IEEE Conference Paper: Different Author Blocks, Different Information?

In the IEEEtran_HOWTO (available in the template you link), they seem to actually mix a bit between the number of affiliations and authors. They actually write (Section IV.2):

  If there are more than three authors and/or the text is too wide to fit across the page, use an alternate format:

which corresponds to the second format you put. So, basically, there are three possibilities:

You have 3 authors or less, in which case you use the first format. If the first and third authors are from the same affiliation, then you can just repeat it, to keep the author ordering.
You have more than 3 authors, but you can split the list of authors in 3 affiliation blocks. In this case, you use the first format.
Otherwise, you can use the second format, even if you have only two affiliations, but the author ordering is somehow interleaved.

In case of doubt, you can use the format that makes sense to you, you will be contacted by the editor if there is any problem.


Can a PhD student write a letter of recommendation for coauthor/collaborator?

Can you write it?

Yes.

Will it be worth much?

No.

An ideal letter of recommendation (for schools in the USA) will talk about the candidate's ability to do doctoral-level research from the vantage point of someone who has supervised students through the various stages of their career. While your letter will be better than one from their priest or their coach, it still won't count tremendously in their favor.

Unless this person's only other option is his priest or coach, I'd suggest that you decline.


Sharing a proof on ResearchGate? Inappropriate?

Take a look at your copyright agreement - many will differentiate between the preprint, postprint, and the final published version.

Default language in copyright agreement tends to be most restrictive with the final published version and least restrictive with the preprint.

You can always contact the publisher and specifically ask for permission. I've done this in the past and even gotten special permission to post the final published version (they asked I prominently add the publication and DOI to the 1st page).


Is it acceptable to apply to a masters program based on your weakness, rather than you strength?

Your reasoning is excellent and I would suggest you stick with this approach: All educational programs exist to increase the knowledge and skills of the student, which presupposes weakness relative to the outcome of the program.  Remember that you need to convince the admissions committee that your undergraduate record is strong enough to justify admission to the Masters program, but at the same time, it is your intention to focus on up-skilling in your areas of weakness, with a view to becoming sufficiently competent for entry to a PhD program at a later time.  There is no contradiction in these two things - your existing set of skills from your undergraduate program might legitimately be considered to be strong enough for entry to the Masters program, but weak in comparison to how you will come out (this being the entire  point of education).

In terms of assessing postgraduate applicants, this is generally the kind of student I would prefer --- one who is able to look at his/her existing skills in a realistic way, identify weaknesses, set goals for improvement, and be proactive in plugging those weaknesses to achieve goals.  Would that there were more students like this!


How to write/cite a description of a software product in a master's thesis?

If you wish to quote the text verbatim, then you could write -- as you suggest -- "According to the developer's website, 'Dart is an open-source...' [citation]"

Bear in mind however, that you are writing a research thesis. You should be demonstrating your ability to discriminate, evaluate and criticise. In your short example, there are some statements which are open to debate. Are the libraries indeed robust? Is the development paradigm indeed non-dogmatic? Do you, as a learned academic user of the software, fully agree with these statements or can you offer some additional insight?


Early career drought and correlation with future performance

If you're not productive early, it's doubtful you will be competitive for higher end jobs in academia.  It's a tournament system and the odds are against you, just numerically.  Doesn't mean you are a bad person or a dummy.  But yes, maybe getting out of academia and into the general economy or government is wise.

It's important for young researchers to pick projects that are high likelihood of success.  Or "areas" with potential for several papers. I once told a grad student in my group "how will you publish that when it doesn't work", who was being pushed to do a dumb set of experiments by my advisor.  And I meant it.  (Some things can/can't publish negative results.)  Probably shouldn't do dumb experiments...but at least if you can publish some "data point" paper(s) afterwards it's not a total loss.

Don't just be a non-thinking "subordinate".  Have your own opinions.  There are always more possible things to do than time to do them.  Give your time to what deserves it. If you are incapable of having good opinions about what projects are worthwhile...you are NOT a budding PI.

Yes, you should be a paper-cranking machine as a postdoc.  If you can't do it now, how will you do it when you are tenure track at an R1 school?  This isn't grad school and you should hit the deckplates running.  And avoid multi-year laser building projects like the plague.  Let some other sap do those.

Look at these two questions of yours:  Should I quit a project where I can't see how to contribute? and How to tactfully "decommit" from projects?  I would think the answer to these early questions would be obvious now, in the context of this later one.  You need to focus and churn out first author papers.

P.s. I'm sure the "reassurance crowd" will down vote this.  But you need to hear the cynical view.


Where in a thesis should a glossary be positioned?

I suggest to follow the order reported on Wikipedia – Book design.

Here is the suggested order (skip all that is not needed in your thesis; colophons are only needed in published works, and your publisher will take care of them):

front matter

title page
colophon
contents
foreword
preface
acknowledgment
introduction
dedication
prologue

body matter

content – optionally divided into volumes, books, parts, chapters, sections

back matter

epilogue
outro
afterword
conclusion
postscript
appendix
glossary
bibliography
index
colophon


Can I get into grad school with a low GPA?

You can file for academic petition where university will initially reject your application but an academic committee will review it and may give you conditional admit. What happens in these cases is if you get more than 3.0 GPA in first sem , you are in the program permanently otherwise you are out.It may be better to speak with the department or program coordinator to get better understanding of this and they may have prior knowledge about these cases and may let you know if there is a good chance of your getting petition getting passed or not.

Alternately you can go to industry and work for couple of years before applying. An Industry experience definitely will add more value to your application and will show the committee that you are a serious candidate.


Is it possible to do a Postdoc without travelling?

This is somewhat field dependent, but your academic career could be much more challenging if your disability or other circumstances prevent you from traveling. You may need to travel to job interviews at the very least. Not attending conferences to present your research will reduce the visibility of your work, and so you will struggle to get your ideas well known in your field. This could reduce your job prospects. You will need to have your research products well-advertised on the web in order to have any name recognition. Your research may also have to be more ground-breaking in order to garner recognition.

If, for example, you work in Computer Science, conference publications are typically the most prestigious, so the inability to travel to present your work may mean that it is not published.

I don't mean to be too discouraging, but I think you should reevaluate whether or not you can make 1 or 2 trips per year in order to present your work. It may do wonders for how hard your career is otherwise.

On the plus side, you might also try talking to some conference organizers before you submit your work about presenting your results via video conference. I was at a workshop this week where a presenter couldn't make it due to a last-minute problem with his flight, and he gave a great presentation via Google Hangouts. He wasn't there to network, but at least his presentation happened. If your reasons for not traveling are due to disability (including mental disabilities like social anxiety, agoraphobia, etc.), the country where the conference happens may require that they try to accommodate your needs.


Professor just gave an exam that was way outside of the scope of the class, various other issues with assignments, what should the class do?

Actually, I don't think there is much you can do. Professors and administration hear complaints about "unfair" or "too difficult" exams all the time and most of them are exaggerated.

If your university has some official representation of students, you should go to them so that they can bring up the issue at an appropriate place. And you can hope that the professor sees that the results of his exam are very poor and that he reacts to it.


How can I get my papers published formally?

Choose a target journal. A good first step is to see where the papers you cite are published.Some other suggestions are here and here. If you don't have a budget for publishing, look for one that has no author fees. Avoid predatory and low-quality journals; see how to judge the quality of a journal.
Visit the target journal's website, and read about the scope of the journal and their instructions for authors. Read some papers in the latest issue of their journal. Make sure your paper is on topic, and is comparable to other recent papers in the journal in scope, writing quality, and rigor. If it's not a good fit, go back to step 1.
Edit your paper to follow the instructions for authors from step 2 (formatting, length, anonymizing if the journal does double-blind review.)
Submit the paper to the journal for review, following the instructions on the journal's website.
Watch your paper go through the journal workflow.


There are plenty of PhD Statistics programs that would want you, just because of your background. Keep in mind that their are tons of PhD Statistics programs in the USA. You can apply to 10 relatively low ranked ones, and and 10 of your choice, and see from there, for example. One thing to reiterate, ranking is just a relative number. If you graduate and are seeking a Data Scientist position, and have a M.S. In Computer Science + A PhD in Stats, your good no matter where you went.


Postdoc health insurance for dependents in US?

Yes, US universities generally offer health insurance to spouses and children of full-time employees, especially academic employees.  You'll likely have to pay for it (part or all of the policy's cost), but normally the premiums would be deducted from each paycheck, not paid in advance.

Most universities have public websites for their human resources office, where you can read about employee benefits.


Should I do exercises given in online course and accompanying textbook if I want to do research in machine learning ahead?

Actually, most people require practice and reinforcement to learn much of anything. Reading and seeing isn't enough to get more that a superficial "acquaintance" with anything. Especially any thing complex.

So, yes, you should do the exercises. Following along with the given solutions isn't the same as actually doing them.

But, success won't come immediately, nor easily, if the topic is deep. You can also look for simpler exercises in a field if the ones you have elude you. But practice is essential for nearly everyone. The exceptions are very rare.

Also, you need some feedback on your solutions and this is very difficult to get in a purely online course. Look for local resources to find someone who can look at the work you do and comment on it. It is possible to develop bad habits if you don't get suitable feedback. Eventually you may be able to work through those habits to better ones, but the path will be longer.


How to make CS conference standards clear to academics in other fields

Having been on a couple hiring panels for people like you - and indeed being in the same situation (for a long time my statement was that my two most prestigious publications were each recognized as a thing by exactly half of the people reading my CV), a couple suggestions:

Cover letters. It might be appropriate, in a cover letter, to call attention to conferences that are particularly prestigious and state that.
Reference letters. If you have authors on the CS side of things, ask them to push that expressly. Talk about how impressive your work is and what a big deal those conferences are. This is what I asked my letter writers to do. Regardless of field expectations, it's important to have your letter writers put your work in context.
If possible, try and find out who is reading things, and see if you need to do this kind of advocacy. For example, for an interdisciplinary hiring panel we had, we expressly included someone from each discipline so that they could provide context - because even though I know CS uses conferences as their major venue, I still can't distinguish between a great, good, and just okay conference.

I think it's appropriate to make the distinction in your CV as well - like the difference between submitted and invited talks, they are somewhat different animals.


In what parts of the world, besides the US, do endowed chairs exist?

Yes, endowed chairs exist outside the USA.

An example is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, which (according to Wikipedia) was founded in 1663 by Henry Lucas, the then Member of Parliament for Cambridge. The post has been held by the likes of Isaac Newton, Paul Dirac and Stephen Hawking.


For some reason there is this belief in academia that people should work without pay. It's inappropriate. You need to walk away.

Even early career researchers are allowed to work for pay.

It would also seem that a 6-month grant would only be for a rather small project. Can the project be tied off quickly so that you can move on?

If the senior PIs are threatening to ruin your career, I would try to get some evidence of these threats. Also keep in mind that even if you finish the project, PIs who make threats to ruin you career are not all of the sudden going to become your best buddies. You could very well finish the project and still have your senior PIs blacklist you for further grants. You owe them nothing.


Should I decline to fill out a recommendation form after saying that I will do it?

You seem really to be overthinking this. You're writing a recommendation -- you're not the student's full-time advocate or cheerleader. Fill in the form, send it in, be done. If you want, to mirror the structure of the other student's application, write a supplemental letter also for this one, just a paragraph or so -- shorter than what you've spent time on in your question here!

By the way: there is nothing at all wrong with having your recommendation for one student look worse than another's if you believe the former is actually worse for the program than the latter. In fact, I've often explicitly written on recommendations that A and B are both applying, and that A is stronger than B. Your job is to help provide an assessment with which the program can make a fair choice among applicants.


Would it look bad if I don't have a letter of recommendation from my advisor (out of personal choice)?

Would it look bad on my part if none of the letters I submit are from my advisor?

Yes, assuming someone reads your letters.

Your advisor should ask people who worked closely with you to help your advisor write the letter so it can include sufficient detail.


LNAI conference accepting papers as accompanying proceedings

An idealistic answer would be "It is the contribution that matters, not where it is published." But, of course, it is a thing to worry in our academic world. Usually, LNAI/LNCS proceedings paper would be given more weightage (at least perception-wise) than the papers published in some unknown publishers with ISBN.

It seems that the conference has two kinds of acceptance: accept for LNAI, accept for ISBN. Based on the quality judgement by the conference panel and the reviewers, the paper is weighted to be published in either LNAI or ISBN proc. What my guess is that the papers which are of good quality (i.e. contribution is significant) would go for LNAI. Good luck!


Found error in published article where to submit a correspondence?

If the error is simply a typo, or two, or a wrong sub-result which does not fully invalidate the findings, don't bother: the chances of publishing are almost zero. (E.g., in mathematics, around 80% of results are expected to be wrong in the strict sense of the word, e.g., not checking whether your claim "for all n≥0 ..." really includes the case n=0. I don't know about the applied physics, though.)

Thus, let's now assume you have found a serious error. A typical procedure is submitting a corrigendum. Corrigenda get seldom published, though. Read the submission guidelines of the journal in question, and, if it doesn't help, ask the editor.

Usually, the chances of getting such a corrigendum published oneself are slim  unless one collaborates with the original authors ‒ otherwise, they would be asked to evaluate the corrigendum.

An aside: If methods mean methodology (rather than, say, algorithms), my personal approach to refereeing the paper would be checking whether the new authors

justify why the published part is wrong as it is,
improve the wrong part,
and re-do it completely, i.e., improve the methodology and apply it.


What graduation gown should a PhD-holder wear when later receiving a Master's in another field?

It varies from university to university. In Cambridge, for example, you wear the academic dress of the highest Cambridge degree you hold, if you do already hold one, but if you are not already a Cambridge graduate you wear the garb appropriate to the degree that is about to be conferred on you. So, in a case such as yours, suppose you hold a PhD from London and are about to take a Cambridge master's degree, you would wear the Cambridge gown and hood.


What are the pros and cons of publishing a positioning paper based on a grant proposal?

Publishing a position paper can possibly be useful to get feedback about the idea and refine it for grant submission, particularly if you're publishing it at a conference.

I personally don't worry too much about getting scooped either, but I would likely only do it if it lays out a space that is far bigger than can be tackled in a single grant proposal. Sure, someone else might get inspired - I think that's a good outcome! - but it isn't terribly likely that they're going to go work on the same corner of the probelm that you are.


First, you should note the difference between checking for evidence of publication bias and correcting for it. To know that there are patterns in the data that indicates publication bias means that you will be able to temper the discussion of your results, and maybe suggest potential weaknessess in the study, even if it is not possible to correct for biases.

There exists a number of methods that can be used to identify publication bias. A simple graphical funnel plot of effect size vs. sample size is maybe the easiest to apply. The idea here is that the scatter around the true effect size should be symmetric and with expanding variance at smaller sample sizes ("trumpet-shaped"). Publication bias can lead to underreporting of non-significant studies with smaller sample sizes, which would result in a skewed pattern in the funnel plot. Another method to test for publication bias is a regression between standardized effects and precision ('Egger's method') or rank-correlation methods. You can get an overview of these methods and others in e.g. Macaskill et al. (2001) and Thornton & Lee (2000).

Accounting/correcting for publication bias is trickier, and I have no personal experiance in using these methods. However, I know that one method that is used in medical research is to only include pre-registred studies in the meta-analysis. If this is possible depends on your topic though. You can also use simulations and parametric methods to basically try to recreate the complete (unknown) dataset, and in this way account for the publication bias (one example of this is Givens et al. 1997)


I was pushed to submit a mediocre paper to a conference. To my surprise it was accepted. How to save face?

How to save face?  Have more high quality papers than poor ones.  People understand that a student's first paper is not necessarily outstanding, especially if his/her supervisor is more about quantity than quality. So it reflects more badly on your supervisor than you as long as you have the 'student' badge on.  However, you can only wear the 'student' badge for so long.  So, aim to get better papers published.

Personally, when I glance at a person's CV, I only look for the best publications.  That's what I judge him/her on.

In summary, people remember successes or high quality papers or those with impact.

Aside: in my area, there is a paper in a poor venue with 10K+ cites.  In contrast, lots of high quality papers have zero citation. Don't despair, there is hope!


What to do for my graduate school application if I think my GPA doesn't reflect my coursework mastery

An application for grad study in the US contains many elements, of which GPA is only one. If the GPA is poor, then the other elements need to indicate a high likelihood of success in graduate study and thereafter. Research experience (published papers especially) is a good indicator. And in the US, the letters of recommendation from people who know you well and can be expected to give an honest assessment can be very important.
Talk to some of your current professors and get their advice about how to proceed and ask for letters as appropriate.
And, you need the knowledge from those early courses, even if your GPA doesn't reflect that you have mastered it.

To respond to your edit:
No, the SoP is not the place for this and it will sound like an excuse there. That isn't to say that you couldn't mention it elsewhere, though it is best if the explanation is given by others, such as letter writers.
But, the SoP should be entirely forward looking, saying what you want to do in the future and not giving explanations about the past. Say, in the SoP what your plans are for graduate study and thereafter, including any ideas you might have about research areas you hope to explore. You likely have a limited amount of space/words in the SoP. Use them effectively.


Can I submit a conference abstract that duplicates a submitted paper?

If you are submitting an abstract for a contributed talk or poster at the ICM and your paper is submitted to a math journal, then there is no issue.  The mathematics community does not consider the abstract to be a publication and there is no conflict with simultaneous submission of a paper.  In fact, this would be common.

If you are writing a paper for the ICM proceedings (i.e., you are giving an invited talk), then this could theoretically be an issue.  It would be polite and proper to inquire with the journal to make sure they are OK with it, but they will certainly say yes.  ICM proceedings papers are considered expository, and being invited to speak is an honor, so there's no way anybody will interfere with it.


It might help to understand where your Dean is coming from. I work for my university's research administration department, and I can understand his position. For context, we are an R1 university in the United States.

There are likely a few things going on:

Grants often create liabilities for universities. There may be cost-sharing requirements or other implicit costs which the university will be required to pay. Administrators need to keep a close eye on these requirements in order to keep the university functioning smoothly.
Grants create risks for universities. There are many legal and ethical rules surrounding grants. Although some of the risk is on you, much of the potential penalties are assumed by the university. For this reason, many (if not all) research universities have dedicated research administration departments and all grants are required to flow through those departments.
There are legal issues. In all of the grants I've seen, the grant goes from the granting agency to your employer. It is not a grant to you personally. You should be careful about accepting money on your own. Carefully re-read the grant terms to be sure that this is not the case here.
Not all the reasons are bad: universities often like to reward individuals and departments who do a great job of soliciting grant dollars. If they can't keep an eye on grants, how are they supposed to that?

Other answers have mentioned intellectual property. I'll only repeat what they have said: if you work for a university you should not assume that any intellectual work product is your own property. Make sure you understand what the rules are in your location.

Overall, I would treat this as an opportunity to develop in your profession. If soliciting grants is an important part of your career (current or future!) then it would help to understand how it works. It's not as simple as just applying for a grant - and for good reason!


Are there formal or informal hiring bans in some academic settings based on gender and/or nationality?

You are unlikely to get examples about formal hiring bans, in particular in western societies. It would not only be frowned upon, as in this case; it would also be against university policies, if not downright illegal. The only formal hiring bans I could think of are those implied by more general rules. The most obvious case coming to mind is that about 20 countries don't allow people with Israeli passport to enter, which means they cannot study or teach there either (about half a dozen or so countries extend this to people with other passports but evidence of a travel to Israel).

Unfortunately, it is possible that the professor was speaking a truth about what some consider in their hiring decisions...where usually they would only have the common sense to not explicitly admit the true reasons for their decisions. They would start where this professor is now: claiming that their labs are full. This is human nature, and academics are no better or worse than their fellow humans dealing with their fear and prejudice in regrettable ways.


How to tell pushy "advisors" to back off?

It's hard to tell exactly what's happening here.

It does not seem unreasonable for collaborators to sync up daily. Ideally all three of you would be syncing up with each other, rather than just this student syncing up with her supervisors -- but since she is only staying for a short time and working on a single project, it is sort of natural that there is an imbalance. I wonder if the student is interpreting standard collaboration/teamwork as "pushing" and "having to prove herself".

But I can also see scenarios where the supervisors are really being overbearing and negatively affecting progress.

Either way, this is not the student's preferred work style, so I would consider trying to schedule some standing meetings. Maybe send a brief e-mail that says something like:

Hi guys,
I'd like to schedule some additional meetings where we could all sync up on the nuclear waste project. So far we've just been doing these discussions "on the fly", but I think it might be better for all of us if we had a set time for the three of us to sync up. Maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1 PM? Please let me know.
Worried

They may react with

No, things are fine, you're doing great, just keep doing what you're doing

In which case, you can say bluntly:

I'd really prefer to have a set time -- that way I can prepare a summary of my progress/questions in advance, and won't have so many interruptions during the rest of the week. Could we give it a try?

If they still push back after that,  you may have to accept that this is how the group operates.


First, make double sure that the error is on their part, not your part, or there is not another reason for the discrepancy (e.g., they're computing something slightly different, they're using different assumptions, there's a simple way to transform their answer into yours, etc).
It seems reasonable sometime between now and then, to contact the authors (1 and 2), to check in and say you want to mention their work in your talk but you're concerned about this possible error.
Try to talk to Author 2 at the conference before your talk about this issue.
What to actually say depends on the situation and exactly how related their work is to yours, but if you are not getting any responses from them, you might just mention their work in passing.  You could avoid saying anything definitive about their work.  You can also just say that there seem to be discrepancies in some cases and you're looking into it.  I would avoid directly saying their work has errors unless they specifically admit that it does (in which case you still should not harp on it).


should I put this information into the reference section or within the text?

Personally, I would put them in the bibliography, but either way looks fine, to me. I don't have a strong opinion, and I suggest you to do what you consider more readable.

However, I have often encountered copy editors who did have strong opinions on matters like this, so be ready to change it if they complain.


What author changes are acceptable after paper acceptance in the camera-ready

I can't speak for all parts of CS, but I have seen authors improving theoretical results, fixing bugs (both bugs discovered by the reviewers and bugs not discovered by the reviewers), changing the presentation (both following reviewers' requests or not), and adapting experimental results to the latest version of a tool, and I have done so myself, and nobody has ever complained about it.

On the other hand, if you have any reason to believe that the reviewers would have preferred the submitted version to the updated version, or would have rejected the paper if they had seen your changes, you should probably not change it.


When marking 150 plus exams, I go page by page so the information I have to consider is small and focused instead of doing a 10 or 12 page paper all in one...

I find that so much faster and as I finish each page I enter that page total into my excel sheet so I can see, when finished, how the questions “behaved” as well as the final students grades.


How to present publication output on CV when you publish in fields where author ordering conventions vary?

I would suggest adding a remark like the following to your list of publications in your CV.

  I publish in multiple fields, with different standards for ordering authors, some ordering by contribution and others ordering alphabetically.  In the list below, first authors are indicated in bold when authors are ordered by contribution; the symbol = indicates a paper with alphabetically-ordered authors.

  [1] Bozo T. Clown and K. N. Zhao.  This is a chemistry paper. Science, 2014.

  =[2] Bozo T. Clown and K. N. Zhao.  This is a mathematics paper. Annals of Mathematics, 2016.

  [3] K. N. Zhao and 4278 others. Higgs bosons are made of cheese. Nature 2020.


How does one keep informed in a field that relies heavily on scholarly books?

The pace in such disciplines tends to be slower. That is not necessarily bad. Those disciplines tend to prioritize careful thought out arguments over the newest, coolest, most hyped finding. It is not how I and my sub-discipline works, but I recognize that it is a legitimate way of working, that has complementary strengths and weaknesses over a more article or working paper based sub-discipline.


Posting a paper on a preprint repository (SSRN) before publishing (economics)?

The disagreement is not merely between fields, but even between journals in the same field, published by the same organization!

For example, the American Chemistry Society (ACS) recently launched ChemRxiv as the chemistry counterpart to arXiv.org in physics. However, as of the launch date, only The Journal of Physical Chemistry series of ACS allowed authors to submit to the preprint server.

So, you need to check with the requirements and rules of the journal to which you want to send the paper to determine what is permissible.

In any event, though, if you can't submit the paper to a preprint archive, you could distribute it to trusted colleagues for feedback before submission!


Are informal inquiries about postdoctoral positions liable to be perceived negatively?

Informal inquiries are not liable to be perceived negatively: An informal inquiry is a very good way to make first contact before sending over more formal items such as a CV, letters of recommendation and proposed research ideas. A thoughtful email with some very brief and basic information about yourself and your interest in the potential lab is more likely to be read and replied to (no information overload). After initial contact is made, the more formal process will then be more directed as information about timing and funding may be provided.


Is it reasonable to ask other researchers to send me their previous grant applications?

In my experience in both the US and UK this is quite common, and in fact encouraged. While technically, we are all in competition for funding, research works best when it is collaborative. There are so many nuances in a grant application that vary from across funding calls, that seeing successful (and even unsuccessful) applications can be hugely beneficial. they can give you an idea as to the scope of the project, how much it should build on previous work, and how much preliminary research should be done prior to applying.

I would hope current and past colleagues will share their funded proposals and would never hesitate to ask, and in fact would be mildly offended if they did not share them. Unfunded proposals are often helpful to see, but some colleagues are more hesitant to share unsuccessful ideas that they may still be trying to improve. In addition to asking to see proposals, you should be asking for feedback on your proposal as well as offering to read the proposal's of colleagues.

One aspect of a grant proposal that is difficult for new investigators (okay they are all difficult), is the budget. Many PIs will not share the budget of the proposal with others since they include salary information that many people consider private.


Do "research team" and "research group" mean the same thing?

I would use “research group” to describe the set of people that is the students that I advise and any researchers I employ (plus myself).

“Research team” to me would be primarily the set of PIs with who I am collaborating on a given grant or other project, and may also encompass the students and researchers who are directly involved in that project.

“PI” here would be anyone in a principle investigator role for the project. This would certainly include professors and researchers at government labs/museums/zoos with whom I set up the project and secured funding, and could also include people who joined the project later under their own resources at our invitation, rather than being hired by one of the existing PIs out of the original funds. A postdoc coming in with their own funding, but with the funding contingent on their having a supervisor, would be in a grey area between the “PI-level” sense of “research team” and the broader sense of “PIs plus their students and staff”.


Chances of Getting into a Top PhD Math Program

It depends on the definition of "a top grad program".

I think your GPA is good. GRE is usually not a (big) factor. I would expect most applicants to have >85/90%. If you are worried take the test as soon as possible. You can choose to send only your best result at the end.

Graduate courses are good only if you get good grades from them.

Try to make sure you get at least 3 strong recommendation letters by the time of the application. You want them to be from your field of interest. At least one should be from a more experienced faculty.

Also if it is possible try to get some undergraduate research experience. It helps, but it is not necessary.


What do admissions like to see in online profiles?

Admissions committees are looking for strong evidence of research potential; that's what your web site should give.  At a minimum, your academic web site should have

Your academic CV
A list of publications and research projects, with download links.

You may want to include a copy of your research statement, but only if you don't tailor your statement to each department you apply to.

Keep it simple.  If your site looks too flashy, you may give the impression that you spend too much time fiddling with your web pages instead of doing research.  (Cough.)

Make sure everything that you post on your web site is polished and professional.  Proper spelling, grammar, notation, and technical language counts, just as it does in your research statement.

Finally, @aeismail is correct: Do not assume that admissions committees will look at your site; some will, some won't.  Your application must stand alone.  But if you mention any publications, independent projects, or other results in your statement, point the reader to your site.  Even if nobody actually visits your site, your willingness to display your work in public will work to your advantage.


If a journal has optional costs, is it bad form not to pay them?

I'm not sure which discipline you are referring to, but I have published my articles in social and health science journals. Most journals offer options at a cost (optional Open Access, color reprints, etc.). If you do not want or need these options, there is no reason to feel that it is wrong to decline them. I have never paid these extra costs. Journals that are not strictly open access make their money from subscriptions, not from the authors. The additional costs are mainly to cover optional features that would make your article more costly to publish than other articles without these features. So, no worries!


How do I cite a quote in the title of a paper

No-one would expect a reference in the title. There are a few alternatives you can consider.

The simple one would be to add "(Winston Churchill)" after the quote in the title.

A better option in my opinion, is to start the introduction with the same quote built into an explanatory sentence and then add the reference there. After all, the quote must have a significant meaning for your work, otherwise it would not form the title. I am not sure what the "GCR2" stands for but in general one should avoid abbreviations in the title.

A third possibility is to rewrite the title to something more explicit. you can have the quote as the main title followed by a subtitle that explains the significance. Different field have different ways of handling such titles so I cannot say what would be suitable for you. The title should draw attention to your work and make readers decide whether the work is worth reading. For me it has no meaning and although I am in a different field, I think that is a sign that the construct is not optimal.


While Bill Barth's description of "professional student" as someone whose sheltering in academia and trying not to graduate is one I have heard, there's also a more formal designation for the term.

Mainly, post-graduate students who are in professional degree programs. For example, medical and dental students, law students, many students pursuing Masters of Public Health degrees, or MBAs, etc. are all pursuing degrees that are intended to be applied to a profession, rather than going further into academia. They often have somewhat different concerns than graduate students, hence the different term.


CV for tenure-track application: not sure whether to include Master's thesis

Create a section for theses and list both your MSc and PhD theses titles there. Or put it under Education.

(As a sidenote: you worry too much about style. What's important in a CV is the content, not so much the style.)


How bad is it to take another year for my undergraduate degree?

If you have a really good relationship with one (or more) of your math profs then you could make  a fifth year work to your advantage. Ask them what research opportunities you have with them, perhaps as an independent study. If you could put together a nice, but do-able, project to fill up the rest of the time for the additional year, then it could work out to be a plus.
But this assumes, for purposes of graduate study, that your GPA is good enough and you have some insight into one or more math subfields. You don't need (nor is it possible to have) universal insight, but something with which you can be clearly predicted to be a success by letter writers.
You are in a difficult place, I think, but is may still be possible to recover through hard work and faculty contacts.


Why not design the proposed online survey using the actual survey tool?

Students use the tools they are most comfortable with. If the excercise does not limit the tools, then that is only right. In my field (sociology)  most of them have put many many many more hours in Word or Excel then in some survey tool, so if this were an excercise for my students I would expect to see the pattern you report. If I wanted them to get experience in the survey tool, I would need to change the text of the exercise to require them to use that tool.


Should I contact accomplished researchers listed as editors of shady journal?

I wouldn't worry too much about tact.  There's enough information in your question to identify the journal, and it looks impressively bad, even by the dismal standards of junk journals.  It's so terrible that I'd consider it unethical to be actively involved as an editor, and humiliating to be passively involved.  Bringing this to the editors' attention would be doing them a favor: if their names are being used without their knowledge, then they'll find out, if they haven't been paying close enough attention, then they'll get a valuable wake-up call, and if they are already well aware of how terrible the journal is, then at least they'll learn that someone has noticed their involvement and disapproves.  Of course it would be quite an awkward e-mail.  Perhaps the easiest solution is an anonymous e-mail: it won't make things less painful for the editors, but at least it won't affect your relationship with them.


Does "being ghosted" mean "rejection" after PhD interview?

It could be that unforeseen circumstances have prevented a timely decision. However, most likely you are not their first choice but they don't send out rejections before their first choice has signed the contract. That's pretty standard.
Something similar happened to me in the past. Three months later they called me and asked if I would still be interested. Their first choice had decided against the position. If they had send out rejection letters they would have had to restart the whole process again (with a new job posting).


Defending A Thesis and Expecting The Worst

I doubt it is so common this late. But certainly it is common enough for setbacks to occur at any time. You learn as you go. Sometimes the lessons aren't happy ones. Research is fundamentally dealing with the unknown and it is difficult to schedule. It is impossible to schedule successful completion, actually.
I suggest that you have some options. Perhaps more than I can think of. But, for example:
You could take your chances and leave it as it is. Your advisor might not be happy and the committee might send you back to work.
You could give it (model updates) your best shot and hope for the best. This makes your advisor happy. Maybe it results in success and maybe in some fallback plan, but you can't know that now.
You could, perhaps, just reschedule your defense for a future date to give yourself time to get to a better result. For a doctoral thesis this would be the necessary option in most cases, I think. Perhaps less viable for a masters.
My own sense is that it is important to keep the advisor happy as they are an important part of your future success.


What is a "good" PhD dropout rate, and how would we know?

I don't think there is a "good" dropout rate - without knowing why students drop out, the number is meaningless. But my overall view is that education (on any level) should be measured by the improvement in knowledge/skills/competence/... it provides to students and not by its ability to classify students into those who pass and the rest.

In this view, ideal (but unachievable) drop out rate is zero as you make sure that only students that are a good fit for the program enlist and then you do your best to lead them to maximal achievements they are individually capable of.

In the real world, it is hard to know for both the student and the institution whether the program is a good fit. Also people and their priorities change over time. So I guess there are a few "valid" reasons for dropping out:

The student's life situation changes (e.g. has a child)
Although the studies proceed well, the student realizes that he/she wants to do something different with his/her life. This should not include the case when the student had incorrect information on what the study program is actually like.
Early in the program the student realizes that he/she is unable to fulfill the expectations of the program (that were known to him/her before enlisting)
The student behaved in some unacceptable manner and was asked to leave.

To me the goal is to have very few dropouts of this "valid" kind and exactly zero dropouts for other reasons. In particular I think that if students fail because they learn midway that your program is too hard for them or because the environment is too harsh or because their ideals of what the study program would look like were shattered, than it is a failure of the institution (although often the student is also at least partially responsible).


What is the difference between a taught and research MSc and a research MPhil degree?

Many take an Mres with no plans to go onwards to a Phd whilst an MPhil tends to be the precursor to a Phd programme (both tend to have some taught component, but sometimes both can be just pure research, there is no one size fits all as each programme is unique).

When joining a Phd programme you will always be put on an MPhil first whilst the same is not true for an Mres.  That is not to say though that you cannot extend your Mres project to a Phd if suitable funding and supervision is available.

As an engineer the only reason to do either of these research programmes is if you actually wish to do research.  If you just want an advanced accredited degree its better you look at Msc or MEng programmes.

Neither degree is more "prestigious".  They are both designed to teach you how to become a researcher.  If you want to do research in engineering though you will need to do a Phd or spend your career with an Mres working under the supervision of Phds.


Feeling frustrated by colleagues' behavior, considering leaving the university

My adviser told me in my first meeting with him: "I warn you that we'll agree on meetings, and I will just forget to come." This isn't ideal, but I took it as a cute forgetful scientist comment, not an insulting admission. And yes, it turned out to happen a lot.

Professors deal not just with research and supervising students, but they might be involved with industry, probably have a family, and certainly spend much time fighting administration; and the more accomplished they are, the more time is spent dealing with issues they'd rather not instead of focusing on what most like (such as doing research, and supervising). I fully understand that your experiences are frustrating, but they don't strike me necessarily as that unusual. If you find yourself with an adviser who is always extremely reliable, you are lucky. You are not lucky, but this is still to say that all I think you need is patience.

There is more to it though. If your adviser is the busy type, and offers a meeting right after sending you information, he obviously doesn't expect you to have it digested already. You should have taken him up on the offer, and refrain from fatalistic attitudes such as calling re-scheduling attempts a "mockery." Marcus Aurelius wrote (from memory) "We cannot change what happens to us, but we can change how we feel about it." While this isn't so easy, it's good advice as attaching negative feelings to events in the course of work or study doesn't help. From your questions here, you appear to do that commonly. I think your mind and body would benefit if you wouldn't. To learn this, maybe talking to a counsellor might help, if only to verbalize your frustration with them, and maybe so get it out of your system.

I can't help but feel that the world around you isn't quite as dark as it appears to you. Try to learn how to perceive it that way.


Without more information from the OP, this answer will be a bit tentative. I'm not sure that a low GPA is your biggest issue, though some schools have rules that they enforce quite rigidly.

I think the biggest obstacle for you now, that you can correct somewhat at least with time and effort, is that your academic background seems to be haphazard rather than focused. Normally a master's is quite focused and depends on the student having certain skills, usually from their undergraduate years. You don't seem to obviously have that.

Learning Python, of itself, will help you very little, actually as it is just a tool. But you may be missing most of the content of the undergraduate education, including, perhaps the vital Algorithms and Data Structures courses, as well as Database and a few others.

Physics (at most levels) is an actual science. That seems to be your background. Computer Science isn't a science at all (in most areas) and hasn't been for half a century. Data science is a bit between, however, as it can be experimental, not just constructive. In CS, we mostly build things, rather than search for the truths provided by the cosmos.

It might be, that if you want to study big data in Physics specifically, that you might find a program somewhere that focuses on that, though it would likely be in a Physics department. If you can find that, your background might be seen as helpful.

But in general, if you want a MS (MSc) degree you should spend some time (not a small amount of time) focusing your studies in one area primarily that will help you be seen as having the needed skills.

While broad interests in life are valued and valuable, academia mostly values specialization. Studying data science online may help you provided you do enough of it and do it well enough, but your broad background may only make it harder. If you can find a way to get some of the background in an actual educational institution (with a mentor) it would (for most people) be better than online courses, which are harder to judge no matter how good they are. There is too much variability in student outcomes to trust them completely. Focus.


How much information should I include in my lecture slides?

Here's a general guideline:

Figure out whether you want the audience to pay attention to you, or to the slide

They can't do both. A large part of the time, you want the audience to pay attention to you and the words you're saying. At those times, the slides should be as sparse as you can make them. Really, the only function they have is as a reminder to people whose attention has momentarily lapsed: this is what I'm talking about, this is where I am in the line of the story. Also make sure, during these moments that you're not looking at the slides. The audience looks where you look, unless you make eye contact with them.

But sometimes, you want the audience to focus on something in particular. Perhaps you're taking them through steps in a proof or derivation, perhaps you're explaining a complicated diagram, you may even be reading out a quote. These are the rare moments when you're asking the audience to really focus, and raise their energy levels for a moment. Here, you're allowed to have dense slides. These are also the slides that you're spending a lot of time on, so make sure to put the effort in. Use all the visual tools at your disposal to make the message as clear as possible. At this point, you're actually allowed to look at your own slide, because you want the audience to do the same thing.

Finally, do not mistake slides for learning aids. If you want to give students something to help when they're studying, create a version with added notes and put that online. Don't clutter up your slides to make them serve two purposes.


Is it possible to get into an elite physcis grad school for theory without having already taken graduate level courses?

Yes.  Graduate admissions committees at good universities are looking to recruit students who will publish a lot of high quality papers.  The best predictor of future publications is past publications.  By comparison, coursework is less important.  The Physics GRE is a very poor predictor of your ability to write good research papers.

You should still pursue a good physics GRE score because it is a good measure of the student's ability to plan ahead.


Should I provide my transcripts for all years or only the last year?

This may vary by university, but a transcript is a full academic record of your time at an institution. As such, they will expect information on every course that you took, all three years. A partial transcript is obviously acceptable for degrees which have not yet been completed, but omitting completed courses may look like you have something to hide.

There will likely be a firm requirement to provide a full original transcript, and if not in English, an authorised translation, before your place is confirmed, regardless of whether a partial transcript is acceptable for an offer to be given.


How to write a really short letter of intent?

Carefully address the question as phrased by the institution.  Different schools may describe what they want as a letter of intent in slightly different ways that may help you understand what they're looking for.

Broadly speaking, a letter of intent is not about your past.  It should explain your intentions for the future.  (Stuff about your past is probably better in a personal statement, if you're asked for one.) A letter of intent should answer the question, what will you do if you come here?

In any sort of admissions or employment situation, whenever you're asked about the future, a good answer usually includes some specificity about your objectives, something testable, what you'd like to work on, how you think you might proceed toward your goals, etc.  Hope that's helpful.


Writing first email to prospective professors about MS application

I'd go ahead and ask, even all three. Ask for further details on their current work and potential thesis ideas. As an outsider you can't really select one of them today, without working your way into the subject.

If they are closely related subjects, as you state, chances are that they work together and perhaps even supervise students as a team. Best of all worlds, sort of...


The examples that you show look like quite similar to either typical IEEE paper formats or ACM paper formats.  Engineering conferences and journals tend to use this type of extremely dense format, and often provide templates (like those linked above) in both LaTeX and Word.

Yes, you can do these things in Word, especially following a provided template, but you probably should not: LaTeX is very widely used in the scientific world because it is much better at precisely typesetting scientific papers, especially mathematical equations.  LaTeX is also much easier to do collaborative writing with, since its textual format is well-suited for diffs and merges with version control software. If you contemplate a career in engineering or mathematical research, you are well advised to invest a little bit of time in learning LaTeX, as it will make many things in your life much easier.  Life sciences, on the other hand, tend to leave all of the formatting to the journal and submit everything in arbitrarily formatted Word.


I'm afraid of chemicals. How do I handle my required uni biology class?

To further echo one of the comments:

Seek professional help. This may be a trained psychologist, or even just a general medical practitioner, who may be able to direct you to another institution if necessary. You may have access to mental healthcare through your institution if you do not otherwise have access. Specific phobias are treatable. Formally addressing this will do two things for you:

It may or may not help you overcome your fear. This may not be necessary just because of a single bio class alone, but it sounds like your condition is limiting your life in other ways, and this just may be a good trigger for you to seek a treatment that may improve your life in general going forward.
However, even if the treatment is not successful, or takes too long to help you much with your class (treating phobias can be a long-term project, from my limited  understanding), your condition is now on record, which allows you to approach whatever office in your university is responsible for handling special needs students. They should be able to convince the teacher to find alternative ways for you to do the class without handling chemicals, but they will almost certainly not act unless you have documentation from a qualified medical professional.


How to answer tough questions / didn't hear the question?

Maybe it depends on the discipline, but I have usually found the conference audiences supportive, especially toward young researchers. In the case of tough question I would explain that the question is indeed tough and answer those aspects I understand and point out that the problems posed by the asker should pose an interesting venue of future research. Just learn from this experience, as conference attendees are generally smart people and probability of faking out a plausibly sounding answer is low when one just doesn't know.

As for the second problem I don't think gambling is a good solution. It'd better to explain hearing problems and ask to repeat the question. After all you want to address the issues pointed out by audience and maybe learn something from it. In grave situation maybe you can ask a colleague to write the question summary down for you? Informing session chair of your hearing problems beforehand won't hurt as well. After all that's nothing one should be ashamed of (as already pointed out by others).


Potential PhD supervisor expressed interest, then didn't follow up about meeting. Should I continue with admissions process or move on?

Don't panic.  The fact that you haven't heard back from him shouldn't be interpreted as a sign that he has lost interest in working with you.  It's summer, and academics often take vacations or travel to conferences in the summer.  It often happens that they take much longer to reply to emails.

Go ahead with anything that you already know you have to do, such as submitting the online application.  It doesn't sound like any urgent action is needed from the professor - you just want to chat with him about research when he has time - so just wait for him to respond.  If you don't hear anything within another week, send another email.


How to write a postdoc research proposal in mathematics?

I think this might be useful as complementary to the questions mentioned by Suresh. I heard for the first time about Heilmeier Catechism in one of the grant writing workshops. Since then I always think to Heilmeier questions while writing a proposal or paper.

I copy Heilmeier questions from DARPA website, however another version is available from Wikipedia.

What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon. What is the problem?  Why is it hard?
How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
What's new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
Who cares?
If you're successful, what difference will it make?   What impact will success have?  How will it be measured?
What are the risks and the payoffs?
How much will it cost?
How long will it take?
What are the midterm and final "exams" to check for success?  How will progress be measured?


What typically limits how many fellowships a PhD student can receive?

Generally the organizations offering the fellowships have some rules regarding accepting other sources of funding concurrently.

For example, the Ford Foundation fellowship:

  A Ford Foundation Fellow may not accept remuneration from another major fellowship or similar external awards while on Ford Foundation Fellowship tenure; however, limited supplementation from institutional funds, educational benefits from the Veterans Administration, or educational incentive funds may be received concurrently with Ford Foundation support. Fellows receiving support from multiple sources are urged to discuss and negotiate the terms of the funding with all funding agencies and their university.

Universities also typically have policies regarding concurrent fellowships. For example, at the University of a Illinois:

  Fellows are prohibited from holding two major awards concurrently (fellowship, traineeship, grant, tuition payment award or comparable support from any government agency, state, federal or foreign, or from any foundation, corporation or similar organization). Any award offer should be reported immediately to the Graduate College Fellowship Office, where the determination will be made whether the two awards may be held concurrently.


Tips for work-life balance when doing postdoc with two very young children and a one hour commute

I'm a postdoc and I work maybe 40-45 hours a week.

Things that make this work:

I don't check my work email at home. I did that in the past, now I don't. I never missed something (although once in a while a colleague will call with something really urgent).
I don't do everything around the lab. I clean up my own stuff in the lab, and I will do my "chores" but I'm not going to be involved with buying stuff, reorganizing stuff, salespeople, "better" kits / reagents, saving money, discussing the who-does-what etc.
I don't do all the experiments I can do. I can think of many things that are very interesting, but some are just more interesting than others and you can only do so many. Maybe at a certain point what you can think of still fits in the time you have (and you're going to work more to do it), but in the end there are only 24 hours in a day, so you have to start cutting at a certain point. Why not now?
Related: I don't write long papers. I gather the proof, make a point, find the holes, plug them and that's it. I don't do certain experiments "because everybody does them" or "because 4 methods to prove we made a known compound is better than 2". And your "interesting side-phenomenon" will probably be moved to the supplementary info.
And the most important one: I don't expect working more is getting me ahead. Good papers are. Smart questions are. A keen eye is. Collaborating with great researchers is. Of course you need to spend the time and effort and be productive, but there's no A for effort, nobody is going to think you're a better researcher because you did 20 experiments this week and even publishing a few more papers isn't going to make a difference.


Avoiding confusion over the term "Research Assistant"

I know I'm resurrecting a dead thread, but considering I'm going through a similar process right now I figured I would leave my 2 cents.

I would caution against the advice of individuals who say "don't worry about it, let your resume explain your position", at least in reference to non-academic positions in the US. You should have two resumes/CVs, one for academia and one for everything else. In academia the recruiter or PI should understand what "Research Assistant" or "Graduate Research Assistant" means. However, in industry some large companies hire 3rd parties to do their recruiting. In the US the average time for a recruiter like this to read a resume is 5-7 seconds. While this website might not be representative of all recruiters, it does emphasis the importance of your position title. Here is an excerpt, emphasis is mine:

  Level. If I’m doing a VP level search and your title is “manager” and you have never been a VP – goodbye. There are exceptions to this, but again it is the 80/20 rule. Again, clients pay me to find them the perfect fit. It is generally way too big of a jump from manager level to VP level, all other things being equal. It works the other way too. If  I’m looking for a manager and you are a VP – goodbye. I know you are qualified to do a manager level role, but it is clear you have grown past. Most clients and recruiters aren’t willing to take the chance that when a VP level position comes along that you won’t be gone. Less than 5 seconds to figure out.

Accordingly, I think it is completely feasible that even if you have your PhD and multiple publications the recruiter could see an "Assistant" Research applying for the "Senior" Research position and immediately reject you simply because of your position title.


Is it a good idea to submit paper which is shorter than conference's page limit

I have seen papers rejected because it was shorter than the maximum allowed pages. But this was not the only reason for rejection; rather it was supporting that the paper didn't have enough contribution/content. If you don't want to give the reviewers any excuses to reject, then you might want to fill up the pages, but I think that's silly.

The answer would depend on the field and the page limit. If the page limit is 4, you probably want to fill all 4 pages, because 4 pages is usually not enough. But if the page limit is 12 pages, I see no problem for accepting a high-quality 11-page paper.


How to re-use information that is itself a conclussion drawn from another source

It's definitely easy to get overwhelmed with all of the sources/papers available. I'm a graduate student and it still happens -- there's always lots to read and never the time to read it all.

Nevertheless, the proper thing to do here if you wish to cite the information in (Ververidis and Kotropoulos 2006) is to read that paper and use it. That doesn't mean you have to read it in-depth, but you should at least skim it. The same goes for other papers.

There's a couple of reasons for this:

Remember the point of a citation is to give credit where credit is due. That means you give credit to the original author, not someone who summarized their idea.
What's to say that the authors of the summary correctly summarized the idea? It's (generally) safer for you to go straight to the source.

A notable exception to this rule might be when reading a survey paper/book. These provide overviews of an entire domain -- if you're not actually exploring that domain in your own writing, the survey paper can be an acceptable way of citing an idea. That being said -- it's always preferable to cite the original source.


Past collaborator submitted paper with my name (and others) without notifying named co-authors

Person A is not acting ethically by submitting a paper with multiple names on it, but without asking those people to assess the paper and agree to publish it. In normal circumstances, you'd expect person A to discuss with persons B and C as well as you. I think that it is beyond doubt that this person is in the wrong.
However, it is unclear to me what is to be done about the situation as it is. Mainly, my question to you would be: do you support the claims made in the submitted paper? If so, it might be socially prudent to just accept that the paper was submitted as is. After all, science is a social construct, and we get nowhere without our network. However, if person A submits a paper where you don't support the main conclusions and puts your name on it, that would be a reason to vigorously oppose what is happening here.


Do people actually buy research articles?

I tried digging through the 2013 annual report of Elsevier. Under "Revenue" (page 111) they list both "subscriptions" and "transactional" - but the latter include not only reprints, but also books etc.

As you can see, even if we lump books and reprints together, it is still less than subscriptions.
To get a more complete answer you may have to ask them directly.


Defining employment on grad school applications

Yes, your lab work qualifies and should be listed, especially as you do not have anything else to list.  But you should indicate that it was a volunteer position.


Which approach is better for publishing in good journals?

The conference approach has multiple advantages. The conference establishes deadlines to force you to stop researching and advance towards a manuscript. The length requirement forces you to be very brutal about condensing the crux of your research. The creation of your presentation/poster requires this 100x more, especially given that how will agonize over how to present your work when you are standing there to be embarrassed by any weaknesses in it. The actual presentation experience produces a great deal of discussion and feedback helping you understand how other researchers see your research. And finally while at the conference you get rapidly exposed to a broad range of related research, which is of immense value to both students and researchers in the field. Note that all of these can be achieved without the work being competitively peer-reviewed. Those reviews are just a bonus (assuming you get accepted in that case).

A drawback of starting with a conference (when your ultimate goal is a journal publication) is that the journal may not accept the results as original anymore. So your journal article would need to add a significant amount of new results and/or analysis.

As for the desk rejections, it sounds like you may not be taking them seriously enough. Consider that, as a student, when you don't understand the value in a paper or text you read, you presume the fault is your own and re-read more carefully. An editor or reviewer doesn't. They quickly skim to decide if there is any value, often starting from the assumption that there probably is not, since they don't actually want to read it anyway. If editors think your paper does not contain results, then you are failing to make the results immediately obvious. If they think your paper does not fit the scope of their journal, then you are failing to make its value within their scope immediately obvious. And the best advice for how to accomplish these things is to read the journal you want to publish in. Read it a lot. Then you will be able to explain clearly how your manuscript fits in with those other papers they publish most often.

And personally I'm not so sure the "top" journals have better reviewers. Even if they do in your field, it appears you would have a lot to gain from any reviews you can get.


How should one acknowledge assistance received via sites like SE?

The proper way to acknowledge any source other than your own brain is to formally cite that source in your bibliography; whether that source is a textbook, journal paper, proceedings paper, preprint, StackExchange questions, blog post, newspaper article, movie, cereal box, bathroom wall, or your mom is utterly immaterial.  If your source is a StackExchange site, then you must cite the StackExchange site.

See meta.math.SE, meta.cstheory.SE, and meta.SE for a discussion of when, whether, and how to cite StackExchange questions and answers.

(Full disclosure: I have cited blogs, StackExchange questions, Usenet posts, newspaper articles, movies, and video games in my refereed journal papers, and at least one of my StackExchange questions has more citations than at least one of my research papers.)


As someone in the U.S. currently teaching a class of mostly international graduate students, I've noticed various specific skills non-native English speakers sometimes have trouble with:

Following spoken English, as during a lecture.
Speaking English comfortably enough to ask questions (or later go on a job interview)
Writing English, first for homework assignments and then eventually for papers.

Before you head to your graduate program, some ways you can work on these skills:

Try sitting in on a course given in English, preferably one given in your field and by a native English speaker.  If you don't have a formal opportunity to do so at your university, then try free online courses with video content.  Coursera, for example, has free course content (as long as you don't want credit for the course) from many big name American universities.
Participate in an English language practice group, to give yourself a chance to feel comfortable speaking before you are in the middle of a class wanting to ask a question.
If you choose to brush up on your language writing skills, focus more on grammar and punctuation than on technical writing.  Almost none of my students show up good at technical writing, whether or not they are native English speakers, and I view it as part of my job to teach them.  Grammar and punctuation, however, although they mostly seem like a distraction when I'm grading exams, can make a difference in whether your future papers or job applications are taken as seriously as they deserve to be.

Finally, a few suggestions for after you get to grad school:

If there is any chance you will ever want to use your English professionally, strongly consider living with a native English speaker, and do your best to find a peer group that is not just international students, especially not just those that speak your native tongue.  Total immersion is a much faster way to learn English then just speaking it in class and my students who seek out chances to speak achieve greater mastery.
If your new school offers ESL (English as a second language) classes, take them.
When submitting papers or job applications (anything official that is leaving your school) take particular care to ask an English speaker to check your English (separately from any technical/content advice.)
Most importantly, if someone asks you to repeat something you say in English, don't apologise or let it fluster you; just repeat it calmly and as clearly as you can.  Keep in mind most of us not only want to understand you, we're in awe of your bravery setting out on a new adventure in a new language.

Best of luck!


What do I need to include in a tenure-track assistant professor job application cover letter?

I'll be honest about when I read packages (in chemistry). The first thing I look at is the CV. I also skim the cover letter. Then I read the recommendation letters and the research and teaching statements. Depending on the CV and recommendation letters, I may take more or less time on the research/teaching statements - if the candidate seems promising, I'm more thorough.

But if the cover letter is short, not tailored at least some to our department, contains obvious typos, etc. I'll get a bad impression.

Look, anyone applying to a tenure-track position has taken a lot of time to get to this point. You've secured a PhD, possibly gone through a postdoc position, and prepared the whole application.

Why spoil it with a lousy cover letter. Take some time, think up a paragraph or two about a particular department, consider what you might add, and let us know.

This tells me that the candidate is not just blindly sending out a gazillion applications.

I doubt everyone completely rewrites their cover letters for each application (I didn't). But I do want to see that someone has taken the time to carefully craft a paragraph or three about us and how they might fit.

Will we interview someone who seems stellar with a poor cover letter? Probably. But we also get ~100 applications for every opening, so why would you risk it?


Is there a citation style with just the first author's last name, and year

In a comment you mentioned that you're looking for a .csl citation style file, e.g. for use with Mendeley. It turns out that Mendeley has a generator for, and repository of such files. In particular, one can opt to search by example. Using that tool for citations of the form "(Campbell, 2007)" reveals some examples, the most relevant of which is a modified Chicago style that appears to be associated with Colorado State University - School of Biomedical Engineering:

  Example Output

  Inline citations

  (Campbell, 2007)

  (Ahlquist, 2009; Borges, 1999; Campbell, 2007; Mares, 2001)

  Bibliography

  Ahlquist, J. S., & Breunig, C. (2009). Country clustering in comparative political economy (MPIfG Discussion Paper No. 09–5) (p. 32). Cologne: Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Retrieved from www.mpifg.de/pu/mpifg_dp/dp09-5.pdf

  Borges, J. L. (1999). Selected non-fictions. (E. Weinberger, Ed., E. Allen, S. J. Levine, & E. Weinberger, Trans.). New York: Viking.

  Campbell, J. L., & Pedersen, O. K. (2007). “The varieties of capitalism and hybrid success.” Comparative Political Studies, 40(3), 307–332. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414006286542
  “CSL search by example.” (n.d.). Retrieved December 15, 2012, from http://editor.citationstyles.org/searchByExample/

  Mares, I. (2001). “Firms and the welfare state: When, why, and how does social policy matter to employers?” In P. A. Hall & D. Soskice (Eds.), Varieties of capitalism. The institutional foundations of comparative advantage (pp. 184–213). New York: Oxford University Press.

I have not tried it myself, but I hope it does the trick.


How to deal with incompetent PhD student as an undergrad

No gloves/splash goggles when working with (hot) concentrated acids and bases. Some of these experiments are run outside the fume hood, and sometimes on the floor when there is no space on the lab bench.

Do not work in this lab.  Do not even go in.  It could kill you.  Obvious safety problems are often accompanied by even worse, hidden problems.
Consult your university's safety policy to determine if you can/should/must report this situation.
The other problems are insignificant by comparison.  Find a new PI.


What causes some students to be selectively impervious to supervision of their thesis writing?

I recognize the problem from supervision (also at graduate level), and remember it from when I was a student myself - saw several fellow students who acted like this. I have no golden solution, but here is what I often find efficient.

Some people are poor at receiving criticism. There can be many reasons for that. One that is quite common is that the person receiving the criticism misunderstands criticism of their work as criticism of their person.

At some point we all needed to learn how to write a paper. Some people have a hard time understanding that they can't write a thesis, simply because they have not learned to yet, and that this is completely ok. This does not necessarily correlate with academic performance. You can have good students, who have simply not learned to write an understandable scientific text. And since they are used to acing everything, the fact that they get a lot of criticism, puts them in a place they are not used to. I must say, though, that I find this problem much more prevalent with students who are otherwise also not stellar. It is not surprising that there is a correlation between students who can't write a text, and students who are otherwise poor performers.

My (ours, I should say) attempt at a solution is to be very open with the students about this. Tell them that it is uncommon to have students who are good at writing from day one, and their first returned drafts will be red with ink. This does not mean that they are bad, it means that they are learning. Sometimes TA's needs to be reminded about this as well, in order to not take away the students' motivation.


Found an error in the title of published article (A phrase has been repeated twice)

Send the journal's editorial office a note and let them know.

I made the a similar mistake once with one of my first paper after the paper had been published online (the paper had a misspelling with one of the words and my department's admin staff caught when preparing a departmental highlight). The journal was happy to fix it, even though I had already returned the final version of the manuscript and they had published the article online. I suspect the editors did not want to have a typo in an article title in their journal.


Keeping track of one's academic record and achievements

Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Research (also DBLP for computer science) collect a decent amount of one's publications (in particular Google Scholar).
If you are writing your CV in Latex/LyX, I would suggest finding/creating BIBTEX entries  for your papers then import the .bib file into your CV.


Should I pursue my PhD dream based on my Undergrad experiences?

A 3.5+ is generally preferred but a 3.0 and some solid test scores (GMAT/GRE) can really bump you up in the admissions line.  Keep working on your publications and when it comes time to write your personal essay talk about how you have published already but really want to develop those skills so you can be a prolific researcher.

If you love research, and the creation of knowledge, then go for the PhD it will give you the best training and opportunity to advance your research.


Must all results be commented on in the discussion section of a research paper?

Not only is that OK, that's really what you should be doing. Nobody else is going to spend a lot of time going over your data to find interesting conclusions – that's your job. Busy researchers who are related but not directly in your field are likely to only read your abstract, introduction, and discussion.

Your discussion tells us what was interesting and why. If someone really wants to get the whole story then they'll go look at your results section to see for themselves.


Is it appropriate to ask my professors what they think of me before I ask for letters of recommendations from them?

Closely related to my answer to your linked question:

I don't think it's either necessary or particularly productive to try to interrogate a professor and determine what letter they will write.  Simply tell the professor you're thinking of applying to Ph.D. programs and ask them something like:

  Do you think that you would be able to write a strong letter of recommendation for me?

The "strong" is important here, because that's what will get you the honest opinion of whether the professor thinks well of you or not, and you don't want letters that are not strong.

If you try to ask the question indirectly, by asking things like "Am I in the top 10%?" then you are dancing around the question.  You know you're asking for a strong recommendation, and so does the professor, so you might as well just ask.

Only the most nasty and deceptive of professors will answer dishonestly---and they probably wouldn't have given you an honest answer to your other questions either.


Should I still consider this person as an advisor?

You might want to talk with people who worked with the person and try to understand if he tends to overlook remarks from others or situation spesific reasons led to this particular problem for you. You can not jujge someone with only one behaviour but I think you can not ignore it eather. I would say just try to learn more about the person.


Practice for publications in foreign language

I am personally not aware of any open online courses although I would be surprised if none existed. I can, however, point you to some other good resources. First there is the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) which has guides and resources for teaching so it is not a course in itself but contains very useful material. I can also recommend a couple of books on writing in English for non-native English writers.
The first is

Robert A. Day and Nancy Sakaduski, 2011. Scientific English. A guide for scientists and other professionals. (publisher link)
Hilary Glasman-Deal, 2010. Science Research Writing For Non-Native Speakers Of English: A Guide for Non-Native Speakers of English. Imperial College Press (link from publisher page)

and then of course

William Struk Jr and E.B. White, (many editions over the years). The Elements of Style. Longman/Pearon. (publisher link)


Deadline for resubmission in Physical Review E

I have only published in other Physical Review journals, but I'm not sure they have a hard deadline. If there is, it's never been communicated to me anyway. As written in the comments, the best way to know for sure would be asking the journal staff or the editor... As a semi-relevant anecdote, I was once quite slow in finishing a minor revision for PRB, and the editors asked me about the status of the paper after roughly one and a half months. They then accepted me saying that it'll be resubmitted in two weeks.

Generally, if you have long delays (think over one month) - especially if there's decent justification for it - I think the journal will be happy to work with you if you communicate this to them.


Why are engineering departments so large in U.S. universities?

Engineering, like business, is an extremely popular major because it has good employment prospects. It's also well-funded relative to more academic disciplines, because it's easier to get funding from both private and public sources for "useful" research.


Citing paywalled articles accessed via illegal web sharing

Nobody will know how you have gained access to the article. Feel free to cite articles found via whatever sources.
It might not even be illegal to download content from the website; check your local laws and Berne convention (if your country is signed up) to be sure. In any case, this is unlikely to affect your reputation in any way.
Remember to cite the source appropriately; a journal or a book, not a pirate website or any other medium. The pirate website is usually not the publisher. You do not cite the university that has bought access to research (probably funded by public sources and peer reviewed by academicians funded by public sources), or the colleguage who shows you an article, or the library that contained a copy of the article; these all have the same role as pirate website.
You might not want to be vocal about using such a website. Some people still see it as ethically questionable. That said, using various pirate websites is increasingly common, and the status of many academic publishers among academians seems to have taken some hits, so many researchers will not care about how you get your articles.
You also have the ethics tag on the question. The ethics of pirating digital material are a polarized subject. You might want to do your own research here, or ask a new question for what the main arguments for both sides are, if it has not been asked already. Some people say that pirating material is analogous to physical theft, while others say that intellectual monopoly laws are bad and breaking them creates more good than ill. (I happen to think the laws are far too strong and harm humanity, and should be weakened substantially or entirely removed.) I strongly suggest reading on the matter until you have found strong statements of both points of view to come to an informed decision.


How to speak fluent English being a mathematics teacher?

I think minimum time and effort as a goal will defeat you. They are also somewhat inconsistent. To reduce the time (a bit) take a course in speaking that forces you to actually do it. But that takes effort. To reduce effort, just practice as you go along, increasing time.

But the way to learn to do pretty much anything is to practice it and get feedback. In the case of teaching, if you are doing so in small classes, you can just inform students that you aren't a native speaker and are open to being corrected. But that takes a bit of courage and isn't without risk.

If you are in a situation in which you can speak your native language, then try to resist doing so as much as is possible (and polite). Force yourself to speak English in all possible situations.

You can ask colleagues to correct you if you trust them, of course. Again, it takes some courage and patience both from you and them.

If you asked how can I become an Olympic Swimmer with minimal time and effort, the answer would be "You can't". It is similar here.


What are Industrial Case Studies and why are they required?

I could not find a specific definition; however, I found a few Industrial Case Study examples from your and similar fields that may be useful analogs for you to model your case study off:

"An Industrial Case Study of Immediate Benefits of
Requirements Engineering Process Improvement at
the Australian Center for Unisys Software" (Damian et al. 2004).

"http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA446147" (Cook and Wolf)

"Process Monitoring using a Combination of Data driven Techniques
and Model based Data Validation" (Duchesne et al. 2007)

"Signed Directed Graph Based Modeling and its Validation from Process Knowledge and Process Data" (Yang et al. 2012)


Renting a house to a graduate student in my department

At the time they sign the lease there is no conflict of interest. Further, there is no conflict of interest anticipated throughout the duration of the lease. There is of course the possibility that an unforeseen conflict arises, but this is always a possibility. You are putting yourself at an elevated risk of a conflict of interest, so it is probably worth mentioning it to you department chair. If an unforeseen conflict does arise, just let your department chair know and do what ever is needed at that point.


Is it worth it to accept this PhD scholarship?

Taking the scholarship will undoubtedly affect your academic performance. 24 hours a week is no joke, and is easily comparable to the amount of time you will spend on academic work. For obvious reasons if you give up 50% of the time you spend on your PhD, your work will suffer (or you will take longer to graduate).

However 50k AUD a year is a lot of money. It's so much money that if you converted to full-time work at the institution (earning 66% more salary because of the increased hours) you would be earning the average Australian salary. This may not sound spectacular to you, but don't forget that this comparison is vs. Australians as a whole, and you are probably quite young; many of the other people in this statistic have been working longer and so also earn more. Compared to your peer group you are likely to be extremely well paid.

Further, if you take the scholarship, you probably also have an easier time finding a non-academic job after graduating. You might even have one already prepared for you when you graduate, saving you the job search. See also my calculations in this similar question.

I would strongly incline towards taking the scholarship. I would even consider skipping the PhD entirely and immediately joining the workforce. The only exceptions would be if you are determined to become a professor and are not willing to consider a non-academic job after graduating, or if you detest working in finance.


What does formal training in a field mean?

It means that this person has received explicit, recognized training, following the norms of the field. For instance, for a physicist this may mean having a university degree in Physics. For a medical practitioner this may mean having gone through med school. For a Linux sysadmin, it may mean having some recognized certifications.

The term is usually meant in contrast to learning through self-study or experience. For instance, we would say that a software developer has formal training if he has a degree in Computer Science, but not if he learned his trade solely by working through many online tutorials or through practical experience working in open source projects.


Citing a Book Chapter where the book is not yet published, and the bibliographic details are not known

It may not be possible in all cases, but if you are preparing a manuscript for publication and there will be delays for review, you can give a tentative descriptive citation, rather than a formal one, marking the other work as "forthcoming". This will probably be fine for the purposes of review and you can correct the citation before final publication.

It might also be possible, in some cases, to contact the author(s) of the other work for their "best guess" as to these things and mark the citation using their words but as a "private communication, publication forthcoming". It is fairly common to mark some citations in new work as private communication, actually.

But it is possible that the work you want to cite won't, in fact, ever be published, so you need to be a bit tentative, both in the short term and possibly for final publication of your work.


Programs vary; it would be best to look at the specific requirements and prerequisites for the programs you have in mind.

In general, mathematical finance can involve a very considerable amount of pure mathematics.  A big piece is modeling assets via stochastic processes, and to understand those properly requires a firm background in graduate-level real analysis, measure theory, probability theory, and often functional analysis and PDE.  A mathematical finance course may well consist primarily of theorems and proofs, just like a pure math course would.  This is typically even more true at the PhD level than masters.

Of course, I would say that just because mathematics is challenging, that doesn't mean you should avoid it!


Are there any online tools for student collaborative learning?

There aren't many popular ones specific to students. Many universities use BlackBoard, but despite having been in many classes where it was used, I've never seen students use it to collaborate. Students use the same tools everyone else uses... Skype, Github, Dropbox, Google Docs, etc.


Applying for a PhD in Europe as a South American. Do i convert all my grades to GPA or ECTS scale

Actually, the institution you apply to normally does this themselves from official transcripts that you have sent from your earlier education: undergraduate, masters, ...

Depending on the program you apply to some courses will be more important than others, and the receiving institution knows what they are looking for. When necessary, they will discuss the grading system with the other institutions as needed.

Schools around the world are quite good at this, actually.


How to respond to intentional lack of citation?

I don't know the details of your case, but in any case like this I tend to liberally apply Hanlon's Razor:

  Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

It does sound as if they know about your paper, but it seems to me entirely possible that they could have intended to cite it and accidentally omitted to actually do so.  I think you can contact them tactfully and point out that the original source for the technical term is your paper (give the complete reference).  They will probably reply with an apology for the oversight.

If you want to be even more circumspect, you could ask a colleague in your subfield to contact them. ("I saw your preprint and it looks interesting.  The paper of Anonymous looks very relevant.  Do you think you should cite it?")

I've been guilty of such an accident myself.  I use BiBTeX to manage citations. I have a large file containing an entry for every paper I've ever considered citing.  Then for each paper I write, I include inline citations where they belong, and BiBTeX automatically picks the papers I've cited and generates the list of references.  In the case in question, I wanted to cite paper X in two places: in the introduction (as background) and in a specific technical passage.  I neglected to cite it in the introduction, but since it was also cited in the technical passage, paper X still appeared in the list of references, so when I saw it there I thought to myself "Good, I remembered to cite X."  Then in a later edit I changed the technical passage in such a way that X was no longer directly relevant there, so I removed that citation, thinking it was also cited elsewhere in the paper.  It wasn't, so BiBTeX accordingly removed it from the list of references, and it might certainly have looked to anyone as though I had intentionally failed to cite X (which was a well-known paper and clearly relevant).  The omission made it into a public preprint and was pointed out by a colleague (though not the author of paper X; he is long deceased), fortunately before the paper was submitted.

It was clearly my responsibility to have caught this and cited X correctly, and technical issues do not excuse my failure to do so, but I mention this as a specific example where such an error was due to stupidity rather than malice, and as evidence that the former could be an adequate explanation.


Different fields use different conventions. For instance, mathematicians frequently use lower case italic letters for vectors and upper case italic letters for matrices.

For physics and chemistry, IUPAP and IUPAC recommend (some journal guidelines are in agreement with this recommendation) a number of symbols for quantities that can be found in the following document:

E R Cohen et al., "Quantities, Units and Symbols in Physical Chemistry", IUPAC Green Book, 3rd Edition, 2nd Printing, IUPAC & RSC Publishing, Cambridge, 2008

In particular, the document recommends to typeset matrices and vectors with a bold italic font.