, as in most cases, individual states may have their own privacy statutes.

If you are really concerned then the prudent thing to do, regardless of legal jurisdiction, would be to ask the student in an email whether they are OK with the posting of their name and potentially other information. The email provides a reasonable level of proof that you did your due diligence prior to posting student information.

US DoE guide to FERPA: https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/students.html


Should I let potential employers know I have a job offer?

The argument for plan 2 is that if you have an offer from employer A with a particular deadline but you would prefer to take a position with employer B, then if you don't say something, employer B could take too long to decide what to do and you'd be forced to take offer A before employer B gets around to making you an offer.

I've been on the employer side of this (as both employer A and employer B.)  Keep in mind that once a search committee has completed interviews it has to meet to decide on who should be offered the position and then this has to be reviewed by higher level administrators (deans or vice presidents) and that the process can take time (days or weeks.)  It may be possible to expedite this process if there's a particular deadline, or it may not.

I think that if you've decided that you'll take offer A by a particular deadline if you have no other offers (and that you wouldn't break your contract with employer A after accepting the offer), then you should tell the other potential employers about the offer and the deadline (I wouldn't mention employer A's name or the specific amount of the offer.) It's not likely to hurt your chances with these other employers, but it could help motivate them to get an offer out to you in a timely fashion.

I have received this kind of information from job candidates in the past.  Unfortunately, I've always had to say that (because we had other candidates scheduled for on campus interviews) that we couldn't make an offer before the deadline.


Using proprietary software to demonstrate work in conference

Generally speaking it is totally fine to use or demonstrate publicly (at a conference or elsewhere) some proprietary software. Many presenters use Microsoft Windows along with Microsoft PowerPoint, and nobody ever gets into trouble.

That said, if you want to be 100% sure you need to peruse the end-user license agreement (EULA), which is the contract that stipulates under which conditions the program might be used: this is the ultimate reference. For example, the EULA can prohibit researchers and scientists from explicitly using the names of their systems in a benchmark. (Oracle is notorious for that, they sued David DeWitt following some benchmarks he had published that mentioned Oracle, see the DeWitt Clause).

Beyond the EULA, one exception I can think of is if you have signed some confidentiality contract, which can happen when the software hasn't been released yet and the developers give you access to some pre-release version of it.

Another exception is that if by "show how it is done on the software" you mean reverse engineer the software, then you might want to be careful: reverse engineering is borderline. E.g. in the United States, EULA provisions can preempt the reverse engineering rights implied by fair use, c.f. Bowers v. Baystate Technologies.

The last exception I can think of is video games: they can be seen as art, both for the graphic and the music. Just like you can't show a movie or broadcast music publicly in the general case (e.g. Twitch mutes some screencasts), video game publishers might use some similar arguments in court. That's very theoretical.

All in all, if you're having some doubts, you might want to drop by the legal office in your University, because as any law 101 course says, the answer is always "it depends".


I don't know in which country you live. If a phone ring, this is not cheating because a phone that rings does not provide any information to a student. However, if a student is using his phone to look up at information on the internet, take phone calls or send messages, or look at answers stored on his phone, this is of course cheating. So if the phone just rings, I don't think that it really matters.

About ending after the official end, if it is just a few minutes, maybe that the professor just decided to give a few more minutes to give a chance to those who could not finish the exam on time. I don't know about your country, but in my native country (Canada), it is not something unusual that a professor will give 5 more minutes to students if he sees that many of them have not finished the exam. In that case, this would not be called cheating, as long as every student can have this extra time.

So, if you think that it is cheating, then you can report it (if you think you are OK with the possible consequences). But from your description, I am not sure that we can really call this cheating.


Examples of research resources for which Wikipedia is known as being amongst top referrers?

This doesn't directly answer your question, but in 2012, the Biodiversity Heritage Library's then-technical director published a presentation reporting on how users from Wikipedia stayed longer and browsed deeper than others, which included some analytics information. You could drop the the BHL an e-mail and see if they'd be interested in sharing any more recent details.


How to find Elsevier journal-specific average publishing time

At least for mathematics journals, the AMS has a list of average waiting times:

https://www.ams.org/publications/journals/notices/201710/rnoti-p1184.pdf


You should follow whatever your university policies say should be done when plagiarism is detected.  Typically reporting is the very first thing that must be done.  What will happen after that depends on your institution's policies.
In the US, many institutions have a discipline process that is progressive in the sense that the penalty for a first offense is small, but later offenses are penalized much more severely.
In my own experience with this, if you catch plagiarism in an early draft, you can penalize the student's grade on the draft, and then the student has a chance to produce a final product that is free of plagiarism. If the final paper still has plagiarism then you can give the student a failing grade or expel them from the degree program.
This requires checking for plagiarism at the draft stage in addition to checking the final paper.  However, if you don't do this additional checking then the student may get away with only a warning or a small grade penalty for plagiarism in a term paper.


How to tell my research advisor I'd like to drop a class?

Dear Supervisor,

  I am taking the AI course.  I need X hours/week to do well in this
  course.  My other courses only take Y hours/week.  I am considering
  dropping this elective course so that I can devote X more hours/week
  to my research.  Do you think this is a good idea?

  Thanks for your advice,

  Student

Note:  Most likely your advisor will support you if you want to spend time on research.  But they may know something you did not tell us on Stack Exchange.  If your advisor says no, you can still tell them you have decided to drop the course.


How to introduce a "general" area into discussion section

The word "Summary" comes to my mind for the subsection heading under Discussion to combine the results of "Variation of X" and "Variation of Y" to present a cohesive argument on your parametric studies.


I couldn't negotiate my postdoc salary during HR meeting, should I try days later? (I haven't received the formal offer yet)

In the UK, it is not common for postdocs and entry-level lecturers to negotiate their salaries. This is different from the customs in the USA and some EU countries.
In the UK, the starting salary of a postdoc or a lecturer would normally be set up by HR in consultation with postdoc's PI or lecturer's HoD. As a postdoc, if you want a better offer, you have the following options:

Provide additional evidence of your relevant experience. Note that an experience of course design and "helping professors with teaching" may not be considered relevant for a research-focused postdoc position. And even if you have relevant experience, it may not be considered sufficient by the PI or HR.
Tell them that you can not accept the offer unless they raise it. This is a risky move, which can cost you an offer. Bear in mind that HRs are not really interested in hiring you, their goal is to ensure the hiring process goes smoothly and according to the rules. They may approve your claim, provided there is a budget for a raise and the PI/HoD supports it. Or they can send you a polite email starting from "We are sorry to hear that you declined our offer" and offer the job to the next candidate.

Before you proceed, note that if your postdoc salary comes from a grant, there may be a firm cap on how much the University can offer you from the limited grant budget. You may want to ask your PI if there is even any room for negotiation before discussing it with the HR.


I found a service that can create custom badges: shields.io. Using the arXiv background color (Firebrick #B31B1B) I was able to create a badge that looked more or less "official". An example of their template and my specific use case:

http://img.shields.io/badge/<SUBJECT>-<STATUS>-<COLOR>.svg
http://img.shields.io/badge/math.CO-arXiv%3A1408.3644-B31B1B.svg

After converting the svg to png for use on github, I got this:


Some conferences exchange corporate sponsorship for various perks. Those perks may include a keynote speaking slot. Thus,

This kind of thing happens in academia.
Perhaps more so at serious conferences, because those conferences are more attractive to sponsors.

Perks may be advertised, e.g., on web pages soliciting sponsorship. Hence,

This may be disclosed to conference participants.
But, possibly not in a reasonable manner, since participants would need to discover sponsorship perks.

Some perks may be privately negotiated, without disclosure to conference participants.


How does one find "suitable referees" for publishing a paper in journal?

From my experience, most journals do not require you to propose referees. It's more like the journal allows you to propose some names of potential referees. The referees are appointed by the editor and you as author will not know their names.

So the answer to "How does one go about finding referees when one is not in academia?" is

You don't have to.

just find a suitable journal that does not require that you suggest referees.

If you the journal system does not allow you to submit your paper without suggesting referees, either suggest authors that you cite or authors that cite the same papers you cite (using, e.g., Google scholar).


Is it ethical for advisors to automatically coauthor papers?

No, automatic co-authorship is not ethical – irrespectively of the discipline!

The following is from the "DFG Proposals for Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice" (pp.82f, emphasis added), which, for instance, strictly forbids "automatic" co-authorships and gives a couple of common negative examples:

  Authors of an original scientific publication shall be all those, and only those, who have made significant contributions to the conception of studies or experiments, to the generation, analysis and interpretation of the data, and to preparing the manuscript, and who have consented to its publication, thereby assuming responsibility for it. [...]
  Therefore, the following contributions on their own are not sufficient to justify authorship:

  merely organisational responsibility for obtaining the funds for the research,
  providing standard investigation material,
  the training of staff in standard methods,
  merely technical work on data collection,
  merely technical support, such as only providing equipment or experimental animals,
  regularly providing datasets only,
  only reading the manuscript without substantial contributions to its content,
  directing an institution or working unit in which the publication originates

  Help of this kind can be acknowledged in footnotes or in the foreword.

In fact, DFG (the German Research Council) requires you to sign strict adherence to this ethical code on each and every grant proposal. Other funding agencies have similar regulations.


Is it "okay" to submit to a workshop without proceedings while in review for publication?

Short answer:  okay, and a quite good idea, for the reasons and with few limits, see below.

  in academia one should never submit the same paper to two journals

If only noone had done that...

So I suppose that you have a journal paper under review (your title). And the  workshop asks for a contribution. I doubt you will directly send the paper under review to the workshop committee. So you will write something "else" for the workshop, possibly a shortened version.

Recently, I read a chronic in IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter (see below for the full quote). In the 1950s, apparently, you could present a paper to the associated workshop/conference (only) when it was accepted or published before in the journal. This has the advantage the audience could read the paper in detail before the talk, and allow nicer discussions.

Recently, some IEEE conferences (ICASSP, ICIP, GlobalSIP) have begun the accept "submissions", after the official deadlines, from papers already accepted in IEEE Signal Processing Letters (which has the same 5-page same format as the conference). The paper, once accepted, is presented at the conference, but it is not in the abstract book: of course, it is already "being published" by the journal.

These examples show that limiting the clutter of unfinished works, submitted too early and several times at conferences, was and still is possible. Indeed, if one writes a conference paper, after presenting it, it is sometimes difficult to find the energy to write the full paper.

So this sounds perfectly fine to me. The main thing to care about is ownership: as the preprint (submitted) is still yours, and as long as it does not infringe the workshop rules.

I believe though it is honest, and useful, to mention in your workshop absract, that the extended version of the work is "under submission", "under revision" in a journal (you can mention the name or not), or accepted with the date of acceptance.

IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter, Vol. 61, No. 2, June 2011 (pdf), in the The Historian’s Column:

  It is worth noting in Fano’s letter that the number of sessions was
  six (6!) and all of them were in series. Each paper was presented for
  about 20 minutes with 10 minutes left for discussion which was
  invariably lively and had to be stopped by the chair person to make
  sure that the schedule was kept in time. But consider this: The papers
  were FIRST published in the Transactions and THEN they were presented
  at the Symposium!! That is a total reversal of what we do today. The
  distinct advantage of this arrangement was that the audience had the
  benefit of studying the papers carefully ahead of time, which enabled
  an in-depth discussion after the presentation. Not a bad idea!


Should examination questions be ordered in the same way as they are presented?

If the questions are not dependent on one another, then in many cases it is better to mix-up the order. Student responses will be less likely do to basic memorization of their notes/material and more likely to reflect higher-level learning.


The standard solution for your question is to indicate your current address in a footnote:

  Alexander Gruber a,†, Another O. Tor a

  a University A, Department of Criminology, 221B Baker Street, London (UK)
  † Currently at University B, Logic Department, Whitehaven Mansions, Sandhurst Sq, London (UK)

If you didn't use any of the resources of University B, that is the way to go. Otherwise, University B should be listed as an affiliation.

The situation regarding your University C is less clear to me: if you were affiliated with them, you need to list them. If they only “handled” the money given out by NSF, then simply mention them in the funding or acknowledgments section:

  Acknowledgments
  A. G. is grateful to NSF program #132-1237 for funding, administered by University C.


Should I mention the title of my published paper in a personal statement even though this paper is not in a top level?

Your tags suggest that this is part of your application for a scholarship to go to graduate school. Thus i'm assuming that you are not already at graduate school but are applying for a scholarship to be able to go?

If this is the case, no one is expecting you to have papers in top venues before you go. I'm my experience any papers at all pre-grad school is going to be a plus for you (assuming you played a leading role in the paper and are not just buried in the middle for ten minutes work you did as a summer placement student).

However, while when I look at graduate applications I am not looking for an extensive publication record, I am looking for signs of commitment/genuine interest to my field. You should use your paper in that way. I would way something like:

  I have published several academic papers. My publication ABC, presented at EFG, demonstrates a long standing interest in X.


Moving from government research to academia

I can only answer for the situation in Germany (where fixed-term full professorships indeed exist). There are two different situations:

In engineering your route is basically the default route to a full professorship. You do a PhD, go working in a company for five years or more and then apply for professorships. (You may also do a postdoc before working at a company.) In other fields it is not very common to return from outside academia (the only field I know for sure is mathematics and there I don't know anybody who returned back to academia).
For professors at "Fachhochschulen" (often translated as universities of applied sciences) it is similar but not only for engineering but also for other fields. Do a PhD, work in companies, apply for professorships at Fachhochschulen. In fact, for professorships at Fachhochschulen it is even required to have working experience outside academia. However, Fachhochschulen are not exactly research institutions but focus more on higher education in science and technology, preparing people to work in companies. For example, they do not grant a PhD (but this may change in the future).


Can I use an online university credit for grad school admission?

This sort of question can only be answered by the institution you apply to. It might require an exception to established rules, and that might be available or not. But it would probably require a person make a decision. If you try to use such a course, you probably need to give a good description of it and also something about how you interacted with it and any measurable outcome.

If you haven't taken the course yet and are just wondering whether you should, then get advice first from the school(s) you want to apply to so that you know in advance what will happen. If they discourage it, they may have alternatives that will work for you and for them.

If you have taken the course, then you can ask, providing the needed information.


Is it worth it to write a book with my advisor instead of focusing on journal/conference publications?

No, you should focus first on publishing journal papers in journals with high impact, these are the "real" things , while a book should be for later. The most important goals on any PhD would be becoming sufficient independently in order to ask questions in the field, see the connections, and publish the "played" results.


Can I submit the results of a poster to another conference as a full paper?

This depends on the customs of the field and the venue. I will answer based upon my experience from an HCI-related subfield of CS:

Conferences usually have some requirement of novelty for published works. Therefore, if a paper associated with the poster already appeared in some proceedings of the first conference, you might not fulfil this requirement. First, however, some different cases might apply:

If the poster was not "formally published" (i.e. did not appear as a (short) paper in any kind of proceedings), you should be good to go.
If the poster was supposed to be "formally published", but the conference organizers never got around to setting up the proceedings of the poster session, you're in a bit of an inconvenient situation. Your work is not published in a way that it can be cited (well, it can, but it doesn't look as verifiable as other papers and is not archived by any publisher), but it has been presented. You may want to contact the conference organizers in this case whether publishing your work again is ok, or else you may want to wrap your work in something larger (i.e. present something new, but reiterate the points from the poster as a part of the exposition).

Even if your poster was published in some kind of proceedings, there may be some options:

Posters are often allowed to present work in progress. If your poster (and the connected paper) was presented in a way to present work in progress, your new conference paper might indeed present the final state of whatever you devised. This can essentially match the content of your poster, but provide more details (see also below).
Even if the poster presented final results, the term "results" seems to be seen in a very wide sense at least in my fields, possibly in others. A full conference paper provides much more space than a poster paper, and on the poster, you probably presented different (more visual) things than you would in text. As such, you can shift the focus of your conference paper compared to the poster; where the poster focused on the results, the conference paper might discuss the methods used to obtain the results in depth, including design decisions, citations of similar experiments, a verification of the reliability of your experiments, etc. This kind of description can be useful for the community and subsequent works, and as such should provide enough new content, despite being based upon the same material as the poster.


Can I somehow leverage my willingness to work for a lower salary in job applications?

There is some possibility of this, but it would work only in certain restricted ways and in certain limited contexts.  I don't know of any reputable college or university that, when considering applicants for a position that already exists, consider an applicant's willingness to accept less than the standard salary as a point in their favor.  If you think this through, probably you can see why it makes everyone look bad.

You might have some luck getting an academic institution to make a position with an unusual combination of duties and salary that is tailored to you.  Here are some possibilities:

At some institutions, faculty couples "share" positions in some fractional way: e.g. the couple together has 1.5 positions and each does 75% of the work of a full-time faculty member.  If someone had come to me with this as a new idea I would have rejected it as ridiculous, but nevertheless it actually exists in the real world.  I know several examples.
Similarly, you may be able to arrange a single position which is "part time" in some specified way: so maybe it is a visiting teaching position with half the normal teaching load and half the normal salary.  In the very short term, such positions are common.  It is not directly in the spirit of what you are asking about, but the effect could be similar.
Finally, if salary is really no object, it is much easier to get a visiting scholar position which pays no salary whatsoever.  I did this myself once: the summer after getting my PhD (at Harvard), I moved back to my hometown (Philadelphia) and got an apartment in University (of Pennsylvania) City.  I noticed that there was a wonderful library and gym a few blocks away from me, and I presented myself "cold" in the UPenn math department with a copy of my CV and my PhD.  I walked out as a Visiting Scholar.  (Nowadays I think that what I did was a little weird: why not first contact some specific faculty member in the department?  Maybe I didn't know who to contact, or maybe I was curious to see if walking in cold and presenting Ivy League credentials would actually work.  It did!  This "position" still appears on my CV.)

If what you are interested is not covered by the above, then I would say: in general this will be hard to swing, but if you have a more specific arrangement in mind you can ask about that (e.g. here) and maybe it can be worked out.

Let me end by saying something that I suspect you already know: if you aspire to have anything like a conventional academic career in the future, advertising yourself broadly as someone who is willing to work at a discounted rate is a pretty bad idea.  If you do seek to pursue this idea of yours, I would do so with much discretion.


There are many online programs from traditional universities that you could choose from. A significant question is your aim for the degree.

Will you pursue further education?
Are you planning to switch careers?
Do you intend a career in industry or academia?

It's important to understand what your goals are. Particularly in the software industry, if your goal is hobbyist, to build skills that will supplement your current job or to pick up as a developer, the education you already have may likely be enough. (Edit: And, if undergrad is your terminal goal, this probably isn't the forum.)

If the goal is to pursue graduate/advanced education or research, then the specific degree is obviously valuable. A problem may exist with finding the nexus between "good" and "easy to get into" (you indicate a concern with admissions rigor at UI and UM-UC). Plus, it's important in those cases to be developing relationships with faculty, a task that is hard to do through emails and online forums.

Programs through traditional universities have costs similar to their in-person programs. That's going to be hard to get around.

One exception that comes to mind is Harvard Extension School's programs. They offer a computer science focus, but do require at least 16 credits completed through in-person courses in Cambridge.

I unfortunately can't offer a comprehensive list of online bachelors degrees through traditional universities.

Something else to consider, though, is instead of pursuing a second bachelors, look for masters programs that function as career-change degrees. These will have a lower bar for entry and include some fundamental learning (though generally expect you to learn quicker).

Open University (Bachelors, Post-bachelors, Masters)
Oregon State (Bachelors CS)
Drexel (Bachelors Info Sys completion, Masters CS)
Harvard Extension School (Bachelors CS, Masters Software Eng)
Georgia Tech (Masters Computer Science)
Penn State's World Campus (Masters Software Engineering)

come immediately to mind as being accredited schools with these sorts of online programs. They're all easily found with a bit of Googling, however, and I'd suggest doing a little focused searching to see what you can turn up.

Many, many schools have programs today. Masters programs will probably be cheaper than Bachelors programs. Through a traditional school, though, all are going to cost. And ultimately, unless you're looking to get deep into theory, you're likely better off completing your Associates, learning a few modern languages and learning through application.


Improving a bound in a problem in "some cases" by using the extra information available in that problem which was unused in the earlier bounds

The result might or might not be reasonable. The following would speak for it being interesting:

The special case is interesting. A good argument for this is that others have looked into it or that it has applications or other relevance in other fields of science or mathematics.
The method of proof is new.

But, in general, the only way to know is to write it down, talk about it and submit it to a journal and see what the response is.

When writing the result down, you will want to emphasize the relevance of the result and refer to similar results, applications and the new features in the proof.


Is it appropriate for a lecturer to invite the course to dinner before grading?

I think it's completely appropriate.

As an anecdote, when I was an undergrad I was in a similar situation. The professor of a WW2 history class I was taking invited all 20-or-so of us undergrads to his home for a barbecue and tour of his collection of WW2 era guns, equipment, newspaper clippings, and so on. It occured before final grades came out.

In hindsight, it was one of those great lasting memories you make in school. I ended up majoring in a different field, but have since still kept a keen interest in history because, at least in part, of the experience I had there. Had that professor decided not to have such an event I would absolutely consider my undergraduate experience to be lesser than it was, and I think the same is true for many of my classmates both in that year and every other year the professor held such an event.

We, of course, don't know you or your lecturer, but I would be absolutely shocked if he has anything but pure intentions. If you don't want to go just reply to the invitation that you've got a prior commitment and can't make it.

Given you know that this lecturer has had this event in the past (after grades) indicates that it's almost assuredly done with positive intentiontions. Perhaps this year he has to travel immediately after he finishes grades, or the school scheduled his final later than last year and he has less time than normal. Maybe he's done it after grades in the past and had low attendance from foreign students who often have to travel right immediately and he wants to include them as well.


What to do with an unfinished research project you previously worked on?

I think this question is difficult to answer without knowing the details of the project, and it's really something you should work out with your advisor. But let me offer two perspectives here that maybe helpful. First, you said that you have spent several months on the project. On the grand scheme of things, several months is nothing. A successful project from start to finish can take 1-2 years (and oftentimes even more). So if I were you I would not fret too much about the time lost to the project, should you choose to simply move on.

Secondly, have you heard of the concept of sunk cost? It's basically an economic concept referring to effort/time/capital spent that cannot be recovered. And the key here is that sunk cost should not factor into future decisions. What is lost is lost, and the irrational desire to recover what is unrecoverable usually leads to more lost time and effort. So you should try to evaluate the merit of the project independent of how much time you've spent. If you find it hard to sell the project even to yourself, as you wrote, then maybe it's time to move on.


How to remove citations from Google Scholar profile?

You can't.

Google Scholar, like everything Google, does not curate the data. It only indexes them and makes them easy to search through. If the citing document is online it'll be counted as a citation.

Google Scholar citations count, h-index and i-10 index are not accurate if you have quality criteria for what constitute a citation (an most reasonable academics do) and should be interpreted with caution.

There are commercial products that give more meaningful citations count per article or researcher. They are generally available via your institution's library.


How can I cite a report written by a Congressman in MLA Style?

I searched google scholar to find your article The path forward: rethinking federal marijuana policy and from there you can cite it using several different formats including MLA by clicking the double quotation symbol as shown in the figures below:

Also in the second figure you can click the BibTeX link.


I own a PhD, but it is the first time I've heard of "Doctor of Science". In the former Warsaw pact countries and some Western European countries there are two level of doctorate. First is the "canonical" PhD and second is called something like "habilitation" which allows you to have PhD students and conduct your teaching in an independent manner.

I see two reasons you asked the question:

in your country, for a certain reason (for example, having own PhD students) you require this title. In this case, ask your Department of Education what are the exact requirements for this. If they legally require such a title, they also provide a clear path to get it.
you look for a title. Simple put, the simplest approach in this case would be to identify universities offering this title, join a program and earn it.

The way you asked the question makes me thing you fall in the second bucket. Probably the following story will help you rethink your course of action: Legend has it that one of the founding fathers of Shotokan Karate-do is asking a student at a seminar what is her most ardent desire. The student replies that she wants to have the black belt. The master replied that he can easily confer the black belt, but would that make her a better karateka?


What criteria is used by THE to determine whether a university gets a WUR ranking or not?

The THE gives a reasonable breakdown of how institutions are rated (based on 13 measurables) and which countries they accept institutions from - based on European Higher Education Area and OECD criteria.

Here is a link to the detail they give : https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/europe-teaching-rankings-2018-methodology

And here are the questions they use (added to prevent link-rot):

These are the survey questions that are used in the ranking (students were asked to answer on a scale of zero to 10):

To what extent do you have the opportunity to interact with the faculty and teachers at your university as part of your learning experience?
To what extent does your university provide opportunities for collaborative learning?
To what extent does the teaching at your university support critical thinking?
To what extent does the teaching at your university support reflection upon, or making connections among, things you have learned?
To what extent does the teaching at your university support applying your learning to the real world?
To what extent have the classes you have taken in your university so far challenged you?
If a friend or family member were considering going to university, based on your experience, how likely or unlikely are you to recommend your university to them?
Do you think your university is effective in helping you to secure valuable internships that prepare you for your chosen career?
To what extent are you satisfied with the access to learning materials (such as library, texts, labs and online material) at your university?
To what extent are you satisfied with the quality of the learning environment (such as lecture halls, study areas, and labs) at your university?
To what extent do you think that the teaching at your university is supporting you to learn skills that will be useful in the world of work after university (for example writing, numeric, presentation or other skills)?
To what extent do you have the opportunity to learn about and make connections to the world of work after university (for example through work placements, careers advice)?

Exclusions

The ranking only includes universities in countries that are a full member of both the European Higher Education Area and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and that are classified as a “developed economy” by the United Nations.

Universities are eligible for inclusion only if they offer courses and programmes that lead to officially recognised higher education degrees such as bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees or equivalent; are focused on more than one narrow subject area; and have at least 5,000 enrolled students at bachelor’s or equivalent level. Institutions must also receive a minimum of 50 valid responses in the THE European Student Survey to be included.

In cases where institutions have not provided the required data, we have used data from other external sources or provided an estimate. We have excluded institutions if this has not been possible or if the data for a particular institution are too sparse. We also excluded countries for which too few institutions submitted data, resulting in a lack of comparison with institutions within the country to create a meaningful score.

Then further reading may be interesting here : http://theconversation.com/rethinking-university-rankings-we-need-to-talk-about-quality-and-inequality-of-teaching-104071


A journal appeared indexed until 2016 is now cancelled in Scimago. What does this mean?

Scimago seems to draw from Scopus' journal coverage (according to its About Us-page):

The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a publicly available portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.).

Scopus regularly re-evaluates its journals. It even offers an Excel-list of recently discontinued journals (at the bottom of this page).
In that list, you can see the column Reason for discontinuation (column F). This should at least provide a vague keyword as to why a given journal was cancelled.
It seems that there are four such reasons:

"Metrics" (under-performance of a journal)
"Publication concerns" (I see journals from predatory publishers like OMICS who carry that reason).
"Radar" (outlier performance; "an algorithm that flags journals based on approximately 40 outlier predictors, including sudden change in output volume, sudden change in publishing country and/or affiliations, and high journal/author self-citation rates" -- citation from this F1000 article, at p. 14)
"do not meet Scopus criteria" (probably refers to Scopus' journal selection criteria, e.g. peer reviews, lack of publication delays, editorial board diversity, online availability of articles etc. As this Scopus blog post indicates, some journals are indeed simply discontinued by the publisher, which might fall under this reason.)


Do you not belong in a PhD program if you don't live and breathe your field of study?

In my experience, good primary investigators are always rather unbalanced human beings in one way or another.  If you aren't intensively passionate about something closely connected to the research process, then you can't last, because so much of leading research involves shaping your own agenda.  That said, you can still be doing work in research, even at a Ph.D. level or beyond, without having such independence and drive, but instead being a "super-technician" following somebody else's agenda and leadership.

The scientific ideal holds that every scientist should be of the primary investigator type, and Ph.D. programs are typically designed to select for and cultivate this.  That said, in practice it depends a lot on the group that you are in.  Some professors expect their students to develop their own research agendas very strongly, others are (whether they admit it or even realize it) more looking for good technicians to execute on their grants, and a Ph.D. is more of a byproduct.

We don't really like to admit this as a community, but with the current market structure of academia, we actually need to have the second type of education and people as well.  Look at it from the perspective of simple flux balance analysis: the rate of Ph.D. students entering programs is far higher than the rate at which primary investigators retire or die.  If every Ph.D. student either ultimately ends up as a primary investigator or a "failure," then it means most Ph.D. students are failures.  But I don't think that is actually the case: people who aren't hyper-passionate to the point where it distorts their lives can still succeed just fine in a Ph.D. program and at research, they just are likely to take one of the other tracks besides being a professor or other form of PI.

That said, even if you don't end up going the harrowing road of PI-ship, research work is very hard, and there are a lot of easier and/or more financially rewarding ways to make a living.  To get a Ph.D., you need at least enough passion for the subject to find more value in this difficult and low-paid path than in any of your alternatives.


What does "First Class or 2.1 Honours degree" mean?

The "definitions," such as they exist, of the different degrees, are available from Wikipedia.

Essentially, "first-class honours" and "2.1 (or 2:1) honours" are the top two categories of honors degrees in the UK system—sort of like the summa cum laude and magna cum laude in American universities. Although the requirements for awarding them appear to be fairly uniform between schools (with the possible exception of Oxford and Cambridge—see dbmag9's comment below), given that each university may have different standards for how they "translate" degrees from other countries, your best bet is to contact the university's international office (or equivalent), to determine if they will consider your degree to be comparable.


How can I zip and share my files in my Mendeley favorite

It's possible in new versions of Mendeley (Currently version 1.19.4). Then:

Select all documents in favorites (Right click and click select all)
Then right click and from context Menue (or click File) and select Export PDF(s) with Annotations
It will ask you to save them in a new folder.


How does the US plan to avoid research falling into Chinese hands work?

The nominal goal is to keep people from running two labs, using US funding to develop ideas that then get teleported to the china lab for commercialization. The guys indicted so far were all running labs in China they didn't disclose.
Like charles lieber, who seems to have run a china lab.
It also looks like they're going after people for not filing fbars, which is kinda shitty since half the green card holders in the US are probably guilty of that.
Is this a real problem? Probably not. But it sounds good if you aren't an academic. Same way "tough on crime" always works.


How is the mathematics academic job market outside of North America?

It's very dependent on where you are. I'm from Europe and here it's extremely competitive. In some developing countries though, it's less competitive because there is a great need for university-level teachers, but research is far from the priority in these jobs (according to some of my friends who took them). It all depends on what you're looking for. If you want a research-intensive job in a developed country, expect as much competition as you would in the US: you're not the first one who has the idea to move to get a job.

  But are all university-level math jobs posted on mathjobs.org

No. Outside the US, posting job ads on mathjobs.org is the exception rather than the rule.


Do I need to have teaching experience before entering grad school?

In general, no, it won't. Having teaching experience might weigh in your favor in exceptional circumstances (a graduate department that needs a lot of teaching assistants, and you're "on the bubble"; you're going into an education program or something similar; or the application specifically asks for teaching experience).

However, most graduate schools don't expect that students have prior teaching experience, and provide training to smooth the transition.

Teaching load also varies widely from program to program: some science and engineering students TA for one semester over a five-year program, while humanities graduate students may have to TA every semester to pay for their studies.


Research Interest in physics (Transferring would be good idea?)

I'll start off by saying that transferring is not unheard of, but also definitely not common.

As a first year, you can't have gotten that far into your studies given that it is still September. In general, in physics at least, it's uncommon for someone to go to grad school with a very specific topic in mind and then follow through on it through dissertation. You'll move around as you naturally move through problems of funding, finding an advisor, and just as your interests evolve. The professor and topic you start working with doesn't necessarily have to be your advisor and your dissertation topic.

I would recommend talking more to the professors who do what you might be interested in, and expanding your search. It's not uncommon to only have one or two professors working in a specific field at a department, but if they are unappealing you might find another professor you like works on something similar. For that matter, when talking to other professors, you might find that you really are interested in what they do and want to work on it.

If that doesn't work out, you CAN apply to transfer. However, as other questions have noted previously, it is an uphill battle. You'll need a convincing reason (WITHOUT sounding bitter or negative) and a very strong application package. Just applying doesn't commit you, but I would consider that a last resort only after you have tried everything else.


If I think I have a publishable idea on a certain problem, how do I publish and proceed?

You are on the cusp between math and CS, actually. The better way to "publish" your work is to write it up formally, with references/citations and everything and submit it to either a journal or a conference. Choose one that matches the content of your paper.

But also make sure it is a reputable journal and not one that just publishes anything for the money you pay them.

However, you also have to be prepared, with journals, for publication fees, even with reputable ones. Sometimes they may waive the fees, but you may need to find a way to pay them. And, for conferences, make sure you have some way of attending if your paper is accepted for presentation. In CS, conferences are usually preferred. In math, usually journals.


Advisor moving to Industry for a year, How should I reapply for PhD elsewhere?

A third option would be to continue to work with your advisor when he moves to industry, but to have a second advisor in your institution. This second advisor's primary role could be to guide you through the PhD process, so he or she may not need to be in the same field as you. They can help you improve your academic writing skills, and your research skills, offer moral support, help you brainstorm, act as a sounding board for ideas, etc. As you go through your PhD, you may find that you need this kind of help at least as often as you need more technical help.

The company I work for has close ties to nearby academic institutions, so it is common enough that one of us will jointly supervise an MSc or PhD student when their project is somewhat relevant to our industry.

I am also a PhD student, and have two academic advisors. I find this quite useful, as they have different strengths.


How much time do professors have to do research on their own?

I found this small-scale, not randomly-sampled survey from Boise State University:

Warning:

  All charts below are from TAWKS Phase 1 Stats, initial survey of 30
  higher ed faculty from Boise State University. While findings are
  highly suggestive, they do not represent a random sample.

Answer to question:

  Only 17 percent of the workweek was focused on research and 27 percent
  of weekend time.

Graphs:


Criminal record and work on federally funded project

I was not able to find any documentation directly related to the NSF, however, I would find it unlikely that it would be a problem.

If nothing relevant is mentioned in your employment agreement/contract, then you are probably fine from a legal/regulatory perspective.

As for the ethical question of whether you should volunteer the information to your employer, I can say that if your performance on the NSF grant were contingent on criteria like your criminal history, the professors would have likely asked you directly during your interview.  If they did not feel that it was important enough to interrogate you about it, it probably does not matter either way.

Where it might be a problem is if the grant requires you get a security clearance, as felonies usually invalidate candidacy for a clearance.  It is very unlikely that a clearance would be required for NSF grants; it's more likely from funding agencies like DARPA and ONR.  With that said, grants don't last forever, and the professors might eventually get one that requires you to get a clearance.  If the professors thought that might be a possibility or concern, though, they would have likely brought it up during your interview.  Also, the government often makes exceptions for software engineers/computer scientists since there is a shortage of ones who are otherwise eligible for a clearance.


The challenges of learning when there are no tasks

I think you could propose for yourself such a task solution of which you could publish in some community.
For example, if you're studying French, you could translate something form French to your native language and publish on Medium


I'm finalizing my PhD in structural engineering and was thinking about getting an another PhD in mechanical engineering. After I have discussed this with my adviser, I do not think that it was the right move for me (mainly due to age [I'm 29 now, no family yet and number of publication is high in my case]). I know a friend who was getting his PhD in structural engineering while getting an MS in Math. He likes it!

It is a personal decision. If you are doing this to compensate for what do you think is not a "satisfactory work" during you PhD, look at the facts! you graduate, got couple of publications and a faculty position! You can always self-improve, explore a different reach area or engage in interdisciplinary field. If you measuring successes by the number of papers, then, more papers will come with time! You do not need a "degree" to be satisfied. However, if space-time is something that you are very interested in, then the heart wants what the heart wants.

I found this the other day while surfing the internet that might help you; "At least for a while, in your heart of hearts you'll be confident only that the university will soon enough discover its error in awarding you the PhD, and at some point will brand you (in public no doubt) the fraud you know you are.  This too will pass as you come to realize that students are extremely gullible and many of your colleagues are even greater frauds than you.  That is to say, you know more than you think you do, and students and the people you work with will appreciate the range and depth of your knowledge and abilities if you let them." The Transition from Graduate Student to Assistant Professor


Quotations and references in introductions to novels

I would recommend thinking about the prefatory material like the introduction to a journal special issue: it's entirely reasonable for such a work to have its own meaningful content and own set of references, even though the work as a whole is strongly dependent on the larger work to which it is attached.

I would thus recommend writing up the introduction just as you usually would, with ordinary references , etc.  You can consult with the publisher to see if they want you to use a special style for references.  If, for example, an explicit references section is deemed ugly by the publisher, they may still be happy with footnote-style references or abbreviated references inline with the text.

Ultimately, remember that one of your key responsibilities as an academic writer is to make sure that your reader has pointers to all of the material that they need in order to be able to interpret a work in context, whether that be through standard references (i.e., "[Whirlygig, 1987a]") or even the narrative itself (i.e., "as Whirlygig noted in their article 'On becoming very dizzy' in 1987, ...").


Is it ok to enquire the editor about the accceptance chance of a paper which is under review for 1.5 years

I don't think the editor could confirm the acceptance chance without communicating with the referee. Perhaps you could ask the editor to expedite the process by asking the referee to cut short the report and submit it immediately if it's going to be negative.

You might not wish to do this if you want a more thorough report in the case of rejection.

You could alternatively ask the editor to send a reminder to the referee,  whether the referee agreed to return a report before a particular date, and confirm that they had not lost contact with the referee (since a long time had passed).


Asking for recommendation letter to a Prof on New Year, deadline in a week

Should you ask? Sure -- there's nothing to lose, and it doesn't seem like you have a choice. How to do it politely? Be very apologetic, state that you're aware of how annoying it is to ask for this so close to the deadline (and presumably during holidays), describe any reasons for asking so late, and note that you will understand if your professor is unable to write.

Personally, I'd refuse such a request unless (i) I knew the student well, (e.g. someone in my lab) or (ii) I had a letter already on-hand that I could easily tweak and submit. ("Easily" doesn't mean it isn't annoying, though -- all the web-based recommendation forms still have a lot of boxes to tick, etc.!)


It will depend on a specific department, I guess the best way to find out is to ask (the department head, or the business office of the department). For example, at our department, Assistant to Associate comes with "automatic" $5k salary raise, while Associate to Full has no automatic raise whatsoever...


What "soft-skills" does one need to succeed as a mathematician?

A few that come to mind, and are probably valid in other fields also --

Learn how to give good talks.
Learn how to describe your research informally. Say you meet someone at a conference, and they ask you "What do you work on?" Can you convince them that what you work on is interesting?
Learn how to come up with interesting questions that you don't know how to answer.
Learn how to read a paper. Can you figure out "the big idea" without getting bogged down in the technicalities?
Learn how to meaningfully participate in a math discussion when you're less than 100% sure what's going on.
Develop a gut feeling for when a subject will come in useful. For example, "This lemma feels like I could use algebraic geometry to prove it", without knowing initially what that form would take.
Get a sense for what other researchers in your field consider interesting. What is worth writing a paper about, and what is worth giving a talk about?

There are many, many more -- and none of the above are easy.


How does one address a tenure-track offer that is below expectations

I think you tell the chair of the department some version of what you've told us: you're very excited about joining the institution (very important to say that first!), but you don't feel like the the salary is appropriate for the position, and you would find it much easier to accept the offer if the salary were increased.  Negotiating over salaries is quite normal, not overly demanding or taking some kind of advantage.  Of course you might well not be successful, but people often are.

Negotiating is not fun (at least for me), but it doesn't have to be that hard, especially when you have some leverage.  I would mention the fact that you feel the current offer is an effective pay cut from your present position (it's up to you whether to mention your current salary), and that you're very confused about the fact that offered salary is lower than the range the head himself mentioned.  Mention the (presumably more lucrative) industry job and its salary, though you should probably make it clear that you don't expect to be matched (unless you won't come unless it will.  Obviously, then you should say that).


boss asked me to draft them a letter of rec?

It’s best to behave honestly and ethically. It seems clear to me that you’ve been acting in good faith so far and cannot be faulted for the oversight of not noticing this one guideline among the many confusing hoops the grad schools tell you to jump through. And the transgression, such that it is, seems very minor to me — after all your boss took an active role in writing the final letter, presumably fully believes in its contents, and only showed it to you because he didn’t know it was forbidden.
Now, the key to handling the current situation is to keep the ethical bar high and not spoil things now with any shady or underhanded behavior. My suggestion is therefore that you send the guidelines to your boss and apologize for the oversight of not noticing this specific guideline before. Add that he should feel free to edit his letter again before submitting it and not show you the edits if he so desires. If you do that, you will be morally in the clear in my opinion, and would not have to worry about your boss developing a poor opinion of you if he were to discover these guidelines himself at some later point.
In theory you could also inform the school of what happened. If you do I am sure they will find the explanation satisfactory. And if so you will be going above and beyond what I’m guessing 95% of grad school applicants would go to the trouble of doing if they were in a similar situation.
Good luck!