Is it possible to get a job in a philosophy department with a non-philosophy PhD?

The key would be to offer the department something attractive. Let me give you a well known example.

Previously in philosophy there have been many workers who have studied the questions around "what is the mind?" They have asked a huge variety of questions such as:
- How do we recognize a mind in another?
- How does the mind connect to the body?
- What does it mean to be conscious?
- What happens to the mind when we sleep? Get knocked out?

And many many MANY other questions. Whole aisles in the library of books published on such questions.

Then along comes artificial intelligence. And a new philosophical "industry" is born. You can go look at nearly any of those books and check what happens if, instead of a biological mind, you use a computer made of silicon and transistors and so on. And instead of memory and sensations it runs on software and electronics.  This can be a hugely productive research program that can, in principle, interest both the philosophy department and the computer science department.  And possibly the neuro-science types in the medicine research areas.

There is another example. Consider the idea of evolutionary biology. This area studies how characteristics relate to genetics and evolutionary selection pressures. Then along comes Prof. Gad Saad who studies the evolution of psychology, with emphasis on why people value certain things over competing interests. Such as why people select their mates, why they prefer certain clothes, etc. And he is a prof of Marketing.

Now you enter with your degree in some other science. Is there the possibility you can relate this to some important philosophical question? In principle, you could found an entire new channel of philosophical investigation.

Crossovers of two seemingly disparate lines of research can be massively productive. There can, of course, be some difficult times at the start. But if you can establish it, you could wind up being the wellspring of a huge amount of highly interesting research.


Should I emphasize my existing PhD in my master's application?

A person qualified in another area (such as a Phd in Physics) who wanted to learn a new topic (like computer game development) would likely be welcomed on a full-time taught masters course. Full-time taught masters courses are often designed for those who want a change in direction and have the motivation to focus for the year to achieve that goal.

There are people who want to be an astronaut, for example, who go back and learn new skills and knowledge and collect several degrees in the process.

You do have to have an interregnum in employment, as a full-time course is exactly that. A lot of daily, weekly and monthly time needs to be devoted to it to learn all that material that others will have picked up in a three year Bachelor's degree.

I teach on such a course and we have many "career change" applicants who are well qualified in other fields. It is quite normal.


The most straightforward way is to provide a regular scientific citation. The users can then use their individual library or online service to access the article.

Alternatively, you could just provide a link to the most canonical location. Even if the reader can't access the article, he or she will find the bibliographical details there as well. (Thanks for this suggestion in the comments.)


John Nash's thesis was 26 pages long with only two references and he later won a Nobel prize. What matters is scientific quality not quantity, if your ideas are superior nobody will object the length (mine was less than 100 pages).


Potential Post-Doc supervisor visit: should I give a talk or just have a meeting?

Unless told you shouldn't, you should always opt to give a talk under such circumstances. It makes discussions with your potential future advisor and group members much more meaningful, because your interviewers now have a much better sense of what you do.

Moreover, a solid presentation of technically sound research shows that you have achieved one of the most important skills needed for a researcher: the ability to effectively communicate your work! As a postdoc, your advisor is going to expect you to have most of the research skills needed to complete your work with minimal supervision. Giving a good presentation will clearly demonstrate most of your credentials in a way that a face-to-face talk will not.

Finally, giving a talk to a (mostly) friendly audience is always good practice for your future career. (People get better at giving presentations by giving presentations!)


Is peer-reviewing a manuscript by a coauthor of yours truly ethical?

When you are being asked to peer-review a paper authored by somebody you have collaborated with (or are collaborating with), you should be aware that you are on a slippery slope.

The very least you should do is:

Ask your self the question whether you think that you can provide an objective and unbiased review.
To inform the editor (or whoever invited you) about this.

There are situations where it might be acceptable, and situations where it is not. It is certainly not acceptable when you have a clear interest in the outcome of the review process (think of reviewing a grant application, where you would be benefiting somehow).
From the other hand, when you are (one of) the clear expert on a certain topic, and had only a superficial collaboration with the authors, it might be acceptable (in some narrow fields it might be kind of unavoidable).


What is the purpose of dissertation embargo periods?

An embargo effectively withholds your dissertation from being placed on your institution's open-access dissertation archive (from which anyone can view/download your dissertation).

I have placed an embargo on my dissertation so that I may attempt to get a few more papers published without my dissertation being searchable on the web. It is a common practice in the department where I did my PhD (though, I wondered sometimes if it was really necessary).

For a more complete list of reasons why one would choose to place an embargo on their dissertation, I'm listing here an excerpt taken from a University of New Mexico page:

  Embargos may be appropriate for authors
  1) who are seeking patents,
  2) who want to publish their work through a traditional press that considers open access publication to be equivalent to prior publication,
  3) who have published material from their work with a publisher that does not allow open access release for a certain period of time, or
  4) who need to protect sensitive data or information.


Should a statement of purpose for a PhD application be single or double spaced?

It probably doesn't matter, although you should review the application instructions carefully just to make sure they don't specify this.

My impression is that admissions committees don't care much about issues like this; certainly I don't care when I serve on these committees.  In particular, I have no idea how many applicants have used single or double spacing, since I've never paid any attention to this issue.

The purpose of the length restriction is twofold: to keep the committee from having to read unpleasantly long documents, and to keep applicants from feeling they have to write a lot.  The precise cut-off is not so important, which is why it is usually not specified carefully (for example, by a word count or detailed formatting instructions).

You may annoy the committee if it looks like you are trying to cram as much as possible into your statement of purpose.  If you use a 10pt font and tiny margins as well as single spacing, it will look like you are gaming the system and trying to write a longer statement of purpose than anyone else.  That's not the impression you want anyone to have of your statement.  However, I don't think single spacing is problematic in itself.  Just don't go overboard with space-saving tricks.  (If you use an 11pt font and standard LaTeX margins, you'll be fine.)


Should PhD students be goal or opportunity driven?

Although naturally the details of the landscape differ from subject to subject, here is my picture from mathematics:

In addition to the obvious point that one should "both" stay focused on a long-term project and be alert to incidental opportunities, I would claim that the best kind of thesis projects (and projects in general) are those that help create incidental opportunities along the way to a worthwhile large-scale goal.

(This in addition to "educational" benefits of well-conceived projects.)

The obvious hazard is to get distracted from a reliable, long-term project by too-speculative "cooler" possibilities one encounters along the way. The hazards here are like "... but don't quit your day job" as advice to aspiring rock stars, etc.


Why do highly successful people in computer fields say a degree in Computer Science is not worth to get "JOB"?

My answer follows the answer provided by @DmitrySavostyanov.

I also feel you are basing all your conclusions based on a false assumption and hypothetical facts.

I have done engineering in the same field as yours. I am working in a quite well-known place. And, trust me, all the things that I have studied in my bachelors are coming up every time I start my day. At least the Mathematics and Algorithm aspect of the courses.

Your friends are probably not clear about what are they doing and they are diffusing the same idea into your head. That happens in the engineering studies.

Further, your claim people are giving less importance to CS is baseless. I would stay with my above statements and exaggerate that CS at present is at the apex of anything. However, I do not see partition between CS, Electrical Engineering, Physics. At the end, everything is Science. So, based on that we can say that we must know our fields as much as we can and then think of expanding it further.

If you look at Computational Biology and Computational Fluid Dynamics (and such like), you would see massive use of Computer Science knowledge and mathematics.

TL, DR; Don't listen to such junks from your friends.


Should I include a professor's name in my paper to get it published?

The much bigger issue here seems to be that you are in dire need of proper advising and mentorship, and your official adviser isn’t providing you with those things. You say “I really don't know how this publication process works.” Well, I don’t think anyone here can give you the sort of advice that you need - a few suggestions and rough ideas, maybe, but without getting very specific advice and feedback from someone who has actually reviewed your work and knows what it’s about, I fear your path to successful publication of your paper will be a very hard one indeed. So, I think you should set it as your goal to fix the situation of the neglectful advisor, whether by talking to other professors who are interested in what you’re working on and are willing to mentor you, complaining to the department chair, or by having an awkward but necessary conversation with your current advisor. It is a difficult problem and I don’t have an easy fix, but at the very least I think it’s important to recognize that this goes much deeper than just the question of who should be the author of the paper.

Coming back to your “official” question: no, you should absolutely not add your advisor’s name as a coauthor to your paper just to increase the paper’s chances of acceptance. There may or may not be some good reasons to have your advisor as a coauthor (for example, he may have proposed the research question, and that might be seen as a sufficient intellectual contribution to make someone a coauthor), but this particular one is most certainly not a good reason - in fact it is a blatantly unethical reason to make someone a coauthor.

Good luck!


Is it possible to cross over from chemistry to biology?

I am a theoretical physicist reconverted to biology (bioinformatics) in his masters. I am sitting next to computer scientists, mathematicians, chemists... all working on life sciences.

Biology is a very complex subject. Most of the concepts are easy, but there are many devils in the details. Ergo, it is very suitable for multidisciplinary work, where people from different branches can contribute with solutions from their own field.

Focusing on your question, depending on your set of skills, you have several options: biochemistry, wet lab, computational chemistry oriented to biomolecules... You can probably swing by the molecular biology department and ask what kind of problems they would need a chemist for; and perhaps ask if they are willing to take you on board for an undergaduate project.


grid line is necessary for CS academic paper?

There are no such rules. I have seen a wide, wide variety of formatting styles for figures in CS conferences and journals.

The goal is portray something to the reader. What provides them that information in the easiest way possible? Too many grid lines and they get in the way, but without them it might be hard to eyeball the y-value.

I often end up making 20+ versions of each of my figures before finally settling on one that is most readable.


Recent PhD graduate, can I change fields and get back into it?

First, I'm assuming that field X and Y are not totally unrelated. (e.g. Greek literature and high energy physics.)

If you are working in academia this isn't usually a problem. In fact, it's great to have two areas where you can contribute, so that you continue to publish, etc, in area X while starting to do work in area Y. This keeps your productivity up while you get up to speed in area Y.

If you are working for a research lab this can also work, but may be a bit tougher. It depends on how strongly the lab wants you to contribute to the core work of the company. If there is a research lab that is doing work in both X and Y then you can probably find opportunities to collaborate in both areas. If they have no interest in X you need to see if they have flex time or if you can find some connection that would interest them.

But, in the end, the best option is to ask them. You never know what other areas they want to expand into, or what connections they may be aware of that you aren't.


How to test my understanding of an academic paper?

Academic papers deal with the state-of-the-art of the field, either pushing it or reviewing it. So, to fully understand them, you need a deep knowledge of the field.

Now, "fully understanding" them might be a bit broad statement. The key of the paper are the problem and the solution, but I put more emphasis on the problem. For, if you are able to understand what the problem is, why is it hard, its background (where it stands in relation to related work) and implications (how future problems are derived from it), you probably have enough subject knowledge to digest the whole paper. The solution is important, but not so much on a fundamental level as on a conceptual, i.e. you don't have to understand every line of a proof to get why a theorem solves a problem.

So, the first step is understanding the problem and the second "getting" the solution. If you want to be more strict with yourself, ask yourself after reading a paper whether you are able to think about the boundaries of the problem or solution, i.e. what could be done to improve them or what could be derived from them (not minding at that point if that is feasible or not).

PS: If you really are doing research in a field, you need to analyze the paper on deeper levels (check the references, the experimental setup, remember the proof from above and the one you read in another paper 3 months ago, etc.), but at your level, the above seems more than enough.

PPS: I don't see a problem with you joining those "seminars". Ask the professor if you could participate in some of them, at the beginning only by being present and listening. See if it suits you. Once you get the hang of it, you can actively be a part of the discussions. It may be hard to keep up, but that shouldn't discourage you. And you shouldn't strive for the level of understanding the graduate students are at, that'll come with time.


"Send me your paper when you're done with it, I'd love to read it"

It's not practical or appropriate for a student to impose on the professor a burden of remembering to send them something at some undefined future time.

More generally, any request of a professor of the form "Do X at time Y" where Y is more than 5 minutes away, and even more so a request such as "Do X after you've completed task Z", is 99% likely to be ignored (and potentially be perceived as quite rude) unless the person making the request is the professor's superior, good friend, highly respected colleague, or funding agency. (Even in those scenarios, there is still a non-negligible probability that the request will be ignored!)

Of course, the student is welcome to keep independent watch of the professor's publications page or preprint archive where they post their papers, read the paper when it is posted there, and send them any comments they like; I don't see anything inappropriate about that, and don't see a problem with asking a question such as "is it okay if I send you any comments I have after reading your paper once it's posted online?" (although the question is superfluous -- I would just assume that it's okay and that no special permission needs to be granted).

To clarify, the issue is not the pretentiousness of the request, but the fact that it shows a rather extreme ignorance of, and lack of sensitivity to, how busy professors are and how hard it is to reliably schedule tasks that are dependent on other tasks being completed.


Is graduating early from college or transferring to another college fine if I took all the upper level courses?

Only in exceptional situations should an undergraduate consider "getting out early" from their undergraduate education to pursue graduate study.  Your situation is rather exceptional and is one of the better cases for doing this that I have seen.

My honest assessment is that you sound like an outstanding student who didn't make the best choice of undergraduate institution.  Liberal arts colleges can be great for a wide range of clientele, but someone who maxed out the subject exam in their intended field of graduate study in their freshman year is probably not in that range.  If you know you want to go to graduate school in physics, you want to be taking physics courses over the next three years: independent study is okay, but it is probably not good enough.

I recommend that you apply both to PhD programs in physics and to undergraduate programs at top tier research universities.  For the latter, you are looking for more than just being able to transfer in: you want substantial scholarship opportunities (I would aim for a "full ride") and specific access to faculty and their research.

It is of course likely that you will get admitted to better undergraduate programs than PhD programs.  In my opinion if you get into an absolutely top undergraduate program with a substantial scholarship, then that's the way to go. Most of the students who are at the very top PhD programs started out their undergraduate career with a roughly similar trajectory to yours and then built on that substantially through four years of a superb undergraduate program.  I  would be a bit surprised if you got admitted to one of the top ten programs without an undergraduate degree.

If I may throw out one specific option: the college at the University of Chicago is a lovely opportunity to get a liberal arts education in the midst of an absolutely world class research university.  You can read Plato and Kant and Dostoevsky while taking graduate courses to your heart's content.  Moreover they have full ride scholarships available for exceptional students.  (I went to the University of Chicago on a full ride scholarship, read all of the above authors, took many graduate courses in my subject of interest -- mathematics -- and then got into all the graduate programs to which I applied, including the top three.  I am more satisfied with my education at the UofC and my decision to go there than almost anything else in my life.  Seriously.)


How best to approach an industry based research program at another university (with independent ideas)

One aspect of research to be aware of is it patentability. If you publish your results in a paper, it may become ineligible for a patent. If you feel that your research has significant commercial value, it would be best to go through your institution's patent department. It would also work best as a point of negotiation between all parties involved.


When is it enough? Final year PhD student with an abusive advisor

Unless the abuse is legally actionable (sexual discrimination or abuse, racist comments, etc), it is likely that your best course is to put your head down and just write. You may be able to get some advice from a local office at your university, however, or, in some cases, from the head of department.

If it is legally actionable, then you need to talk to a lawyer, either inside the university system or on your own.

It is difficult to deal with powerful bad actors and difficult to avoid all negative consequences. But you probably need advice and support from someplace closer than this forum and with whom you can be more open.

But if you can just finish, somehow, you can leave the situation behind, though you may still need allies to deal with recommendations, etc.

However, if the abuse is continuing, you should try to document it, even if it is in a journal in which you date occurrences with a clear description. If there are witnesses, it would be good, if possible, to get statements from them as well.

I also wonder if the professor's colleagues recognize this as an issue and could serve as your surrogate in correcting the problem. He or she may have power over you, but not over the entire faculty. Allies.


My co-author is claiming to be the sole author. How should I handle it?

Let's take some of these points in turn.

  My co-author is claiming to be the sole author.

That's not right -- neither of you is the author.  By conflating the difference between author and translator, aren't you doing a disservice to the author roughly similar to what your professor is doing to you?

I should also say that in my academic field (mathematics), translating a text is viewed as service to the community rather than an intellectual or academic contribution per se.  I know it is different in the humanities.

  The professor claimed to have "reworked" my translation and we are both credited on the title page as translators.

Why "claimed" -- did he or didn't he?  You seem to be a bit breezy on your description of the work that the professor did on this project.  Again, it would be better to be clear.  If the professor didn't actually change your translation, then the translation should be attributed only to you, right?

  The professor wrote an introduction and edited the translation so the professor's name is also on the title page as editor.

So the professor edited the translation.  I wonder if there is some subtle distinction between "editing" and "reworking" that I am not appreciating: does the latter imply a larger intellectual contribution?  Again, how much of an intellectual contribution are you claiming the professor made?  That seems important.

From my standpoint in a STEM field, it seems like editing a translation is a contribution of about the same order of magnitude as writing the translation...but again, I tend to think of translations as being somewhat routine work for those who have language skills.  Maybe I am missing some nuances here.  But certainly writing an introduction and finding a publisher is a big part of, um, getting a work published.  So from what I understand it seems reasonable that you are both listed as translators on the title page.

  Recently, it has come to my attention that the professor, who is now an emeritus professor, is claiming to be the sole author.

That's a very strange claim to make when the book itself says otherwise.  In my experience, academics are highly attentive to bibliographic information like this.

  I recently attended a conference where the professor gave the keynote address.   I recently attended a conference where the professor gave the keynote address. The professor was introduced as the sole author of this book.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean.  First of all: really as the author of a translated work? Second of all: do you mean "Professor X's book Y, which is [hopefully something about a translation of someone else's work!]" or "Professor X is the sole author of book Y, which is..." The latter would be a really weird thing to say even if it were true, and the former, while not very nice to you, need not be construed as denying your role.

  However, I recently came across the professor's written biography on the internet where the claim is made that "[the professor's] book presents an edition, translation and . . . commentary" of the treatise.

Again, this does not strictly imply that you were not also an author.  Whether this is okay may depend upon how formal the document is.  If it is formal enough to give bibliographic citations, then your name should certainly be included in the bibliography.

  Should the professor mention my name in connection with the translation in such a circumstance? If so, how do I go about getting the professor to do this?

Is this biography written by the professor or by someone else?  If it's by someone else, you should just send them the bibliographic reference, perhaps accompanied by an electronic copy of the title page of the book.

  should mention that the professor has done many collaborative projects and in every case other than our book, the other collaborators are mentioned in the biography. Also, there is a long history of my having to remind this professor to acknowledge my work. Before our book was published, the professor gave a conference paper on the treatise and didn't mention that I had translated it. When I call it to the professor's attention, the professor said it was an oversight. The next time it happened and I mentioned it to the professor, I was told that the project could have been done without me. Every time it has come up, there is a new excuse.

That sounds horrible, and there is no doubt that the professor is behaving inappropriately.  "[T]he project could be have been done without [you]" is by no means a justification for not including a coauthor's name!  No reputable academic would accept that answer.

  My question is whether it is worth pursuing since my name is on the title page of the book itself as a co-translator and other scholars will see it there. It really bothers me that the professor is claiming credit for my work by omitting my name.

You raise a key point: you've described various venues in which your coauthorship was not mentioned, I believe inappropriately, but these are all rather informal.  As I mentioned above, academics are very formal when it comes to bibliographic issues.  When the work is cited in other academic works, both you and your professor's names appear, right?  (If the work is not cited in other academic works, after this many years it might be best to let it go.)  So I don't think there's a serious risk of loss of your academic reputation.  (Note that you don't say whether you are currently an academic, so the consequences of a loss of academic reputation to you are a little unclear.)

Honestly, I think you should do something else if and only if you are very upset with the professor.  If so, I would begin by writing to him along the lines of the current message: remind him of the facts of the situation, tell him that his behavior has been distressing to you for many years, and tell him that you want your name mentioned along with his.  Be prepared for that not to go very well, of course.  If it doesn't, well then you can fight webpages with webpages: you can make a webpage where you describe the situation in enough detail to firmly convince a reader that you are in the right.  I have occasionally seen such webpages by academics, and if they are done well they certainly have an effect on the community's views.  They also reveal to the entire world how upset the writer is with the situation, so definitely think several times before engaging in this.


What could be the effect of mentioning a student's weakness in the recommendation letter?

Honesty is the best way. When you admit a student, one of  the things you dread is if you find out someone is not what you thought. The issue is not easy to deal with of course.

If you think someone has a weakness, it should be mentioned. The first thing I think one can do is to point out that it is ones own opinion and possibly also describe the circumstances for why the weakness has become evident. The main point is provide the recipient of the information with as much information as possible to make a well-founded decision. After all, a persons positive traits are easy to describe and it is only the negative that cause problems.

One aspect that weighs heavily is if you would take on the person yourself, and if so, would you then deal with the weakness in some way? Provide possible solutions.

If a candidate has a weakness that you think may affect the persons ability to be considered, you should probably bring it up with the person. This can of course be very difficult and may result in bitter feelings but the question is, are the weaknesses something that can be compensated? If the person does not know about them, then the situation will seem inexplicable when he/she gets a rejection. A constructive discussion may make it possible to elaborate more in a letter to defuse the negative aspects.

In the end, writing negative aspects about a person is very difficult but it is also vital that a letter of recommendation has value. You may not be the only person writing a letter so the picture you provide may be one of many that has to be weighed in at the other end. If the person ends up not being appointed, you cannot take it personally as long as you have tried to provide an as objective appraisal as possible and that includes both positives and negatives. I have included what I sometimes have thought were damaging (but true) comments in letters and found the person was appointed despite them. I have then carefully explained why I think the way I do and tried to see how the negatives could possible be worked around. I have never written a letter where I had to just say, don't employ this person. I have then avoided the task altogether.

So, in summary, be honest, be objective, be constructive, and the opinion will be much valued by whoever reads your letter.


Should I be worried about the fact that I will be too old for applying for tenure track positions by the time I complete postdoc?

Hiring committees do care about how many years it’s been since you got your PhD, but they more-or-less don’t care at all about what happened before you received your PhD.  I think you’ve misunderstood what people meant by “younger.”  I took 7 years in grad school and it caused no issues whatsoever.


How are unusual thesis topics looked at?

For a topic like this, I’d recommend making sure it’s something you’re comfortable having your identity tied to.
On this particular topic, I know folks who have outwardly countercultural identities built up, in which they've made work in this area part of said identity, and others for which they are more mainstream, matter-of-fact about the role of sexuality in everyday lives.
The key thing to avoid would be a topic that made you personally feel awkward/embarrassed about telling people about it (unless you were sure that you wanted to become less embarrassed about it, and practiced braking down your discomfort before becoming committed to it).
With respect to careers, it will likely be limiting in some aspects, but open other doors (and this ties into the identity aspect via asking yourself what you actually want out of life).


Missed April 15th deadline to accept grad school offer. What can I do?

You have nothing to lose by reaching out -- the sooner the better. The best person would be a professor who recruited you (wants you in their group) or informed you of the offer. But I would also reach out to:

Any administrator who contacted you
Any other professors you are interested in working for
Whichever faculty member in the department is in charge of graduate admissions

The email doesn't need to be long, but it is important. Just apologize and say that it was a mistake, but you had intended to accept the offer. Unless they are looking for an excuse to retract the offer, there is a good chance they still want you. They may see missing this deadline as a bad sign; however, being proative and apologizing for your mistake will make it more likely that they forgive it. Follow up and reach out to new people if you don't get a response.

P.S. Bryan Krause makes an important point in the comments about programs that have wait lists:

  The biggest issue is that any program with a wait list is likely to go to those applicants as soon as possible, which is the fairest thing to those applicants. They may not have a funding slot for you if someone from that list accepts, and they may feel they should give them priority over you[.]


Software for recommending papers -- does this exist?

You may want to have a look at https://www.meta.org/ - you can create research interests and the search engine then suggests relevant articles for you (or tries to), based on machine learning.


Where can I find referral for my post-graduate application?

As such, is there any avenue where I can find professional referee who will be willing to look at my application and endorse my application?

It can't just be based on the application, since the purpose is to provide additional information and personal impressions.  It's possible in principle to hire someone, but it's a bad idea in practice.  I see it on rare occasions in the U.S., maybe once a year or so.  Someone will have a letter of recommendation from an "educational counselor" or the like, who was hired to advise them on their graduate school applications.  These letters are almost entirely useless.  There's only so much information they could provide in principle (since the letter writer has no special expertise in the subject area and doesn't know the applicant particularly well), and the little they could say isn't particularly trustworthy due to the financial conflict of interest (they are hired to get people into graduate school, not to provide an unbiased evaluation).

As ff524 pointed out in a comment, you can ask colleagues other than your supervisor.  This is not quite as good as your supervisor, since they are not in as good a position to evaluate your work (and the admissions committee will assume that you asked your friends), but it's better than nothing and might be good enough.

Another possibility for getting an academic letter is to take a single class now, as a special student rather than enrolling in a degree program, and to ask the professor for a letter once you have impressed them with your class performance.  However, this could be time-consuming or expensive, and there might not be any suitable classes available to you.


It sounds like you are having a hard time making the transition from knowledge consumer to knowledge producer. While it is nice to get additional training as a post-doc, by this time you are the expert and you should be driving your research efforts, not your post-doc supervisor. In fact, you may be on the post-doc precisely because your area of expertise is different than that of your supervisor, and he may be looking at you wondering why you aren't proposing research.

The fix is simple but not easy:

Change your mindset to that of an independent researcher. You are an expert and a professional now, and your research is your responsibility.
Take the work from your dissertation, and develop a plan to expand on and/or publish that research.
Discuss integrating your research into the remaining post-doc.

Like I said, simple but not easy. There are many people who may be able to help you in this, including your PhD advisor and your post-doc supervisor. The process is going to be highly individualized, but is critical to your progress as an independent scholar, so do not delay.


Expectations when contacted by an acquisitions editor about a course I teach

I would probably ignore such a message, but if you want to know what to expect from a hypothetical meeting, I suggest asking the person who emailed you, since they weren't very specific. Why do they want to know about your course? What's in it for them, and what's potentially in it for you? If they can't or won't give you clear answers to those questions before the meeting, you can conclude they are not worth your time.


Yes.

It's a lot of work to examine a thesis and (generally) this is unpaid work done in our own free-time. So a simple thank you will make your examiners feel appreciated. This will have the side benefit that your examiners will remember you in a positive light, which may be useful in the future when you are looking for a job, for a reference, for a place to visit to give a research talk, etc.

It never hurts to be polite.


Impact of the quality of a presentation in a conference on the number of citations the corresponding article receives

This survey by Dalton (2014) reviews literature that correlates citation rates with dissemination strategies. Research into a correlation between presentation quality at conferences and subsequent citation rates is notably absent, suggesting that there likely is not much research on this question. That said, a few things can be inferred:

  Frenken et al. (2010) carried out a study on collaboration in scientific research and found that international collaborations tend to receive more citations than national or regional level collaborations.

Intuitively, a principal reason for attending conferences and workshops is to expand one's network and meet potential new collaborators. A good presentation is more likely to serve this purpose than a poor one, because it can set a first professional impression of you.

  A considerable amount of work has been published on the positive effects of open access on citation rates. Lawrence (2001) carried out an investigation on the impact of free online availability of papers on citation rates in computer science. The results showed a clear correlation between the number of times an article is cited and the probability that the article is freely available online. The more highly cited articles were significantly more likely to be available online.

If you publish your presentation online after the conference, then you are increasing the open access material related to the paper. Especially if you are publishing the research manuscript behind a paywall, the presentation may open the research to a broader audience. Whether the presentation is well done, intuitively, is likely to affect whether you are willing to post it online and the amount of time that readers are likely to interact with it. If you present it well, you are probably more likely to post a public video of the presentation  online.

  Thelwall et al. (2013) [...] found that there were statistically significant associations between higher citations for articles and the use of various social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and forums. Similarly a study carried out by Shuai et al. (2012) showed there was a statistically significant correlation between social media mentions and download and citation counts.

Further to the previous point, if you publish your open-access presentation online after the conference, it creates an opportunity to create a social media buzz around it.

Summary There might not be much research on whether a direct correlation exists between presentation quality and citation rate, but a good presentation can amplify factors that have been shown in literature to increase citation rates.

References

S. Dalton (2014). "Increasing citations: key evidence." Retrieved from: http://library.leeds.ac.uk/downloads/file/616/increasing_citations_literature_review_april_2014 on 15 October 2015.

K. Frenken et al. (2010). "The citation impact of research collaboration in science‐based industries: A spatial‐institutional analysis." Papers in Regional Science: 89(2), 251-265.

S. Lawrence et al. (2001). "Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact." Nature: 411(6837), 521-521.

X. Shuai et al. (2012). "How the scientific community reacts to newly submitted preprints: Article downloads, twitter mentions, and citations." PloS one: 7(11).

M. Thelwall et al. (2013). "Do altmetrics work? Twitter and ten other social web services." PloS one: 8(5).


Should mathematical symbols and equations be included in a word count?

To me, the key question is this: what is the purpose of the word count?

If the purpose is to fill in a blank that says: "word count goes here", then just take the simplest approach that will give you a number and don't sweat the details.  Personally, I would run "wc" on my LaTeX source in such a case.

On the other hand, in some cases word count is being used to determine how the length of your document relates to a minimum or maximum length.  If it's actually strict, then they'll generally provide clear guidance; if it's an approximate guideline (which is usually the case), then again, just take a reasonable approach that will let you conform and don't sweat the details.


Can I start writing my PhD thesis from the second year?

It is probably a good idea to keep a running outline of your work as you go. Also, sometimes you get stuck for some period of time - say waiting for experiments to mature. In those periods if you can't otherwise make progress it might be a good idea to write up (and to revise) what you already know.

I wouldn't do this to "shorten" the time, however, but rather to keep myself on track and to keep an overview of the work in mind.

One advantage of this, if you have the discipline to do it, is that the thesis gets revised many times this way before you finish, rather than only once or twice.

In short, it could be time wasted or time well spent, depending on when you do it and how you approach it.


Job prospects for international student in the UK for an academic position in the humanities

tl;dr: You parents are right. However, it is your choice to make.

Professional job market is very competitive in the UK. If you are not a UK/EU citizen (which follows from your question), you need a Tier 2 visa to work in the UK. To be eligible for this visa, you need to earn a salary above certain threshold (currently £30000 per year). Also, your employer should sponsor your visa application.
If you plan to work in academia, the majority of the universities do not discriminate on the basis of your citizenship and will sponsor your visa application if you are the best candidate for the job. However, academic job market is very competitive. To secure a job in academia, you need to have a PhD, and often a good number of academic publications under your belt. Note that PhD students in the UK pay tuition fees and do not automatically receive a stipend (as in some EU countries). You will either need to pay your way through your PhD studies, or to receive a scholarship to support your studies. However, even when you get a PhD, securing an academic job on top of it will take a lot of effort, commitment and luck.
Outside academia, not many professions can offer an entry-level salary which is above the threshold required for professional immigration (Tier 2 visa). Among those which can, I can name a few: financial sector, data analysis, insurance sector, IT, some engineering occupations. Most of them are looking for candidates with strong technical (STEM) skills.
Humanities are broad, and some people do make good money on top of their education in Law, in languages, in Arts, etc. However, note that for the purpose of immigration it is not sufficient just to earn money. You will need to demonstrate that you can earn money consistently and above the threshold. A lot of artists work freelance occupations, for example, and it is much more difficult to use such earnings as an evidence for UKVI purposes. Typically they would expect artists to apply for Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa, which is more expensive and generally harder to get.

Having said all this, I now want to answer a slightly different question. You asked about a  chance of a student in STEM against a student in Humanities. However, what you really want to know is what is your prospects, assuming that you choose a career in STEM vs Humanities.  This is a different question. Whatever career you choose, in order to immigrate on top of it, you will need to be excellent in what you do. It is very hard to develop excellent abilities in something you don't like very much. You have many years of studies in front of you; and you commitment and dedication to these studies is crucial to develop yourself as a desirable job candidate. You must love what you do. So my advice is: choose a career which you really like and work towards it. Don't make immigration your number one goal. And definitely don't make immigration to the UK your main priority - it is very unclear what the situation is going to be here by the time you graduate.

Good luck.


How to get an up to date PhD title in Cloud Computing Security?

You have a couple of options, I hope. One is choosing a new topic that your supervisor is more familiar with. He or she is the one to help you with that, so you need to have a discussion about it.

However, while your supervisor isn't familiar with the topic you have, he should be familiar with how to do research and to get quickly to the edge of the known world in any given (similar) field. So he may be able to help you find the resources you need and even respond intelligently to your questions and concerns. The only thing that he can't help you with is specific topical questions (facts and techniques). But he can help you find the places in which you can learn that.

Even if he were more up to date in the field, you would still need to read a lot of papers and work to understand them and the remaining work to be done.

At some point every doctoral student needs to surpass the understanding of their professor. That doesn't mean the professor is of no use anymore, it is just the specific topic that you are then able to teach them, rather than the other way round.


How widespread is sharing of slides/assignments among educators?

It is common for college professors to use teaching materials from outside sources. There is generally no an expectation of originality when it comes to teaching materials.

  Do college professors commonly purchase their lesson plans and assignments from vendors?

Many textbooks come with a set of slides, distributed by either the publisher or the author of the textbook (often for free). Instructors may choose to use these exactly as they are, or adapt them. Some books come with other materials too, including assignments.

Personally, I often don't like the textbook authors' prepared materials and prefer to develop my own. But that's my preference.

  Do instructors and universities share premade courses with each other?

Yes, this is also common. I have shared my course materials with instructors at my own university and at other universities. Many of my course materials are hosted online with an explicit Creative Commons license allowing others to use them.

I have also participated in projects that received NSF funding specifically to develop course materials and other resources to share with other instructors.


What is the volume of this article in a journal?

As others have already said, it's an article number.
You can verify on the publisher's website that papers in the same volume have indeed consecutive numbers.

As far as I can tell there is no bibtex field for an article number, so you'll have to work around it. Personally I'd go for volume=6, number=16, and no page field (it's not mandatory for an @article). The publisher's own bibtex file (go on "download reference" from the article page linked above) reads VOLUME = {6},NUMBER = {1},PAGES = {16} instead; that said, publishers' bibtex files are often quite bad, don't take this for an authoritative answer.

More importantly, the formatting of the author field is wrong. It should be Kudriavtsev, V. and Polyshchuk, V. and Roy, D. L., or even better (if you know their names) Kudriavtsev, Vladimir and Polyshchuk, Vladimir and Roy, Douglas L.. Note that the correct format is surname, name or surname, n., with "and" as the author separator. What you wrote would be parsed as two authors, one with given name Polyshchuk V and surname Kudriavtsev V, and one with surname only Roy D L. Abbreviations and sorting could go wrong with such a field.

For more information on formatting .bib files, ask on http://tex.stackexchange.com.


How Much Weight does a Conference Paper carry compared to a Journal Publication?

The weight given to conference and journal publications is completely determined by field. In a few fields, such as CS, they have essentially equal weight and the vetting process is similar. This is partly due to the fact that the field itself is less mature and fast changing and many breakthroughs in subfields are first introduced at conferences.

In other fields this is quite different and journal publications may have much more weight than conferences - even if the conference paper is published in a proceedings.

So, it depends on your audience. You may need advice on this from someone in the field who represents that audience. For doctoral students the advisor is usually a good guide for such things.

And, of course, there are low-quality conferences just as there are low-quality journals. Beware.


Should I ask a highly involved PhD committee member to be a co-advisor?

No you should not ask them to be a co-adviser. You personally have nothing to gain but do have something to lose (upsetting your current adviser or other unforeseen issues which I can already think a quite a few more).

Every university/department handles these things differently (advisers, committee membership, tenure, etc...). I would venture that as a second year you probably don't have enough experience to know what is or isn't appropriate for your situation. But, your committee member does (or should). Thus I would say that the responsibility falls on him to initiate this if his work does indeed warrant the title, co-adviser.

If your committee member decides that they would like the "credit" of being a co-adviser and asks that you do this, then you can approach your current adviser as a neutral party and mention to him/her that you have been working closely with "Dr. Committee Member" and he has request that he be considered a co-adviser.

On a more personal note...I had a surprisingly similar situation during my Ph.D. I joined a well-known, well-funded lab, with a high profile adviser who was very busy. So I largely worked with a less senior individual who was an aspiring advisor/PI. How it resolved itself was in my 2nd year, they both decided between themselves that he should be appointed as my co-adviser. They then both approached me with their decision and asked if I would be ok with it. Naturally I said yes, everyone was happy, and it was a complete non-issue.


I hold a PhD in political economy, and am outside academia; what route might I take towards researching for a PhD in canine psychology and behaviour?

Given that you already have a Ph.D., can you network with anyone to meet a mentor in this subfield? Their personal advice could help you figure out which formalities you can skip and what skills are essential. Do they see your work as providing transferable skills to their field? Would they recommend that you need more background in lab work, psychological theory, or something else?

While it's not normally a good idea for people to try to contact unknown professors merely to ask for help preparing for a later application, you've been socialized into the norms of academia (especially within the Russell Group) and may be able to do so in a targeted and effective manner.


Should I tell hiring committee about my interview opportunity at another institution?

Consider asking for an extension without giving a specific reason. People should expect that you are exploring options and that they have different expiration dates. Ask if it would be a problem if you can't make a decision prior to -date-. If they ask for more, say that you are exploring your options and expect to be ready by that date. But the details can remain private. Don't give the impression, however, that an offer would be unlikely to be accepted if another comes in.

I can't predict, of course, whether you will get an extension. If you don't, then you need to deal with it as presented.

But assume that if they want to make you an offer then they actually want to hire you and not just fill a slot by some date. They have some incentive to deal with you, though they have other considerations as well.


Are the IEEE Standardized Keywords Madatory For The Index Terms Section?

If you log into the target journal in IEEE, go to your author center, and click on "start a new submission". On the next page, click the button "Begin Submission". Click on "Step 3: Attributes". This will show you what keywords are required, and how many (look for the "required : X. Max Y") to the right of the Keyword entry. IEEE seems to require between 1 and 3 keywords, and the list could be different per journal. Some also let you enter your own.

You can either keep that draft and use it for your submission, or just delete it when you are done.

If you want to identify the journal, I could give you specifics.


Acknowledge grants (which may indicate conflict of interest) in double blind review?

I think the best approach is, as recommended in the comments, to cite the funding organization but not the particular grant.  In fact, I have recently encountered some journals that request this information explicitly as part of the submission meta-data, which I think is very wise.

Citing only the funding organization may, indeed, be extremely vague information: for example, "US National Science Foundation" tells you pretty much nothing.  In general, however, this is already enough information to determine potential conflicts of interest:

If the funder is a broad-mission government agency, there there is generally no meaningful conflict of interest to consider.
When funding comes from a private organization, such as a company or a foundation, that information is generally enough to identify potential conflicts of interest.  It doesn't matter which division of an oil or pharmaceutical company is funding a project---all of their research projects will still be expected to relate to their bottom line somehow.


How to ensure a research idea has not been explored previously

This is of course always hard to protect oneself from. However, I would say the best way to ensure that your research proposal hasn't been investigated before is to get in contact with an expert in the field and ask him or her this.

Of course, you should investigate the topic thoroughly before approaching the expert. One tip to do this is by using a citation index. This enables you to track how a certain paper has been cited, meaning you can follow the trail and more effectevly find out what has been done. For example, if you have located an old seminal paper in your field, finding out which papers have referenced this one should give you a fair chanse of finding what you're looking for.


How to write a thesis to transform into a book?

I would just focus on writing the thesis. If it is good enough to be published as a book, you will know when it is done. Regardless of what you do now, getting it into publishable form is going to be a huge job, and the problems will only become apparent once your thesis is finished. So what you do now is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to publishing your thesis as a book.


How does one effectively assign mathematics homework when all answers to all questions are available online?

One approach would be addition of the minor constraints and conditions to the problem and manipulating those constraints, trivially, each time you are going to plan the assignment set to the students. By taking such strategy into account, the core of the problems will be fix, but there is no way for students to copy the available answers within either the web or somewhere else.


While this is not a perfect answer (not a rigorous study of the costs and benefits of learning outcomes) I hope it will give some insights.

Learning outcomes are not all that rare, although I do not remember seeing them much in the US when I was there.

One of the key reasons for learning outcomes is to be able to evaluate how closely Module A in School X matches to Module B in School Y. If you are teaching a subject titled "Contract and Negligence Law in New Zealand" then the learning outcomes kind of write themselves. If you are teaching a subject titled "Modern Business Practices" then it is less clear what it is that students who passed that subject actually learned.

So, leaning outcomes, I believe, are mainly for the benefit of administrators so that can 'map' modules across universities. However, I also believe that they have great value for us as teachers. I believe the more we can formalize, in writing, what students will learn, the more transparent we are being and the fewer (unhappy) surprises people are likely to have. Students will better understand what they are supposed to learn, as will their parents (if they are involved in the process) and other teachers will be able to see how our modules fit together with their own simply by reviewing the learning outcomes.

Typical learning outcomes might include (in my field): Understanding teamwork and team development. In this case, you do not need to look at differences in test scores. The outcome is not an improvement in knowledge (take a module where you have already learned the outcomes and you will likely learn very little) but rather an absolute "The student will understand this." If the student did not understand before, they should understand at the end, or they should fail.

I do not believe the goal of the learning outcome is that it is one-question on a final exam but rather it is what gets assessed by the assessor. How you do that is up to you. For the example of team work I have several tests to see if students understand the key points that they should have learned.


Language requirements for postgraduate studies in UK and Canada?

IELTS is widely accepted in the UK, and it is also accepted by the UK immigration authorities.

ToEFL is also widely accepted by universities but is no longer accepted by UK immigration authorities.


What are the major differences between PhD programs in mathematics and PhD programs in other STEM fields?

In brief, many aspects of math grad school are very different from CompSci, for example.

The vast majority of math grad students are funded by TA-ships, although some have NSF and other fellowships. The (large) size of typical math depts is tied to their role as service departments, teaching lower-division math, and this is what funds the large number of math grad students.

Internships in some applied math fields are desirable, but non-trivial to arrange.

Outreach and volunteer work are not strongly connected with these other questions.

It is not that math depts "disregard students' research interests", but that, almost universally in the U.S., further coursework beyond undergrad work is ... wise. If one has an unusually solid background, there are usually procedures by which to "test out" of requirements. On another hand, I am well aware that a certain number of grad students do feel that they're all ready to do research, and that coursework gets in the way. The "problem" is that "research" at a professional level in mathematics is not necessarily an immediate continuation of the sort of "research" typically done in undergrad projects. Another "problem" is that mathematics is an old subject, and there is a lot of very useful, helpful, enlightening stuff already known... and whose relevance to any given research project is very difficult to guess based on ignorance. I am absolutely not in favor of "oppressing" students by pointless busywork, but I am equally opposed to ignorance. Accurate perception of a given situation is difficult, and both students and faculty often have pre-existing biases... Again, testing-out of requirements ought to be a viable option, if one is well-prepared. If one doesn't see the relevance of the requirements, I'd tend to interpret this as reflecting a need to better understand the content of the required subjects. (Because they are relevant.)

In particular, depts to not "disregard students' research interests", except as not automatically exempting students from "requirements". Further, there are many hours in a day...

As to social events... it depends.

Networking? People know people. "Industrial connections" would exist only for very applied people, although connections to applied science research groups inside the university are common.

And/but none of what the question describes strikes me as unusually "uncooperative". In my observation, it is very common that math grad school is quite different from what people are expecting, exactly insofar as many students expect to immediately "start research" (perhaps parallel to the impression given about other STEM fields' programs), rather than having any required coursework at all. Also, there seems to be a not-uncommon disaffection with TA-ing, as though this were lowlier than having a fellowship of some sort or research assistantship... and is construed, again, as "obstructing research". But without all these TA-ships, many fewer math grad students would have any financial support at all. (There's little grunt-work available in mathematics that would compare to the low-level research-support work in some other STEM fields, which does (by tradition) get the student's name on a published paper, etc.)

So, yes, mathematics is somewhat different from other STEM fields. Further, the fact that a program is not what one presumed it would/should be is not at all a strong indicator that something's wrong with the program (although, of course, there are dubious programs). The greatest resentment I see is among students who believe that they're fully-fledged "researchers", and are offended to not be immediately treated as such... While this message can be imparted rudely, and perceived as "a rude shut-down", the many issues of professional competence are not easy for novices to judge.

(One more time: one can see about "testing out" of requirements...)

Edit: prompted by Brian Borcher's comment... Teaching is an important part of an academic mathematician's job! The question of "how much" is secondary. The TA experience is very important to get up to speed on teaching, and, in unhappy cases, to discover early on that one hasn't the taste for it, if that is so. (I had one PhD student who discovered this unhappy fact in his own case, so he did not take the academic route.) Part of what one should try to learn is that "teaching is not a burden"... !!! ... to say the least. :)


Should I simply ignore it if authors assume that I'm male in their response to my review of their article?

As a reviewer, you are supposed to comment on academic value and scientific correctness of the manuscript.

As a woman, you feel unhappy about authors not guessing a correct pronoun for you and not using an appropriate gender-neutral pronoun.

It seems that the issue has nothing to do with the manuscript and hence you are not reacting with your reviewer hat on. You are considering your response based on your role as woman/feminist/activist — but not as a reviewer. You are not reviewing the paper, you are reviewing author's communicative behaviour.

As long as you make it clear that you are not commenting as as reviewer of a manuscript, I think you can make this remark to the editor.


When looking for students to work on a research project: contact good students directly or contact all class then select the good ones?

At my institution the selection was two-fold. The professor usually has an open invitation for all students to apply for their lab, but chosen students were known to be approached to raise their interest. This was always done carefully as to don't imply any precedence between students, but not secretly, and almost always orally (not by email or similar). For example, at the project oral defense, the instructor would suggest to the best students to consider applying for their lab.

At least all of my instructors were careful not to "flatter" the students, but only to raise their interest. There is little sense to have a, no matter how brilliant, student working on a project, if they are not interested in the subject.


Recent publication versus old, crappy letters of recommendation?

If you have done valuable work on open source projects, a recommendation from one of the lead developers would certainly count highly in my book, if you are applying to a related field (or software related in general). That you have never even met face to face should make no difference.

You say you did well at some classes you liked, presumably some of the people who taught you (preferably later courses) will write you "face to face based" letters, I wouldn't forego such totally.

For the record, I had some students around here (OK, still have) that do extremely well in non-directly study related stuff, and do so-so or directly terrible in their regular classes. I would recommend some of them highly, even if their grades aren't stellar. But probably with some warning about "careful, if work isn't interesting to them they might just drop it".


How good are "For Dummies" books in Academic Study?

Those books are not only very useful, I would argue they are the best option in many cases, as they represent the best use of your time. You will find that, throughout your graduate studies, you will have to learn aspects of many different fields. In most cases, while it would be possible for you to embark on a thorough study I some other discipline, that would take weeks, if not months. These books allow you to quickly learn the basics, giving you a solid foundation of knowledge that you can expand with further study if necessary.

Edit: this applies to topics only ancillary to your main field of research; you should not use this book on your research topic itself, for the reasons outlined by your professor.


How can I confirm that the format of the paper is correct?

The double blind refereeing instructions mean that the text of the paper should have nothing in the LaTeX    \author{} macro. All the authors should be listed only on the web form you fill out when you submit the paper.
For help setting the proper margins and other formatting constants, ask at tex.stackexchange.com.
Although you have never "met" your mentor, they should probably know about this submission and should be able to help you with it.


Why do some mathematics professors teach more/less courses than others?

Depending on the department, the rules can be very different, but here are some things that I have seen that can lead to teaching reduction from a theoretical teaching load that is the same across the board:

New faculty. Think of it as both a hiring bonus and a humanitarian "you are still settling in so we won't burden you too much."
Super big shot. Some "research stars" can negotiate their way to a semi-permanently reduced teaching load; this is on the theory that their name recognition and the research grants that they can supposedly bring in will benefit the department greatly, and that in theory it is more cost effective to let them spend more time in research and less time teaching.
Grant buy-out. Certain schools operate on a system where faculty can buy out of their teaching load by obtaining sufficiently large or prestigious research grants.
Other service. Professors taking on administrative duties (chair, director of graduate/undergraduate studies, for example) get reduced teaching loads on the principle that they are serving the department in other capacities.
Student mentoring. Some departments have established exchange rates of X graduating PhD students = 1 course, and Y undergraduate research students = 1 course to encourage participation in student research.

Also, some people just love to teach. While professorial contracts usually state a minimum teaching load, I have not seen a case where a maximum teaching load is prescribed.

In addition, at many departments the teaching is, by design, not equal across the board. Many universities hire special teaching faculty or adjunct professors. Sometimes these hires (temporary or not) do not have different sounding academic titles. Whereas research faculty typically have teaching loads of about 3 courses per year, the teaching faculty are contractually obliged to teach 6 to 8 per year (and many adjuncts are paid "per course" so the more they teach the closer to a living wage they earn). You cannot always tell from their titles in which category the professor is hired.


Ethics of conducting research on a class

I conduct biology education research at my large, state research university, so I have experience with this process.

An IRB is necessary if you plan to make the results public. Educational research is considered "exempt" research under IRB regulations, but this really just means you have fewer flaming hoops, not NO flaming hoops. You will likely be able to convince your IRB that students do not need to sign consent forms, since you will post a study information sheet and they have the opportunity to opt out to someone else without it affecting their grade. You may also be able to get student data from previous years with a retroactive IRB.

An additional hurdle is that you will probably need the approval of your FERPA specialist in addition to IRB approval, as FERPA is very concerned with the sharing of private student information. Our FERPA guy is in our registrar's office.

As you can see, I'm being a bit vague. Every institution interprets the human subjects regulations a bit differently, and sometimes schools are relaxed... and sometimes they are not.

So, it's doable, but not at all trivial. If you still want to move ahead, I recommend you call your institution's IRB office and say you are considering education research and would like to meet with an analyst. And the first question to ask the analyst is, "who else on this campus has ever done education research?" and get the real skinny from that research group.

Then, the basic steps will be:

Design the experiment, do a lit review, write up the IRB proposal and study information sheet
Send the proposal and SIS to the IRB analyst, and they will help you make changes
Send the proposal and SIS to the FERPA specialist and they will send an approval letter to IRB (in a month?)
Wait for the IRB subcommittee to approve the proposal (another month?)
Post the study information sheet on the class website, and get another grad student or postdoc to be the "safe" researcher that students can contact to opt out. This researcher will make a short announcement on the first day of class.
Teach using your fabulous new technique
Ask the registrar for grades for previous years (if you've worked this out)
Do analysis, write it up, present it. Fair warning - most of the time we find that the first try is the beta test, and the SECOND try generates better results.


Superficial solution: Control your behavior with a time budget

Sit down and set priorities for your current life. Your research is probably more important in the long run than the joy you get out of teaching. If you agree with this, set a time budget for each area. E.g. assign 70% of your time for your research and 30% for teaching. Plan your teaching preparation accordingly. If according to this budget you can only spare 2 hours a day for the teaching but making custom exercises takes more, use prepared exercises. Also do not offer additional hours if your daily budget does not allow that. You can use a time tracker software. You may also try to do x hours of research related activities first before you "allow" yourself to spend time on teaching.

In-depth solution: You are not responsible for everyone and nobody will pay you back

It is admirable that you sacrifice yourself for other students. I also had mixed experiences with other tutors and when I became a tutor myself I wanted to do it better and often stayed one or two hours longer to make sure everyone understood the material. It felt like I had an effect on the world and could show them that there are people who care about them. It is a great feeling, BUT...

...will these students help you with your research? Will they give part of their earnings to you when they start working as a thank you for what you have gave them? Probably not. There will be no additional compensation for your excessive commitment. Nobody takes care of you, but you. This is sad, I know, but this is the hard cold reality. Few people care about you, unless they get something out of you.

Additionally the apathy of the tutors is the shared responsibility of the faculty, not yours alone. Don't let your ideals guilt you into feeling responsible for it.

You are not a trash teacher if you do less

The other teachers might have realized the previous point. Sure some just don't care and are trash teachers but maybe some of them, in their hearts, are just as idealistic as you but realized that spending time on their research or with their families is more important for their life and happiness. They are not ascetic monks that devoted their whole life to the "holy cause of teaching". If you realize that they are not bad teachers but just have created boundaries and a healthy work-life balance you will not be afraid to become one of them because you will not be afraid to be seen as someone who does not care about students but just someone who also has limited his working hours to a healthy pensum.

Make small steps to improve your universities teaching standards

Identify the most hindering problem with the easiest solution. Try to focus on one at a time. I don't know how your department works, but maybe you can mention this in a weekly meeting or talk to the head. Unless you are the head of department you most likely can't change the department on your own, small steps is all you can do.

Think about a teaching career

Not sure if this already crossed your mind but would you consider a career in teaching? It may suit your passion, although it might be depressing if this becomes your profession and you are stuck in a apathetic institution that does not value your dedication.


What is the timeline for UK postdoc applications in math?

The timeline varies from one place to another. Some Universities will compose a shortlist in a week after the deadline and call candidates in for an interview a couple of weeks later. Following the interview, the final decision can be made in a couple of days.

However, it is not uncommon for the shortlisting to take several months. For various reasons, the final decision after the interview can also take longer. I received my postdoc offer ~3 months after the interview date.


How to register for GRE if you have multiple surnames?

Yes, you made a mistake, because "last name" means surname or family name (sobrenome in Portuguese or apellido in Spanish). It is NOT the last of your names.

So your question now is how to fix it. Have they answered your email yet? If not, call them. You can also call your testing center and ask if they'll allow you to take the test. If they say they are OK and understand that you made a mistake, then you have more time to fix the problem. If not, you need to fix it before your test date.

If they do allow you to take the test before you fix the problem and you still have issues with ETS (and cannot fix your name), then you'll need to contact the universities you are applying to, and make sure they are aware of the problem and are able to find your test grades once ETS reports them to the University.

I know of people from Spanish-speaking countries that have registered for the GRE using only their first surname and have had no issues during the test taking or the reporting of the grades. However, your problem is different because you are using the last of your surnames, and unless in your country that surname is considered your "main" surname, they may not let you take the test.  For the case of the people I know, in their countries the first surname is considered your "main" surname, so using the first or both of their surnames works, but using their last surname would probably have raised questions at the testing center.


What gets included for Continuing Professional Development?

Seconding Damien's answer - it depends on who you are reporting to, and it depends on what they want. Ask for guidelines.

I report to a committee of peers in my department who forward my report with recommendations to the dean. I am judged in several categories. Explicit guidelines on what counts (and what does not) in each category are provided. I would earn credit somewhere for everything on your list. Each category is weighted differently, so I do not received equal credit for all activities. I have taken your list of activities and placed them into the categories for which I would receive credit, and added some of my own.

  Instructional Design and Development - Activities to improve the courses that I teach and the methods by which I teach them.

Attending a seminar on teaching skills
Video or webinar series on the position
Experimentation in teaching methodology
Developing new materials that better suit the needs of the course

  Teaching Performance and Feedback to Students - Activities that improve my interacting with students in and out of the classroom.

Nothing from your list fits here
Reflecting on student evaluations and using them to improve your instruction
Faithfully keeping office hours and responding to students in a timely fashion
Advising students and writing letters of recommendation for them

  Scholarly Activity / Professional Development - Activities to improve my knowledge of my discipline and which improve the discipline as a whole

A new degree, diploma, or certificate
Reading books, articles, letters, reviews, etc. in your field
Conducting research in your field, even if specific to education in your field
Attending, and especially presenting at, conferences
Submitting grant requests, and especially receiving grants

  Service - Activities which forward the mission and goals of the department, the institution, the profession, or the community.

Participating in Stack Exchange
Serving on committees at the department and institution level
Serving as department chair
Being active (and especially holding an officer position) in professional organizations
Educational outreach to the community

  Collegiality - Activities that improve my relationship with my colleagues and improves my colleagues' abilities to perform their jobs.

Discussions with colleagues focusing on best practices
Sharing of teaching materials with colleagues
Mentoring younger colleagues

Again, the specific answer to your question is held by the authority to whom you are responsible - your supervisor, department, department chair, dean, provost, vice president, etc. Ask for guidelines. If your supervisor wants you to be productive in the desirable way, you should receive guidelines.


Why do papers published by people in tech industry often have such a large number of authors?

TL;DR: results in industrial practice are often much more of a product of team work, rather than the "every student works on their own thesis" model that we usually have in academia. This is also reflected in the length of author lists.

The work mode of an industry lab (or, even worse, of a group of day-to-dat software engineers in industry who just happened to become involved with a paper) is typically different to your average academic lab. To wit:
Academic project (simplified, of course):
Somebody (a PI, the student themselves, or somebody in between) has an idea for a research paper. A person (often, but not necessarily, a student) takes responsibility for executing it, and collaborates with their advisor and, maybe, one or two other students on executing it. Importantly, for this "driver" of the project it is usually of high importance (because it goes into their thesis in the case of a student), and they invest a significant portion of their time on it. The other collaborators usually only invest time in specific roles (giving feedback, doing specific analyses, helping with paper writing, etc.). In short, there is often one person responsible for bringing the project all the way.
Industrial project (particularly in the case when a software company is reporting on aspects of their practice, as in many of your examples):
Somebody (often a member of the research division of the company, sometimes an academia-affine practitioner) has an idea for a paper. They start working on it, but they cannot commit more than a fraction of their time on it (because even for industrial researchers, writing papers is often much less a core focus of their job profile than for students or academic staff), so they gather collaborators, who likewise cannot put more than a few hours here and there on the project. Additionally, for such "report of a practice" kind of papers, many people have typically contributed to establishing the practice, and it is bad tone to leave out key players (unless they don't want to contribute to the paper). In short, while there may be a coordinating person as well, nobody really has the time to work on this paper full-time, and many people have somehow contributed to the work being reported on, so automatically the author list swells.


Doctoral Advising: No Available, Appropriate Chairs

Even if it's not "distance learning", there is an obvious hazard in admitting doctoral students that do not fit into the capacity of the faculty. It's irresponsible to the point of immorality. Ok, but/and once they're in your program, yes, your program has an ethical and even moral obligation to serve them well.

There is the complication that, if the students are by-accident allowed to toooo freely choose topics, that it is manifestly infeasible to properly advise them. Someone "should have" explained this to them at the outset. In doing a PhD, "distance" or otherwise, one cannot choose a topic first, and somehow insist that the faculty in the immediate vicinity supervise it. (Nor, of course, is it sane to try to do a project independent of an advisor, or significantly outside one's advisor's expertise. It's hard enough to do a PhD project even when one's advisor is an expert on the topic.)


Does every paper in mathematics have Zbl and MR?

Your paper is MR 3628846.

MR and Zbmath don't index every paper in mathematics.  Each one has a list of specific journals that they index; these lists are extensive but not exhaustive.  New journals are sometimes added, and journals can be dropped if they cease publishing regularly or don't keep their quality up.  However, MathSciNet at least does index the journal where your paper appeared (I didn't check Zbmath).

Both services operate mainly by subscription (usually institutional subscriptions).  As you've found, they do offer limited searching to non-subscribers (e.g. the MR Lookup service) but it is, well, limited, and it is not unusual to have trouble finding a paper through the free searches.  The full subscription version offers much more powerful searching.  In this case, however, when I pasted the paper's title into the "title" field of MR Lookup, it returned the paper right away, so I am not sure why you were having trouble.


Publishing an algorithm that may not have many applications?

Is it possible to publish such algorithms?

It's not only possible, it's far more common than the alternative.  Most algorithms papers do not have real applications.  The vast majority are motivated by applications, but there are usually several layers of abstraction and/or simplification between the problem actually solved and the motivating application.  But even this "motivation" is often post-hoc rationalization, added by the authors to help draw the reader into their paper.  Most people who study algorithms do it primarily because algorithms are cool, not primarily because they're useful.

Or maybe that's just me.

  Does it even make sense to publish it?

In principle, sure!  Of course, to be publishable, your algorithm needs to be both novel and interesting, not just to you, but to the algorithms community as a whole.  You need to be sure that your problem hasn't been solved before, and in particular that your algorithm wasn't already discovered and published by someone else.  You also need to sell the problem, the algorithm, or both; it's not enough for your algorithm to be "non-trivial".

I strongly recommend running your algorithm past a local algorithms expert, if possible.  They may recognize your problem or your technique under a different guise.  At a minimum, they should be able to help you start the necessary literature search.

Good luck!


The assistant professor doesn't answer e-mails

15 days ago was the weekend before Christmas, 5 days ago was new years day. I am not surprised the assistant hasn't answered: my university is closed till Monday. Since I have children and the school and kindergarten are also closed till Monday, I have very little time for answering emails. Moreover, this is the time of year to focus on other things than work (why am I writing this answer?).


Mistake In an Email to Professor that is already sent out

The way I see it, you have two choices:

Do nothing - I do not endorse this, as it transmits the message that you do not care, or even worse, you did it on purpose;

Send another e-mail with the proper apologies (do not over-do it), and correct the mistake.

The message can be as simple as:

Dear ....
In previous e-mail I wrote: "...ABC..." while I intended to write "...XYZ...". Please accept my apologies, this was totally unintended. I cannot even explain it to myself.
Yours...

Words may vary.


How to deal with professors who don't follow the text

If your undergraduate lectures were perfectly predictable, following the book exactly, and you showed up perfectly prepared to each one, then they were actually completely useless. You could have just stayed home and read the book yourself!
At the graduate level, the best practice is to ask the professor for good references, both at the start of the course, and whenever unfamiliar topics come up. You shouldn't expect immediate full understanding from going to lecture; graduate subjects are too deep for that. Treat lecture as an informal invitation to the subject. It's your job to turn that into understanding, by reading from references, doing problems, and asking questions.
Of course, this isn't an excuse for lazy or disorganized teaching. When a professor doesn't follow a book, they could be doing you a great service, by presenting a carefully thought out, alternative view of the subject which will complement existing books. (That's where many textbooks come from in the first place!) But in other cases, they could simply not care much about teaching, and not have any direction in mind.
I've been in classes of both types, and if you're stuck in the latter, it's absolutely essential to get good references to solidify your understanding. In these cases, don't count on the professor to supply them -- if they aren't paying much attention, they're likely to recommend books they used decades ago which are well out of date, or subpar books that they've only heard of, not read. Ask other students, and try resources like StackExchange. You can find good resources for any graduate course in any subject in this way.

I think my issue comes from spending valuable time studying the book, then having the professor totally skip that topic and go to another, never to mention the thing I spent hours studying. My effort is wasted, and I have to expend double the effort to understand what is covered.

If you're planning on doing research later, then effort spent learning core material in standard graduate-level books is never wasted. You can't know in advance what's going to be useful for your research, and often it will turn out to be the core material -- which is why it's the core in the first place. Many times, I've been stuck on a research problem only to find that the right way of thinking about it was in a book chapter I skipped long ago.


How do senior faculty change universities?

In the US, universities are normally bound by rules that require public announcement of all positions and and open process. You occasionally see announcements in professional academic publications of senior positions. If you think you meet the criteria you can apply. You can also be encouraged to apply by colleagues at your own or other institution.
But all applicants are supposed to be fairly considered "on the merits", just as for employment at any level. Sometimes an Associate Professor who realizes that promotion is unlikely (budget constraints, conflicts with colleagues, ...) might want to seek such a position.
Senior people might also want to change institutions for personal reasons. The economist Paul Krugman, for example, moved from Princeton to City University of NY, at least in part, because he wanted to live in NYC. Of course, creating a position tailor made for hime didn't hurt. But their rules probably required that others be considered if they had applied.
I moved twice as a Full Professor. Once because the institution was having serious problems and I needed escape, and once for personal reasons.
But, there are normally fewer openings for senior faculty than there are for junior positions.


Can I publish a survey-paper on a broader subject of a technology instead of narrow approach?

In theory? Sure, you can write a survey paper about any topic you like, no matter how broad.

In practice, there are two main restrictions: practicality, which is - how the heck will you write a proper review of a subject so large given resources that are available to you, and is now the right time for you to do that?; and publishability, which is your ability to find an appropriate venue that considers it on topic and get reviewers to sign off on it as good.

For the obstacle of practicality, as your starting scope becomes broader more papers must be included, until it quickly becomes unwieldy. Using your example, a search on Scopus for "communication technology" AND "vehicles" returns 265 articles in 2017 alone, and only slightly lower amounts for previous years. Removing the word "technology" shoots the results into the thousands per year, as an example. Clearly not all of the papers returned by a keyword search such as this are relevant (and not all relevant papers are turned in 1 keyword search), but a proper review paper covering even only the last 5-10 years would still be a considerable undertaking. The length of time you need to cover depends on the publications in your field, and I've seen some reviews cover 50 years, which obviously would not work if the scope included 10,000+ papers.

This leads into the issue of publishability. One problem is by being more broad, some of the more specialist topic venues might consider it out of bounds. But honestly, the more likely problem is that as you broaden the topic, it becomes harder and harder to do a good, convincing job of covering so much material. The exact numbers vary by fields, but in fields I'm familiar with a published survey paper generally covers at least 10 years of work, and is sufficiently bounded in scope to include around 200-300 papers. Re-using the example from Scopus, if even 20% of the papers returned in a keyword search were relevant you'd already be at over 400 papers already, which only includes searching in title/abstract/keywords. I've also been repeatedly told this sort of work is hard to publish at the top venues my colleagues care about, but this of course varies by field (its also rare to publish meta-analyses in my field, but this is certainly not true in other fields).

Reviewers will also inevitably ask, "what is new here?", so you'll need to explain how such a review covers things that no one else has already covered in this way. If 3 papers review A, B, and C, and you propose A + B + C, it will tend to be seen as "nothing new, reject" - and if you make it A + B + C + D, only D is new, which can also encourage rejection because only a small percentage of your review is 'new'.

The other big issue - which draws on both these restrictions - is what the "point" of the paper might end up being? If its just "here's a bunch of papers", that is often seen as less interesting than if your review also systematically addresses interesting research questions. So if you, for instance, set the scope to be "challenges for industry adoption of between-vehicle communication technologies", your systematic review is more structured, it will be less likely to read as a paper-dump, and conveniently in your selection of papers you will have more criteria to look for that allows you to throw papers out as unrelated - narrowing down the papers you need to actually cover in depth. But if its just "lets talk about a bunch of papers that happen to be about this general topic", you are going to need a lot of work to explain what is "interesting", and a reader might need to put in more work to figure out why this is worthy of publication - which generally does not bode well for the project.

None of this results in a "yes, do it" or "no, don't do it". As always, the best two sources of guidance is the literature in your field (what are published surveys, how are they structured, what do they cover, where are they published) and senior researchers who may have been involved with surveys before and can give you first hand experience more relevant to your specific field.


Are there any online tool for translating a Russian-language PDF to English?

During my PhD work, I've come across many non-English articles of interest that have no English translations best I could tell. Copying and pasting into Google Translate is good when you have a text or vectorized file. If you do not, OCR software, careful editing, and then copying and pasting into Google Translate works.

A member of my research group pointed out to me that you can get Google quality OCR by uploading the document to Google Drive and then editing in Google Docs. This can work very well, or not well at all. I typically find I need to clean up the scan enough in an image editing software that using a local OCR software is sufficient, so there's often no reason to use Google's OCR. I use Tesseract for local OCR. In your case, no OCR is required.

For longer documents, Google Translator Toolkit can be better than copying and pasting small segments. This will translate the entire document. I'd copy and paste the text of the document you are interested in into a text file and upload that to Google Translator Toolkit. Afterward, you can readd the equations and whatnot in Word, LaTeX, or whatever you believe would be best.

Also, my own experience with Russian and German in Google Translate for fluid dynamics related papers suggests that the translation often leaves something to be desired. Google Translate tends to give literal translations which may not correspond to what is said in English. (Frequently the differences in terminology are thought provoking, actually.) A scientific dictionary can help here, as also can having a copy of a related foreign language article and a professional translation of that article (to see how certain phrases are translated by a professional). All is not lost with Google alone, however. Google does take into account the edits you can make in Google Translate, and I've noticed over the past few years marked improvements that appear to come from my own edits.


How can I withdraw a manuscript that is placed under-review?

Just contact the editor in charge of your submission.  It may not be the main editor but an associate editor. Usually, when you login in the website for managing submissions, there is often a link to contact the editor. If not, you may also know who is the editor in charge of your submission by reading the e-mail that was sent to you as confirmation when you submitted the paper. Otherwise, you may look for an e-mail on the website to contact the editor. Those are general guidelines. It may vary depending on the journal. But don't worry. It is not a problem to remove a journal paper. This happen quite often.


How do US Ph.D. applicants without research experience convince admissions committees that they are interested in a particular field?

I would have thought that in general the time allotted for a PhD is too short (3 - 4 years full time) to spend too much of that learning the basics of your field to the level of being able to produce original research.  Not forgetting that most PhD students start publishing heavily during their candidature, so that really you would be expected to be producing publishable papers within the first 18 months to two years.  I can't imagine any mathematical academic taking on a PhD candidate who didn't already show some expertise in the field - maybe a few papers already; certainly previous studies in the discipline.  (There may be some exceptions, but I imagine they'd be rare.)  If you had read a little about algebraic geometry and wanted to research into it, you would in many cases be recommended to enrol in a few postgraduate courses first - pretty much to test your ability and expertise - before enrolling in a PhD.  Also, supervisors aren't going to teach you the area - although you may be recommended some background reading - they are just wanting to encourage your research, and also of course to get their name on your papers.