Why are conference papers so important in computer science (CS)?

I'm afraid this answer may be unsatisfying, but at its root, it just boils down to the culture of the field, as determined by early choices in its particular history.  Now that it is well established, practices have developed that cement it in place, including clear distinctions between what goes in a journal and what goes in a conferences.

Michael Ernst has a very nice write-up of the typical way a computer scientist thinks about conferences vs. journals.  In short:

Conferences are fast, higher status, higher selectivity, and higher visibility.
Journals are where you put a review article or a final "extended version" of a paper (the typical threshold is "at least 30% new material").

Journals are also important for getting tenure at lesser institutions, which apply the same standards to biologists and computer scientists.  This also further lowers the perceived status of journals, since the best departments are less motivated to publish there than the worst.


How to get recommendations for PhD program when outside academia

Who did write you the recommendation letters for the first PhD? Maybe you could use them again. I think there is nothing wrong in using recommendation letters from industry, in any case. I was in the industry when I started my PhD and I showed my boss' recommendation letter, but my field is not math but physics.
On the other hand, I agree with people that recommend you to try a post-doc instead of a second PhD.


The Carnegie Foundation gives 6 types of criteria:

Undergraduate instructional program
Graduate instructional program
Enrollment profile
Undergraduate profile
Size and setting
Basic classification

There are many factors involved--for instance, geographic region and percent of full time students are factors in 5 and 4.  I don't think semester versus quarter system is too important.  See the link for descriptions of these criteria.

There also seem to be a couple of Chronicle articles about selecting peer institutions:

http://chronicle.com/article/in-selecting-peers/134228/

http://chronicle.com/article/Who-Does-Your-College-Think/134222/

however I can't access the Chronicle website right now, but did find this other article which discusses the first Chronicle article linked:

http://theairspace.net/commentary/u-s-colleges-name-their-own-peer-institutions-rank-themselves/


Is it acceptable to refer to theories to support an argument?

Are theories more than just names for ideas?

No, they are just names for ideas.

  Can any person coin a new theory, or is there some process by which a theory gains recognition and support before it is deemed a “theory”?

Anyone can coin a new theory, and the term “theory” does not imply any special status.  For example, the flat earth theory is a theory, just not a good theory.  As a general rule, people don't spend much time talking about theories unless they are valuable or controversial.  If you make up a new theory without some real insight, probably everyone will just ignore it.  But that doesn't mean it's not a theory - it's just not a useful or interesting theory.

  Can I really cite theories to add support to my papers?

Part of the point of citing these theories is to show how your work fits into the field.  You are engaging with and responding to certain ideas, refining or extending some of them and correcting or refuting others.  It's important to describe these ideas in a recognizable way, so readers will see the context for your work and can better understand what you mean.  Sometimes the best way to do that involves referring to named theories.  If you can explain how these theories help justify your conclusions, then that will add support for your ideas.  (You're taking advantage of the fact that many experts already understand and agree with these theories.)

Another factor that may be relevant in graduate papers is proving that you understand these theories and can explain how your work is related to them.

  While writing various graduate papers, my professors have often asked me to cite various named theories to support my arguments.

I'd strongly recommend discussing this with them.  People on the internet can offer general comments, but only your professors can tell you exactly what they are looking for and why.


Does all computer science research involve heavy usage of mathematics?

The sad truth is that you absolutely don't need CS for most practical programming tasks.

But without a CS degree, you will have nearly zero chance for the better programming jobs.

Furthermore, without a high-level math/cs knowledge, your mental skills remain significantly under-developed, compared to your own possibilities or to the ones who actually got this degree.

The sad truth is, that the job of a programmer, the ability to write a program what a customer pays for, is hard, but it is an absolutely different type of knowledge, like to know the math of the General Relativity. This truth is so sad, so catastrophal, that you will likely spent some decades of your life, whining on it. But it is the truth.

CS, its math, yes it is such a knowledge. For example, to understand, why there is no such thing as "best compressor" (more exactly: there is, but there is no program what could implement it), is a similarly complex and interesting knowledge, like cutting edge physics. But you absolutely don't need this skill to be a well-going programmer selecting freely between well-paying jobs.

This is how the world works. You can fight it, you can whine on it. I did both of them, decades long.... and I never became a scientist, only a programmer.

These fights and these tears are yet before you.

My advice would be this: learn that math, and get your degree. So:

you will fight
you will whine
you won't ever use it
and you won't be ever a scientist.

But

you will be a better man
you will be a smarter man
you will be able to choose freely between well-paying programmer jobs.

Believe me: if you do this now, you will be pride for that in your whole life. Despite the lifelong pain of your never reached goals.


How does one become a multi-disciplinary researcher?

To answer the general question: You can be a interdisciplinary researcher by getting multiple degrees in different fields, getting a single interdisciplinary degree, or by getting a degree in one field and, over the course of your career, working your way into another.

Most academic jobs are hired by departments, and the wide majority of departments are single-disiplinary, though interdisciplinary programs are fashionable right now.

To be a marketable researcher in a given discipline, you would generally need at least a phd in that discipline, possibly a interdisciplinary phd that centrally involved it (marketability depends a lot on the specific interdisciplinary program, but in general, these will be less appealing than an phd in the actual discipline), or, in very rare cases, a a phd in a different discipline but VERY extensive research in that discipline. When it comes to the latter, things are probably more flexible in the humanities than in the sciences, and often only in one direction (ex. there are philosophy phds in rhetoric departments, but not rhetoric phds in philosophy departments). In general, you need to be able to  teach introductory courses in that discipline as well as in your particular area.

Some universities do have particular interdisciplinary departments or other interdisciplinary lines, but these are in established interdisciplinary subjects—cognitive science, peace studies, asian cultures, environmental studies...

There are also "cluster hires," where universities look to give a researcher appointments in multiple departments for work on topics like diaspora studies and agroecology that are appealing to administrators but too small to support entire departments. Cluster hires are rare and are not something you can plan a career around.

There are no lines for unspecified "interdisciplinary" researchers. You need to be able to market yourself under a specific discipline or under an established interdisciplinary program. In general, the latter will be harder.


Does the school or the student cover health insurance for PhD students in the US?

This varies tremendously from one university to another.  At some institutions you're on your own to buy insurance through the exchange. At other institutions the university pays for insurance for students and their families as part of the compensation for teaching/research assistants, similar to the way in which staff are insured.  It's important for students to understand exactly what is being offered as part of the TA/RA package.

Some institutions that used to offer low cost/low benefit insurance plans to students have had to stop offering those plans because they weren't compatible with the ACA.


Where to find literature on Cosmology, Astrophysics and Astroparticle Physics?

The most comprehensive source of literature in astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology is NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)


How can I avoid the requirement of using friends or acquaintances to complete coursework?

I agree that this concrete instance is somewhat problematic, but as usual it's a sliding scale. In practice, there are certain learning objectives where you as a student can't help but interact with the outer world, which usually requires them to spend some amount of time or work on your course work.

To give another real-world example, for a teacher's education course on diversity I am currently doing I was recently asked to interview an international student w.r.t. their experiences at our university. This required me to find an international student who was willing to commit 30 - 60 minutes of their time to talk to me about diversity. I found this assignment quite reasonable, as it's clear to me that the general learning objective underlying this exercise can't really be achieved differently.

For me, the difference between your example (which I agree is problematic) and mine (which I think is not) is that in my example, the student did not actually have to do any "work" alone and by themselves. They did not write or submit anything, I actually had to do all the work related to writing up the analysis and report. The student "only" had to commit the time, which is not nothing, but the barrier is certainly lower than if the student had to, say, write a report themself.

  Assuming I was the student in question and asked to find reviewers for my game demo, what is the best way to refuse?

I would ask the teacher whether you can also do the assignment in the way that you as the student make a few review videos with your friends. Basically you would still do the assignment, but you would take over all the "work" of making, editing, and uploading the videos. Your friends would only need to commit the time to look at your game and speak their thoughts into your camera. This would sound like a sensible compromise to me, while accomplishing the same learning objectives for you as a student.


Gaining software skills after PhD. Is it possible to achieve it in 6 months?

Yes
Barring exceptional circumstances, this should be possible.
It depends, of course, on a few things:

How much time you have (e.g. hours per week that you can spend on studying)
What resources you have at your disposal (some courses are for free, others are not, and of course you need the appropriate hardware)
What is meant by "tangible results"
How fast you learn

There are many courses that teach machine learning in python. Here is a list of some courses, most have a duration of 3-6 weeks, with 3-8 hours per week. This blog entry lists free courses that focus on specific python libraries that are useful for machine learning. I checked the contents of a few, and they consisted of a series of video lectures, with only a couple of hours in total length.


Should I be an author on another PhD student's paper if I went to their meetings and gave advice?

Actually, I think you should relax and take your advisor's advice. Collaboration is a good thing, and it is a two-way street. You give a bit and you get a bit. I assume you got an acknowledgement in the paper for your help. I don't think it would be appropriate if you weren't. But authorship is a different thing.

You contributed ideas. Research seminars are often organized to give ideas to researchers but the members don't become co-authors in the normal case.

Congratulate your colleague and, as your advisor suggests, spend your effort on your own work, not raising an objection to someone else's.

But, it is good that you contributed ideas. Do that a lot and you will have a lot of people willing and happy to work with you. Occasionally you may need that help.

Pay it forward.


You describe an existing system, analyze it, and compare it with similar systems. If any of that is novel, your work is publishable, otherwise, you might be able to publish your work as a tutorial.


How to share responsibility for part of my advisor's project, which I did not create and I am insecure about?

One question additional question I've got, you state you're not funded under the funded proposal. Does that mean you came to your advisors group with your own funding or are you being paid by the department to TA or something related?

I ask this because the above two funding situations for a PhD student means the advisor is free to spend what would otherwise have been your salary on materials, equipment, or other personnel. But your efforts can still be attributed to the project. So unless your source of funding is conditional on publishing, I wouldn't worry about how the various things you're working on are funded.

That said, if you find your current efforts interesting and exciting, stick with it and try to align your research plan with it. As a first year PhD student, you have the time to spend developing an apparatus(you've got 3 or so years extra over postdocs or masters students). And if you do get the apparatus setup and working, that sets you up as the person in charge of the equipment, paving the way for collaborations.

Though I would advise you to do your best and layout a timeline for your advisor, and make him aware of your timeline. If he wants faster results you can always suggest the intermediate steps such as your hunch(nothing beats experimental results), or ask for assistance from the more senior members in your group.


When will the authors be listed alphabetically?

In mathematics authors are almost always listed in alphabetical order. This works, among other reasons, because work groups are organized less by a lab structure so you get more rhetoric of equality between all authors.


Why do math/physics professors publish textbooks?

Does it help their tenure case to write an expository textbook?

While I cannot speak for math or physics, in many of the biological and medical sciences, it would likely actively hurt your tenure case. "Why did you spend your time writing a book instead of getting more grants/writing more papers?"

  So why would a professor, say an aspiring full professor, write a textbook?

There are a few reasons one might be interested in writing a textbook:

You have, effectively, already written one. Many professors, having taught a course for a number of years, have accumulated a body of lecture notes, slide figures, exam questions, etc. that might be the foundation for a decent text on the subject. Writing a book is a way to get "credit" for all that.
There is no book on the subject you're writing, and you want one.
Writing a well-regarded textbook is a means to influence the direction of the field. For example, if you wanted to push a particular perspective on how one should approach the field, etc. writing a textbook on the topic is a way to do that. Again, not in math/physics, but in my field people are writing textbooks with either a causal inference or systems science bent to them to try to help push those methods forward.
Simple desire. Books are neat. They feel important. Many people are rather fond of them as objects. Seeing your name, and your thoughts, in a proper book on a shelf is an appealing concept. That may be enough.


Is it legal to upload preprint on ResearchGate?

As one of the other answers says, typesetting is completely irrelevant--the question is whether or not you are authorized to upload the content.

The RoMEO website has documentation on the precise legal authorizations of every major journal publisher, and of an extensive list of journals. You can consult it to quickly confirm what exactly the journals you've published in authorize you to do.

Their information is not always 100% accurate, but it's above 95% accurate. I've sent them corrections and they are quite conscientious to update their information, and they usually have direct links to the publishers' copyright statements so that you can verify what they say.

I will note though, that a very large amount of the time, it is not authorized to upload to general repositories like ResearchGate, Academia.edu, SSRN or arXiv (depending on the journal). If you want a safe place to load your articles, the most commonly authorized places are your personal website or your institution's open access repository.


How to mention possible mutual interests when applying for a job?

Imagine for a moment that Dr A doesn't want any help and would see you as competition. Would leaving off your knowledge of and interest in T help prevent Dr A from suggesting they hire someone else? I doubt it.

Now imagine that you include mention of topic T but don't mention Dr A. Perhaps they will think "this applicant doesn't even realize we have a world expert on T here already!"

Suggesting you can help Dr A may be a bit presumptive. But saying that you love topic T and are already working on it, and that the presence of Dr A in the department is one of the reasons you want to come to this group? That sounds very positive to me.

Is there a reason you aren't contacting these Dr As directly and saying "I'm thinking of applying to your department because I'm so excited about topic T; do you have any advice for me?" That seems like a good use of your time if the number of Dr As is reasonably small.


Can postdocs in the United States apply for funding to support undergrad/MS/PhD students?

The answer depends on the funding agency. Some agencies only require a PhD for the PI, in which case it's certainly possible, although it can be difficult to secure funding with only a postdoc as PI. (Many such proposals might have a more senior scientist as co-investigator.)

Other programs have specific requirements that the PI hold a more senior position, such as a tenure-track position, in which case a postdoc could not apply as the primary or sole or investigator.


Supervisor/advisor ignores me regarding my paper

There are many reasons why people can miss an email; a likely possibility for busy people is that your email simply got buried under many others. So, don't assume he's trying to ignore you, and you should first bug him again (politely) about that.

It is also a good idea to start writing the paper on your own: your supervisor will be much more willing to help you improve a first outline or even a draft than to start from a blank page.


You are allowed to improve a manuscript during review in areas other than what the reviewers specified!

Just make sure that you call attention to the changes and explain why you made them somewhere in your response to the reviewers.


How to search private annotations in Mendeley?

You CAN search your notes from the library/folders page (searches all notes for all documents) by selecting "Notes" on the drop-down menu in the search box. I don't know why you can't search notes from within a specific file.


Site with statistics of publications/citations per country?

I think what you are asking can be carried out using Web of Science. I used address == "Canada" for the past 5 years, and immediately had published records for 241, 711 articles! You can ask for a citation report, which provides the information that Scimago has at the top. I think the issue you'll face is the sheer volume of data you're asking for. Even limiting the category to "ecology" (my field) yields over 3000 articles.

Of course, this answer won't be much use if your university doesn't have access to WoS.

The other thought I had was using Harzing's Publish or Perish (http://www.harzing.com/index.htm) which uses Google Scholar data. I tried a direct google scholar search, but can't immediately see how to limit it to articles published by people in the country as opposed to being about the country.

I hadn't heard of Microsoft Academic Search (see comment by Gopi) - so I had a look. The short answer is yes, it will show you publications by geographic region, but you have to go in by institution. You can get a google scholar like list of papers - and export those in various formats, but I only found the export option at the level of individual author.
For example, Université du Burundi has 16 publications by 5 authors, with an H-index of 4.
Pretty cool map though.


Do journals need to save all publication-relevant communications

Journals do not have any legal obligation to store all documents associated with the review process. While many do store them in the electronic system, these systems are still relatively new. I have never heard discussions about record archiving polocies. Further, when journals switch review systems, the records are sometimes lost.

Of course, you have access to all these documents, and should use whatever archiving policy you think is relevant. I tend to save all the documents. I have paper files for my older manuscripts and purely electronic files for newer manuscripts.


What happens if you don't enjoy your research partially through your degree?

First of all, as @ff524 points out there is a world of difference between a master's program and a PhD program.  If you don't understand the difference, then you know too little about graduate school to be thinking about it any meaningful way.

In the US a math master's degree takes about 1-2 years and is not a prerequisite for a math PhD program.  (In fact, although some students can use a strong performance in a master's degree to "launder" their academic record and gain admittance to a solid PhD program, in most cases enrolling in a master's program signals a much smaller commitment than enrolling in a PhD program.)  In Canada it seems to take a bit longer: 2-3 years, and up until recently it was viewed as a prerequisite to getting a PhD.  (Things seem to be changing a bit, although still probably the majority of Canadian math PhD students have done separate master's degrees, which adds to the total time to get a PhD).  Getting a PhD in either Canada or the US takes 4-7 years; I believe 5 years is the most frequent number though the mean is higher.   Moreover a PhD is the required certification for a future academic career in mathematics (it used to be that a master's degree let you teach at 2 year colleges, but that is rapidly ceasing to be the case in the current job market).  The purpose of a master's degree in mathematics is much more fluid...or it may serve no purpose at all.  You should know that the lowest common denominator for master's degrees in math is indeed very low: it is well known to US graduate programs that an undergraduate degree at a top institution with good grades is usually better than a master's degree at a mediocre institution.

It is fairly easy to "weather through" a master's degree in mathematics, even if your level of interest wanes in the middle (because there need not be much middle, in part).  If you have some specific career goal for which a master's degree in mathematics would be advantageous -- e.g. high school teaching -- then not being unilaterally devoted to mathematics is not a serious obstruction.  By contrast, if you are not interested in mathematics almost to the exclusion of other academic fields, then a PhD program in mathematics is probably not for you.  (Certain branches of applied mathematics are exceptions to this, but the vast majority of students who do a PhD in a "mathematics department" are not that applied.)

  Right now, I have the freedom to take other, non-maths courses (I'm minoring in film, for example). Will this freedom continue in grad school?

Technically yes -- graduate students are allowed to enroll for courses in any department just like undergraduates.  In practice: the freedom will be severely restricted.  If as a graduate student you take a course outside of your department then you should expect to be asked to explain its relevance to your mathematical course of study.  Thus it is relatively common to take language courses and courses in related fields (cs, physics, statistics...).  You should probably not be taking "elective" courses -- e.g. if you took a course in film, it would have to be strongly skewed to the technical aspects of image production / reconstruction / whatever or you will probably find yourself having to defend doing something that interferes with your research.

Moreover, theoretical mathematics (and some branches of applied mathematics) is one of the least interdisciplinary of academic fields.  If you want to work on logic, then you may well find an expert advisor or co-advisor in the philosophy department -- but nevertheless you should expect your work to be at least 90% mathematics.  There must be a few math PhD students who take more than a small handful of philosophy courses...but I have never met any.

All in all: you should not seriously consider a PhD program in mathematics unless (i) you are single-mindedly, passionately devoted to mathematics or (ii) you have a very specific career goal for which a PhD in mathematics is beneficial, and your plan has been vetted as reasonable by multiple trusted mentors.  If you like but don't love mathematics as you are completing your undergraduate degree, plan on continuing to read, learn and perhaps do mathematics after you graduate, at your own pace...as a hobby.


Feasibility of Study in Cuba for U.S. Undergraduates

Ignoring the issue with obtaining a license to visit Cuba, I would say the feasibility of a US undergrad being able to study in Cuba is quite low. International study in a third world country is difficult and Cuba presents even more problems for US citizens. US credit and debit cards do not work in Cuba. You cannot wire money to Cuba, and you cannot legally exchange US dollars for Cuban currency. Staying in approved hotels and eating at approved restaurants is very expensive. Using the black market and finding less official housing and food is difficult and I think would be beyond a typical undergrad. I think anything related to political science would be a touchy subject. Finally, Cuba is very very hot in the summer, making getting anything done difficult.


Is it worthwhile to cite documentaries in personal statements?

While this may vary somewhat by discipline, I would think that the faculty would be more interested in what you took away from this source of inspiration and how it shaped your perspective/career interests, rather than the actual source itself. (This assumes the documentary is somewhat mainstream and not endorsing fringe ideas that would seem extreme to academics in your field.) Many students and professionals are drawn to study a particular field not because they read a brilliant academic book or paper, but because they read a lay book on the topic or saw a documentary or television program that introduced them to certain issues. These less formal forms of media can be excellent gateways to academic study.

Personally, it was Pete Earley's book "Crazy" that sparked my interest in mental health policy. I referenced this in my graduate school applications, describing how it helped me connect my macro-scale interests in health interventions with my micro-scale interests in the pathology and treatment of severe mental illness. When I interviewed with programs, several faculty discussed this, and they seemed more interested in how I had connected to the ideas in the book then the fact that it wasn't a formal academic text.

Be careful with simply stating that "X had a huge influence on me and made me want to study y or fight injustice"; avoid generic statements. If you feel you are able to clearly state how the documentary impacted your career interests intellectually as well as emotionally, I see no reason not to include it. I also agree with the earlier comment - you might mention the name of the documentary or cite one particularly influential paper, but I'm not sure you need to cite works throughout the statement. (Of course, this may differ by discipline as well).


How to efficiently organize my PhD data, papers and notes?

I'll take on a rather technical side and talk from my experience.

Folder hierarchy

I start a folder for each "project", which is either a separate talk, an idea, a paper, etc. (Funnily, I store code elsewhere. Same with large research data.)

Previously, I put literature from the related literature research in a subfolder of a "project", nowadays I just push papers in a magically-syncing-around folder. I am sure, there are better solutions though. Zotero? Papers? That's a separate question, actually. But same software would also manage the citation database for you.

In the same "project" folder the template files for the paper land: publishers often prescribe the looks and style of a paper. Typically in the root of a "project", paper sources lie, under version control. Nowadays this spells git. I've been checking images into git, too. There are better ways now, with git lfs or git annex, but that's again too specific. (By the way, revisions of a paper for a resubmission elsewhere become branches in git.)

The key thing: at some point I had a further "project", the thesis. I made subfolders for each chapter (that roughly corresponded to the papers). I already had text to put there. These subfolders had further subfolders for images, which I hardlinked from their respective projects.

Large data

Zenodo is wonderful for storage of the final large data.

For development, we had an FTP server and OwnCloud to share data in the research group and to allow for upload by partners and subcontractors.

I found git annex to be both useful and a huge pain in the ass for this. So test it beforehand, and your milage may vary.

Definitely invest in a backup solution. Nothing is more irritating than loosing research data. That's again a separate question, but both proper storage (RAID or something) and proper backuping (RAID won't help, if a thunderbold grills your PC) are important.

Byline

Typically a research group has some kind of data sharing and collaboration platform running. Go with it. If not: it's rather a software / eGroupware question.

Always do a fresh backup.


Examples of harmless mistakes (on purpose) in submitted papers

You're not the first one to come up with this idea.

In case it's not obvious, I recommend against doing this:

Having stupid mistakes in your submission makes you look stupid.
It wastes the reviewer's time.
It wastes the editor's time.
If all the mistakes get through the review process, it wastes the reader's time deciphering what you means, and also makes you look stupid again.

Just don't.


Scholarship asks for copy of diploma, old university slow to print it

Calm down

Getting angry at your university and/or its staff is tempting but solves nothing; if anything, it will make them less inclined to help you.  Focus on solving the problem and being respectful to everybody, even if you don't want to.

In particular, it will help to act as if everybody involved is doing their best in good faith to help you, but may be unable or unsure how to do so.  Don't treat them as though they're just trying to obstruct you, even if it seems like they are.  Don't focus on the amount of tuition money you've spent; that's not going to seem like a relevant issue to anyone who can help, and it might be a distraction to you.

Understand the problem

At the root of your situation is the fact that you're stuck in the middle of a cultural misunderstanding.

In US academia, the diploma is strictly a ceremonial piece of paper. Nobody uses it for anything except to hang on the wall.  If you want an official document that verifies your degree, you get a transcript instead.

As such, within this academic culture, there is no reason why anybody should be in a hurry to get a diploma, so university systems won't be set up to provide it on any particular timeframe; they'll schedule production of the diplomas in a way that is most convenient and cost-effective for the institution.  This most likely means producing them as a single batch, perhaps by an outside contractor.  Trying to do one as a one-off may well be quite expensive and/or a major disruption to their existing process.  It's not necessarily a simple procedure that they're just putting off because they're lazy or uncaring.

However, my understanding (based in part on things I've read in this site) is that in European academia, the diploma is an important official document, which serves as the standard proof of a degree.  Thus, a European institution would expect that anyone who graduates with a degree will get the diploma immediately, and the most likely reason for someone to be unable to show a diploma is that they didn't actually graduate.

I would focus on trying to help people at both universities understand this disconnect, and asking for flexibility from them in helping you navigate it.

Pursue all avenues

It seems like so far, you've been focusing on trying to get your university to speed up production of your diploma.  But it looks like that could be a dead end.  So try something else.

They've offered a transcript and a signed letter.  Take it for sure.  Then, I'd try to get the European university to compromise by accepting these documents as proof of your degree, at least temporarily.  Try to explain to them that these are the standard documents that US universities expect to create and see.

Get faculty involved

It sounds like so far, you've been trying to negotiate directly with administrative offices on both sides.  That's a good place to start, but at the end of the day, they don't have the same investment in your academic success that faculty do.

I'd look for any faculty at your current university who know you, and who might be able to make an impression with a letter to the European institution.  For instance, is there anyone with contacts at the European university, or who at least is familiar with the academic system in that country?  They might be able to help convince them to accept your alternative documents.

Likewise, get in touch with faculty in the European department; either someone in charge of your specific graduate program, or some other faculty member who you've had contact with.  (If it's someone who has some familiarity with US academia, all the better.)  Make sure they understand that this issue, if not resolved, might prevent you from attending their university at all.  They went to the trouble to accept and recruit you; they'll be very disappointed if bureaucratic issues wreck it all.  So they have an incentive to help.

Have a backup plan

Although hopefully you'll be able to get this resolved, there's always a chance that you might not.  Life isn't perfect or fair, and unfortunate things happen sometimes.  But your life will go on.  Make a general plan as to what you will do if this problem can't be resolved and you don't get the scholarship.  Attend a different program?  Take a year off and apply again in a year?  Follow a different path entirely?


Should a dissertation cite the chapter within the dissertation or the published manuscript?

If you have a dissertation with structure

Chapter m = Paper n
Chapter m+1 = Paper n+1

where Paper n+1 builds on and cites Paper n, then the best course of action seems to have Chapter m+1 cite both Chapter m and Paper n. That way you provide both the convenience for the reader to find the relevant material by just looking at another page in the current document, and the proper original source.

The same idea applies to other expository documents too, like review articles and textbooks.


strategies for sharing teaching information with universities I don't personally have contacts with

I've reached out to a few universities but so far my strategy is to just send an email explaining my goals and wait. No one gets back to me.

Unfortunately, as other questions on this site attest to, this is probably to be expected. Especially if you reach out to "universities"; my guess is that you won't get help from them at an institutional level. But if you find individual people who share your interests, your chances might be better.

I would recommend starting at your own university. Many universities, at least in the US, have teaching and learning centers, or some variant. Their purpose is to support instructors who want to improve their own teaching. They might be able to answer some of your questions directly, or put you in touch with others who can.

If you go to conferences, I've found those to also be great places to discuss teaching.

You might look for instructional materials directly on the internet. Sometimes the instructors who created these will make them publicly available. (In math this is fairly common.) You can learn a lot by reading these directly, and the people who created them might be more likely to respond to cold e-mails. Perhaps not your big-picture questions, but they might be happy to answer questions about their course materials.


Are publishers making less money on textbooks now?

To be honest, I'm not sure even to what extent a book can be seen as profitable separate from the online tools because of the ever tighter integration between the two. A number of textbooks in newer editions have started offloading (er, onloading? uploading?) activities that would traditionally be in the textbook to online systems.  This is especially egregious with audio or video activities that used to come on CD/tape/VHS/DVD, and now are only accessible online (those materials are important for us in foreign languages).

And to really drive home the point that they are considered to be a single unit, I've used at least two textbooks now in the past few years for which the physical book + e-book + online tools cost less than the physical book alone.

So I guess in that sense, you could say that the online tools are where the money are (because that's where they're pushing people), but it's not like they could discard the textbook and just sell the online tools, at least in my field.  A good book can go without online tools, but the other way around isn't so true.

Now there is a trend to goto single-use sells, and again, it's easy to conflate that with the online portion (and hard to fully separate out the economics of it without detailed numbers none of us have): they've always been able to grab people on single-use sells via workbooks, but now I notice there's a small trend to try to integrate textbooks with workbooks in a single print to reemphasize the formers' single use nature, with or without an online system.


Is there a reason to report standardized test scores on crazy ranges?

There is indeed no statistical reason to use these unusual ranges - zero to one hundred would do the job just as well. So why don't they just use that scale?

The main reason is that most standardized tests need to use some kind of difficulty scaled scoring system, to allow having different editions of the tests etc. One easy way to stop people from mixing up the scaled score and say a raw percentage score is to use a different range for the scaled scores. See e.g. Why Do Standardized Testing Programs Report Scaled Scores? written by two ETS psychometricians (Xuan Tan and Rochelle Michel) in 2011. Relevant quote:

  If two test takers taking
  Forms A and B respectively got the same scaled score of 194 (corresponding to raw
  scores of 95 on Form A and 96 on Form B), we know these two test takers exhibited the
  same level of performance on this test. One might ask: Why not report the adjusted
  scores for Form B instead of the scaled scores? This is because the adjusted scores
  would be on the same scale as the raw scores and could be easily misinterpreted as the
  raw scores. Thus, the scaled scores are used and are commonly set to a range of values
  different from the raw score values.

The same is true for percentile scores, which are easily misinterpreted for the percent of correctly answered questions. The test takers can probably figure out the right interpretation either way, but with this approach e.g. parents less conversant with SAT scoring or percentiles are more likely to go "oh, 1500, is that good?" rather than "only 52%?!".

Next, the test designer has to pick an actual range. As far as I understand it, this is somewhat arbitrary. It involves picking an increment (e.g. 1 or 10),

  For example, the scaled score can be reported in various increments (1-point increments,
  5-point increments, 10-point increments, etc.). Usually, we want each additional
  correct answer to make a difference in the test takers’ scaled score, but not such a large
  difference that people exaggerate its importance. The selection of a score scale, with
  appropriate increments, aids in the usefulness of the reported scaled scores to the
  test-score users.

Then you naturally have an interval of scaled scores, which can be offset to whatever minimum you prefer. See e.g. the answers to Why do some tests have a (nonzero) minimum score? for more details.


Attending supervisor's group meeting after thesis approval

The general rule: go if you think it would be useful to you, though it would probably be polite to check with the supervisor first:

  "Is it ok if I still come to lab meetings during my thesis-pending period [or whatever it is called in your location]? I'd be interested in keeping up with the work the group is doing."

Usually I would expect the supervisor would be glad to accommodate you. And even if you are not reporting on any work of your own, you might have useful input regarding other people's work.

In your particular situation - "he got really mad at me" - for whatever reason it does not sound as if you have a very healthy relationship with your supervisor. So it's probably in your best interests just to move on. It's hard to say how your supervisor might feel about that, but in this instance you are better off thinking of yourself rather than trying to maintain an unhealthy relationship.


Disclosing work affiliation in journal paper

Since you have a contract with the company already assigning all IP rights to them, the affiliation should be the company. Or, perhaps, the company as well as the university.

But a better solution would be to ask a legal officer at the bank what is appropriate here. They can probably dictate what you say, I think, but might agree to let it be the university, depending on the contents of the paper.

Without such an agreement, your affiliation in this case would be "Independent Researcher" or your university. Probably the university would best in this case. The research was done as a student there, not as an employee of a company. The company would be irrelevant. But the signed employment agreement has changed that.

But some advice to others, though it won't help you. If you are already a scholar (or student) and want to take a job with such restrictions, try to work out at the time of hiring any exceptions that are possible for work related to your degree. You may have a bit of leverage here if they really want to hire you.

And, if you are employed under such a restriction and want to take up a degree, try to work out before you start how your academic work will be considered. In this case, you have less leverage, I think, unless the company can find some other value in your work than in claiming it.


Should I mention about my governmental-funded PhD scholarship which I don't want to use

This is a tricky situation.  If you mention the scholarship without explaining your reservations, then it might help you get admitted, but you'll be admitted with the understanding that you'll use this scholarship.  Not having to pay for you is exactly why it could give you an advantage, so the department would probably be upset to learn that you didn't plan to use it.  It would feel like a form of cheating, and you might face pressure (such as withholding other sources of funding on the grounds that you had this scholarship available).

If you don't mention it, then you don't have to use it but it won't help you.

Sadly, there's not much room in between these possibilities.  You could try mentioning it but explaining your reservations about using the scholarship.  However, this isn't likely to help your chances (nobody cares about the scholarship if you won't actually use it), and it might create an awkward situation if they try to convince you to use it.

  I also don't want to lose the chance of PhD in a top university, I use GSch if needed.

This is a judgment call you'll have to make regarding when to reveal the scholarship.

  Sending another email and mention it if they reject me because of lack of funding (Would they say it is lack of funding?).

Probably not.  At least in my experience, rejected candidates are not given a specific explanation.  On the other hand, you might end up on a waiting list, where you may be admitted if a suitable spot opens up (for example, if someone else turns down an offer).  That could be a time when revealing the scholarship would help your chances, if you are willing to use it.


I keep forgetting what I've learned. Should I even consider pursuing advanced degree in math?

Your question reminds me of this question on quora, which is about physics, but is pretty relevant to math as well. To summarize the many good answers there, no, you're not supposed to remember every single detail of everything you learned in college (ok, I guess there are people with eidetic memories, but not every person with an eidetic memory is in research, and not every successful person in research has an eidetic memory). If you learned something well, as in understood it and didn't just memorize it, it will come back to you when you need it (and it will take less time to understand it the next time).

In fact, preparing for the math subject GRE, which you should take if you are planning on graduate school in mathematics in the US, was really helpful for me to recall a lot of the information I had managed to forget as an undergraduate. It also made a lot of connections between fields clear to me. (Of course I have now forgotten it all again!)

Mostly, you should aim to remember the major theorems, and a general idea of how they are proved and how it fits into the 'big picture'. It is okay to not remember every single detail of every proof.

Usually one spends the first year of a PhD program in mathematics taking courses in a number of areas (algebra, analysis, and topology where I went to grad school), and then one is expected to pass qualifying exams based on those first-year courses -- the advanced students who already know the material for these courses coming in will likely get the opportunity to take the quals early. In some sense the idea here is that regardless of what your thesis eventually turns out to be, every math PhD student should know about, say, the fundamental group, or Grobner bases. After passing quals, one tends to become more and more specialized, usually this means we forget a lot of what the first-year courses covered, but again, since we learned it well enough to pass quals once, this means that in research you get a sneaking suspicion like 'this smells like covering spaces', and then you go back and remind yourself of all the stuff about covering spaces you had learned back in the day.

Anyway, the point is that at least at the beginning of a graduate program you are expected to learn a number of things in a number of areas, and most likely demonstrate this by passing qualifying exams of some form. Then as you get more specialized, many things get forgotten, but you usually remember enough to know where to look things up when needed.


How to ask for a reference when you’re not sure that you're applying yet

I would tell them this.

  I'm thinking about applying to a master's program and for a scholarship.  The deadline is the end of January, so I have to decide
  soon.  If I decide to apply, would you be willing to provide a letter
  of reference?

  Here are the links: ...

  I've also attached copies of my unofficial transcript and my resume.  You
  have my permission to discuss any of this in any letter you decide to write.

Most of your instructors will likely have acted as references in the past and if it's just an LOR you need, they know how to do that.  Give links to  the program and scholarship pages so they can confirm the details of what's required.


The Ethics of Preparing for a Course Long Before Actually Taking it

IMO, there is no ethical problem with students preparing for a course in advance.  As Moriarty notes in their answer, what matters is that the student learns the material, not when or how they learn it.

That said, there are (at least) two actual problems that your question touches upon:

the occasional problem of advanced (or self-taught) students taking beginner-level courses for "easy credits", and
the practical problem of teaching a course for students with a highly variable baseline experience level.

The first one could be considered unethical behavior in some circumstances.  For example, let's say I'm a math major who decides to minor in biology, and the university happens to offer an "introductory math for biologists" course.  If I was unscrupulous enough, and nothing specifically forbade me from doing so, I might be able to take that course and basically just show up for the exam, getting free biology credits for stuff I learned in first-year math.

(In fact, I freely admit to having done something similar myself on occasion.  For example, one of the last courses I took as an undergrad, to make up the credits I needed to graduate, was a first-year "computer literacy" class that basically consisted of learning how to use a web browser, e-mail and a word processor.  As I had already completed a minor in computer science, as well as worked for several years as a full-time software developer, I hardly need to mention I did not find it much of a challenge.  Still, it got me the three extra credit points of "general studies" that I needed.)

It could also be argued that there is no problem: if you consider the credits to be awarded for knowing the material, then I clearly deserve them.  On the other hand, if you consider the credits to be earned for learning something, then I clearly do not (as I already got credited for learning the same material once, back when I first learned it in math class).

More generally, issues like this can occur any time an institute offers multiple introductory-level courses covering essentially the same material (but possibly from a different angle) and does not specifically forbid students from taking more than one of them.  When that happens, a student can effectively learn the material once, but get credited for it n times, where n is the number of such overlapping courses they can find.

The usual solution here is simply to try to find and close any such loopholes.  Some possible methods for doing that include:

explicitly designating certain courses as equivalent to each other, so that a student can only receive credits for one of them, and
restricting certain very basic introductory courses, like the "math for biologists" example I gave above, only to students actually majoring in the target field (here, biology).

Also, if students are going to commit such shenanigans anyway, it can be argued that they should be allowed to demonstrate their competence in a separate exam, so that they don't need to waste time and classroom space, and skew the grade distribution, by actually sitting in a class they don't need.

As for the second problem I mentioned above, i.e. teaching a class where some students already know much more of the material than others, there are several distinct approaches that people may argue, depending on their general teaching philosophies.  My personal suggestion, which I'd consider a "moderate" position, is to take a "triage" approach and mentally divide your students into distinct groups:

The advanced group consists of the students who already know much of the material, and just want to show their competence and get the official certificate for it.  Some may be hoping to learn some interesting new tidbits, but they'll still pass the course even if they learn nothing new at all.
The learning group consists of those students who actually more or less match the intended level of the course: they know the prerequisites reasonably well, and are reasonably capable learners, but don't yet know the material you'll be covering.  In many (but not all) courses, this group will make up the majority of the students, and they're the ones you should adjust your teaching pace for.
The struggling group consists of the students who lack some of the prerequisite knowledge the course assumes, or who are otherwise falling behind the rest of the class.  They'll likely need remedial teaching to have any hope of passing the course.  You should not have many students in this group; if you do, it may be sign that you're going too fast, and some of the students that should be in the "learning" group are falling behind.

It can be a temptation to focus on the "star" students in the advanced group, since they're the best in class, have the most interesting questions (if any), and generally appear to offer the most reward for the least effort.  They're also the ones most likely to end up as future grad students in your field, which makes focusing on them even more tempting.

However, the advanced students are, by definition, not the ones the course is actually intended for, and they're not the ones you're really there to teach.  Rather, your main goal with the advanced students (insofar as they come to class at all, rather than just taking the exam directly) is simply to ensure that they're not bored.  There are several ways you can achieve this, such as:

giving the advanced students additional bonus exercises or projects that go beyond the standard syllabus, or letting them pursue their own side projects;
encouraging the more advanced students to help the less advanced ones;
encouraging students to come see you outside class if they'd like to learn more about something that sparked their interest; and
if you still cannot engage some students in class, letting them skip it if they already know the material.

As for the struggling students, there is an argument to be made that you, ideally, shouldn't have any, and that even a single student falling behind is a sign that you should slow down until they can catch up.  Essentially, this approach amounts to lumping the "learning" and "struggling" groups together, adjusting your pace to the tail end of that combined group, and treating any students who progress faster as "advanced".

While there is some merit to this approach, it can also be taken too far.  Especially in higher education, it is often simply not possible to set the pace by the slowest students in class, and still have enough time to cover all the material in the allotted time.  Instead, as an alternative to simply letting these students fail, it may be more effective to set the in-class pace by the majority of the class, and to focus specific remedial efforts (such as individual tutoring, possibly by some of the more advanced students) on those that need it.

Of course, even this won't always help, and sometimes you may simply have to let a student fail.  In particular, it's important to learn to distinguish students who'd like to learn, but have a hard time doing so, from those who are simply too lazy or disinterested to learn.  The former group can be helped; the latter cannot.


Should one stick to their expertise/experience area post PhD?

One of the advantages of academia is that, in general, you get to follow your nose into whatever research corner you want to explore. You can change incrementally over time or you can make big jumps. Of course, you probably want to stay employed, so it is requires a bit of finesse and maybe negotiation.

But the big lesson is that your early work doesn't constrain your mind from think other thoughts and your past doesn't constrain your future if you are willing to work for it. But the same thing is true for people outside academia where such change is possible, though possibly harder. Resource constraint, for example.

Do what you love if you are able.

That, actually, is what keeps a lot of people (most?) in academia even though the pay may be less than what they could earn elsewhere.


How to describe a paper for which you have not yet submitted revisions in CV?

I would use some of the following:

submitted
under review
submitted to …

and do not stress that there is already a revision going on. Even revised papers may get rejected, so being in revision is no guarantee to get the paper published. I also would not state the journal to which the paper is submitted to because I do not see how this says anything about the quality of the paper. If you think, that the paper is good and interesting for whoever reads the CV, make it available as a preprint and provide a link.

I myself have a section "Preprints" in my CV where I list submitted but not published papers with links to the arXiv and add the line "submitted, month, year".


Resubmission - Dealing with rude reviewer

It's not clear that it's actually the same reviewer as before. Sometimes journals will bring in additional referees on a revised paper; I know that I have certainly been asked to do so on a few occasions.

That said, if your review was so biased as you state, then you should be able to write a convincing response to the criticisms made by the reviewer. Be firm but also polite—trading insults or being rude will get you nowhere.

Overall, though, it seems that the editor is not a very good one, and you may find more luck submitting to a different venue. (I also don't see why you have to be in an academic position to be the one to resubmit the paper!)


How do you measure success to remain motivated in academia?

Unfortunately, and as it happens for most jobs, there is no such a thing, or at least, not as immediate and clear as a grade of an exam.

While one can argue that the number of publications, and the quality of the journals\conferences you publish at, can be good ways to measure your worth, this can often be biased by many factors.

If you do not work completely alone, publications are often the result of team work. There are cases where it is hard to see who worked the most, or who gave the key contribution that made the paper be accepted. I have seen people with many published articles move to another group and loose productivity all together. This probably because the previous group supported the PhD way too much and they did not learn from their colleagues. I have also seen the opposite.
Despite everything, publishing papers to journals or conferences (even the best ones) can really feel like a lottery. Usually, when you study a lot for an exam, you are almost certain that you will get a good mark, this is not true for publications on any level. A paper can be hardly rejected by conference A and, instead, accepted by conference B. This can be because of many factors. Maybe conference A was not the suited one, or reviewers just did not like the paper despite its contributions, in any case, as you can see you cannot really value your work on this type of outcome. You can, for sure, improve from reviews, but I would never use it as a way to evaluate yourself.
Depending on the specific topic of your PhD, there are different standards expected regarding the number of publications you should have. Maybe, you just need a couple and, in that case, it is pretty hard to motivate yourself for years with just two inputs (two accepted papers). Moreover, even the best PhD students have to deal with rejected articles, sometimes, even more than they have to deal with accepted ones.

I would also like to add that PhD students are pretty prone to mental illness such as depression, anxiety disorders and so on [1]. In my modest opinion (as an academic), these problems are also caused by the fact that many doctorate students evaluate their worth depending on this hard numbers (number of publications, number of paper not accepted).

Overall, I think that self motivation is a very personal thing. It is up to you to decide what motivates you and what makes you worth.

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2018/03/graduate-students-need-more-mental-health-support-new-study-highlights (one of the many)


Can a managing editor replace the editor on a paper or remove them from the editorial board?

Yes, a managing editor (which I'm using as a term synonymous to "editor-in-chief" etc - basically members of the editorial board with more responsibility) can replace the editor assigned to a paper or remove them from the editorial board.

Perhaps the more pertinent question is: if the managing editor doesn't do it, who will?

The editor is not going to remove himself/herself from the editorial board - after all they're already inactive.
The publisher is not likely to do anything without approval from the editorial board. In special circumstances they can, but doing so is a nuclear option that will leave a lot of bad feelings among the remaining editors and is therefore usually avoided.
Obviously the authors and the peer reviewers can't do anything about it.

Therefore the managing editor must do it. Nobody else will.


Is it plagiarism to use another person's unpublished thesis?

You can work on anything you want. If you publish you must:

cite the thesis;
give an accurate account of what work was already contained in the thesis, and what you added;
if you use passages of text or images taken directly from the thesis, identify them as such (as a quotation or similar). Extensive use of such quotations or images may also require permission from the original author and/or their university, depending on who holds the copyright.


Should someone continue with their PhD if they fail the core courses in master's?

I'm going to answer here as if you are the "friend."
If the university accepts you into a doctoral program they have fairly high confidence that you will be successful. Otherwise they are just wasting scarce resources, including money, space, and faculty time.
It may be that you have some deficiencies and I hope that the educational system in place gives you the time and opportunity to fill any gaps, but you probably also have some compensating points in your favor.
It is good, of course, to try to figure out why you had issues in the past and to correct what can be changed.
But doctoral work is different from coursework and the skills required are not the same. Trust the people who admitted you to the program that you can do it.


Should a teacher be able to solve all the assignments they give their students themselves?

In general, yes, a teacher should know how to do any assignment and, in some cases, should have actually done it. In teaching programming, for example, it is usually a mistake to assign a problem that the instructor hasn't essentially done themselves.
The reason is that one of the tasks in making assignments is to estimate the effort and time required to do the task. If you can't solve the assignment yourself, you are giving an open ended task to students. In almost all situations students have a limited time to spend on any given assignment and that competes with their other tasks.
There is an exception to the above. If you tell the students at the beginning that you are assigning something you don't have an answer to, and will be grading their efforts rather than their results, then you can make this work. The assignment becomes an exploration. At lower levels of education this makes less sense than it does at higher (say, doctoral) where it is natural to explore the unknown.


Should a paper of exactly 15 pages be submitted to Transactions or Proceedings of the AMS?

You should submit your paper to Proceedings.

The overview page for Proceedings of the AMS clarifies this:

  This journal is devoted to shorter research articles (not to exceed 15 printed pages) in all areas of pure and applied mathematics.

If your article is exactly 15 pages long (or less), then its length does not exceed 15 pages, and so it is suitable for submission to Proceedings.  By that same token, it is not suitable for submission to Transactions.  The intention is clearly that the criteria should be mutually exclusive.

Information on a journal's own web page should be considered more authoritative than information about that journal on a different journal's web page.


Retaking a course but the exams are exactly the same as last year's

If a student is allowed to register for a class as a "new registration" as opposed to a resit and the student attends the class and does the work, the student deserves to be given a fair evaluation. While reusing assignments and examination materials is not optimal, it happens. Not wanting to (re-)evaluate a student on reused assignments seems reasonable. I would expect the instructor and department chair (or teaching chair) to work with you to resolve the issue. making you withdraw from the class seems to be an unreasonable solution.


Is it appropriate to ask journal review status after not hearing back in quoted timeline?

As a sometime-editor, I wouldn't be offended by such an email. Not happy, but not offended. I'd say go ahead and email.

(My first editing stint significantly increased how fast I turn around peer reviews...)


Mature PhD Project Application - How are these received?

I can't speak for any PhD program other than my own, but can I just say that I have a really hard time thinking of 27 as 'mature'?  FWIW, I didn't even get a BS until my mid-30s, and spent enough years in industry to become financially independent before pursuing a PhD.  Had no problems whatsoever* getting into the program.

(*But I should probably note that this is at the state university branch near where I live: getting into e.g. Stanford or CalTech might be a different story.)

While I'm not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination, I think it likely that (in the US, anyway) it would actually be illegal to ask a candidate's age.  WRT to the particular project, I'd suggest getting to know people on the project.  Convincing the project director that you have something to contribute certainly can't hurt your chances of admission.  And if you're asked why the gap period, just state that you went into industry in order to make some money, rather than racking up more student loan debt.


Usually, Erasmus research projects are available to other students through network that your institution has with other universities. People who are responsible and actually paid to do promotion should be ERASMUS administrative officer at your institution, but if you for some reasons cannot rely on them, I suggest you to use ESN, ( Erasmus Student Network, organisation ) They can advertise and offer your vacancies to students,  this service suppose to be for free,
other way, maybe more time existing, is to contact collaborating universities from your network, and invite their students to take a look on your project.


How to deal with a supervisor who engages in micro-management and does not give their PhD student any autonomy?

If the student wishes to be self-sufficient in PhD research, then she/he ought to express that the student is competent to do so.

There are supervisors who tend to give sufficient freedom for the student to do their research in their own accord. There are some others who feel much more procedural in their approach to build and shape their scholars to their view. Both are actually fine as long as they confirm to the type of their respective students. There are some who require more attention that others, and some others less so. If the student feels that she/he does not require to be spoon fed, then it would be up to the student to show that she/he is capable of producing valuable result by him/herself.

The student ought to exhibit active involvement in the research and request for suggestions to the advisor. Here are a few examples.

  There is this new problem I've just came across while doing this work. It's about .... May I look further into this?

or

  There is an idea I would like to discuss regarding .... Shall I try this one out?

The point is to show how eager you are to be able to do research with lesser support. Of course this might not work all the time (depending on your advisor). This would, however, show how capable you are and is certainly worth a try.


Writing two different books with some overlap

First of all, as long as you cite your sources correctly, there is little concern regarding plagiarism. Secondly, It is actually quite common to see similar materials in different books written by the same author. This becomes more understandable if the topics are related (which in this case they are). The only misconduct I can think of is if you copy an entire chapter or section verbatim. Otherwise, as long as the core concepts and contributions of these two books are not the same, it is natural to have some overlapping materials (especially if its' purpose is to explain fundamental and introductory concepts)

In any case, informing the editor about this issue beforehand (as you have) is probably the most straightforward way to prevent any violations.


Is There a Way to List Writing Recommendation Letters on a CV?

I have not seen this and wouldn't recommend it, I would not consider writing recommendation letters to be under academic "service."

If you specifically mentored particular students then it makes sense to note that mentorship, but if they were just people who took your class then writing them recommendations is just part of your teaching responsibility, it doesn't mean anything for your qualifications if your students were successful when you wrote them recommendations, those are your students' accomplishments rather than yours.


What is the exact meaning of an "Abstract Submission Deadline"?

It is only for an abstract. Usually, there is another one for the whole paper, clearly said.


How to allow survey participants to contact me without breaching anonymity?

This answer may depend on how many participants your survey has in general - but I think one of the main objectives of conducting a survey "remotely", online, rather than personally, in a controlled environment, is to gather an exceptionally large amount of participants. Therefore, I'll assume a sufficiently large number.

Note that online surveys are quite an exception here in that you never get into contact with the participants. In general, you always know to some extent who participated in the survey (hardly anything else is possible when you have to meet in person with the participants). And even for online surveys, contact details are often required if there is any compensation for the effort of taking part, or only the offer to be notified once the results of the study are ready (which is generally the least that should be offered to participants in response to the time they reserved for you).

Therefore, the anonymity assured to participants generally does not mean that researchers never learn about any of the personal data of the participants; it means:

Responses will not be connected to the personal data of participants.
The personal data will never be published in detail, just as aggregate values (e.g. age minimum, maximum and median across all subjects).
Any identifying data (e-mail addresses etc.) will be erased as soon as possible.

Unless there is just a small total number of participants, participants can feel reasonably safe that even though the researchers know both their personal data and their responses, those two won't be connected in the future.


junior professor's strategy of postdoc recruitment

Being a young professor I will not hesitate to hire an applicant with a profile even stronger than mine; especially, if I feel that postdoctoral candidate has good plans which will be beneficial for my research group. My own Postdoctoral experience was very good, my professor never treated me as student, rather a peer colleague.  Also, in my opinion a professor who want an obedient postdoc is not a professor I would ever consider to work with. In academics healthy criticism is the best feedback on your work and the way to improve.


In Computer Science, does a presentation of findings at a conference constitute a "publication"?

There are two types of publications in Computer Science:

Publications in peer-reviewed conferences with published proceedings
Publications in journals

If you present your results at a conference or workshop but don't publish them in the conference proceedings — it's not a publication.

In general, publications in top tier conferences are much more important than journal publications for computer science researchers. Usually you can first publish your paper in conference proceedings and then submit it to a journal but not the other way around (though, of course, that depends on conference and journal policies).


I would encourage you to contact the authors. Both John Milnor and James Stasheff have their contact info on the web. As Stasheff is emeritus, Milnor might be a better bet.


Asking about the status of paper you refereed?

My experience has been that a review acknowledgement should come immediately---usually via an automated system, but quite rapidly even when there isn't one.  This is sensible: otherwise, how do you know that your review was actually received?  You should feel free to query the editor on this matter.

Your assessment of the paper sounds a bit unconventional, but essentially boils down to a recommendation for major revision.  It's possible you haven't heard back because the editor doesn't have all the reviews in, and some journals never actually tell you what the final result is.

Do check, however, that the journal is really a reasonable that you want to be associated with... review by informal email with a non-communicative editor would be a very bad sign in my field...


When to use the abbreviations f and ff in scientific literature?

Working in STEM fields, I have never seen this form of citations. Instead, on those rare occasions where citations talk about specific locations in a text, people use explicit page and/or line numbers.

I thus suspect that if you used this form of reference in an engineering publication, it will be confusing to your reviewers and readers, and you will be asked to change them.


What is the scholarly value of a report containing experimental results and the procedure

Short form: if the contribution is scientifically useful, then it will also be useful for your career.

It seems to me that the implicit question within your question is whether you should be investing your energy into something else instead, like try to turn it into a peer-reviewed publication in a high-impact-factor journal, and whether this sort of less formal publication is a "waste of time."  If your PI is well-experienced in journal publication and decides this isn't well-suited for a journal publication, then I would be inclined to trust your PI's judgement.

The nice thing about doing a more informal publication like this is that it can also potentially be much more lightweight to prepare and publish: you don't have to follow anybody else's formatting requirements, nor worry about what peer reviewers will attack you on.  You can just write it up nice and simple and the way you'd like to and post it online.

Then, if it's useful to other scientists, it will be cited and you will get credit.  Not as much as for a journal paper, but quite likely with a similar "value for effort" ratio for you.  Moreover, computer science is a particularly friendly field for getting credit for such alternative forms of contribution, in which many scientists have become famous for their tech reports and software projects rather than their journal papers.  And if it turns out not to be useful to other people, trying to publish it "higher" instead would likely be a worse use of your time in any case.


Is there any appropriate way to offer cash to a lecturer or TA for private tutoring?

At my university in the USA, it would likely be illegal for the instructor or the TAs of the particular class to participate in this. There is just too much of a (perceived) conflict of interest since they are evaluating you for a grade for the class.

However, there would not be anything barring you from approaching a graduate student who was a former TA for the class; nor would there be a problem in approaching an instructor at another institution or someone who is at your institution who is not teaching your section of your class that term. You could even ask an upperclass student who took the class last year to tutor you.

Your department secretary may be able to connect you with a grad student who needs a few extra dollars and isn't in the conflict-of-interest position to tutor you directly. Or post something in your local craiglist or student bulletin board system.


What can I do if I find errors in someone's thesis?

Generally no official action can or should be taken regarding errors in a dissertation (assuming they are not a sign of dishonesty or fraud).  However, it could be worth pointing out errors to the author in case he/she is preparing a publication based on the dissertation.  I wouldn't do this if it's from long ago or you see that the material is already published, but you could be providing a useful service to the author otherwise.  (If these errors have already made it into publications, then it's worth reporting them to the authors if they are substantive, so they can decide whether to publish errata, but it may not be worth reporting typos.  I'm a perfectionist and would like to know of typos in my publications, but others might be annoyed.)

But you certainly shouldn't write to the advisor.  That comes across like you are reporting bad behavior to an authority figure, so it's not appropriate unless that's the message you want to send (for example, if you discover plagiarism).  Instead, you should communicate directly with the student who wrote the dissertation.  If you can't figure out how to track down the author, then you can assume he/she isn't pursuing a research career and you don't need to worry about it.


Is it ethical for a student to commit self-plagiarism from a non-academic source?

The best approach would be to discuss this with the instructor of the course to see whether it satisfies the requirements of the assignment.


Is it OK to change mistakes/typos when you are in the minor revision stage of publication?

Yes, this is completely OK. You are not bound to perpetuate typos from earlier versions just because reviewers did not find them.

It's always good to indicate that typos were cleaned up and similar, though you shouldn't note every single typo. I'd write something like "we corrected typos, especially in section X, and tightened up the prose in paragraph Y" in the answer letter - just to make sure that nobody thinks you are trying to smuggle in larger changes.

Of course, there is a bit of a gray area between small and not-so-small changes. If you want to change something that goes beyond simple spelling errors or awkward prose and starts to change your argument, you should draw the editor's and reviewers' attention to this more explicitly, since they should really sign off on any not completely minor changes at this stage.


My transcript has the wrong course names. How to fix this in PhD applications?

If at all possible you should get the issuing university to correct your transcript. Failing that, you should get a letter, signed by an authority, that explains the situation. The letter should come from some official. In the US, the person would normally be called the Registrar, but I doubt that is universal. Whoever is responsible for transcripts.
The answer of Nicole Hamilton is correct in that you shouldn't try to alter any official document.


What does satisfactory completion of Master's degree mean?

Satisfactory completion means that you've completed the program by satisfying the requirements, as opposed to, say, simply leaving.  Additionally it implies meeting any final evaluation criteria, e.g. passing any final exams.

Usually this phrase doesn't imply anything more by itself, though it's not uncommon for additional constraints to be attached to it.  For example, if they want your GPA to be above a certain point, they may say "satisfactory completion with a GPA of at least 3.5".


How to publish your research quickly when it pertains to a topical current event?

Quality peer review takes times: Science takes time and quality peer review takes time. Presumably, you want the stamp of approval that peer review brings. In which case, you will want to publish in a journal where the peer review has meaning. And in this case, peer review takes time. Sure, some fields and journals will get you an initial decision faster than others. But you might get rejected at the first outlet and that can take time; and you might be asked to do revisions somewhere and that takes time to get that outcome, and then for you to make the revisions, and then get an outcome on those revisions. The fastest experience that I've had from submission to in press was about 2 months. And I wouldn't expect to have the same outcome for other work submitted to the same journal.

Consider sharing a preprint: One option would be to post your work to a relevant preprint server. I don't know what discipline you are in, but OSF preprints will accept work in any discipline https://osf.io/preprints/

This would allow you to circulate and share your work immediately.
You could then engage in the more time-consuming task of getting your work published in a peer-reviewed journal.


Is it reasonable to report another student for cheating when it has no impact on me?

As others have already mentioned, cheating is wrong and it's the right thing to speak up when someone commits a wrong. It may also indirectly affect you when someone cheats (eg. through grade inflation).

However, by reporting the cheater you are also implicating your friend who passed on the photos and facilitated the cheating. Your friend might feel upset (and perhaps rightly so) that you didn't put your friendship above some general (and perhaps minor) moral obligation. I caution that your obligation to report is not unconditional in the sense that you have to accept a disadvantage for yourself, such as a spoiled friendship. Moreover, I would argue that you also have an obligation of loyalty towards your friend; whether or not that 'trumps' your obligation to report depends on how close your relationship is.


Why a certain period of time is needed for promotion of qualified applicants?

From my experience and what I have observed, the time frame is time for the academic to "earn their stripes", so to speak.

Some more factors that I have noticed that are considered, that do take some time to notice, namely:

The person's character - how well do they work with colleagues and/or students.
How the person performs under pressure and during 'down' times.
How much initiative the academic shows can only be observed over a period of time.

note: the above is not usually formally documented, but are important in any profession for someone going for promotion.

Also, as the university will be making a considerable investment in the academic, it would seem that they would like to see that the academic is willing to make a considerable investment (time, expertise etc) in return.


What is the most common way to change fields in academia?

If this is a move within the same broad area (or a closely related field) your best bet is to get or keep a job in your own field, and then begin finding research that transects both of your fields. For example, if you're in political science currently and want to shift to, say, geography, then begin by publishing research on geospatial politics until you have enough publications in geography journals to get a geography job. Often, schools will have interests in more than one field, and so a background in more than one can be a benefit when looking to advance.

What would be best is if you are in a school that has both fields of research - in which case collaborations would be the easiest way to go. I'm currently in the process of doing something similar, but I have the benefit of being in a very broad school that has both people in my own field, and people in the field I am shifting to (slowly, but surely!).


What is considered a standard time for asking a status update from the editor for various stages of peer-review?

I can see two reasons where asking for a status update is any reasonable:

You have a practical use for the information, i.e., it would actually affect a relevant decision you make. For example, when you know that the journal is only waiting for one reviewer who is trustworthy and promised to submit a report next week, you would not plan a lengthy vacation so you can react to the decision. If you just want a prognosis to soothe your impatience or similar, that’s not a practical use.

Things are taking too long and you hope that nudging the editors will get them to take relevant action such as reminding reviewers. Mind that this is too long with respect to the standards of the field and journal, not your own time constraints. For details and particular what is too long, see: Is my paper under review (or similar) for too long and if yes, how should I react?.

In particular, there is no reason to expect that asking for status updates is accelerating anything unless Point 2 applies. It’s like repeatedly pushing the crosswalk button.
If you want to communicate something to the editors, do it explicitly (and not implicitly by sending frequent status requests).
Specifically, just tell them why it is crucial for you to have a decision on this paper within whatever your deadline is.
Even then, this will likely not considerably accelerate the process or ensure anything, but at least the editors might give you a prognosis as to how likely they will be in time or tell you when it becomes evident that they cannot make a decision in time.

Hence it is extremely important to get review within a stipulated time

First, are you sure? You can usually already search for postdoc positions and similar without your PhD being actually completed. Second, just that it is important does not mean that you can do something about it. Sometimes, things are just a matter of luck; this is usually one of those cases.


Poster orientation: Landscape or portrait (horizontal or vertical)?

While I am not aware of field-specific differences, my personal experience leads me to believe that landscape is likely to be better for conveying information than portrait.  The reasons for this are:

People are much more visually sensitive to vertical than horizontal changes in position, due to the fact that we are largely surface-dwellers.  You'll have a much bigger visual impact from things that are near eye-level than things that are significantly displaced up or down.
Posters are typically consumed in parallel, with different people arriving at different times and looking at different parts.  A landscape format lets more people be close to the poster (and potentially the parts they're focusing on) than portrait format.

That said, 1) many venues restrict you tightly in the amount of space that you are allotted, and it will generally be better to use the space you've got rather than make a smaller poster with a preferred orientation, and 2) good vs. bad graphical design will vastly outweigh portrait vs. landscape in terms of impact.


What should I include as "evidence of effective teaching methods?"

From the perspective of someone who has been on a search committee this would normally mean your teaching evaluations -- either as a TA or as the instructor on record. Any teaching awards you might have won in this regard would also count

But we also recognize that not everyone has had TA/IOR experience. So it could also include:

Evidence of having taken teacher training / professionalization seminars
Sample syllabi and assignments
Student/faculty/participant feedback from guest lectures and guest talks

This question is deliberately broadly worded so as to not exclude people who haven't had to teach. You can include a cover sheet to this item category (i.e., when you upload your PDFs you include or prepend a cover sheet) that notes how you have interpreted this and let the committee know that you are willing to send more material if requested.

Why is this material requested? After the search committee makes its decision, your file goes to the Provost's office. The Provost will want to see "evidence of teaching effectiveness" as well as "evidence of research" as part of the portfolio. It's simpler for the committee if you can make this case for them ahead of time.


How common is college graduation at an early age?

At least in the USA, the number is probably much smaller than 5 percent.

The reason for this is that there are generally fixed lengths for education, and minimum enrollment ages at which the process can start (at least for publicly educated students, who are still the majority).

Finishing two or more years ahead of schedule means that you probably have had at least two events that belong to the following categories:

Started education a year earlier than "normal" (perhaps because of birthday-limited enrollments)
Skipped a grade during primary or secondary (high-school) education
"Accelerated" college studies by reducing the expected enrollment time by either a semester or a full year (through early accumulation of credits via work in high school, or taking college placement exams, credit overloading, and other methods)

The first is the most common, but still only applies to about one-third of the population. The others are much less frequent, with the second probably pertaining to only about 1 percent of students (if that many). The third also probably is not that common, but I don't have hard numbers (but again, probably less than 5 percent of college students finish in three years or less!).

Now remember that you have to have at least two such events, and you can start to see why the odds are stacked against a 5 percent rate.


My student in one course asks for paid tutoring in another course. Appropriate?

You're correct in feeling uneasy.

Even if you are not yourself improperly influenced, there would definitely be the appearance of possibility of improper influence, which is as important, in terms of the impact on other peoples' actions, as actual impropriety.

Even tutoring _for_free_, since you are in the same dept as the people giving the other course, could be perceived as improper, for various reasons.

Best to keep "squeaky clean", I think.


What is the median math GRE subject score for admission to a Group 2 or 3 PhD program in applied mathematics?

This may not exactly answer your question though... Below are "official" statistics for two group-one (?) pure math programs. Note that whether a score is "acceptable" might also depend on whether you are domestic student or not (based on the Ohio State data).

(Since my reputation is too low to add more than two links in an answer, I can't provide more information at present. But I'll definitely update this answer once my reputation grows...)

Ohio State University: http://www.math.osu.edu/graduate/apply

"There are no a-priori minimum scores for the test set by our program. However, admissions become rare below the 50th percentile. The distribution of percentiles of subject test scores of Ph.D.-applicants we admitted between 2009 and 2012 is depicted below.

The data over the four admission cycles includes 125 domestic (in red) and 129 international (in pink) applicants. The median percentile for domestic students is 67, the one for international students is 95."

University of Pennsylvania: http://www.math.upenn.edu/grad/graddata.html

"Scores on the Advanced Math Subject Test of the GRE should be at least 750, though applicants with somewhat lower scores may be admitted if the rest of their application is sufficiently strong. The average GRE scores of the students who entered our Ph.D. program in the recent past were: Verbal: 597; Quantitative: 789; Advanced Math Subject Test: 820."

Edit: More data...

Cornell: http://www.math.cornell.edu/m/Graduate/app_details.html

"Most successful applicants score 700 or above on their GRE subject test."

Georgia Tech: http://www.math.gatech.edu/academics/graduate/faqs-graduate-admissions#MINGRE

"The PhD entering class in Fall 2006 had the following averages: ... Subj 795"

UIUC: http://www.math.illinois.edu/GraduateProgram/apply-phd.html

"Mathematics subject GRE scores of entering Ph.D. students in 2013: upper quartile 850, median 790, and lower quartile 690."

Penn State: http://www.math.psu.edu/grad/phd/faq.php
("Listed below are the average scores of students accepted to our program for the last several years...")


I think that it is partially depends on an institution that you plan to or, eventually, will be studying toward the Ph.D. degree. Note my emphasis on "partially", perhaps, I could have used "somewhat" or, even, "potentially". The implies that it might have some impact or it might not. If you don't plan to attend a Ph.D. program at a top university, then I would think that it will have a minimal effect in terms of admission. However, from a perspective of gaining experience in semi-dissertation-level-writing, the thesis option could be useful to you. However, at the end of the day, IMHO family should be a priority and, thus, I would suggest choosing the route that puts less strain on your family. It is possible to graduate in a Ph.D. program with a dissertation after previously graduating in a 100% online Master's program - I am speaking here from my own personal experience. It is somewhat more difficult, but doable. Again, family should be a priority in my book. Good luck!


What is difference between funding an MS and a PHD student

Disclaimer: this is US-specific and quite likely engineering specific.

The only potential difference is that the rates for funding Ph.D students (post-candidacy) might be different to that of an MS student. But the difference is usually between types of funding(RAship, TAship, etc), not who gets funded.


How do tuition and credit accounting work in an independent study course?

Since you ask about 1 or 2-credits, I'm assuming you're talking about doing an independent study course with the professor and not creating your own independent study track.

Independent studies (also called independent readings, directed research, tutorials, etc.) are essentially micro-classes of one or two students. You come up with your own reading lists, discussion topics, or projects -- subject to the approval of the professor. Whether to list it as 1 or 2 credit hours (or in my university 3 or 4 credit hours) is up to you. In general, you should plan on spending as much (or more) time in your independent study as you would with any other class.

From the registrar's perspective, it's just another class that you are taking. If you pay a flat fee for up to 5 classes a semester, then it can be one of those 5 classes. If you pay a fee for each credit-hour, then it would count as one of those paid credit hours.

I do independent readings with the undergraduate seniors, master's students, and PhD students when they come to me with topics that are of interest to me, but aren't in the regular course catalog. Since faculty do not get paid to teach independent study courses (we don't get any more money for doing this, nor do we get course releases for it), we're essentially do them out of the good of our hearts or because the topic is particularly of interest to us and/or we'd like the interaction with advanced students.


Is it okay to send a letter of intent to attend a grad school, but withdraw if a scholarship is not provided?

I do not think that this should be a problem. Even if you get accepted for admission, and they send an official offer letter. You can always accept or decline it. If you choose to decline it, that is totally fine.


Is it inappropriate to give one faculty member a larger thank you gift than another?

I would suggest sticking with a card, but writing your appreciation as extensively as you wish.  There's no reason for the contents of the cards to be similar.

Even ignoring the question of differences between faculty members, gifts can be tricky for professors to deal with, ethically, particularly when it's regarding a favor in a class.

Finally, I guarantee that a heartfelt explanation of how much the help mattered to you will mean a lot more to the professor than a $10 mug.


Are best-paper awards for conferences rigged/pre-decided?

I would find it very unusual and very disturbing if that happened.

In my experience (Computer Science and related fields), conference committees work hard with submissions to select the best paper. And they debate it, as different committee members will typically "champion" a paper that they think is worthy. Often this happens because the committee member is a specialist and recognizes that some paper makes a really significant contribution to some aspect within their speciality.

But I've never seen anything such as you suggest, nor any personal favoritism.

If this sort of thing really exists within a field, I think that it would be a good idea to raise the idea as an ethical issue with that community generally.