What are the chances of getting into a great CS PhD program with research in a different field?

I'll assume you intend to study in the US. It might be a bit different elsewhere.
From the sound of it, you are a good and eager student, interested in opportunities. If your record is good, generally, and you get good letters of recommendation from professors, then you are competitive. However, there is a lot of competition, and the higher up you go in university rankings the fiercer it tends to get.
Only an admissions committee can really answer your question, and that would only be in how they treat your application. There are a lot of applicants for every slot in doctoral programs.
If you want to assure that you find something suitable, cast a wide, rather than a narrow net in making applications. Apply to a few "dream" universities, but also to some others that have good programs, but not necessarily in the top 25, or even 50 in the rankings. The worst case is that you will get a lot of offers with a wide net, but no offers at all with a narrow one. Stay flexible.
Some undergraduates going in to doctoral programs (in the US) have some research experience, but not all. The fact that you have some, even in chemistry, is a plus, but more for your overall likelihood of success.


I strongly suggest having conversations with other faculty in your department, to get their perspectives on what your responsibilities actually are, and on the behavior of the chair. I would also suggest speaking with deans or associate deans, but only after talking to your colleagues within the department.
The situation sounds bizarre; good luck!


If I fail PhD, what is the appropriate way to present myself in CV for jobs in industry?

You can put "admitted to candidacy" or "all but dissertation" or something like that in your CV.

In the the interview, you can say that you got a lot out of your studies, but that you've realized that the academic life is not for you.  Be prepared to give one reason if necessary, and choose something as a reason that makes you look sympathetic, for example, "I found out I like working on real world problems, more than on theoretical problems that have no connection to the way people actually interact with computers."  I made that up -- it's just an example to give you an idea how it's possible to present oneself in a positive light.

Don't let them get the idea that you were extremely close to defending when you decided to leave, or that you failed the defense.  Let them think that you broke up with your department, not that your department broke up with you.

But take the high road when speaking of your department.  In other words, don't wash any dirty laundry in public.  Don't say anything negative about the department or anyone in it.  If they press you for more information, just go into broken record mode.

The easiest way to pull all of this off is to imagine that a year or two have gone by since you left the program, and you're talking to them about something that was a minor headline in last year's newspaper.


How do I include a journal article draft in my dissertation?

This is actually how many "sandwich thesis" dissertations are actually structured, my own included. Generally speaking, I've seen them structured like so:

Background, literature review, sections on data sets, and other material that will matter to each and every chapter under consideration, and is likely more detailed than you would find in a paper.
Each "paper chapter" essentially existing in it's free-standing, ready to be published form.
Final chapters putting those free standing chapters in context with each other and your work as a whole, summarizing key findings, etc.

So basically, the short answer is to put it in as a chapter in its current form. I've never seen any journal object to a paper having previously appeared in a dissertation, and keep in mind it may very well change - there will be editorial comments from your committee, reviewer comments, etc. It's essentially just a pre-print.


Difference between research paper and scientific paper

A research paper is a paper containing original research. That is, if you do some work to add (or try to add) new knowledge to a field of study, and then present the details of your approach and findings in a paper, that paper can be called a research paper.

Not all academic papers contain original research; other kinds of academic papers that are not research papers are

review papers, (see What is the difference between a review paper and a research paper?)
position papers (which present an opinion without original research to support it)
tutorial papers (which contain a tutorial introduction a topic or area, without contributing new results).

A scientific paper is any paper on a scientific subject.

  Does the research paper also mean a term paper at the end of your Masters?

  I need to present a research paper. So does it mean I need to present a solution to an existing problem or does it mean a summary of various solutions already existing?

If the term paper at the end of your masters contains original research, then it's a research paper.

Depending on the policies of your department, you may or may not be required to attempt original research during your masters. In some departments, a review of existing literature may be fine. If you're not sure exactly what's required from you, you need to ask the relevant faculty or staff members in your department.


Submit to arXiv with a different order of authors

I don't think there are any rules against having a different author ordering on the arXiv version, but I'd recommend against trying this.  The author ordering on the published paper would be regarded as "official", and doing things differently on the arXiv would certainly not be considered to demonstrate the real first authorship.  Instead, it could easily be misinterpreted:

People may assume you were careless about author ordering in submitting to the arXiv, which wouldn't be good for your reputation.
Worse yet, they may assume you were dishonestly changing the author ordering, which would be a disaster for your reputation.
The best case scenario is that they would assume the author order changed between the preprint and the published paper, because the authors changed their minds about who should be listed first.

The only way to avoid these dangers would be to add an explicit note explaining the change, but I assume that's out of the question.  After all, if you deserve to be first author on the arXiv paper, then you should have been first author on the published paper as well, so such a note would just raise ethical questions about the published authorship.

It sounds like you should have been first author all along, since author ordering should not be determined based on how much credit the university gives.  If it is still possible to fix the author ordering before publication, that could be the best approach, but the arXiv is not a good way to fix it after the fact.


Approaching Another Lab With A Project Proposal Based On My Thesis Chapter

Is there an ethics/legal problem with taking the idea to another professor to see if they are interested in having another student complete the work...?

Your current collaborator/PhD supervisor is not returning your emails. This is a signal that work will not proceed. For confirmation, you can outright ask them whether they want to proceed, and inform them that you'll proceed alone if you do not receive a response within a certain window, e.g., two weeks. Assuming you still don't receive a response, you can work with who you want to complete the work. (I'm unsure why another student is being sought. You'll surely need to contribute for any collaboration to be viable.)

  ...or does the original university own the rights to the data that the idea was based on?

With regards rights, you haven't given enough information to answer. If the prior work appears in your thesis, then anyone can continue the work. If the prior work is whatever you conceived whilst employed by the university, then rights will be defined in your contract. If the prior work includes a dataset owned by the university, then permission to use that dataset will be required.


Should I recommend rejection for a paper I referee if the authors don't make changes that they could have made?

It's totally reasonable to be upset that the authors ignored your comments, but for the purposes of reviewing the paper, I think you should set that aside.  I would let the editor make the decision as to whether the authors are "unwilling to make reasonable adjustments".  Send him/her a note saying something like:

  I mentioned in my initial report that it was essential for the revisions to address the issue of XXXX, but this has not been done, nor mentioned in the authors' comments.  This paper has many good qualities, but I do not think the paper is suitable for publication if this issue is not addressed.  If you feel it is worth the time to ask the authors for a further revision addressing this issue, I would be happy to read it and give my opinion.

I think it's up to the editor to judge between "this is a paper I really want in my journal, so I'm willing to put up with a little bit of crap" or "the authors are wasting our time, to hell with them".


3+ month delay in reviewing the revision of paper, what can we do?

Aug 15 to at least Dec 2 seems like a very long period for a decision based on a minor revision. Particularly since the procedure earlier seems to be very timely. Sending an e-mail to the handling editor seems in perfect order. There may of course be some natural reason for the delay but after more than three months you should certainly enquire.

As for the content of your request just make is short, to the point and polite. Do not assume anything or be unfairly judgemental, you do not, yet, know the reasons for the delay. If you have some "excuse" for why you are extra anxious to get a response, please mention it. This could be that you need to show your updated publication list for applications or for some other official reason. This will of course not mean you receive special treatment but will make the editor aware of the delay and the possible effects it may have. But, a short e-mail will suffice.


Wrong font used for statement of purpose and résumé

As far as I can tell, the reasons behind font prescriptions are usually:

To avoid silly or unreadable fonts such as Comic Sans or blackletter fonts.
To avoid biases.
To be able to quickly assess the character count of a document.
To prevent the circumvention of page limits or similar by using a narrow font or similar.

(Whether one should care about character counts or page limits to the extent that the last two points matter at all is another discussion.)

Now, the if rules were only made with these purposes in mind, they would be something like:

  The statement of purpose must be set in a traditional sans-serif font such as …

or if the restriction is due points 3. or 4.:

  The statement of purpose must be set in Arial, Helvetica, Liberation Sans, … or any metrically similar font (in 11 pt with double line spacing …)

Unfortunately, the people making these rules usually do not know sufficiently much about typography or are even aware of that not everybody has Arial and Times New Roman pre-installed on their computers. Similarly, some applicants may be confused by such instructions. Therefore you end up with prescriptions that just require a Arial or Times New Roman, though probably nobody really thinks that you must use those very fonts.

Thus to evaluate the impact of your font choice, you first have to find out for which reason the font prescription was made. To this purpose, ask yourself questions such as the following:

Are other aspects such as font size, linespacing and borders prescribed as well? If yes, the prescription is likely due to point 3 or 4.
Is there any prescription on the length by other means as the word or character count? If yes, it’s almost certainly point 4.
Is a wide variety of fonts offered? If yes, the description is probably due to point 1, perhaps 2.

Finally, you need to consider, how much your actual font choice sabotages this purpose. Some examples:

If Times New Roman was prescribed due to reason 1 and you chose another traditional serif font such as Georgia or Baskerville, it will likely be without consequences. Even, if you used a traditional sans-serif font, you might fare well, as whoever is reading your submission may not even be aware of the prescriptions in this case.
If Times New Roman was prescribed due to reason 4 and you used Liberation Serif, which was designed to be metrically equivalent (i.e., each character takes up the same space), this will likely be without consequences. You need to have a trained eye to even spot the differences between the two, if you are not specifically looking for them:

If you used Comic Sans and it was not the prescribed font, this will likely have disadvantages, no matter what the reasons behind the prescription are and even if there was no font prescription to begin with.

However, at the end of the day, you can only guess the intentions behind the prescriptions and your document may get into the hands of some pedantic who radically enforces for these rules for their own sake (especially, if submissions were to be made in a format that allows to easily control the used font). Thus, if you want to be sure, only time (or asking the university) can tell.


You have nice and professional and less nice and less professional people in every field, you unfortunately met one of the less nice people. The fact that other members publicly rebuked him shows that you are not alone in your interpretation that his behavior was not OK.

The important (and very hard) thing to do is not to stoop to their level, and you seem to have achieved that.


Equipment/Computer Budgets for CS PhD Students

This answer is based on my experience in France and Ireland. I would assume that it's similar at least in other European countries [please edit or comment if I'm wrong].

In computer science PhD students are usually provided with everything they need to do their work including (at least) a desktop computer, office space, and generally there is also a budget for traveling to conferences. Depending on the country they might have the status of staff member or not, but even if not the working conditions are very similar to those one would expect in a regular job (well, an academic job, don't expect too much!).

The budget related to equipment/travel is usually a part of the PhD funding which is given to the institution, as opposed to the main funding which is a grant or salary given to the PhD student. The budget for traveling/accommodation is usually the most limited part, it might even happen that there's no budget at all for this. It's a good idea to ask the supervisor about it at the beginning in order to submit papers to conferences in a sensible way: it's a shame to have a paper accepted but find oneself unable to attend the conference.

PS: in terms of computer equipment, in computer science it's also common to be provided with an access to some kind of high performance cluster.


I don't understand the problem: if you don't want to finish, just quit immediately. Then they can't "expel" you. Why delay, anyway, if you really don't want to complete the degree anyway? And what kind of reactions from faculty do you expect if you're not doing the work, and give other visible evidence that you don't want to and don't intend to complete the program? It's one thing to not want to complete, but hard to understand why you'd hang around if that's the case. As it is, you've had plenty of time to resign/quit, so why haven't you? There's no obstacle in your path here, unless you really want to remain in this "limbo" longer, for some reason.


Does auditing a class and taking it later for credit look bad on my transcript?

I thought auditing was just sitting in on a class that you aren't taking?  It's not on your transcript.  So how the heck can anyone tell, that you audited before taking something?

Source: I audited classes and took classes for credit.  Audits not on my records.  Go check yours to be sure.

P.s.  I personally don't see the point.  If you are going to take a course (audit or paid), you should do best effort in it and take it once, unless you fail. If you know you're not doing it right, than don't audit.  If you do it right, than no need to take it for credit--you mastered it, previously when auditing.  So move on to the next battle.


Blacklisted and cannot do the work I am interested in before, What I should do?

Your current situation is troubling primarily due to non-academic aspects of your employment. You seem to be concerned mostly about academic factors, but let me try to refocus you on what is in my opinion more important: your safety and security.

You are in a foreign country (I presume), and you were forced into your current contract. You were in need of money and you signed an agreement which you find unfair and abusive. You feel insecure, you are not properly payed, and you are provided housing by your employer, whom you fully depend upon. This situation is short of what is known as modern slavery.

Academic aspects of your current situation are irrelevant and academic nature of your work is irrelevant too. Your current working arrangement falls short of basic requirements. While 350 EUR + housing may be appropriate level of pay in some third-world countries, the lack of security and forced nature of this arrangement are not acceptable.

My advice would be to get out as soon as possible. Ask for help in the consulate of your own country, if you need money or legal protection to get out.

When you are safe, please reflect on your experience and ask yourself a question: why do you want an academic work so much, that you agree to work in conditions which are worse compared to what you can get by doing a non-skilled work in your own country? What other (non-academic) career directions you can imagine for yourself and how could you learn more about these opportunities?


Ask your employer. They're the ones funding you after all.

Having said that I strongly suspect they'll prefer a 2nd Masters as opposed to 2nd Bachelor's. Several reasons:

Masters degrees usually take a much shorter time to get.
You learn more in a Masters. Bachelor's degree are broader in the sense that you often have breadth requirements. You can't focus everything on your major. That doesn't apply to a Masters degree.
You learn more advanced things in a Masters degree. If you have a Masters in [topic], you are assumed to be qualified for jobs that require a Bachelor's in [topic]. The reverse doesn't hold.
Holding two Bachelor's degrees is pretty unusual. Why do you need two? Why didn't you do a double major?

Discuss it with your employer, but I strongly suspect they'll prefer a 2nd Masters (they might even be assuming you'll do a 2nd Masters).


You won't be making a fool of yourself, we all appreciate a "thank you"...

You can choose to say in person, and your idea of "thank you for the learning experience" is good.

An email can also be fine, which you can send to arrive after the grades come out if that is a concern for you.

Do it, it will be fine. Or do both...

Edit, as Bob points out a handwritten note or card is also good.


Is Computational Social Science better as a degree or as a field of research for various disciplines to collaborate in?

This is an interesting question. I was just hired to an assistant professor position for which the desired specialty was computational social science, so I may have some relevant perspective. My field is communication, a field which sometimes describes itself as part of the humanities but is better described as a social science with a strong professional orientation as well.

First, I should note that your question does not make it clear what kind of career you would like to pursue after you get your PhD (if you choose to get one). I will answer this question as if you prefer an academic career (i.e., you would like to be a professor).

With this in mind, I should note that professors in computer science departments earn much more money than in the social sciences. According to this, the median assistant professor in CS earns $107,000. Assistant professors in the social sciences appear to earn a median of $63,000 (but do note these are two separate sources). Based on what I know about the field of communication, I'd be surprised if there are any newly-hired assistant professors making $100,000, at least outside of a few places like the state of California where such a salary doesn't go nearly as far.

That being said, you should of course not study CS or in any other discipline if you do not like it. The ultimate reward of a PhD is, in my and many others' opinions, not worth suffering for 4-7 years to get the degree. If you like what you're studying, and find the typically low pay such students get tolerable, then it can be quite rewarding.

I think most quantitative social science fields have growing interest in computational social science. In communication, there certainly is, thanks in part to the existence of so much widely available data that constitutes communication (tweets, news archives, etc.). Training in this area would require initiative on the part of the student — few graduate programs have a formal program available. The best thing to do would be to find programs with more than one computational social scientists on their faculty (more than one makes it more likely you have some "in-house" courses and protects you from having an important faculty member leave you with no adviser).

One thing you may enjoy is that your background in computer science could give you a significant advantage over your social science peers in terms of technical skill. Most computational social scientists in the field are like me, people who self-trained their computational skills in an ad hoc way. You will surely have technical skills to learn but you should have a much easier time picking these things up. You will find at many programs that a significant portion of students are at least mildly repulsed by scientific computing — they think highly of those with skills, but see it as too challenging to attempt themselves. Among senior faculty, this attitude is even more prevalent.

Clever students with CS background could bring insights and skills from CS that wouldn't be particularly novel to computer scientists but might be very useful and otherwise unavailable to people in the social sciences. You might also be able to better comprehend new developments in CS while most other social scientists wait for these innovations to be better explained to non-experts (and perhaps wait for a C or some other less accessible implementation to be moved to Python/R or whatever).

Of course, the challenge in terms of curriculum will be a lack of background in the subject matter. I can't speak for political science, for instance, but my field regularly recruits people with no background in the subject area to its graduate programs. I only had a humanities background paired with some self-study in preparation for grad school when I started my PhD. I like to think that you do not have to be a genius or extensively trained to become a competent social scientist over the course of a PhD program as long as you are willing to work hard, know how to write/communicate, and are comfortable with abstract and empathetic thinking about the social world.

Just to boost my own field for a moment, here's why you might consider a degree in communication:

Although communication is not a high-paying field as far as professors are concerned, it has a much healthier academic job market than virtually any other humanities or social science field. One easy metric to consider is this: There are more faculty job openings each year than there are new PhDs. I expect faculty hiring to continue to increase because the discipline is very popular among undergraduates (for good reason).
If you have broad interest in social science and want the freedom to study topics that are interesting to you and other people might find interesting too, I think you may find a home in communication. The example you gave about examining gender bias through language is certainly a thing communication scientists do (but linguists and surely some others do as well). I was attracted to the field in part because so many different subjects can fall under the broad umbrella of communication — politics, social relationships, child development, information technology, public health, and many more things.
The field is notoriously open to outside perspectives, particularly when it comes to methodology. This is partly why it has been so accepting of computational social science and why so many job ads explicitly target these skills. The field isn't terribly tool-oriented; there aren't constant battles over the best methods of analysis like are common in economics and political science. So if you want to use the toolbox of computer science but don't want your days to be occupied with minutiae of algorithms, communication is a discipline that's quite open to this. I don't want to say the field doesn't care about rigor — in fact a journal was just founded to help develop and refine computational methods — but there will always be a demand that your method not just be sound, but also that it should teach us something about the social world.

Other fields of interest: information science is one you didn't mention but they are trying to develop these skills and want to become the home of data science on college campuses. Sociology is good, especially if you want to do social network analysis (the statistical methods, not necessarily studying Facebook, etc.), but a very difficult job market. Economics pays well but it's a difficult job market, hard to get into without prior economics training, and economists are not big fans of non-econometric methods (speaking very broadly). Based on what I know, if there are data science PhD programs I wouldn't bother with them and would rather prefer applied statistics or sticking to a social science field.


Present journal paper at conference or the same work at multiple conferences

The exact answer depends on the topic, but normally:

Publishing finding in an academic journal does not preclude presenting at conferences (except in computer science!). In fact, it's quite common to first publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal, then go to one or even several conferences to advertise it. Just be sure to mention it at the conference, because if there are proceedings, there may exist conferences with different ideas, depending on the field.
Presenting at a local conference does not preclude presenting at a global one, certainly not if the local conference has no proceedings, because then there is not really any publication at all.
The answer to your third question is most likely yes.

To be 100% sure, contact the organisers of the conferences.

See also:

Publishing the same results at multiple conferences
Submitting the same research to multiple conferences
Journal publication and acceptance to competitive conferences
Under what circumstances can one republish a conference paper/presentation?


What are some good ways to provide computer labs for the students?

Just a couple of comments from local experience (CS Biased).

When building your lab, you have to ask what it is that makes it special. In many universities, you can expect that some very high fraction of the students are going to have their own laptops (this will vary by discipline, of course). Simply providing a generic computer may be a waste of resources -- a desk and a power-plug, with an external monitor and keyboard could be sufficient.

My take is that a computer lab today should serve a distinct purpose: Teaching a course on computer graphics: Have a lab with beefy hardware that will minimize waiting time when attempting renders. Teaching a physics lab? Perhaps have a data-capture system integrated into the workstations.

In the same vein, labs get used more when students see the value of going to the lab. A lab with large (or even dual) monitors will get used more, because it's A) less likely the students have that equipment at home B) more likely the students will understand the value of using that lab -- higher productivity  for example.
Consider a 'virtual lab': If the reason the lab is there is because of a peculiar software requirement, think about providing a virtual machine instance of the lab machine for the students to use at home. This can ease the grading workload on TAs too, by eliminating platform differences as an excuse.


Can i copy a slide from another presentation or is it plagiarism?

Standards for attribution are a lot lower in presentations than in formal papers. There is simply not enough time and space for it. It is unlikely that you will be accused of plagiarism for copying slides.

However, to be safe, you could add a small note to the slide or verbally say something stating where you got it from. Perhaps the creator put a lot of effort into the slides and wants to be credited.

Standards vary from field to field and country to country, so ask someone in your department to be sure.


Is it acceptable to take some exercises directly from the text book when preparing exercise sheets?

From a practical point of view, taking a few exercises for internal classroom use will probably not cause copyright problems, depending on the local laws. Teaching is one of the fair use possibilities in the US, but I am no expert in law, and I don't know how far it goes.

Assuming US law applies, here are a few rules for fair use, and I believe you fulfil them all: non profit, for educational purposes, on content more factual than artistic, extracting small parts, and no net effect on the market. Some other sources also add restricted access to the student as a point in favour. It is always safer and more ethical to add a reference to the original book.


My work was published and my name was nowhere to be found: how should I handle this?

This seems to be a real case of Scientific misconduct by your former supervisor. By common scientific ethics, everybody who made significant scientific contributions to a publication must be named as an author.

In practice, violations of this rule occur, and there are several options for you to react to it. In fact, several institutions have a responsibility to follow up on indications of scientific misconduct, any of which you could try to approach on this matter.

The research institution itself is responsible for investigating any possible scientific misconduct of their members. The question is of course which organizational level to approach first. The level just above your former supervisor may have conflicts of interest, but any higher levels may suggest that it should be dealt with on lower levels first. This is probably best judged from the local situation.
Journals and conferences must make sure that scientific results they publish were obtained in adherence to standard scientific rules. Editors of the journal have the responsibility to investigate problematic cases, and may take measures such as correcting the author list or retracting the paper. If you want to take this approach, it would be best to contact the editor in chief of the journal (if it is a journal publication).
National science foundations usually have their own rules concerning scientific misconduct, and investigate cases where violations may have occured. This applies especially if the research was (co-)funded by such an organisation (check the acknowledgments of the paper in question, or it may have directly been your former source of funding), but some foundations also take this role more generally and may feel responsible if the scientist in question gets any money from them. An easy approach will be if the foundation in your country has a contact point for scientific misconduct. Otherwise you could ask the central administration there how best to proceed.

In any case, secure your documents. Drafts or analysis results that you sent to your former supervisor will probably be a very important proof of your claims.

Also, before you take any of these quite serious steps, it could be helpful to confront your former supervisor with the issue. You can clearly state that you see it as a case of scientific misconduct, and that you are willing to pursue the case with any accountable institutions such as the ones I listed above.


How to list the second edition of a book

Normally you would just give the bibliographic information for the most recent edition.  If you feel it's important to say when you first wrote it, you could add a parenthetical like (First edition published in 1987).

If the book was originally written by someone else, and you joined as a co-author on a later edition, then include a note like (Co-author for editions 5 and later).

This would be the same regardless of what stage of your career you are at, and as far as I know it would be the same in any field.


Should the PhD proposal be discussed and adjusted by supervisor and student before formal application?

You will probably join an existing work group, and work on the projects of the advisors. You will get some job that (somewhat) aligns with your interests (and competence), as asking for stuff you don't like and aren't competent in is just wasting a (valuable) position. Other than that, your thesis will be directed by their pressing interests, not yours. Laying out a detailed proposal as first contact is just a waste of everybody's time. You will work it out with them, eventually.


Do I have to ask a research advisor before sharing a technical report?

I haven't understood why you were hesitating.  You shared several reasons why it would not be a problem.  You made a convincing case that there would be no danger of some publishable results being scooped.

I suppose now that you asked Prof. Z's permission, with brief lead time, it could be awkward if you submitted it and then he wrote back subsequently to say no.  You could get around this, however, by writing again, to ask if he received your email, and to say that you would very much like to submit the report in your application, but will omit it if he notifies you by (date).  Put something like "time sensitive" in the subject line.

If you're asking just to satisfy your curiosity, sort of in hindsight, then my answer would be no, you wouldn't need to ask permission in the situation you described.


Programming languages in computer science / applied math academic journals

I don't know anything about Computational Methods in Engineering or Computational Intelligence and Complexity, but I can speak to the other journals.  Journal of the ACM publishes plenty of theoretical papers, and the others you list are all mathematics or theoretical CS journals (although note that the American Mathematical Monthly is not really a research journal).  Papers in these journals won't generally include code samples, and you can write a theory paper analyzing an algorithm without implementing it.  If you do implement it, any reasonable choice of programming language is fine, whichever you prefer.  A computer algebra system can be a good choice for a proof of concept, but it's really up to you.

Incidentally, you've listed a rather broad range of journals.  It would be a rare paper that could comfortably fit into all of them, so you'll eventually have to narrow the field.  Based on your comments about code samples and implementations, I also wonder whether less theoretical journals might be a better fit, but of course it's hard to tell without knowing more about the paper you're writing.


It's probably reasonable.  The teaching load for a full-time lecturer with no research responsibility tends to range between 10 and 15 units, equal to two or three 5-unit lecture courses, perhaps one more if some are 3-unit.  What constitutes a full-time load at any given school is largely dictated by the financial reality imposed by their average class size and, thus, the tuition revenue per course from which you and all the other expenses must be paid.  If their class sizes are really small, as they are at your school, they pretty much have to load up each instructor to make it work.


How to determine who is the PI and who the co-PI?

There are some significant issues that may influence the selection of a PI versus a co-PI or co-I. There are grants where eligibility requirements may vary, depending on whether someone is a PI versus a co-I. For instance, some programs may have a requirement that an investigator may apply for only one grant as a PI, but could act as a co-investigator on multiple proposals.

In addition, the PI will likely have additional reporting requirements or be responsible for ensuring the coordination of reporting for the entire team.

There might also be "programmatic" reasons for selecting the PI—for instance, if the program is designed to particularly support a particular kind of institution, having someone from that kind of institution as PI could be useful.

But, in general, there are so many different programs that, in the absence of more specific information about the program, it's hard to give any kind of general guidance about how to select a PI.


Why/how APA was chosen as a standard for many fields?

I am posting my reply as an "answer" because of its length and detail, but credit goes to Nate Eldredge and Andy Gillett (see below).
I agree with Nate Eldredge's comment (May 5 at 18:38):

I always assumed that APA saw the need for a standard style and
created one, and then other fields simply adopted APA's style because
it was good enough and less trouble than creating their own.

An English professor and professional writer (Andy Gillett) published a superb blog post in 2014 that provides the most thorough history of "APA Style" I've seen. The blog post is titled, "'The Harvard System' of referencing" (September 28, 2014).
Although the post's primary subject is the so-called "Harvard System", Gillett discusses APA Style at some length. For example:

The earliest version of the Publication Manual of
the American Psychological Association was a short, seven page guide
published in the Psychological Bulletin in 1929. This was followed by
a 32 page version by John E. Anderson and Willard L. Valentine in a
1944 issue of that journal. The first edition of the Publication
Manual appeared as a supplement to the Bulletin in 1952 and was 61
pages in length. It was revised twice prior to the publication of the
second edition (1974, with many reprintings).

Gillett also offers a nicely detailed list of the various iterations of APA Style. Here is the beginning of that list:

History of the APA Publication Manual

Instructions in regard to preparation of manuscript. (1929). Psychological Bulletin, 26, 57-63.

Anderson, J. E., & Valentine, W. L. (1944).The preparation of articles for publication in the journals of the American Psychological
Association. Psychological Bulletin, 41, 345-376.

American Psychological Association, Council of Editors. (1952). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association. > Psychological Bulletin, 49(Suppl., Pt. 2), 389-449.

Although Gillett's blog post doesn't necessarily provide a complete answer to question posed by TrivialCase, it provides more history, detailed information, and references than anything else I've been able to find.


Is participating in professional meetings helpful from a CV point of view?

The key factors here are that it's a contributed presentation (not invited) and it's in a huge meeting with many presentations of differing quality.  It sounds like you may be talking about the APS March meeting, but similar things are true in many other cases, such as the AMS/MAA joint meetings in January.

How valuable such a presentation would be on your CV depends on how far along you are in your career.  If you are coming up for tenure, then you'd better have far more impressive things to list on your CV, and presentations like this would be inconsequential.  (The only value on your CV would be in demonstrating continuing scholarly engagement if your job is almost entirely focused on teaching.)  If you are a college sophomore, then presenting at a meeting like this would be noteworthy.

To a first approximation, if you're an undergraduate then these presentations are worth highlighting on your CV (unless you are lucky enough to have something more impressive to emphasize), while if you're a grad student they are worth listing but probably won't be very important.  However, it's worth asking a mentor for personalized advice.


Accepted a job with a year-long deferral to do a prestigious postdoc. Now a better job came along

Be upfront, be polite, and be quick.
First make a decision if you really want to accept the second offer. If, so make sure you sign the contract with the institution that made the second offer. At that point, inform the institution who made the initial offer ASAP and let them know in the most polite way that you cannot follow through with the contract you have signed. It will be painful and embarrassing and there is no way to avoid this situation. Then you will feel relieved and can start with the new job.

The institution you dumped might still be able to contact other candidates who were shortlisted. I do not see any other way of handling this, other ways will involve making some excuse and later they would find out that you are at a different institution. Better be embarrassed now and save face later.


One approach is to have a number of clear learning objectives. For example:

  At the end of this course the student will be able to differentiate functions of a single variable.

Then for each of these provide a description of what it means to obtain each of the various grades available.

  F: The student does not grasp anything about differentiation.
  D: The student is able to differentiate simple functions.
  C: The student is able to differentiate many functions, but has difficulty with composite functions.
  B: The student is able to differentiate most functions and employ the chain rule.
  A: The student is able to differentiate all functions and can apply first principles.
  A+: The student employs novel approaches to differentiation.

Of course, you'd need to tailor these to your course and make them more precise than mine.

The learning objectives and the descriptions of what each grade means can be given to the student. A course may have different learning objectives, each with their own description. Your assessment can be tailored to measure the learning objectives based on these criteria.

The idea, apart from making your job of assessing more objective, is to replace scores by learning objectives, so ultimately the course will not be about scoring points, but learning.
You could even disassociate the grades from the learning objectives and replace them by unsatisfactory, satisfactory, good, very good, excellent, and fantabulous.


What is a good system for generating BibTeX reference keys?

Probably, the only general rule to follow is that the key should be something that well characterizes the document. Anything more specific will depend a lot on the topics you are writing about, and vary from reference to reference:

Is the title very unique, or rather generic? In the former case, a shortened version of the title could be integrated into the key. (As a random example: The title The triangle processor and normal vector shader: a VLSI system for high performance graphics might be shortened to something like TriangleProcHighPerf.)
Does the publication describe a product or technique that has a name (which you might also use in your text)? If so, that name could become a part of the key.
Is the publication connected to a recognizeable author name, or do you rarely see the same author name twice in the literature you deal with, in particular with respect to specific approaches? In the latter case, author names may just be arbitrary strings that do not help you remember anything particular, while in the former case, you might think about including the author name the work is associated with the name in the key.
Is the year in any way special for the work? For example, is it an exceptionally early example of a supposedly modern invention, or is it the variant that has become known as "the 2011-version" of a particular approach? If so, the year could reasonably be a part of the key, otherwise, it seems superfluous.
Can the publication be categorized? For instance, you may want to indicate in the key whether something is a concept draft, a user study of a concept presented elsewhere, a survey of several techniques, or a design rationale for a given concept.
Are there various versions of essentially the same work published by different publishers? Different layouts and presentation forms (monochrome vs. color, ...) may have different strengths, so you may end up wanting to specifically refer to (w.l.o.g.) the Springer version and the IEEE version of some work that for some reason was published twice. In that case, including the publisher name in the key might be reasonable.

I hope this helps to get the idea - I do not see a reason for a uniform key format here; instead, this case-specific format highlights the peculiarities of each referenced work and therefore seems to help best to remember which reference points to what work in my experience.

For me personally, the above system generally leads to keys that never include an author name or publication year, and almost always a concept name, otherwise some fragments of the paper title. Depending on your topics, you may well end up with different preferences.

I have never had a problem of key collisions while using this approach; if anything (not that it would actually cause any problem), I may have ended up with several different keys in cases where I created bibliography entries for the same publication several times rather than copying the first one to later works.

To summarize:

An advantage of this system is that you do not need to remember any information that is not descriptive for the content of the paper (publication year, author name, publication venue, ...) to understand the reference.
A disadvantage may be that the key cannot be generated automatically, though I use one .bib file per project and my workflow is usually decide to add reference -> search for reference in JabRef to check whether it is there -> add if it does not exist -> Ctrl+K to get insertion-ready \cite-command in the clipboard, where automatic generation of keys is a non-issue.


How to stay active in research when my faculty job involves mostly teaching and administrative duties?

Where do you expect the funding to come from? In my experience, in UK and other European countries, the research funding comes from successful proposals to the relevant funding bodies. There are research centres that were established and keep going only because the staff there constantly submits project proposals (somebody told me that the success rate is 1 out of 5 or maybe even lower).

You are on your own, so your best bet is to find out what funding bodies can sponsor research in you location. Then you have to come with an idea about a project but keep in mind that most often than not the funding bodies have priorities, which change on regular basis, e.g. every year, and it is VITAL that your proposal fits their priorities.

Whether you personally will have time for research is another matter. If your college is not very interested in research, you might have a heavy teaching workload and would be able to spend time on research during the breaks between the academic terms. You might have enough funding for one or more PhD students, who would do the majority of the work while you supervise them.

There is another option, which might be not applicable in your research field as you mentioned you need a lab but maybe part of the research could be done this way – find undergrad students, who are enthusiastic about your research ideas and would be happy to do some work for free (or as a part of their assessment – coursework, final year project, etc.). That is how I started my research career many years ago (as a 2-nd year student) – one of our professors invited several bright students from the courses he was teaching to take part in a very innovative research. We had the first results after a couple of months, which allowed the professor to secure funding for several further projects. Then we could buy more equipment, attend conferences, there were several PhD grants as well.


What is the percentage of Bachelor or higher degree holder that finish calculus 3?

The Conference Board on the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) is an umbrella organization representing the main mathematical sciences professional societies in the US.  They've done a series of surveys of undergraduate mathematics programs that include numbers of enrollments in courses at various levels.  The most recent published survey was from 2010.

See
 http://www.ams.org/profession/data/cbms-survey/cbms2010-Report.pdf

and the summary in chapter 1 of
  http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/cspcc/InsightsandRecommendations.pdf

Sadly, I don't see specific data on Calculus III enrollments.

However, there are about 300,000 students per year enrolling in mainstream Calculus I in the fall semester.  A smaller number start in the spring or summer.  Many of those students won't make it through Calculus I and II, much less enroll in Calculus III (at many institutions only a few STEM disciplines require Calculus III while other STEM disciplines and non STEM disciplines don't require it), and not all of these students will go on to complete bachelor's degrees.

So I'd be surprised if more than about 100,000 students per year graduated having successfully completed Calculus III.

For comparison, about 1.8 million students per year completed bachelor's degrees in the comparable time frame of 2010-2011.  Thus the percentage is small (likely less than 5%.)


You don't need an affiliation to publish. Independent Researcher or the equivalent is enough. You probably need an email address, but likely a professional one, separate from one used for personal things. That isn't really essential, but might be helpful.


Will publishing a paper hinder graduate admissions if errors are discovered?

Have the one you know check it out. If it has merit, they'll know who can look at it closer, and tell you what to do.

It is very probable that your proof s wrong, or contains holes. Even so, you learn something (and learned by working it out).


Can I cite a comment by a reviewer of a conference paper?

Can you cite this? Yes. Should you cite this? Probably No.

This source is a normal website which can be cited. How exactly you can do this depends on your citation style and type of document you are writing. Most likely, you must give the URL and also have to include the day when you accessed this website. You also may have to save/download the cited page since it may become unavailable. If in doubt, talk to your thesis advisor.

Nevertheless, citing a review might be a bad idea, depending on the intention of the citation. Compared with a usual scientific paper, a single review was not peer-reviewed and may contain incorrect information. Usually, you should be able to find the same information somewhere else in a better source.
If you give more information on what and why you want to cite this, better recommendations can be given!


Why should the scientific community avoid double submissions?

One possible answer is that the referee process of a paper is a very professional and time consuming job (at least I am sure it is in mathematics). Therefore it is not fair you submit your paper to several journals and make them to referee your paper by different experts and then you withdraw your paper just because your paper got accepted by another journal.


Potential PhD supervisor mentions potential co-supervisors in email. Should I contact them?

That depends on what else your Prof. said in the email - (s)he may have mentioned that they will initiate contact : in which case wait.

Or they may have said or implied for you to initiate formal contact (as they have already chatted over a cup of tea... and want to see how you handle it..!).

If the email is bereft of suggestions then perhaps the best is to ask your Prof. if you should go ahead and contact X and Y...


Is it possible to recover after completely botching my best chances to get a PhD?

(1) If you're in computer science, then even failing to get into a PhD program immediately after finishing your master's degree is not an insurmountable road block. There are even industry projects you can work on to improve your application.

(2) Yes, it is ultimately a roll of the dice. Some advisors are, in fact, just assholes who will ruin your career, and there's no amount of due diligence that will completely remove the chance of finding one. It's horribly unfair that a choice that will determine your career and entire life will depend on making a random die roll, but there's really nothing you can do about it; you have little power as a prospective grad student. (And don't expect much understanding or sympathy here; this board is mostly composed of people who have made that roll, and don't realize the amount of luck involved or that there was a die roll in the first place. The same remark applies to a wide variety of such die rolls in life.)

(3) Few people will say so explicitly, but yes. You have little power in the advsior/student relationship; and as a student (and not even one of his PhD students), you're probably beneath his notice. It is also massively unfair, but see point (2).


Enquiring PI about post-acceptance process of admission (PhD, Germany)

Should I mail PI requesting to let me know the status as some of the official things were halted (like visa application) from my side?

Yes (assuming that you are polite). In most, if not all, German science institutions, the administration is a separate department. It is very unlikely that your PI sympathises with them and in fact, most scientists in Germany I know are not on very good terms with their administration.

Moreover, your PI is much better equipped to spur your administration than you (and everybody else for that manner):

Its his research project that is delayed and possibly also his funds that are wasted.¹
He is usually higher-ranking than than the people handling your employment, though not their direct superior.
He is usually experienced with that specific administration.
He knows all the details of the process, because he started it.

Finally, he usually has an interest in things going smoothly for you. If your PI exhibits no interest in taking care of these matters, you should reconsider your decision to take this job.

The only exception from this may be if your PI’s group has its own secretary. Then it’s the secretary’s job to deal with such things and they are the best person to talk to.

  Generally how much time HR people will take to send this information to the candidates?

Administrations in Germany can strongly differ in efficiency, usually depending on their backlog. I did experience such a process to take longer than a month, but that was by an administration that has a nation-wide fame for its incompetency. Still, most administrations are capable of handling things quickly, if they want and need to – maybe they just failed to notice that you need a confirmation of your contract early for visa affairs.

However, there are certain inevitable durations. For example, depending on the circumstances, your employment may have to be ratified by some personnel board, which only meets at certain intervals.

¹ If all things fail, he can threaten to report himself to the authorities for wasting tax money.


Using mendeley and science papers from sci-hub in Germany

In Mendeley you can turn off file syncing if you'd like, by folder or for all files. Right-click any item under "My Library" (folder name, "All Documents", whatever you like), and choose Edit Settings from the context menu. You will be presented with settings that includes Synchronization options, including an option for "synchronize attached files", which you can turn on or off as it pleases you.

In terms of checking copyright or digital rights management schemes, I'm not aware of any reference manager that cares about this - but then back in the days of Napster (or even the early days of YouTube) no one cared either, right up until they suddenly did. The main difference is that most reference managers, including Mendeley, have extremely limited file-sharing ability, as well as limited space requirements, so they tend to be more like a cloud file backup service than a file-sharing service. Also, historically, "digital rights owners" disagreed that even having a digital file was legal at all, even if it was just a personal backup copy, and this made the 1990's a bit weird in retrospect - but should not be an issue with academic papers, which are mostly digital now anyway. And when services are only backing up files only you are using, and often accepting payment to do so, there is far less incentive for anyone to care about the provenance of the materials.

If you are concerned about the availability of the files in-case a service suddenly decides to start erasing files they can't establish you were licensed to obtain (which seems unlikely and technically difficult to achieve in any useful way, but I can't predict the future - and passing files around between colleagues and students/teachers is so common that it would be really disruptive to attempt), you can instead just have a system like Mendeley organize the files into a folder that you then backup/save with a backup service/system. But if you are concerned about being targeted for having such material at all, I'm not sure that just turning off a feature like sync would actually do anything to protect you at all, as there is no guarantee a software could not still scan files and report back to the mother ship whenever it pleased anyway. So I'll have to leave it to you to decide how big of a risk you think that is, and whether it is worth attempting to mitigate.


Skills gap for high-school to university transitions

In the US, the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks reflect academic skills that students should have before entering college.  Sadly many high school graduates don't meet these standards and end up in remedial classes to make up for their lack of preparation.


In the mathematical sciences, how much advisor contribution is expected on joint papers?

I disagree with the given answer by Buzz in a few ways, especially since it does not address one decisive part of the question:

  We've all tried to casually broach the topic of when coauthorship is expected or when solo authorship is okay, but we've mostly been met by blank stares and awkward subject changes.

If there is a justification for the advisor being included as an author, then why has it not been brought up by said advisor when being confronted by his students? It would perhaps be understandable if the author just didn't pick up on the subtle clues his students were giving him, but that does not seem to be the case as per the indications of 'awkward subject changes' and 'blank stares'. It seems that the advisor is simply trying to avoid talking about the issue. Why would he do that? It certainly indicates that something fishy may be going on here.

Then, the other answer asserts that nobody is less impressed by a student who always has her advisor as a co-author*. This is verifiably wrong, which you can prove, being a mathematician, by "contradiction": if nobody is less impressed by a student who publishes papers of a certain quality with her advisor, then a direct implication is that nobody is impressed more by a student who publishes papers of an equivalent quality independently of her advisor. This is wrong. It shows great promise to be able to do independent research as a young student.

But I hesitate to even make that point. This should not be about recognition but about a matter of principle: if your advisor did not contribute to the research (either through substantial amounts of guidance or by actively doing it) or the writing, your advisor is not an author of the resulting paper, and making him one is a direct lie.

In your situation, judging by your post, it seems clear that the students are doing all of the work (in fact, that's a direct quote from your post). If true, you should be worried, both by the ethical issues that exist if you continue this practice, and the potential aftermath (e.g, in regards to your relationship with your advisor) if you decide to take this further (which you should, but that's just an opinion).

Note that all of this is entirely dependent on the assumption that what's going on here is not normal. If it is, if advisors are usually co-authors on all their student's papers despite no contribution, if that is understood by everyone, then you are not lying, you will get all the recognition, and there's really no issue at all ... but how are you supposed to know whether this is normal in your field or cultural domain? We cannot really answer that for you without a bit more information. But your advisor can ... and this brings us full circle: why is the advisor not willing to explain to you whether this is normal?

*.. I now realize that I may have misread the other answer. It's not quite clear whether by "work" they meant "effort" or "actual quality of the mathematical content". Clearly, I took it to mean the former.


Effective way to deal with misuse of mobile devices in class

There is nothing new in what you describe. As a student who oft got bored during lectures, I have done some distracting things during them, even though I didn't have access to any electronic device at the time (I'm young enough that they existed, but it wasn't accepted practice to bring them to class). We did crossword puzzles (collaboratively), we played cadavre exquis, we read newspapers and discussed them, we flirted, we worked on other stuff, … What makes you think the situation you are experiencing is specific to mobile devices? The cause of the distractions is different from other situations, but I think the issue is the same and the solutions are, too.

So, what I would suggest is: warn your students that while what they do is their business, you expect that their behavior does not interfere with other's study or the general class atmosphere. Tell them that mobile devices are useful, but that they should be careful not to abuse them. Handle non-compliance as you would a typical incident: talk to them, give fair warning, but clearly set the limits and enforce them if it comes to that.


Submitting a previously rejected paper to a different journal

I have never known anyone to submit a mathematics paper and identify it as having been previously rejected by a journal.  (In particular, I have never done this myself, though I have resubmitted over a dozen papers.)  If a journal specifically asks for this information, then ethically speaking you should give it or resubmit elsewhere -- I would recommend the latter, since requiring this kind of authorial disclosure is exceedingly rare in mathematics (if indeed it is done at all).

I don't see any benefit to the authors in disclosing a previous rejection.  You write

  One reason to reveal the history of the paper is that it might be that the same referee will get to handle the paper again. And then there is a good chance of getting a second rejection. By doing this, I can at least make sure that the editors are aware of the situation.

I don't follow why you think that making the editors aware that the same referee previously rejected the paper will help: if the paper and status of the journal are not much different the second time around, then giving the same verdict seems to be appropriately consistent.

Also, in my opinion, that the referee did not seem to understand the paper very well makes it more likely that they were chosen by the first editor somewhat capriciously / randomly / badly, and thus the chance that they will be called upon again is small.  Getting a repeat referee is only likely when the referee is one of a very small number of experts in your subfield....but such an expert had better be able to understand your paper, or you have problems well beyond the scope of your question.

For completeness, let me say that I didn't find the argument against disclosure so convincing either:

  One reason not to reveal this is that the original journal is not considered "top tier" (and in fact many people raised eyebrows when they heard about the rejection). So by stating that I got rejected from a B-tier journal, I might be shooting myself in the leg.

In my experience, any journal can reject any paper, and the necessary meaning in any one instance of this is infinitesimal.  I know many mathematicians who like to tell stories about getting rejected from journal A and then getting accepted by better journal B.  Moreover, as I understand the editorial process [I am not a journal editor, but I know some and have discussed the edit flow with them] it is not even really clear where the piece of information that the paper had been previously rejected would be taken into account.  If the paper looks decent then it goes out to at least one referee.  Certainly the referees are not being informed that the paper has been rejected elsewhere before (unless they were themselves previous referees, but again, this has nothing to do with the disclosure).  In most cases the decision to accept or reject is made entirely based on the referee reports.  In some cases the editors exercise some additional scrutiny, but it doesn't sound plausible that at the end of this long process they would take the prior rejection into account.

The one case I can think of where this disclosure might matter is if the paper has the superficial look of being really faulty (this includes the case in which it is really faulty!).  If I were a journal editor, then upon hearing from an author "The Annals rejected my paper on the proof of the Goldbach Conjecture, so I'm submitting it to you" then I would think: well, if it was correct, the Annals would have published it.

Finally, I think you should pay more attention to the fact that you chose to pass along a second draft after "a couple of months."  Not getting a confirmation of that resubmission was a mistake -- it puts you in the position of having to accept a referee report on the old version no matter how much time has passed, and that sounds like it might have been what happened.  When it comes to submitting an "improved draft" before receiving a report, I advise doing one of the following:

1) Resubmit within a couple of weeks of the original submission, ideally before the referee has started reading the paper.

2) Refrain from resubmitting until after you receive the referee report, with the understanding that you may get dinged for problems that you already found and corrected.

3) Withdraw the paper.  Then submit the new version as a new submission -- either to the same journal or to a different journal.


Adding co-author for a revised manuscript

A revision to a manuscript is a chance to correct any issues raised in the original review. If you and your co-authors feel that adding a co-author would make the manuscript better, then it is of course acceptable to do so, absent explicit instructions to the contrary from the journal (although I am unaware of any journals with such rules).

However, you will also need to clearly explain in your cover letter to the editor why you added the co-author, and exactly what her contributions to the paper were.


PhD student as corresponding author: author list and logistics

The authorship order and corresponding author issues are separate, and I think considering them separately will make it much easier to address each of them. There is no need for the corresponding author to be in any particular position in the authorship order.

Yes, it can be common for the corresponding author to be last in fields with a "final author is senior author" convention, but that's by correlation, not causation: senior authors are both last and are often corresponding authors.

These days, I don't think the corresponding author role is important for much beyond submission and handling things with the editor. There are much better ways to find contact information for authors, such as their personal or institutional website. If you expect to still be at the same institution (or at a minimum still have access to your email) when the paper has gotten through the publishing process, I think it's not much of a problem for you to be the corresponding author.

In my field which has similar authorship conventions, "You*, Student, Advisor" seems appropriate to me.


Naming inconsistencies in booktitle fields of BibTeX entries provided by IEEEXplore

In general, the quality of Bibtex entries produced by the IEEE website is low. For instance, they do not properly escape capitals in titles nor diacritics in author names, and they do not identify names and surnames correctly. See for instance the Bibtex for this paper (found searching at random on their website), in which they did two of these mistakes and even forgot some HTML character codes in the title.

So it does not surprise me at all that there is also this inconsistency. I don't think they even bother checking, they just spew out whatever is in their database as a raw string. They put zero effort in them.


Recent data supported by media report, not by peer-reviewed article?

There are cases of course where a non-peer reviewed source is the authoritative source for a particular piece of information. I'd do my level best to track down if they have the raw data (including requesting it) but personally, if that's the best source available, it's the best source available.
I'd consider that preferable to ignoring data that exists in the world because it's from the "wrong sort of people".


To search for patents only, Google Patent Search, rather than Google Scholar, is the right tool for the job.


Choosing the right journal for your papers - the top journals or the one that you are a frequent guest reviewer?

If published in the former, the paper will be considered more valuable; while in the latter, I suppose, the manuscript might be easier to get accepted.

Fundamentally, I think your role as a "frequent guest reviewer" is fairly irrelevant to the question. If this is a real, non-spam journal, whether you reviewed for them in the past or not should not have a bearing on your chance of acceptance.

However, similar to every other researcher for every paper, you need to find the best trade-off between "competitive and high-impact" versus "less competitive, potentially lower impact" venues. In my experience, PhD students have a tendency to steer towards lower-impact venues to increase the chance of acceptance, while professors often advise for higher-risk venues. What is optimal for you is really not something that can be answered in a vacuum. However, you should think about the incentives of all involved persons to make an informed decision:

It is my impression that the reluctance of some PhD students to submit to top venues is grounded mostly in an overproportional fear of rejection and the associated delay - when you just started a few years ago, having to wait many more months or even years for your work to be officially published may appear prohibitively risky.
Conversely, as a professor, submitting primarily to the top venues can be the only smart move, as professors often are measured primarily or solely based on their best and most prestigious work (while, as a PhD student, just having reasonable papers alone may be seen as good enough, especially if you are not keen on staying in academia).
Similarly, you should evaluate for yourself why you are writing this paper. Will you be on the academic job market after your PhD? Then go for the most prestigious venue that you have any hope of getting into. Have you decided to move to industry? In that case, the career value of this high-impact publication may be smaller, and you need to seriously ponder whether you would not prefer a "safer bet" personally. Do you mainly want to tell the community and the world about your work? Then submit to wherever you think your paper will find most interested readers - this may or may not be the better journal.


Reviewers comments refer to last (senior) author

It is not uncommon. Reviewers must be aware of your professor's previous work and therefore, they refer to this work as Professor D et al. though you are the first author (A). However, if the reviewer is publishing his/her own paper, he/she will refer to this paper as A et al.
I have received comments like this the following "In this work, D et al. have confirmed the hypothesis they had proposed in the previous work of D et al. (J. Basket weaving, 2016)."
In any case, there is nothing to worry about. Reviewer's comments are meant to improve your paper and don't reflect on the work done by A versus work done by D.


Are there PhD programs that do not require letters of recommendation?

I've never seen a program not require a letter or recommendation when it comes to the US and I cannot speak for all other countries which can be found out by looked at other countries application process.

If there are legitimate reasons in which you would be unable to obtain a letter of recommendation or would receive one that would not help or even hurt your chances of acceptance I would talk to an adviser who is very familiar with the application processes because sometimes they don't always spell out alternatives to certain areas of the application process when it comes to rare circumstances.


Ethics of deadline enforcement under certain extenuating circumstances

Is it unethical for the professor to continue to enforce the deadline and associated penalty (significantly reducing student A's grade and grade average) under these circumstances?

First, I think it's quite misguided to frame this as an ethics question. If the professor is creating course policies and enforcing them in good faith, with the goal of achieving certain educational outcomes, then, even in the event that the professor makes a mistake or does something that most reasonable people would disagree with, it would be hard to argue that the professor is behaving unethically. Thus, the correct thing to ask IMO is not "is it unethical" but rather "is it appropriate" or "is it the right thing to do".

With that said, I think the best thing that the student in your question can do is argue her case to the best of her abilities and allow the professor to make a decision to the best of his ability, and respect whatever that decision ends up being. Bringing ethics and accusations of unethical behavior into the debate is counterproductive in my opinion and may backfire by causing the professor to become defensive and entrench himself further into his punitive position. Personally I think that given the student's lack of timely action to communicate the nature of the problem to the professor, which resulted in missed deadlines, enforcing the course policy would be a reasonable decision. On the other hand, making an exception to take into account the allegedly extenuating circumstances would also be reasonable. To my mind it's simply not a black and white issue.

As for the student's supposed difficulty to communicate with the professor because she likes him... well, not sure what to say about that. People have all sorts of difficulties in life, but ultimately the question is, is the student willing to make an effort and take proactive measures to overcome her difficulties so as to achieve the outcome she wants to achieve? If so, there are any number of steps she can take. She can write a letter instead of speaking to the professor in person. Or she can recruit a friend to come with her to a meeting with the professor and help her overcome her shyness or even speak on her behalf. Etc etc. It's all a question of will. And if she lacks the will to confront the problem, she has all my sympathy, but nonetheless I don't see that as an "extenuating circumstance" and she should not be surprised if the outcome is not what she wished it to be. In any case, best of luck to her.


Why do graduate student contracts state "RAs shall work no more than 20 hours per week?"

If you are working at a US University, they often do this in order to ensure that you are ineligible for benefits under the family and medical  leave act (fmla).  If you work over 1250 hours they have to provide you with additional benefits, which cost more than they are willing to pay for your labor.

http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/workhours/fmla.htm


Is there a university website that lists all books used/recommended per course in order?

No, there is no one single website holding book information for every university and course everywhere.

Each course will have some information that they consider appropriate located somewhere but it won’t be in the same location for all.


Can I ask a DST INSPIRE faculty for a recommendation letter?

In general, any mentor with good scientific or academic qualifications can be a good recommender.  It's always better to have somebody who can speak strongly about you, even if they're in a "non-standard" academic position.

That said, it's important that your letter-writer make it clear who they are and why their opinion should be taken seriously, especially when writing to an international recipient who may not know their system.  That might include explaining what a "DST INSPIRE" faculty position is, or it might just mean pointing at the letter-writer's own CV of scientific accomplishments.


Can I put my accepted paper on arXiv before it appears on the proceedings

The conference did not claim any copyrights!

Are you sure about this? Moreover, even without a copyright transfer or similar, you could have agreed to not having submitted or published the paper elsewhere. If exceptions are being made for publishing preprints, they are often explicit exceptions to clauses that forbid you publishing the article elsewhere, so this is where you should start looking.

If the proceedings are part of a series by some publisher, you may find relevant information on preprint publishability on RoMEO.

If you are still uncertain, you have to ask the conference organisers. I have no experience with such CS conferences, but if journals allow the publication of preprints, this is intentional. Thus I do not see any risk in asking the organisers.


Applying for research funding as an independent researcher?

Having only a MSc (and not doing a PhD) it might be hard to get an official research funding (although, there are many different programs and maybe there is one for someone with your status; especially if in some way you are still affiliated with an university of institute).

Sadly, (as Paul Hiemstra pointed out) there no such thing as a scientific freelancer. Science market is very far from an unregulated, free market (and the supply is higher than demands, so it is not a place for freelancer jobs).

However, there are two options which may make sense to you:

doing a part-time PhD, or some PhD where you are not expected to be at the univ. all the time; effectively, it may work for you (though, then it will need to be rather at a low-rank univ.; most likely the most important thing is to find a univ. with no to low teaching load + an advisor who does not care (sic!) or one who understands your situation and is willing to participate in such relationship),
considering crowdfunding - i.e. describing you project on a website and gathering from all interested people (like on Kickstarter); here is a list of sites for crowdfunding in science (then it is not from government).


Include Disability in Statement of Purpose

Mentioning your disability in your statement of purpose can be helpful to faculty.  Often faculty are trying to ensure there are opportunities for students with disabilities.  To do that, they need students with disabilities to identify themselves.


Should my class be more rigorous, and how?

You are asking the question incorrectly. The grades alone don't tell whether the course is too easy. After all, upper division students have already proven themselves in earlier courses and the ones still there should be better "on average" than those in the first courses.
To improve the question, ask yourself what it is necessary for students to actually gain and know from your course. Ask how you are measuring that. Ask whether the students, by your own measurement techniques actually have demonstrated that knowledge. If the answer is that they are learning the material then giving out lower grades "on average" just disadvantages many of them for no reason at all.
But if their answers on exercises or exams indicate that they aren't learning the material then it might be that higher grades is disincentivizing them to study hard. In that case you need to provide proper incentives. That might be things that lower the average, but it might be other things as well.
For some, but not all students, a bit of "stick" will get them moving. For others, carrots are much more effective.
But the point of it all is learning, not grading. If your grades don't measure learning then you have a bigger problem than you think you do.
But the main question is answered by comparing your syllabus to the requirements of the course and the field and making sure that you are fairly measuring that the students are able to demonstrate competence.
And, if you do conclude that it needs to be more rigorous, then the ways to improve things is to give more assignments, readings, exercises, whatever, depending on the field. Make them harder, require better solutions, etc. Learning requires hard work, just as does excellence in, say, athletics.


Deciding whether to study abroad or continue at my current university for my PhD, what factors to consider?

One big advantage of changing schools is that you meet new people.  Most people have a few things they're really good at.  By meeting new people, you get to learn the new things that they are really good at.  More generally, you get to experience the culture of a different place and group of people (both academically and socially).  This helps to give you a more developed sense of what is normal (reasonable to expect), and likely will expose you to new insights.  All else being (close to) equal, I suggest that you move.


Reviewing papers at a journal where your own work is currently submitted

I think this is normal.

  Because of the power imbalance

I think the power imbalance is a bit overstated here. Editors want good papers for their journal; a good editor is not primarily just farming out the job of peer review with as little effort as possible.

If I...

1) submitted a paper,

2) received a request to review a paper,

3) denied that request for good reason, and then

4) had my paper rejected by the editor,

...either those outcomes are unrelated and the paper should be submitted elsewhere, or the journal is crap and the paper should be submitted elsewhere.

  it seems as though the author might feel compelled to agree to review the paper even if they didn't otherwise want to.

I think this is not really a very crucial ethical issue, although I am not in mathematics where maybe the burden of review is greater. Certainly if this compelled someone to review a paper they were not qualified to review, that would be a problem, but I don't see this being a substantial issue.

If you are submitting papers you should also be reviewing them. If all papers were single-author papers, then the number of papers you review should be greater than the number you submit. If a journal is in your area of study such that you submit papers to it, you are among the people in the best position to review other submissions applicable to that journal.

  Or maybe they will feel an instinct to say the paper is terrible if they believe fewer other papers being accepted might increase their own chances

I can see this being an issue for grants where there is a limited pool of money and a zero-sum game. I don't know of any journal where it is a practice to rank order articles and then reject one for publication because it wasn't the 12th best article submitted this month. Journals just don't operate on that time scale, and if a journal did decide to be more or less permissive due to overall submission and acceptance rates, that would be over a longer time scale than the review of a single paper.

In summary, feel free to feel annoyed: feelings don't necessarily require justification. However, I don't think there is an ethical violation here.


A few students requesting to cancel lectures due to their personal reasons. What should I do?

If you do this for a minority, then you will have to do it every time a few students have some excuse.

I suggest that you don’t consider this and make it clear that if they miss lectures then it is up to them to catch up on material.

Providing double or triple repeats of lectures due to a few absences, especially if unpaid, is not a good use of your time.

Some students will want to rationalize their choices and make sure which they attend - some workshops can be valuable. If you think one workshop is very worthwhile then you could consider re-scheduling for all, but that depends on your schedule, and yes, I have done this for similar reasons involving the majority.

Based on a comment>
I always provide the material used in class - notes & worked example on Moodle as well as further practice problems (some 10 to 20 for each topic with solutions) for those who attend as well as those who do not.


How to prepare for a (PhD or PostDoc) admission procedure?

I'll start with some steps prior to yours in the interest of making the answer more generalizable:

Determine which universities to apply to. This will involve weighing factors such as ranking, faculty members, student opinions (from online discussion sources like this one or face-to-face discussions), sub-field specialties, and location, among others. You can prepare for this by looking all this stuff up:

US News & World Reports rankings for graduate programs is a good ranking system; there may be better ones I'm not familiar with.
Check the department's faculty page (example) for each university to see broadly-defined research interests for faculty members. Some people will explicitly list whether they're taking on new graduate students or not.
If you know anyone in the field, talk to them to see which universities/professors/labs would be good to check out.

Determine which lab to apply to. This will involve a lot of the above, but specifically it will involve talking to graduate students. This question covers that topic in pretty good depth.
Read up on the fundamentals of the topic you're interested in. I would suggest you be familiar with the field enough to ask a basic question about it. In my field, review papers would be a great resource for this, although I will admit that it may be hard for you to find a good one. Speak with one of the subject matter librarians in your university (i.e., if engineering, talk to the librarians in the engineering library) and ask them to help you find recent review papers on your topic.

I'll concede this is a difficult task, but being able to ask even simple questions about the field shows familiarity, and will make you look better during the interview. I recall some of my graduate school interviews where I just sat there, almost completely unfamiliar with the lab's research topic, and I felt very foolish indeed.
All the stuff in the question you linked to above.

At this point, most of your work is already set in stone; your undergraduate grades are set, your summer internships are complete, you finished the GRE, and it isn't likely you can do anything for your professors at this point to improve your recommendation letters. Just focus on the labs themselves and learn as much as you can before making decisions.


Include unrelated patent on publication list

Yes, you should list it. Even if you had an otherwise rich CV it would still be proper to list it.

Your application needs to make your best case for acceptance and any IP contributions show evidence of quality research. People understand that patents are hard to obtain.

Your application otherwise will show mostly work in progress, which is fine, but work completed is also a good indicator. You might want to explain your change of fields if that is relevant also, or, at least be prepared to discuss it.


A major journal in my field is published by Elsevier. How can we move the field to a less objectionable, more open publisher?

As a publisher who has launched an OA journal and seen what it takes to do so, I see the biggest problem for starting any journal being lack of an Impact Factor (IF). I've polled authors at ECVP and about 90% said IF is what determined where they submitted. Everyone knows why this is, so why don't academics turn inward and try to undermine this reliance on IFs? Doing so would insert true competition into the journals market. Maybe academics have tried to do this, though I've never read of any real substantial attempts. I could be wrong. The second problem after IF and before funding is loyalty. Ed board members are often tied to multiple journals and in those first few years you really need those big names on your board to commission for the journal. Big names often care more about another journal or just don't care.

You need a publisher, be it nonprofit or profit, that can put in the work to promote the journal and help commission. Financially, OA journals are very easy to start. Subscription journals require more financial backing, which perhaps could be gotten through grants if you don't want to be tied to a commercial publisher. The answer is long and requires lots of discussion and more important, commitment.


How dificult is it to get into a PhD program years after quitting another?

It will be very difficult indeed.

Having a second-class undergraduate degree I was unable to get any PhD position and was advised to take a Masters course to improve my grade. If you fail the PhD or abandon it then you will find it almost impossible to get a funded place again - you would need to fund yourself, and to demonstrate successful completion of whatever you did in between. You might be successful if you had to withdraw early on for health reasons, but not as late as the 5th year. I presume that you are already past the usual finishing date, which in itself is a negative indication.

You will do far better to apply for an extension or a suspension of studies. You will have to re-register every year but this could give you the time you need to reassess what has gone wrong and how you can steer your PhD to a successful conclusion.

The starting point is to have a thorough discussion with your supervisor and the tutor in charge of the PhD programme (assuming they are not the same person), to discuss the options. If at all possible avoid taking a major break because it can be a huge obstacle to get back into it, and the field will move on while you are away so that your research becomes less relevant and harder to "sell".

In the end you just have to grit your teeth and get the work done, regardless of how dissatisfied you are with the outcome. Lack of a PhD may not make a difference in your current job but it will make a difference to your career progression, and will probably close off options of moving into an academic career later on.

The fact that you have a job might be a distraction which is keeping you from completing your PhD. It might be better to ask your boss for 3-6 month of unpaid leave to complete your PhD, or at least get it back on track.


Can graphics created with Wolfram Mathematica be freely used and distributed?

There is nothing wrong with making public an image created with Mathematica; that's the whole point of the software. The license restricts your rights regarding what you can do with the software package itself (no copying, reverse-engineering, selling, etc), but not the content you produce using the software. If that was the case, no one could use the software to do anything.

You may, however, be restricted by the journal to which you submitted your article. The publication holds all rights to your article, including the figures. You may retain some rights to using the images in your own work (e.g., presentations); you'd have to check with your specific journal.


Is the status of postdocs perceived differently in western Europe vs. North-America?

The big difference is that most places in Europe don't have a tradition of assistant professorship, or, more generally, tenure-track faculty. Here's an example of the "typical" career progression of an academic in Austria (durations can vary by a lot, I just give examples here for illustration purposes):

Phd Student (4 to 5 years finished with Doctorate)
Postdoc (6 to 10+ years finished with habilitation / venia docendi)
"Privatdozent" (undefined length, non-tenured position, somewhat comparable with a non-tenured associate professor)
Full Professor / Chaired Professor (tenured position).

Note that there is no assistant professorship, and (2) that no tenured position before Full Professor exists.

Clearly, in this system there are postdocs with many years of experience in their field. They often have developed their own small group, work very loosely with a faculty mentor or completely independently, have their own funding and supervise PhD students that are "quasi" theirs (postdocs are not formally allowed to supervise PhD students before habilitation, but it is common practice that the mentor of the postoc formally supervises the postdoc's staff without involving her/himself much in the actual process). These postdocs are often considered assistant professors, even going so far as to call themselves assistant professor on their web pages and business cards despite not actually being professors de jure.

The general takeaway is that being a postdoc in Europe may have higher status than in the US, but it is not true for every postdoc. As postdoc status can last a very long time in Europe, one needs to look very closely at the person himself to see how senior she/he actually is.


Is it ethical for a PI to tell university to pay out intern's salary for an extra month after internship ends, and keep the money?

The person who owns the money for a project is not the PI, nor even the university, but the funder who has supplied the money.  The university, and through that organization the PI, is essentially granted custody of the money, and it is their responsibility to ensure that it is disbursed to the appropriate persons in compliance with their contract and the rules of the funder and university.

What you have described is pure and simple embezzlement, and needs to be reported to a responsible authority.  It's possible you misheard, but if you're certain about it, you have a duty to report, or else you are aiding and abetting the embezzlement.

Now, how to report safely is a potentially difficult issue.  If there are people in the university administration that you can trust to take action, that would be one route.  In the United States, you can also often report directly to the funder, often including through an anonymous hotline designed for just such occasions.


Is it okay to grade some students harder because of their perceived potential?

It is legitimate if, in a single course, there are two "classes" of students taking the course for different forms of credit (such as a course with undergrads taking the course for undergrad credit and grad students taking the course for grad credit, or majors taking a course with students majoring in something else), it is legit for the prof to deliberately and transparently hold the different "classes" of students to different standards.  This should be made clear to students registering for the course and should be made clear on the first day and on the course syllabus.

The best and most legitimate way to make this distinction is, even if the course is taught together with the same prof, is for the different "classes" of students to register for, what appear to be different courses with different course numbers in the school catalog or schedule.  So seniors would be registering for ECON 458 and grad students would be registering for ECON 558.  The "two" courses happen to be about the same topic, meet in the same room at the same times, are are taught by the same prof.  But that prof can assign assignments to the students expecting grad-school credit that is not assigned to the undergrads.  And that prof can apply a stricter measure of performance to the grad students.

Other than that, the same standards should be applied to every student throughout the course.