Is it possible to cancel paper submission after one week?

It's certainly possible.  You can withdraw a submission at any point until it has been accepted and you have signed the publishing agreement.  You might upset the editor, but there's absolutely no way they will try to forbid you from withdrawing the paper.  The worst case scenario is that they will remember you as a flake who wasted their time with an inappropriate submission.  (Of course, that's not a good outcome.)

You should not plan on resubmitting the paper to the same journal, at least not if the social conventions in your field are like the ones I'm familiar with from mathematics.  There might not be a formal rule against it, but it would look really strange, and you'd get reactions along the lines of "What are you doing?  You had your shot at publishing the paper in this journal, you deliberately withdrew it, and you wasted everyone's time in the process.  Now you want to start again?"  (Only it would probably be stated less confrontationally.)  I doubt they would accept a resubmission unless it was a really important paper.

The disadvantage of withdrawing a submission after just a week is that it looks flaky, like you couldn't be bothered to check the paper carefully enough last week to detect the problem.  On the other hand, the longer you wait, the more time may be wasted by reviewers.  If you know you need to withdraw the paper, it's better to do it early than to delay.

Note that everyone will assume you withdrew the submission because of a serious problem with the paper.  If there's a minor problem, correctable without important consequences, then you could submit a revised version instead of withdrawing the paper.  (That would still look a little flaky, but less so.)

If there's no problem with the paper itself, but you just changed your mind about where to submit it, then you'll really annoy the editors and reviewers.  You shouldn't do it without a compelling reason, and I'd recommend not pointing out that you merely changed your mind (since there's no sense in adding insult to injury).  This would make sense under some circumstances, for example if you discovered you accidentally chose a predatory journal, but under ordinary circumstances it would really look bad.  You could still do it, but I wouldn't advise it unless you feel you really made a dreadful mistake in choosing the journal.


International master programm in Physic at university of Rostock

A master's degree from a German Universität (University) or Technische Hochschule (Institute of Technology) is directly recognized by other universities in Germany (and usually by most other universities around the world). The same cannot be said for a Fachhochschule (FH). Rostock is officially a university, so that shouldn't be a major concern.


How long should I register a domain name that will be referenced in scientific publications?

If you consider the data of permanent value and essential to your paper, then you should try to preserve it permanently.  The question in that case is not how long to register a domain name for, but rather how to find an organization that's willing to archive the data in the long run.  If you don't have that, then it's going to disappear eventually anyway.  If you do, then you can do whatever you want with the domain name as long as you provide enough information that someone could access the data from the archive even once your domain has expired.

Most scientific publishers solve this problem by archiving supplementary information and data along with the paper.  There are also field-specific data banks.

On the other hand, if this isn't an essential part of your paper (but rather just for illustrative purposes), then you can do whatever you want.


How do you deal with being stuck in mathematics research?

A journey of a thousand li begins with a single step.

Rather than aiming for a big result all in one go, why not break the problem down by aiming at some smaller results that will bridge you towards where you want to go.  For example:

If you restrict to a much more limited range (even to a single scenario!), can you show the result for that special case?  You may then be able to generalize bit by bit.
Can you identify some property P such that, if property P holds, the overall result will hold?  You can then separately try to show that your system has P and that P implies the desired result.
Can you break your system into little pieces and take an inductive approach, where you show that if all but one fragment are correct, then the last fragment will be correct too?  You can then show that this holds for larger and larger fragments.

Complementarily, if the simulations work but you can't find the proof, it might be the case that the result does not hold, but it appears to because your simulations are all coincidentally close to some special case.  I have often seen this happen to people.  So an alternate approach that you can take is to try to break your simulation.  For example:

What happens when you hold all simulation parameters constant except for one, and change that parameter greatly, say across a range of a couple of orders of magnitude?
What happens if you radically alter the initial conditions, e.g. making initial conditions extremely homogeneous or heterogeneous in a strongly correlated way?

If the simulation fails in more extreme conditions then, well, you know why you couldn't find a proof.  If it doesn't fail, then you may gain insight into why it doesn't.


Accepting 2 postgraduate university offers

If the programs you are interested in have a limitation regarding how many new students they take in each term, you should probably not accept both offers. It could mean that someone else interested in a slot would potentially not be accepted into a program. There might be the possibility of extending the deadline, and it won't hurt to ask them.
I understand it's hard to decide on a program, but you should save others' time and effort by first deciding, then accepting. There is no hard requirement that I know of, however, that explicitely prohibits you from doing otherwise.

Make sure to make an informed decision, e.g. check the curriculum for both programs.


Got stuck with overambitious master thesis

Your situation is quite common with MS theses (in the US at least). There are several people who are given ideas from their advisors which either turn out to be dead-ends or take up much more than the allotted time. In EECS, the MS thesis defense is more about displaying your ability to conduct research than having significant results. Clearly describe the problem, your methods, and display preliminary results whether they are significant or not.

As an example, a professor in my university is interested in inverse problems in imaging. Every once in a while he takes up a student for an MS thesis for denoising images. Problem is, nothing really beats an algorithm called BM3D in terms of PSNR for denoising images (except in specific circumstances). So he has had a few MS students who developed a new method which didn't work as well as BM3D but nonetheless conducted meaningful research and successfully defended. Everyone on your committee knows that it is impossible to anticipate whether an idea will actually work before doing it.

Switching topics and advisor halfway through might not work (how do you know that a new idea is doable in time before actually doing it?). Usually, this is best reserved for situations where there are inter-personal conflicts. Assuming that your advisor is looking out for your best interests, schedule a meeting and talk to them about your concerns with the amount of time you have left and what aspect of the project you should focus on.


Adding Authors After Manuscript Acceptance

The difficulty here is that there's not a lot of ethical flexibility.  It's possible that this is a borderline case, where it's genuinely unclear whether your advisor should be an author and the two of you could reasonably change your minds.  However, most cases are not near the borderline.  As a general rule, either your advisor should have been an author all along (in which case submitting the paper without him was unethical), or he should not be an author now (in which case adding him would be unethical).  It's possible to change the author list after acceptance, but the editors will be suspicious and will ask for an explanation of why nothing unethical is going on.

I assume you discussed authorship with your advisor when you submitted the paper, and both of you approved of the author list at the time of submission.  (If you didn't discuss it, then you need to do so immediately.)  In that case, what has changed?  It's usually best not to revisit the authorship once it has been agreed on, but if you feel strongly about it you could explain that you feel the current author list undervalues your advisor's contributions and that you think he should become an author.  (Note that as Nate Eldredge points out in the comments, this is only allowable if he made substantial intellectual contributions to the research, not just to thank him for his supervision.)


Why is it important to specify your source of funding in published papers and posters?

Several reasons.

Conflicts of Interest.  If you're doing climate change research that's funded by The Society of People Who Think Global Warming is Poppycock, you need to mention this. Organizations with a clear interest in a specific outcome are much more likely to produce research that affirms their desired outcome than they do those that refute it, regardless of the actual truth of the matter.  Researchers may perform ethically compromised science to satisfy the funding agency. Since organizational bias (and pressures they exert on their researchers) may not be known until after the fact, this information should always be mentioned so that we can always make the best judgment of the results in light of current knowledge.
Part of the point of funding you is so that the organization's name is out there and associated with (hopefully good) research.  If McDonald's funds your race car, you're expected to put a sticker or something on it with their name on it. Grants often include specific language requiring you to mention the grant in any work that directly utilizes it.
So the grant agency can track work done with their money. These agencies want to know that their money is being used appropriately and for good projects. They don't want to just throw large sums of cash out there willy-nilly.  Money isn't meaningless; it's worth something. This may even be required by law: if they are funded by a government, the government is going to want to know how the money is being used.  Without such tracking, funds can be misappropriated or embezzled, or wantonly wasted on clearly sub-standard proposals.


Can someone requests further modification after the revised deadline in an IEEE conference?

Contact the program chairs immediately. There is a moment in the publication process where changes are no longer possible, but this moment is not necessarily the deadline for revised papers.

Regarding the acceptability of such a request: Conference organizers are humans, too, so they will understand that people make errors and/or suboptimal choices. In addition, they might have an active interest in publishing the revised version: For example, a critical error that made it through the review process may reflect poorly on the conference and its organizers.


How do free speech protections of permanent positions in the UK/Europe/Canada comparable with those of tenure in the US?

Tenure does not protect free speech, but academic freedoms
Professors can be fired for free speech issues separately.  Tenure in the U.S. system means you've completed a tenure package and been awarded tenure by a panel of tenured professors.
Tenure isn't a free pass to do whatever you want.  It just means as long as you continue doing your job (teaching + research), you won't be fired.  Not getting tenure usually means leaving the university.
There are A LOT of advantages to Tenure (see this question).  It generally means your job is secure, and you have much more freedom to research things others might see as silly or moonshot ideas that may not pan-out for a while.
Free speech isn't protected by tenure.  The university may be more tolerant of a tenured professor stating an unpopular view, but that has nothing to do with academic freedom.  A quick google search will show you if a tenured professor causes enough problems they will be fired.
relevant XKCD

EDIT in response to comments
It's uncommon to fire a tenured professor, but it does happen.  Usually after repeated warnings or obvious abuse of power.
Selman Akbulut was fired from MSU for refusing to teach an undergrad class.
Rick Mehta was fired for controversial statements.
Denis Rancourt was fired for teaching his political views instead of physics.
All were found in a few minutes using Google.


Going to the younger colleague is fine, but I also wouldn't hesitate to go to your advisor again.  It is, after all, part of his job to train you.  Prepare a detailed explanation of the problem you see with the proof and the spots where you think it is tricky.  If you're conscientious in narrowing down the scope of the issue, you surely won't be wasting his time.  Either he can fill it in (and you're done) or he can't (and then you've made him aware that there's a gap in his old proof, which is doubtless important to him).
I have been in a similar situation.  There was a theorem which my advisor attributed to another, famous and famously sloppy mathematician who only sketched the proof.  Moreover, another student of my advisor several years prior wrote out a detailed proof in his unpublished thesis.  I was working on generalizing the result to a different setting (already as a postdoc) and noticed an unproven assumption in the other student's proof.  In the end the assumption was false, the overall result was correct, but required additional novel ideas and evinced some unanticipated subtleties -- my advisor and I published a paper in a very good journal.  (Then I got distracted onto other projects and never finished the generalization.)


How to deal with Educational Testing Service (ETS) inefficiency and awful post-exam service?

I faced similar problem during my undergrad application process. The admission officer told me to fax them a print of my score report from my online account. You can try asking the admission office at the institute that you are applying to and see if there is any way you can self-report the score before the official report arrives.
Good luck!


In academic papers, is it really a bad thing to not report the relatively not good results?

Research is a search for truth, not for happy talk. If you have evidence of some behavior then you should be honest and report it just as it is. Don't try to dress it up.
Giving only the "best" results will sometimes mislead people and will cause them, perhaps, to waste time and effort.
You are currently the best source to give an honest and complete review of the meaning of your results. I strongly suggest you do that. At some level, not doing that is malfeasance.
I suggest that the reviewers themselves probably think like I do and won't reject a paper that is honest and complete, other things being equal. They aren't looking for happy talk either.
But you may also have an opportunity to investigate why you get different outcomes. Is it something about your model, or something special about the data? Inquiring minds want to know.


Research publications in string theory/QFT by undergrads

I'm not in the same area as you are, so I couldn't speak for students in theoretical physics. However, generally speaking, a publication doesn't make or break a graduate application. They are definitely a plus, but I don't believe any department would simply reject a student because they have no publications.

If you wanted to find out if graduate students in your area had journal articles published during their undergraduate, you can browse the websites for the related departments of schools you are interested in. Almost all of them have lists of their graduate students, some of which may have uploaded their resumes. You can check the dates on their publications.

Although I said publications don't make or break an application, previous work including internships, projects, research with an advisor in a related area is definitely a must. You are required to show that your interests led you to pursue further work in your fields of interest. This doesn't even have to be the same field that you are applying to graduate school for. But you are required to demonstrate that you are willing to put in the time and effort to go above and beyond in what you like to do.


Is my adviser stalling or am I being plainly lazy?

Since everyone here seems to scratch their heads about what might be going on, my first reaction is that there is a breakdown of communication between you and your adviser. It clearly doesn't make sense to do 100-page long computations on paper if they can be done by a computer. So the reaction of your adviser doesn't seem to make any sense -- but what stands out to me is that you don't seem to talk to your adviser about the situation.

Talk to him about the issue. Have a conversation, understand his motives, discuss why he wants you to do these calculations by hand and why he doesn't seem to trust the software. He may have good reasons, but you'll never find out if you don't talk about it. At this point, it's all speculation when you could have a conversation to actually understand.


How to convert Italian grades to American and U.K system?

Don't even try.

There is no "American grading system".  There is a fairly common 0.0-4.0 scale for "grade-point averages", but the meanings of those GPA differ significantly among different US universities, among different departments at the same university, and in some cases, even between different instructors of the same course.

The only reasonable way to judge what Italian grades say about your potential for graduate study is to compare them against other Italian grades.


What can I do with my paper that is out of a work which contains no improvement of the methodology?

You say that your work on methods is uninteresting, but that you believe the results to be valuable.  That's great!  You should write a paper about the results!

Sometimes people feel like the amount of manuscript text they produce for each aspect of their work should be proportional to the time and energy put into that aspect, e.g., if you spent 3/4 of your time working on the methods, then your text should be approximately 3/4 about the methods.  That is incorrect.  The amount of space something takes up in the text should be proportional to how interesting it is to the reader.  Sometimes you have to put in a lot of work on something that is very simple to explain, and that's OK.  Focus on the bits that will be interesting to the reader, and instead tell your friends the stories of how long and hard you worked on the "uninteresting" bits to get there.


Letter of Recommendation from Instructor

This depends a lot on what the student is applying to. Being an instructor means you're qualified to assess the students' ability to do well in your class (and some related things like study skills and desire to learn), but not a lot else. For e.g. Ph.D. admissions, they really want someone to speak to the student's potential to do research, which you probably won't be seen as qualified to do. Thus is for two reasons - first, being somewhat early in your career yourself, you haven't established a ton of credibility by your own research career; second, you only know the student from class, not a research-related activity. Whether fair or not, I think in reality a well-known professor's recommendation will be taken much more seriously than yours, even if you know the student better. If you were a postdoc or other junior/non-permanent faculty the balances would tip a bit, but not having a graduate degree yourself is likely to make the reader be skeptical of your recommendation.

On the other hand, if the student is applying to a summer program or a job that isn't directly related to physics research, writing that they're a strong student who did well in your class and asked good questions and came to office hours or whatever is perfectly good. I have no idea how professional schools (med school etc) work but my guess is you'd be taken more seriously - it seems to me that their admissions process puts more emphasis on grades/class performance, which of course you're qualified to speak to!

I'm a PhD student and have been asked to write recommendations once or twice for students I've been the TA for (at my university, TA's are typically the only people interacting directly with the students in the larger classes). I have warned the students that I'm likely not the best person to ask and asked if they have even a tenuous connection to someone more senior, and helped them out if they can convince me I'm actually the best person for them.


in my experience, the shepherd is supposed to produce constructive feedback, and basically setting a shepherd on a paper tells the authors they need to keep working on the paper for as long as possible. Don't worry about it too much, you're not meant to rewrite their paper. Ask the person that set you up to be shepherd whether the authors will know you or not.
You might get mentionned, same as reviewers in the proceeedings, but think of it more as building experience and goodwill in your research network.


What is the difference between early career research positions

Researcher may be a permanent position (or not). Post docs are usually term limited and possibly renewable, but not likely indefinitely.

But I imagine that different institutions may use them interchangeably for things that are pretty similar.

Some postdocs actually do a bit of teaching and advising, and in that case, might not be best described as "researchers", but I don't think there is any universally valid terminology for these things.

But each offering announcement should make clear what the expected duties are and, how free you will be, or not be, to carry out your own research.


Do german professors like to be called "Herr X"?

I am not a professor myself, but I am going to report my observations from CS in Germany as a native speaker:

Basically, this depends on personal preference. However, there are some more and some less frequently accepted ways of addressing, so I'll compile a little list of options (centering around a fictional person named Thomas Müller):

Herr Professor Doktor Müller: While formally correct for most professors, this is rarely used in spoken language and should be reserved to written letters - and even to the more formal ones among these.
Herr Professor Müller: Usually acceptable. It's the default way of addressing a professor, and even if the professor might not prefer it, it's a safe way that won't offend anyone.
Professor Müller: This is not a typical (I would even say: correct) way to address someone in German. Titles such as Herr and Frau (Mr./Mrs.) are used even when the degree (or position) is indicated - the addresses Captain Meier, President Schmidt, and Doctor Huber translate to Herr Kapitän Meier, Frau Präsidentin Schmidt, and Herr Doktor Huber, respectively. (Only when talking about oneself, such as on one's academic website, Herr and Frau are dropped.)
Herr Doktor Müller: I have never heard about addressing a professor "only" as a doctor. The higher title always supersedes the lower one, and in this respect, Professor is definitely considered higher. Calling a professor doctor would seem quite odd to me, maybe comparable to addressing an M.Sc. holder as a B.Sc. (even though they have an M.Sc. in the same field as the B.Sc. as a direct follow-up). It feels like ignoring/neglecting some of the progress they have made in their career.
Herr Müller: This is very commonly used, and quite some professors seem to prefer it. I have heard various justifications, such as avoiding overly long titles, and professor being merely the position, not a part of the name. Some professors also prefer being addressed like this by their/other university staff (post-docs, doctoral candidates, ...), while expecting to be addressed as Herr Professor Müller by students.
Thomas Müller: Using the full name (given name + surname) is not a usual way of addressing people in German.
Thomas: It is rare for professors to allow this form of addressing to students, though within their own institute, first-name policies are not uncommon, especially with younger professors.

Note that for female professors, you can also use the female forms Professorin and Doktorin, although this might make your words sound even a bit more formal (as in writing).

EDIT: As correctly guessed by Massimo Ortolano, the name can be skipped in Herr Professor, although for some reason, this sounds quite old-fashioned to me. Probably, you would just say "Entschuldigung" (Excuse me) to call for attention, rather than directly addressing the professor nowadays.


Can ResearchGate upload preprints from ArXiv without author's consent?

Yes, anyone can share your work as long as they follow these restrictions.
That is the nature of an open license. You have already explicitly consented to let them do that.
The actual licence clause that matters here:

For purposes of this Public License, the exchange of the Licensed Material for other material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights by digital file-sharing or similar means is NonCommercial provided there is no payment of monetary compensation in connection with the exchange.

To answer the (very relevant) question that got buried in the comments:

If I want the preprint to appear only on arXiv and restrict platforms like ResearchGate distributing it, what license can I use?

There is a licence that you can choose which leaves you with full control over the use and copyright: arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license. There is no legal right for anyone to rehost a manuscript that you give to arXiv under these terms. The only thing it allows is arXiv (and nobody else) to host your manuscript. Nobody else can use or reshare it for any (non-fair use) reason.


How to cite a method that has a huge history of contributors?

To cite a body of work large enough to have generated textbooks or comprehensive review papers, you should cite a good recent textbook or comprehensive review paper.
You may not need to, however, depending on why and how you are using the algorithm.
The key is to provide the reader with everything they need to know about why you chose that algorithm and the significance of the choice.

In this case, if your work is focused on genetic algorithms and/or their applications, then you should position it within the comprehensive space of genetic algorithms work.  You would then cite both the textbook/review sources and the more specific "nearby" pieces to compare it to.

In the other hand, if your work is focused on an application, it's its more just about needing some tool and you happened to find genetic algorithms promising, then you don't need the comprehensive references because that's not the point.  Instead,
if you chose Algorithm X for particular reasons, then you should explain why you didn't pick competitor Algorithms Y, Z, and W (citing each). If you just chose Algorithm X because you thought that probably any algorithm would likely do, then be clear about that fact and don't worry about positioning it within a larger field, because honestly you haven't.


Does previous participation in Google Summer of Code help when applying for a Master's program?

Applying to Masters Program does not really depend on one single factor but a variety of factors.

The above sentence is very important before we move on to the answer. The decision on your admit depends on your application as a package and will be evaluated in its entirety. If your are a local student and then you attend Google Summer Of Code as part of the general trend of your location, then its obvious that most of the people from your school would have done so as well. In that case, what factors in is your school an its culture.

But say, if your are an international student and from a non-reputed institution, then the grad schools does not really know a lot about your institution, but then what matters is how you have excelled in your institution. Are you an student, who just want to finish of your course work or wanting to do beyond something? Here what you have done matters a lot.

Now the school where you are applying counts in as well. Some programs in a school would need a certain kind of attitude to survive. So it all boils down to how you project your resume, SOP (statement of Purpose) and how can good you have come up with what you have?

So most of grad schools know students dont have the luxury of doing all things needed for a program, but will seek to know how the applicant has fared in his life.

So it does matter a lot unless you did study in school where just most of them would have done something beyond just academics or apply to a program where you expect to see a lot of these performers apply too.

Just highlight them in way that is appealing to the school. Like 'I am 2 of 100 people in my school who participated in Goodle Summer of Code'. Strike it like its still hot.

Source: Personal Experience/Opinion when applying.
I did focus on highlighting things I did and my other folks in college did not..


For how long afterwards can you publish papers based on field research?

If you prove a theory or find an interesting or useful relationship using 100 year-old data you can publish, that is send to a journal for review.

It is not the age of the data but the results / analysis / conclusions.


Do reviewers tend to reward or dismiss the use of new languages in scientific computing projects?

I tend to get annoyed reading a paper that has its code examples in an atypical language for the area. I don't want to have to learn the language to understand the examples. Unless the paper is about the language and its features or advantages or disadvantages, the example code should be as straightforward to understand as possible, and using a toy or hobby language to provide algorithm examples makes the review harder to do. I'm likely to decline to even do the review if I don't think I'll be able to get through it easily. For example, working in high performance computing (my area), unless the paper is about the advantages of a new run-time system with its own language, I don't want to see some sparse matrix algebra routines in Haskell or Julia since I don't come close to speaking or understanding either of those languages. I'd rather you use a made up psuedo-code description of the implementation and not even provide the actual code unless you're making a specific point about the implementation that's part of the new results.


What to do with papers after misconduct allegation was resolved?

If you would like an academic future, you should ask these questions your (former?) PI, and do your best to make up.

Some answers to related earlier questions you asked gave you advice that saw this only from a David taking on Goliath perspective, and wrote what I felt would only further egg you on. With additional information added in the newer questions, however, you really found yourself in the extremely rare case of your PI taking action against you at your own school. It is time to stop acting on guesses and interpretations, with some Internet forum feedback. You need to get a clear answer from that PI, ideally in writing: for 1 and 2, ask if this means he agrees you can go ahead and submit the 2 papers under your single-authored name?

However, that isn't what I would do. 2, at least, could be read as a conciliatory outreach by your PI: I assume you want to publish this by yourself? (...but do tell me that no, you would like to go together).

Even if that is not true, publishing something (anything) with your PI now matters more than a publication by yourself. You write they are "afraid" of you. They are not. Whistleblowers (if you even could blow a whistle) are a nuisance and embarrassment, rarely more; and in the cases in industry I know of (a friend was a fairly high profile one in banking), they eventually only come back to bite the whistler. It may take years and seem differently; but they eventually do.

Justly or not, the whole incident reflects poorly on all participants (a petty adviser; and a student setting off a petty adviser). For an academic future, in all cases I am familiar with you need your adviser's support. You had a falling out; you should try to mend it. The situation will not help the PI to recruit in the near future; and how are you going to get recommendations that matter? You both have an interest in making up: that is what you should focus on. It may be hard, it may be impossible; but it doesn't seem that you have tried, or tried hard enough. It's your life and future, and phyrric victories and a single publication don't matter in the big scheme.

If you really just want to know if you can ignore all this, and publish alone  based on that email and the result of the proceedings: I find it risky, but not very so as there is no way your PI is going through with another case...at least it's extremely unlikely. But I don't think that's what will serve you best.


In fields (like pure math and TCS) in which the convention is to list authors in alphabetical order, it makes a very jarring, striking statement to put authors non-alphabetically.  The most common instance of this in my experience is when one author is very senior, enough to perform a power play on their very junior coauthor.  Unless the reasons for the non-alphabetical order are carefully explained and seem logical to the readers, this could make a widely negative impression.

Non-alphabetical ordering is almost never used in pure math and TCS to signal importance of contribution: the convention, for better and for worse, is that the authorial contributions are not disclosed to the reader.  As a result of this, unlike many other academic fields in which being a fifth author may be understood to mean very little contribution, in pure math and TCS there is a cutoff phenomenon: you have to decide what level of contribution merits coauthorship, and there will certainly be many cases in which a positive contribution does not result in an authorship.  People who are not coauthors but made intellectual contributions to the work should be acknowledged for this.  If you read acknowledgments on papers in this area, you will find that people are sometimes acknowledged for things that are clearly significant contributions: e.g. for providing the key idea of the project, or for providing correct proofs of key technical results needed by the authors.

The general conventions are to be generous and modest.  Namely, the coauthors should err on the side of generously offering coauthorship to those whose contributions were positive, even if they were lesser in magnitude than the other coauthors.  On the other hand, one should be modest in responding to coauthorship requests: if what you did feels like helping out a colleague rather than doing substantial, original work, then probably you do not want to be listed as a coauthor.

Of course in practice there is a lot of subjectivity here.  In the case at hand, another answerer says that because your colleague's contributions "did not actually make it into your paper", then they are not sufficient for coauthorship.  I don't completely agree.  Telling people what not to do and setting them back on the right track can be an invaluable contribution.

Recently a junior colleague found a key mistake in a draft of a work of mine in which she was not an author.  The coauthor and I withdrew the paper immediately and were able to fairly quickly recover the main result of the paper by arguing in a different way.  The paper was then accepted.  I think it is quite likely that if not for my colleague's contribution, the original, erroneous version of the paper would have been published.  In principle we would have fixed it eventually, but in practice: yikes -- she deflected a bullet.  I offered my colleague coauthorship...and she declined.  In this case the offer was essentially mandatory, whereas both accepting and declining it seem reasonable.

If the OP feels that the contribution to the work was sufficient to make it plausible for the contributor to be listed as an author, I would recommend that the coauthorship offer be extended.  If you know your colleague pretty well, I might follow the offer with an offer to discuss the situation: that's a good way
to make sure that you reach an outcome which you are both comfortable with.  I don't think your colleague's last name has any role to play in this discussion.

Added: Here is the American Mathematical Society's 2004 "culture statement" on coauthorship.  It says that more than 75% of coauthored math papers with at least one American author use alphabetical order, and that this percentage is over 90% in pure mathematics.  I think that for publications in more mainstream and prestigious journals, the percentage is even higher.  For instance, I checked the last 100 multiply authored papers in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society and found that alphabetical order was preserved 99 out of 100 times.

The cultural statement also says: "Joint work in mathematics almost always involves a small number of researchers contributing equally to a research project." Unfortunately I do not completely agree with this statement.  For one thing, the number of coauthors on papers has been rising so sharply that even a statement from 2004 seems a little out of date: I remember that 10 years ago, seeing a math paper with more than three or four authors was worth a raised eyebrow.  That is really not true anymore: a substantial minority of papers has a long enough list of authors -- with such widely varying expertise -- that it is not plausible that all are contributing equally.  Moreover, unlike alphabetical order, I don't know how one can gather statistics about whether authors contribute equally.  To me this statement reads like an aspiration rather than a description of reality.  In my experience, there is a cultural push for authors to contribute equally, but there are other cultural pushes as well.  Listing authors alphabetically essentially always in confluence with the reality that sometimes the contributions are not equal seems to me to an underacknowledged problem of our profession.


My application is declined because of covid - true or false?

I suspect it's true. I mean, why lie? In the past, when I've decided I don't have the time or energy for summer interns, I've just replied "Sorry, I am not taking any summer students this year". They are not under any obligations to take students, so there is no reason to lie.
Most labs currently have strict occupancy and distancing limits. Many researchers are only attending labs under restrictive timetables or on a shift-work basis. Even where there is enough space for those employed at the lab, there may not be space for additional people. Even where there is, teaching people in the lab requires close contact and that might be hard with 2m rules in place. And even if all those problems can be surmounted, an extra person in a room always increases the risk. Why increase the risk for those you are responsible for?
Add into this that many academics are far busier this year than normal, may have extra child care responsibilities, or are trying to catch up with things missed during the pandemic. For example, my postdoc was out of the lab for 6 months. Normally they would look after a summer intern, but they don't have time for that this year as they have 6 months (out of their 3 year contract) to catch up on.


How to respond to receiving a duplicate list of corrections

Perhaps the new version didn't arrive or they lost it. Perhaps the editor clicked the wrong link and sent you the wrong response. Write back that you made those corrections and sent them on date. Include a fresh copy of the new document. Ask for instructions on how to proceed if there is any difficulty.

I suspect it is just a simple error. Make a simple and friendly response.


When is it prudent to argue against a suggested revision to a journal paper?

From what I know (I am a mathematician with some publishing experience), it is perfectly okay to argue against a referee's demand, as soon as

you do it politely, and you explain your arguments in a non-conflictual way;
you are ready to delay the final acceptance of your paper;
you are ready to either ultimately  accept the demand if the referee does not change her mind and the editor backs her up, or to get your paper ultimately rejected.

In the case you describe, I do not think that explaining your point of view would have turn the editor's mind right away. In a similar situation (a referee asked for some terminology to be changed into something more standard), with my coauthor we argued with success (our argument was that to date, no terminology existed for what we discussed, let alone standard terminology).

Added in edit: I forgot an important point; in many situation, including yours, you can find a middle ground that may be considered an acceptable answer to her query by the referee, and that avoid departing too much from your initial intention. For example, in your case, you can propose to add a precise reference giving the derivation.


Teaching Special Adult Populations: How Much is Too Much?

Well, the only way to be sure is to try.  However, I would never encourage anyone to use candy in an incentive system, for children or adults.

For anyone interested in using an incentive system, I would suggest that the first step would be to brainstorm lots and lots of possibilities.  Here are a few ideas and considerations to get you started.

In my piano lessons at age five, the teacher would put a sticky star on the page once I had "finished" a piece.  There were three colors.  Gold was the best, of course.
Sometimes it is helpful to let the student self-evaluate.  (As an example, you could offer the three-bin box of stars and ask if she wants to choose one.  She could then fish one out herself, or point or tell you a color.)
One of the most effective incentive systems I ever saw for my son, who was 10 at the time, was the following: his art teacher kept the kids motivated to stay on task by reminding them from time to time that the reward for productive work was a popcorn party at the end of the month.
My dentist has a basket of inexpensive toys for the patient to choose from at the end of the visit.  I'm thinking, if a large number of your students are mothers, they might enjoy picking something out to take home to their child (not every day of course).  You can get some real bargains at thrift stores.  Also try the party favor aisle at a big box store.  Children may like a strip of animal stickers, a tiny box or a strip of fake tattoos, a fancy pencil, silly putty, Groucho glasses, etc., etc.

That's just to get you started.  This list can be expanded.

But I wanted to bring up another aspect of this.  You mentioned they "complain about the time commitment or workload" and you mentioned also the challenge to "complete assignments on time and are prompt with meeting deadlines."  This makes me wonder what the homework load is.  I remember in college the rule of thumb was to expect to put in 2 hours on my own for every 1 hour in class.  Of course this is quite variable but that was a general rule of thumb I heard at some point.  What is the ratio you are anticipating to be needed by your students, on average?

A homework to classwork ratio that is difficult for your students to carry out might be part of the root of the problem.

If so, it might be helpful to design into your program some required or strongly encouraged "lab" hours.  The "lab" could be staffed by a minimum wage person (as opposed to you, who hopefully have a substantially higher pay rate).  The "lab" could be the place where the homework assignments are done.


Can open-source software be peer-reviewed and published?

Yes, Open Source software can be published. What's required varies depending on the venue.

There are general journals that focus on the software process. The idea is to encourage better software development gets the credit it deserves. Examples of journals with this approach are the Journal of Open Research Software and the Journal of Open Source Software.

Then there are domain specific journals that have specific software paper policies. An example would be the AAS Journals which state

  AAS Journals welcome articles which describe the design and function of software of relevance to research in astronomy and astrophysics. Such articles should contain a description of the software, its novel features and its intended use. Such articles need not include research results produced using the software, although including examples of applications can be helpful.

(Emphasis mine to link to a point in the original question)


How does one find an advisor for an online graduate program?

I think it depends on the nature of the particular online graduate program. Unfortunately, for the reason RoboKaren suggests in her comment, I think that many faculty don't care for online education. Which faculty members recruited you to come? Which of them answered your questions when you applied? Which are teaching your classes, or other online classes available through the same program? These are the faculty members that have made some investment in this program, and I think they are the ones most likely to be willing to supervise you.

Three more pieces of advice:

I strongly second RoboKaren's office to travel to the campus and meet with as many professors as you can. Let them know that you're an online enrolled student and that you're travelling 6 hours each way and hope to meet with them. Knowing that you're going to such an effort will probably lead some of them to take you more seriously.
Don't ask anyone to be your advisor on the spot, or over an initial e-mail. It is a major commitment, which most people wouldn't make to a stranger (whether online or not). Wait until you know each other well and the professor is somewhat familiar with the quality of your work. In the meantime, start smaller. For example, if one professor recommends a particular paper for you to read, read it and ask some thoughtful questions. This has the chance to make a very positive impression.
If this goes poorly, you might consider withdrawing and enrolling in an in-person graduate program, if at all possible.

Good luck to you.


How should you cite dead urls in a thesis?

You cite/reference stuff so later readers can check it. A dead URL is mostly useless, cite the archived one if need be (and explain why! perhaps the page went away for a reason that makes your whole point of refering to it moot...).

You mention "web application", presumably the application behind the page went away for good, in which case you don't have much to discuss anymore. Either find some detailed discussion elsewhere that covers what you are interested in, and cite that, or see if the application still exists (under another name elsewhere, a evolved version, ...) and see to cite that.


How to manage very weak students presenting problem solutions?

There are at least two+ different issues: (1a) your suffering (1b) suffering of the other students, (2) the obliviousness or incompetence or low-energy of the individual student. The easiest argument that there's something needing repair is that the other students shouldn't have to suffer, in any case.

My anecdotal evidence indicates that whether it's obliviousness or incompetence or some sort of lethargy, any one of these can be an essentially fatal obstacle, and is not within anyone else's power to change in the short term. Maybe long-term. Giving easier problems will not be understood as such, and can have the effect of passively "confirming" the inadequate strategies of that individual.

So: time limits on presentations, at least. Perhaps "failure limitations", too, meaning that a certain smaller window is allowed to persuade the audience that things are going in the right direction. This criterion gives a device to get failing performances off the stage and not waste other peoples' time.

Similarly, in my experience, it is possible to spend unlimited amounts of time on some students "with problems", thinking to "lift them out of failure", but have essentially no impact on them. Don't do it. Allocate the reasonable amount of time, and then stop. This is absolutely not an argument against spending time and energy on students (a.k.a. "teaching"), but is an argument against pretending that one has infinite personal resources, and against pretending that bad allocation doesn't harm other parts of the enterprise.

Possibly time to mention the Dunning-Krueger syndrome again, too? That is, that sometimes the most problemmatic scenarios are those in which someone lacks the meta-cognition to understand that they "even have problems". If someone has already passed/failed that filter, the chances are slim that you can call on their meta-cognitive faculties to help them... Sadly.

So, you cannot deny weak students resources, but don't misallocate so as to harm others. And the cost to you yourself should be limited. One does not have unlimited responsibility (in time or energy) to students. Definite responsibility, yes, but definitely limited.


Can I Publish Research if I work for the company?

Two important things to consider...

A) It's up to the company. If they approve, then you can possibly write it up. If they disapprove, you cannot.

B) Human subjects research must be conducted under proper ethical controls - some sort of institutional review board has to approve of your human subjects research ahead of time, or certify that your research does not need full review.

These research regulations do not apply to certain types of data that are not considered research. For example, if a teacher is assessing the efficacy of their own lessons, and they don't plan to disseminate the results, it is not considered "research". Similarly, market studies, customer satisfaction surveys, etc, are all not "research" from a regulatory perspective.

Therefore, it's possible that your study is completely okay if it's just used internally, but not okay to be published without taking steps like obtaining proper informed consent from the research subjects and getting prior approval for the study.

(this is from a US perspective; rules might be different elsewhere, but there are likely to be similarities and it's something you would need to investigate)


Is independent research a good long term goal for a bachelor's degree holder with experience and interest?

It seems you have two options to weigh against each other:

Do research independently, viewing it more as a hobby than as your profession, or
become a professional researcher, which would require getting the appropriate formal education.

If you want to make research the most important aspect of your life, then option 2 would be the way to go. However, from your current biography, it seems that this may require more effort and changes to your life than you may be willing to invest. Getting a PhD is a definite requirement along this path.

If you go for option 1, it will still be possible to make research an important aspect of your life. It will be more difficult though to maintain sufficient investment of time in view of work and family commitments to keep things running.

Personally, I think that being a hobby researcher can be viable and satisfying in research fields where you don't need expensive equipment. While the examples I know mostly do something like locally focussed historical research or botanical/zoological research in their environment, it seems that mathematical or theoretical engineering topics will also be feasible for this. If you want to go that way, the internet certainly provides much more advice on being a hobby researcher than I can hope to give here. A link to start with may be this question on cstheory.stackexchange.com.


Nature Communications and Nature subject journal differences from Nature

It's weird to me that this question has no answers even though it is a bit old now. I have a friend in STEM who talks about these journals in a way that seems fairly straightforward to me.

A publication in Nature itself is obviously the most prestigious and is roughly equivalent with publishing in the most respected journal in your field.
Nature subject journals are a tier below Nature, but are also extremely prestigious and can allow young PhD students and postdocs to break into permanent research positions.
Nature Communications is a respectable "megajournal" a tier below the subject journals. It accepts a larger number of publications.
Scientific Reports accepts a very large number of publications and most any good science can be published there. Its impact factor is half of Nature Communications.

Generally you only submit to one of these tiers, and if you are a student your advisor would be able to tell you which is the correct one to aim for.

Again, I don't do STEM research and this is based purely on the way my friend talks about these journals. If this is wrong or too judgmental please post a comment.


Can I exclude my own thesis submission on Turnitin repository saved by mistake?

No. As far as I am aware there isn't. The person reviewing your thesis after submission can exclude the earlier submission though. You should probably make whoever is checking this aware.
You should however, be aware that submitting your thesis to a user account provided by someone else at a different university may be breaking some rules, or at least expectations - either at your university, at your friends university or turnitin's rules (possibly all three). This is not a serious infraction, and I wouldn't expect any comeback other than disapproving tuts, but its still bad practice.
Students often want to submit their work to check the turnitin score to see if they have paraphrased things sufficiently not to trigger the plagiarism checks. This betrays a misunderstanding of what plagiarism is. Taking text from another source and paraphrasing it, even with attribution, is still on the "plagiarism spectrum".


Leaving PhD program to apply for industry job - better to apply while still officially enrolled?

Being unemployed can significantly decrease your likelihood of successfully landing a job. The preceeding link is one of many stories covering that angle. The best graph describing how bad it is comes from this Atlantic article:

The upshot of most of these is that employers have a psychological bias towards employed people. Whether this is "fair" or "appropriate" or even "smart" not is really not the question, the finding is pretty difficult to refute: you are far more likely to land a job if you are currently gainfully employed.

To bring this back to your original question, I would strongly recommend you begin your job search before you leave the program.


Cannot attend CS conference but coauthor isn't registering

Another possibility is that your "non-academic employment" obviously values your skills - have you considered asking them if they will give you leave (paid or unpaid) to let you present - and it has been known that some people say in their intro "I am here thanks to the grace of X...".


What should a student do if a professor agrees to write recommendation, then retracts offer upon realizing he confused the student with someone else?

The questions-not-asked include asking about the basis for student B's actions. As @BenBitdiddle comments after his answer, perhaps student B was "advised" to ask the most famous professor, etc.

My blanket reaction to this is that this advice should not have come from any professionally competent "advisor", but probably from peers, or peer-based information. Abstractly, there's certainly nothing wrong with getting the opinions of one's friends and peers. However, it is exactly in such situations that the critical weakness in asking people who don't know much about a given thing is instantiated. How to know that this would be a problem? Difficult, for many understandable reasons, but that does not resolve the issue!

That is, younger people would benefit from appreciating the palpable fact that important decisions affecting their lives are made by people (often older) who need not share their viewpoint, nor their same-age friends' viewpoint.

While it is true that some people who "have power" abuse it, this is not a universal, and it is not wise to postulate that all experienced/older people are oppressive or selfish. Genuine experience, as opposed to conjecture, is hard to replace. Thus, ideally, letter-of-recommendation writers are sufficiently experienced to have been through (and succeeded in) the endeavor for which they're writing a letter. Perhaps also experience (and successful in) appraising the likely future success of people in those endeavors. From this comes the value of letters of recommendation.

Yes, unfortunately, even a pretty-darn-good performance in a routine course doesn't give a letter writer much to work with. Many people hit that mark, etc.

What's a student to do who has trashed all those bridges, before they realized that it'd matter? Probably spend extra time proving exactly that they'd caught on, and have moved to a different plateau. But there'd need to be tangible evidence, not just a promise.

So, in effect, "tell your friends not to hope for letters from faculty in whose courses they'd done badly"... And, if people discover themselves in the position that there's no alternative, then they need to get as close to a "do-over" as they can, because otherwise they've sealed their own fate, in any conventional avenue.

Yes, it is indeed unfortunate that this "appraisal" period comes during a period of peoples' lives where many things are in turmoil...

So, again, people who become aware of this mechanism should "tell their friends" to work hard to avoid finding themselves in such a situation. If one does, then it is almost surely better to allocate considerable time to repair the damage, rather than somehow "fake it" and limp along with fatally bad letters of recommendation.

By the way, part of the "currency" that faculty have to spend (or not) is their word/reputation, so they are very, very hesitant to blow it on bogus not-so-bad recommendations. Faculty who'll give glowing recommendations to nearly anyone will have debased that currency to an extent that it is nearly worthless... so you'd not gain from a letter from them anyway.


Does rushing work in a PhD happen by nature (of the degree) or is it applied (by supervisor)?

A research paper may take several months to understand for a beginner, based on its complexity. Although a student is good with the required background in that broad domain, she has to understand several other research papers in backward chain, which takes a lot of time.
So, I feel that PhD is not a degree which has an inherent property of rushness.

You have it backwards. The fact that reading, understanding, and producing research takes a lot of time is precisely why a PhD is often stressful. You have a finite amount of time to do a lot of something that's inherently time-consuming. That means you have to hurry / crunch on occasion, otherwise you aren't getting done what's required in the timeframe of your PhD.

why do most of the supervisors do rush their students instead of leaving them for sufficient amount of time?

I'm not sure if "most supervisors" do this, but if you feel you aren't getting enough time for your tasks it may boil down to one or multiple of the following:

You are going too deep (e.g., when reading previous research), and your supervisor is trying to nudge you to progress in your own work instead. Alternatively, if you are working on your own research, it may mean you are going too deep on one task and the supervisor thinks this has been done well enough and you should move on now.
Your supervisor has extrapolated that with your current speed of progress you will not finish your PhD in time (especially in countries with hard time limits this can threaten your PhD entirely).
Your supervisor is trying to establish a sense of urgency. Especially early on, a hard deadline five years from now can seem like nothing is even close to high-urgency, which for some people can translate into a lack of motivation to get stuff done right now. Having your supervisor ride your behind is a time-tested way to resolve this dilemma.
Your supervisor is unreasonable and is trying to squeeze too much out of you. Of course, what's "too much" depends on many factors, including legal requirements, standards of the institution, supervisor, and student.
[The worst case] Your supervisor values numbers over quality and is pushing you towards sloppy work.


Advice on postgraduate study in experimental/theoretical physics for a 3rd year Mathematics student

Don't go to graduate school in physics, at least immediately.  The best case scenario is a five year program, followed by three years of postdocs, and then THAT will be followed by five years of tenure review, and THEN you might have a chance at having a stable life.  All of this happens with a tremendous amount of competition.

Use that Oxford degree to find a job somewhere for a few years, and see if you still really want to do physics at the end of that.  If you must absolutely go to school, find a terminal masters program, and learn about research some.  If you don't know whether to prefer experiment or theory, you're going to have a horrible time picking a school that has a compatible advisor, and you want to be looking for compatible future advisors far more than you want to be looking for the Platonic "quality physics programs."  So, you'll be better suited to start a PhD program effectively (and getting a masters on the way doesn't really slow you down--you are better prepared to start research after that, and the first couple of years between your quals and really starting research is where grad students flounder most frequently).  Additionally, if you are in your current situation, this will enable you to rehabilitate your academic record.  Finally, if you do your two years and don't like physics, you can find something else to do.  As someone who has finished a doctorate, I strongly recommend against immediately entering a doctoral program straight out of college.

EDIT: Additionally, as you go through school, keep some sort of exit plan--sign up for those numerical projects and learn programming.  Take the sensor analysis class and learn how to align a laser.  Learn the basics of data analysis.  There are all sorts of skills that physicists have that are wanted not just in academia, but also in the private sector or government.  Make sure that you have the skills to go out and do something enjoyable, even if it is not academic physics.  Because the odds are really, REALLY against anyone making it in academic physics (and none of these things will hurt your physics career, to say the least).


Is it OK to write first initial of some authors on a paper and full first name of others?

Usually, this is determined by the style guidelines of the journal or conference, so all author names should be formatted in the same way. There are cases, however, where one author consistently uses an initial as his first name, or even, where an author has an initial as his first name, leading
to a non-uniform formatting of authors' names (e.g.,
Deepak Kapur, G. Sivakumar, Hantao Zhang: A path ordering for proving termination of AC rewrite systems or Zhou Chaochen, C.A.R. Hoare, Anders P. Ravn: A calculus of durations).


Who owns the intellectual property for work you do on weekends?

To broaden Bill Barth's answer a bit: you definitely need to get an lawyer involved.  You also should make certain that there is date-stamped written communication ensuring that your university's legal/IP staff are aware as well.  This may seem like a pain and may make it harder to get started on anything, but it's much better to get any possible conflicts identified and sorted out now, rather than to find yourself in the middle of a complex and lengthy lawsuit later.

I don't know about the UK, but suspect it to be similarly heterogeneous to the US, where there is an exceedingly large range of differences in the IP rights given in employment agreements at research institutions, both within academia and outside of it.  Some places are very liberal and basically claim nothing that's not "in the direct line of your duties."  Others claim even your dreams and the photos you take at your kids' birthday party (not exaggerating!).  In all cases, however, there is often a wide grey area between de jure and de facto policy, and it's important to get an agreement and understanding written down before you give IP to any second organization.


Should I finish my current not so good PhD research or start a new PhD in a much better university with a much better PhD adviser?

I see this as a question about whether you should choose to attend a fully funded PhD program with an advisor you like, or to continue on a more expensive, less supportive path. If it's legitimately true that you would be taken on at the new university, that's a great opportunity.


Don't waste other's people time, and be respectful to your professor and to your fellow students as well. Send an email and apologize: the time slot allotted for you can be better used in another ways, e.g. to improve other students' exam schedule.


Submitting ACM Conference papers to ArXiv

This is a matter of obsolete documentation.

The current version of the "ACM Author Rights and Publishing Policy" you linked to is v9, last revised in 1/2016. This version says that authors have the right to:

  Post the Accepted Version of the Work on (1) the Author's home page, (2) the Owner's institutional repository, (3) any repository legally mandated by an agency funding the research on which the Work is based, and (4) any non-commercial repository or aggregation that does not duplicate ACM tables of contents, i.e., whose patterns of links do not substantially duplicate an ACM-copyrighted volume or issue. Non-commercial repositories are here understood as repositories owned by non-profit organizations that do not charge a fee for accessing deposited articles and that do not sell advertising or otherwise profit from serving articles.

(emphasis mine.)

The previous version, v9 with a 5/2015 last revision date, only gave authors the right to

  Post the Accepted Version of the Work on (1) the Author's home page, (2) the Owner's institutional repository, or (3) any repository legally mandated by an agency funding the research on which the Work is based.

The Fair Access FAQ page is from before January 2016, and reflects the old policy.

The current policy as of January 2016 does allow the accepted version of the work to be posted on "any non-commercial repository or aggregation that does not duplicate ACM tables of contents" such as arXiv.

malexmave confirms after contacting ACM:

  FAQ was indeed outdated. Posting the peer-reviewed / accepted version to ArXiv and other non-commercial repositories is fine (but not the final version). Policy change does not apply retroactively, only to new papers under the new policy.


Why is plagiarising words such a big deal?

Per your example, you are not, in fact,  "forced to waste time" finding another way to express the idea that another author had. You can just copy the passage down verbatim, but to do so without putting it in quotes and citing it is plagiarism. If you write a publication that has no quotes in it, you are essentially claiming that you wrote the entire thing yourself. If you have copied text verbatim, that is false. You are taking credit for someone else's work, which is rather frowned upon in academia.

Authors should be deliberate and unambiguous in their language, so finding the right words to express an idea isn't always a trivial task. A lot of work can go into a sentence that is succinct, precise, and understandable. Your choices are to either find different words to express that idea, or give someone else credit for having done the work already.


Is including an own paper in the literature review a bad practice?

No, not at all. You should cover all publications which fall within the scope of the review, and if one of them happens to be a paper of yourself, then of course you still have to cover that in your review. Just make sure that you try to be objective in the way you discuss it. Best practice would be to review your paper as you would review a paper by any other author.

Maybe you have a coauthor in the review who was not coauthor on the research paper? Ask him/her to do the review section about that research paper.

Also note the positive aspect of this situation: having published a research paper in the area you are reviewing gives you more credibility as an author of a review in that area.


Application Letter for European Universities

Speaking as someone who has chaired selection committees, I would say that it is expected that you make a succinct argument for choosing you; if it were just a choice of projects then a check box would have sufficed. Also, the professors will usually be asked for an opinion and a ranking of candidates, so contact professors whose projects interest you.

In France this would be a lettre de motiviation, a kind of cover letter where you present your arguments for being the right person to hire. Typically one page or a page and a half. Generally you would want at least to explain

What you have done before: education and experience relevant to the position
What your ambitions are, scientifically of course and personally if appropriate
Why the institution and project would be great places to realize those ambitions
What you hope to contribute to the institution and project

For example, as a graduate of the University of Souther North Dakota's department of bike shedding, you have been trained to design bike sheds, and your time as a summer intern in Unité Velocipède of the Clermont Ferrand police department gave you insight into the role of bike shed ergonomics for special needs users. Your ambition is introduce bike shedding thinking at all levels of the outdoor shelter design process, and feel that your application to the prestigious Slough Institute of Canine Environmental Protection provides a unique opportunity to place your experience and abilities at the service of innovative projects. In particular you would be thrilled to contribute your expertise in chromatic selection to the development of height-appropriate shelters for injured Great Danes using wheeled carts.


How do I deal with a candidate mentioning God twelve times in their application?

Regardless of my own faith, referring to god a dozen times in an application is highly unusual and rather unprofessional. Prospective PhD students, however, should have some understanding of the professional customs of the field. (After all, you don't go on at length about any other personal and non-work-related beliefs and preferences in applications, proposals, presentations etc..) If the rest of the application is very good, I might look past this. But it is certainly a glaring minus.


What subjects benefit from textbook editions?

Take undergrad economics. While standard micro- and macroeconomic theory likely doesn't change quickly enough to warrant a new textbook edition every few years, students might be... irritated... if recent economic events (the US housing crisis, the Great Stagnation, right now the ruble meltdown) were not reflected and discussed.

Suppose the last example of a major crisis in your econ textbook (printed in 2004) were the dotcom bubble bursting in 2001 - today's college students were barely walking back then. This would be ancient history for them.

Yes, of course a motivated instructor could work with an older textbook and provide the updates based on his own notes. This is a lot of effort, though, and apparently few instructors go to this trouble.


Does a student who graduated from a lower-ranking school in a developing country be admitted to a graduate school in a western country?

There is a chance, but it is not easy, unfortunately.  We get a good number of such applications at my department, and the problem is that we have no context to evaulate what the transcript means or what standards are used in the recommendation letters.  (In fact, often the letter writers do not seem to know how to write useful letters.)

As a result, you will probably need to do something else to (i) make sure you are prepared for serious graduate studies, and (ii) show that you are prepared for serious graduate studies.  For instance, study some serious books and write notes on topics online, or get actively involved in an SE site in your discipline.  If you can arrange to do something like an independent study with someone, or study abroad, at a reputable institution, that's even better as you can get a meaningful reference.

When you do apply for grad schools, say if you want to get a PhD from a good school it is probably easier to try to do a masters' degree at decent but not top school first, then try move onto a PhD program at a better institution.

See also the related question: How handicapped am I in graduate admissions if I graduated from a lower tier university?

PS I doubt if the admissions committee will have any idea whether a random school from your country is accredited or not, but if it's not, there's even less of a chance it will have prepared you for grad school.


Applying to a school with a new PhD program

Georgetown and the University of Maryland have new PhD programs in
  biostatistics

Even though the program is new, both of these are very reputable universities. It is the same faculty, same resources, and probably same philosophy. Therefore, no risk there in terms of program age.

  More specifically, does that hinder future employment because the
  university doesn't have as many connections with other places? Does
  the fact that these universities already had a masters program
  mitigate that?

I don't think it matters. What matters for future employment is what you learned, new skills and experience gained, leadership development, goal oriented personality, and ability to work in teams.


Pay for open access publication from private money

People would rather avoid doing this, but, yes, it is possible. I can't say how common. Most academics will try to pay such fees (and other publication fees) out of grant funds. Some university departments will provide funds if asked.
But there is no prohibition about paying as a private person. Independent researchers have few options otherwise.


The best thing to do is send a short email thanking him for the offer and for his support of your application. Explain that you are waiting to hear back from a couple of other universities before making your decision. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and no one would expect you to make a decision immediately.
Congratulations on the offer!


Is it a valid concern that a PhD student runs out of research ideas?

Research ideas tend to grow exponentially.

At the beginning, Alex is a student who doesn't know what's already been done -- no ideas (though maybe some interests)
As an undergraduate, Alex will start to have ideas based on what he reads and his experiences. Many of these will be off-topic, already done, or impossible.
Then Alex will spend time doing research "at the cutting edge" -- usually on someone else ideas (i.e., his advisor's). He'll now start to understand where the gaps are and what ideas could be developed, adapted, or applied to plug these gaps. Some of these ideas could be valuable.
As Alex continues to read the journals and perform his own research, he'll identify more and more ideas. The limiting factor is time: having ideas may be fast, but taking an idea from conception to publication always takes a long time, so Alex normally has a long list of ideas in the back of his mind.

So yes, Alex will gain by discussing his ideas with his advisor. In most cases though, students start by work on their advisor's ideas, which they gradually make their own and begin to supplement with their own ideas as they mature.


What are the advantages and disadvantages to completing a Masters program before applying to a Ph. D program?

I can only speak for my (computer science) department.  Students who apply to our PhD program with MS degrees are held to a higher standard than applicants who apply as undergraduates.  What we look for in PhD applicants is strong evidence of research potential.  Most undergraduates don't have an opportunity to undertake a real research project, but MS students do have that opportunity, by definition.  It's much harder for MS applicants without publishable results to be admitted than an undergraduate in the same situation, all else being equal.  Grades are much less important (unless they suck, which yours don't).

On the other hand, the fact that your already decent grades improved when you started taking graduate classes is a huge point in your favor.  Be sure to get recommendation letters from your instructors in those courses, and hit them up for research opportunities.  I recommend applying to both MS and PhD programs; some departments will even let you apply for both simultaneously.

There's a similar effect in NSF's evaluations of graduate fellowship applications.  NSF splits the applicant pool into three piles based on the number of years of graduate education: still an undergrad, less than 12 months, and more than 12 months.  Expectations are higher for applicants in later piles.  In particular, publications are a de facto requirement for students in the more-than-one-year pile, even if their one year of graduate education was in a non-research masters program.


When can I withdraw a paper accepted by a conference?

The registration fee being too expensive is not an extreme excuse. You could just inform the chair that you are not able to pay such fee.

Since you did not sign any documents, you have no legal responsibilities.

However, not informing them would make them get into a scrape. I don't think it is ethical.


Focusing on one specific academic field?

To give a general answer: If you can show you have a significant, long-running research agenda, i.e. if you can bind the different publication or most of them with a single narrative - than it's probably ok. Of course, expectations depend by field, country etc.


Is it "fair use" to use figures from a publication in monetized educational material?

That is very problematic. Even if the author would allow it, the copyright is usually owned by the publisher and they are usually not interested in sharing. And even if they would allow it in principle, they are certainly not interested in answering letters from people that want to make Youtube videos.

Things are differently if the material is published under a less restrictive license, for example Creative Commons. Then you just have to follow the rules of the license. But even if the paper is published under Creative Commons, that does not necessarily hold for the pictures and secondly it only holds for very few publications.

That said, there are rules such as "Fair Use", but you have to consult a lawyer to get to know if these apply in your case. Have a look at Can I use data and images found online in my project report, under the fair use clause in copyright law?


Noting posters/presentations (formal project titles/dates/locations) essential for statements of purpose in US PhD programs?

Don't confuse the purpose of the CV with that of the SoP. The former looks to the past, what you have already accomplished. The Statement of Purpose, on the other hand looks to your future and what you expect to do in the future, both in future schooling and beyond. Together they provide a more complete picture.

So, I suggest that you only mention your past research in the SoP if it has research threads that you hope to follow in the future. And then, you only need to briefly mention the papers or projects (name, say) to create a link in the reader's mind. If you have work in progress, you can mention that.

Don't leave the committee wondering how you view your future. "I've been great up to now but, .... (nothing)".


Across most of the social sciences, the answer would be: No, the published manuscript should not cite its own pre-print.
The pre-print is rather considered a draft version that happens to have circulated prior to its acceptance at a journal, where it transforms into its final version.
This seems to be grounded in the paradox of the published preprint being regarded as a preliminary, non-refereed and thus fictitiously unpublished paper (e.g., a Google search for "preprints are unpublished" yields enough pages with confusing semantics of that kind).


You'll need to carefully review your academic institution's intellectual property policies.  Many academic institutions consider the work done by their researchers (including students) to belong to the institution, not to the person that created the work. If your institution has a tech transfer office, they would be able to advise you on how to legally patent and license your work for use by the "very big" institution.  Also, your collaborators have a right to know how the work is being used (it belongs to them as much as it belongs to you), and you need their permission to share the work.

Note that I am writing this from an American perspective, so the legal (but not the ethical) portions of my answer may not apply if you are outside of the US.


Contradiction on indexing between the journal and MJL

Clarivate decides what to index in the Science Citation Index, so their "Master Journal List" is going to be authoritative.  Elsevier's list is likely to be less accurate.


Are there math graduate schools without stressful tests?

No one gets a PhD in mathematics (or any other subject) without experiencing stress, period. But there are different kinds of stress. Exam stress and research stress are different, and some people respond better to one or the other. In particular, the time constraints in research are obviously much much more flexible.

As Nate Eldredge notes in the comments, pretty much all US programs have some form of qualifying exam. UChicago is a notable exception, but their first-year graduate courses are more difficult, to make up for this. (We might formulate this principle as "conservation of stress.") But the important thing is that even though students freak out over qualifying exams, these exams are merely a hoop to jump through, and are not the main focus of any PhD program. Don't get me wrong, they are a useful hoop, but once they're over...they're over. You will stop stressing over exams, and start stressing over your thesis. Typically, qualifying exams happen around year 2 of a 5+ year program--the remaining years are all about research.

To put it another way, avoiding a good PhD program because of exams would be like avoiding a good vacation because of a fear of flying: perhaps necessary if you have a true, diagnosable phobia, but otherwise, you should grit your teeth and get through it.


How to organize a work-in-progress workshop for PhD students in the field of law and related social sciences?

I think following the model of the HESG (http://hesg.org.uk/) would be a good idea. Have the students presented 'advanced' drafts of papers, then have another student discuss it. The author is then able to reply to the Discussant's critiques, and the audience can also weigh in.

(Im sure this model isn't unique to the HESG, but its where I've come across it).


Is it ok to start looking for other postdoc positions?

Actually, it sounds like it is essential for you to to look for alternatives. It is improper for the PI to hold you in jeopardy and he should be more clear.
But your career is at risk if you just "hope for the best". You also need to "plan for the worst". It is more than OK.
Whether you let him know or not is a matter of your judgement of his personality. But it might be fine to say (a) I'd love to stay, but (b) I recognize it may not be possible and need a backup.


How to decline a potential PhD supervisor?

I wouldn't say you 'wasted' their time. All supervisors are well aware that most applicants apply to more than one institution at a time; wisely so, especially that PhD admissions for good universities are highly competitive, and one shouldn't risk their chances applying only for one place.

Unless you made a promise or commitments to be working with them, you've been an applicant and have acted as such. As an applicant you have the option to decline an offer, so this is totally normal.

Therefore, you can contact the other supervisors; the sooner the better so that they can consider their other options too. You can thank them for their time and the interest they had in you, and explain your situation like you did here. They will likely understand the situation (TBH this should be happening a lot for them).


How to get a .edu email address as an independent mathematician?

Of course, becoming a student or staff member is one way to get a university email.
Some institutions provide alumni email.

Many universities have various unpaid affiliates. Such affiliates are sometimes eligible for a  university email. However, such affiliates are often expected to contribute to the school, faculty, or university. For example, you might publish with the university as your affiliation or you might give occasional lectures or you might supervise a research student. These sorts of affiliations are typically obtained by building up a relationship with some academics in a given department and making enquiries.


Mention a specific potential adviser and project in the PhD statement of purpose

Stating specific professors you want to work with can be a good idea usually I feel. It shows that you have researched the school individually and are not just sending out blanket applications. It also allows for the admissions committee to see a developed idea of what you plan on studying. Whenever I review applications for graduate school, I always like to see that an applicant has given some thought to what they actually want to specifically study. Even if their listed topic is not what they end up studying, I can at least see that they are capable of determining a specific research direction.

All of this being said, it can be a bit risky as an applicant to base your entire application on a single professor and topic. You ask the following question:

  If that professor doesn't accept new Ph.D. students, will I risk my admission to that school?

The answer to that question is unequivocally "yes." An admissions committee is not likely to accept a student who is extremely rigid in their proposed plan of study if said plan of study will not be feasible. (E.g. saying "I will only work with Dr. McDonald because she is the expert in the field of rubber chickens. This is only topic I am interested in." when Dr. McDonald is not available to take on more students). Departments on the whole do not like students (or professors) who are inflexible in their research (and teaching) goals.

My advice would be to present your first choice professor as just that, your leading choice. I would then also present one or two other options as backup plans of sort.

  I am quite interested in doing research on polymer composition of imitation foliage with Dr. Thomas York. His latest paper on the subject is exactly the type of project for which I want to develop a greater ability. Fake plastic trees is a field that I foresee myself enjoying immensely and I believe Dr. York to be one of the principal leaders on the topic. I am also intrigued by the work of Dr. Linda Petrovic and Dr. Ron Bobb on kettle drums. I have taken several classes using kettle drums and would enjoy pursuing research on the sociological implications of taking kettle drums to funerals. Dr Petrovic's work on the topic introduced me to several questions I had never considered before.

You will ultimately need to decide whether it would be better to be admitted to the school of your choice and potentially not study your chosen topic, or to be rejected from the school of your choice and maybe study your chosen topic elsewhere.


How to write the information related to referees in an application form?

Looks to me like you've left out the "organization" and the mailing address. I'd change line 2 to something like: "Associate Professor, Department of Physics, The University of Exampleville". Then you should add several lines below the telephone number that gives the work mailing address of your recommender. If they can't provide that to you directly, you can almost certainly provide the departmental mailing address which should be on their website.


Do more people earn BAs or BSs in Linguistics?

When I was studying linguistics and trying to decide BA or BS, my professors said the BS was not as common because the majority didn't want to take the additional science based classes required. I do not have specific stats. I received my BA in '98 from U of Utah.


Can I volunteer to work with my Masters thesis advisor, when I am funded by different advisor for PhD

Your personal time is yours by definition. A good idea though might be to talk to your
Ph.D. advisor. If your former and current research projects do not overlap to much and you do not use results obtained in one lab and not yet published in the other lab I don't see any problem. Of course there may also be some personal animosity or rivalry between the former and current advisor so its a very good idea that your Ph.D. advisor is aware of this other activity and does not find out about it from a third party.


University students and staff think my son is rich. Is there a possibility of altering this mentality?

Can he do anything to change this mentality of students and staff?

Moving out won't help now that the voice has spread. Looking stingy in ordinary expenses will further stereotype you into a Scrooge Mc Duck type, so do not try to overcompensate by saving pennies. Just live a normal life. Do not drive to campus in a Lamborghini or a taxi, but do not reuse tea bags.

I am afraid it will take time and personal interaction to fix this and get across one's real personalities. Stereotypes exist exactly because they are easy to form.

On the bright side, as far as stereotypes go, it's not a particularly bad one.

  Is extended-stay hotel this un-ordinary for academics and students?

For students, in my experience it is quite unusual. In many universities there are student dorms, of course, but they are aimed especially as students and they are a different thing.

For academics, it is more common; see below.

  Don't visit academicians that visit just 6 months' stay there?

Yes. 1-6 month visits are very tricky to arrange from the logistics point of view: too long for a hotel, too short to make renting an apartment convenient. This kind of furnished accommodation is a godsend.

Nowadays these visits are reasonably common, but it is not unheard of that some academics, especially older ones, never went to one or hosted a long-term visitor. You basically need a semester free from teaching to do it, and once you have a family a long trip is a lot more tricky to arrange.

For this reason I would suggest you not to worry about faculty; things will fix themselves, and most faculty at least tries to be objective and not let these stereotypes influence them. For your own social life, convincing students that you are not Paris Hilton is your #1 priority. How to do it is is off-topic here though. As another stereotype says, we academics are not so competent about social interaction. :) So treat also my first paragraphs with a pinch of salt.

I would suggest you to head over at [interpersonal.se].


Yes, it is acceptable. I heard a rumor that scientists are human beings. I have not been able to confirm it, but it seems like a plausible assumption, and if you are willing to accept this as a working hypothesis, it follows that it is acceptable to behave around them as you would with other human beings.

In particular, most human beings are flattered if you approach them with excitement and admiration and ask to have your photo/selfie taken with them because you want to brag to your friends (or whoever) about meeting them, and would either happily agree or (less likely, but possible) politely refuse. Scientists - even protein chemists! - are no exception to this rule.


May I modify the code/program for my undergraduate thesis project?

That is an ambiguous enough statement from the author about licensing, that I would simply send them an email and ask what they would allow. You can make your decision on whether to use it after you know whether you can.

I would also ask your advisor if this kind of work is acceptable for your project. If the project requires more self-work, you need to know that before you use too much of this code.

Finally, if you do use it, don't forget to cite it.


Your PhD supervisor sounds like my PhD supervisor.  And my PhD worked out well (though it was intended to take 5 years).  Professors typically are subject matter experts, not mentoring or management experts.  It's good he knows the methods and unsurprising he does not set clear goals for you.  I recommend you take this as an exciting opportunity to decide for yourself what the goals (which might relate to funding, publication, employment, scientific results...) and priorities are.  Some of the things you have been assuming are your supervisor's responsibility might be better viewed as your own privilege.


Can a fellowship be stopped suddenly? If not, why do PhD courses charge a fee?

This is a complicated question which depends on the country, university, discipline, and in some cases individual agreements.

  Why do they even need to charge a fee then?

Here's a common situation for sciences:

Universities get grant money to conduct research.  Often it comes from a government.  The money can only be used for research purposes.
Universities use the grant money to pay students' tuition when they conduct research.
Tuition money can be used by the university for any purpose.

Universities are incentivized to charge themselves as much as possible for tuition so that they can convert restricted grant funds to unrestricted funds.

  Why is the scholar being charged a fee then?

They usually are not.  The funds are deducted from the research budget and not paid by the PhD student.

  If a scholar starts a PhD with a promise that fellowship will be provided for 5 years, can the fellowship still be withdrawn before 5 years?

If you read the fine print of the contract/offer, it probably has a loophole which allows funding to be cut off.

  Won't that put the scholar under financial duress? I'm asking these
  because before I choose to do a PhD somewhere, I need to know the
  financial risks.

Yes.  Universities want a way to get rid of bad PhD students.  Getting rid of bad PhD students hurts the university's reputation.  If you are not a bad PhD student, your funding will only be cut off if:

You are studying at a bad university or with a bad supervisor, in which case you should leave for somewhere better.
Some external disaster takes away funding.  This is a risk with any employer.  Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_Hurricane_Katrina_on_Tulane_University


Citing both, as you currently have, is fine and provides good a good indication to readers who are unfamiliar with this paper.
With regards to the fact that the translation was not permitted by the author, that is strictly not your problem. Copyright doesn't apply to people who are viewing or otherwise using the copied content, but to its distributor (i.e. the translator in this case). This would be no different to me simply sharing the URL of an unofficial stream of a football match (where the official source is a payed TV channel) with a friend --  I would never get into trouble for this, only the website hosting the stream could.


Should a colleague receive authorship for identifying a research gap and reviewing a manuscript?

Identifying a research gap and reviewing a manuscript does not seem to warrant authorship to me.

Things would be different if your colleague had also worked with you in designing the study, experiment or research project to address the gap she or he identified. Or if your colleague had written part of the manuscript, say the summary of the existing state of the art.

Different disciplines have wildly different conventions on what constitutes enough contribution to warrant authorship. For instance, the American Psychological Association offers resources and a helpful scorecard. At the first link, we find:

  An author is considered anyone involved with initial research design, data collection and analysis, manuscript drafting, and final approval. However, the following do not necessarily qualify for authorship: providing funding or resources, mentorship, or contributing research but not helping with the publication itself.

This does not seem to cover your colleague's contribution under the specific conventions in psychology.

I suggest you look over the websites of associations in your field, and/or of relevant journals/conferences, perhaps the venue where you are considering submitting your work. There may be similar resources specific to your field.


How to write a follow up paper describing a different solution to a similar problem

There are two basic approaches to the potential issues of self-plagiarism in such a case:

First write the paper, then ensure there is no significant re-use of text by going through and paraphrasing.
Embrace the reuse and explicitly declare (with citation) which elements are adapted from the previous publication.

You will clearly need to reference and compare with the prior publication in any case, as this is obviously a closely related work.  As such, your text must be different in many ways reflecting the different context created by the first publication.  Personally, however, I would prefer to use the second strategy and perform a declared reuse of text rather than attempt to arbitrarily paraphrase just for the sake of being different.


Choosing an adviser based on the professor's past students' jobs

Perhaps the jobs they got are what they wanted to do - I doubt they were forced into them...

You will decide what jobs you will apply for which determines where you are likely to end up.

Are you using the term "dope" as in Dopey one of the seven dwarves or dope as in a drug ie not necessarily good...