From the publisher's point of view the point of these reviews is to sell more copies of the book. Therefore you need to be one of these:

A well-known authority in the field. It's especially good if you're affiliated with a well-known university like MIT.
Some kind of well-known personality. For example if you have 100k Twitter followers, that would work. Or maybe you host TV shows like "The Planet", that would work too.

If you are one of these then feel free to write to the publisher offering to review books. If your review is complete early enough it's possible they will add your comments to the book cover; otherwise it'll mostly be in the promotional materials. One thing to note is that if your review is poor, it might simply end up unused.

Alternatively, you could write to the editors of magazines that publish book reviews, such as Physics Today or Scientific American. It's possible they just need the text and are less concerned about who is writing it (you will still need some credentials though). Being neutral 3rd parties, they can publish negative reviews.


Discovered that my research was not so original after it was complete. Is there a policy I should follow here?

This happens even to people who know how to search the literature and have some experience. Often it happens because when one starts thinking about something new, one understands little, and only once one has understood some things is it possible to realize that others have also already studied and understood them. Talking to other researchers, attending conferences, reading widely, etc. are all activities that help avoid rediscovery, but obviously they are all hard for a high school student.

Generally, one should not publish results that are already available in the literature, particularly if one's methods are in the fundamental aspects the same as those used previously (moreover, it will usually be quite difficult to publish results that are already known). There are exceptions, as sometimes one has a new take on an old result, or a better way of obtaining it, or sometimes one can adapt one's work into an expository account of the already known results that could be published (this will work only if those results have generated a fair amount of interest). If one succeeds in publishing already known results, it could generate in others' minds doubts about one's honesty, although it certainly happens that people innocently rediscover and publish known results (I know several examples). Often this occurs when they rediscover them in a context different from that of the original discovery (e.g. a graph theorist discovers some algebraic fact, and publishes it in a graph theory journal, although some experts in the relevant algebra would recognize it as a special case of something they already know).

However, there is a positive side to such rediscovery, and this is the most important aspect for a high school student.

The positive aspect of rediscovery is the following. First, that one has rediscovered published results should confirm one's sense (that one ought to have already) that one is doing something interesting (this is important for one's confidence). Second, any interesting results admits extensions, variations, further developments, etc. so such rediscovery provides a base for further work. Third, as a practical matter, that someone else has already worked on something means the audience for extensions of those results is at least one (besides oneself) and it is always positive to reach others with one's work. So the productive/constructive response to discovering that one has rediscovered something is to push it farther. This really works in practice. My most recently accepted paper started this way - I worked out something, it seemed so natural that I thought this surely is in the literature already, and, sure enough, there it was, published 5 or 10 years earlier. It was a disappointment, but I kept thinking along the same lines, and it was possible to build on it to obtain something new. Also it brought me into contact with the authors of the previous work, which for me was also positive.

Finally, I would recommend that you get in touch with the mathematics department at the nearest research university. Usually someone is happy to help out an enthusiastic and talented student.


Checking with co-authors on status of a not-yet-submitted paper?

Publications plans can end up going into limbo for a long time.  In my experience, this can be especially true for publications with lots of authors, because you can easily end up in a situation where nobody's really stepping forward to get it written, or where everybody thinks somebody else is the one dealing with the current road-block.  One paper that I am an author on spent three years in un-submitted limbo for such reasons.

As such, checking in every few months is totally reasonable, as you may in fact provide the stimulus to keep it moving forward.  Be warned, however, that if it's ended up in limbo and if you actually care about the paper, that you may well find yourself one of the ones getting handed tasks for actually writing it.


How to number courses in an undergraduate Computer Science curriculum?

The general rules that I've seen (but have not been written down) typically work as follows:

Sequences of related courses should have, as much as possible, consecutive course numbers.
Courses that are prerequisites of other courses should have lower numbers than the courses that depend upon them.
Courses that are closely related to one another should have closely spaced numbers.
Within a century, introductory, general, and required courses should have lower numbers than the elective courses.

Since you have a three digit number to work with, you can use the middle digit to relate courses according to thematic areas (x0y and x1y numbers could correspond to basic or interdisciplinary subjects; x2y could be algorithms, and so on).


How successful are publication agreement addenda?

I finally managed to take a bit of time today to research this question further, so here goes:

First, there hasn't been much data compiled on the topic. Science Commons's FAQ on publication agreement addenda says:

  Anecdotal evidence from a variety of sources reveals that many scholarly authors have had success over the years in altering the terms of a publication agreement. Sometimes this has been done by marking up the publisher’s agreement; other times the change has been done through use of an addendum. However, we are not aware of any statistical data concerning the success rate.

while the more recent Creative Commons Science page fails to mention success statistics at all.

However, we can measure the “success” of such addenda (or its influence) by looking at the reactions of various publishers to it. The MIT Libraries actually maintain a list of publishers and their stance. In a similar vein, the useful (and by now, well-known) SHERPA/RoMEO online database maintains a publishers statistics:

If you look at these lists of publishers/journals, and you cross that information with the hottest and most common journals in each field, you see that things are very field-dependent:

In mathematics, the status of publications is quite different from the other hard sciences listed below. I do not feel competent enough to comment on it, but it seems to be working okay, with most mathematicians able to publish preprints or postprints on their personal websites, or to publish outside the “conventional model” (read: arXiv). This summary of various publishers' policies in the field is quite good (and recent).
Physics: due to the success of arXiv and the open-friendly stance of physics publishers (both American Institute of Physics and American Physical Society), physics seems to be one of the favorable fields for open publishing.
Traditional biology journals tend to belong to the big-money editors, who don't favor open publishing. However, open journals seem to have made good progress in this field in the last few years.
Chemistry is simply a nightmare. Most quality journals in chemistry are published by the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Wiley and Elsevier. All four of them have taken a hard stance against the open publishing movement. Open access journals have very little (read: absolutely no) success breaking through in the field of chemistry :(

Above are the fields I felt comfortable enough discussing. I welcome edits (or comments) that add information on other fields (including humanities)!

So, all in all, statistics pertaining to publication agreement addenda specifically are hard to find (if they exist). But, we can measure the success of the open publication model, and it  varies widely between fields.


What's a good strategy for coming up with a lab name?

You should use your own name in the name of your lab because it (likely) has existing name recognition.  You should not include the subject of research in the lab name because it will evolve over time and shut you out of potential collaborations beyond the subject stated in the name.


I think my TA winked at me and have developed feelings. Should I ask her out after the semester ends?

As long as you wait until after the semester is over and final grades have been assigned before asking her out, you are on clear grounds ethically. Personally I find the idea no less reasonable than the idea of asking anyone else out. You are both adults. She will either be interested or not. You will never know unless you ask her.

A good friend of mine started dating his former student back when he was a TA. They waited until the semester was over. They are now happily married with two kids.

Good luck! And don’t pay attention to the downvotes. Your question may not be the most pressing one the world of academia has right now, but it’s a valid question and is important to you.


Adding a short (and interesting) observation to a submitted paper

I can add it to my old paper and resubmit it, but even if it's not too late to do so, I'm afraid that my result won't get noticed (as the long paper will only attract a small number of specialists)

It is certainly not too late to do so -- you haven't even received a first referee report yet.  I suggest that you add the extension of the old, classical result to the present paper.  There are two aspects here:

Rewriting the paper:

If you just tack the new result / proof on at the end of a long paper, indeed it might not get noticed.  So don't do that.  Rewrite the abstract and introduction of the paper so that your new result / proof gets much more prominence: if the deduction is only a paragraph, you could even do that in the introduction.  This is a great way of selling the results of a long, technical paper!

Resubmitting the paper:

You could either send a new version of the paper to the editor and ask them to send it to the referee or you could wait for a referee report.  In my opinion, either one should probably work here: the changes are not going to bother the referee, and if the paper gets accepted, neither the editor nor the referee is going to be bothered by a new version with the same technical guts but with superficial rewriting so as to permit a nice new application.  What I would say is: since you know how to improve your paper and it hasn't been accepted yet, the smartest move seems to be giving the referee access to the improved version before they make up their mind...if the editor is on board with that.

So: I would suggest writing a new version, sending it to the editor, and seeing what they think.


I wonder whether the committee member is not so much concerned about plagiarism per se as whether you actually understand your advisor's work.  An undergraduate thesis is supposed to involve, at least in part, the student gaining a certain level of mastery of prior literature (as well as building on it.)  This sort of understanding is usually conveyed in a "theory" or "background" section near the beginning of the thesis.
If this section reads like it was copied-and-pasted from your advisor's previous work, then the committee member may be concerned that you don't really understand what you've written and are simply parroting it without any real comprehension.  They may then have doubts that you haven't really engaged with the material in a manner that is really worthy of whatever level of distinction is associated with a "thesis" at your institution.  Being a mathematician is not just about finding some interesting results;  it's also about understanding about how they fit into the broader picture of mathematics, and about being able to convey your understanding successfully to others.   Your institution may value these latter parts just as much as the ability to find new results (and I applaud them if they do.)
If this is the case, you may just need to bite the bullet and rewrite the section.  It's probably OK if the equations remain in the same form;  but the "connective tissue" between the needs to show, in your own words, that you actually understand how you get from equation (1) to equation (2) to equation (3).  (One of the things I always try to convey to my physics undergraduates is that the "connective tissue" between equations is just as important for conveying meaning and understanding as the equations themselves—if not more important.)


Fixed an error in my published paper, and cite the paper in my not-yet-defended thesis. What should I do?

I've come across one Ph.D. that I read, where the main body was just a collection of past published papers by that author. The subject was interesting to me, but I got a bit bored reading the same introduction many times over, as naturally many of the papers published had the similar introduction. Is your Ph.D likely to be like that, where the published paper is included in an unedited form?

If it not, then I don't see what your problem is. Just present your graph, and you can add a footnote that a similar graph, but containing an error was published in journal XX.

Unless your Ph.D. is similar to the one in the first paper I described, then you will be judged by the content in your thesis - not on what you may have published before.

Whilst publishing material before you complete a Ph.D. is nice, certainly where I did my Ph.D (University College London), there was no requirement to have published anything before getting a Ph.D. I myself had published some papers, but it was not a requirement.

I think you are worrying about nothing to be honest. But it is worth letting the editor of the journal know about the error, but as for it being a problem in the Ph.D, I really don't see it as an issue.


Not sure what you mean by "professors" because that varies from system to system. It is completely normal that there be a quota on the number of "academic staff" (i.e .professors in an American sense) on a university senate. I don't think it is unusual that there be a quota for "chairs" or "full-professors" (i.e. professors in the British sense).

At our university the senate is composed of:

The president/vice-chancellor of the university (1)
The vice-president of research and vice-presdient of learning and teaching (2)
The deputies of the above (2)
The pro-vice-chancellor of each faculty (5)
The head of research and head of learning and teaching of each faculty (10)
The head of each academic department. (43)
35 staff representatives elected from those on grade 8 and over (Lectuer in Brit-speak, assistant/associate professor in US, or equivalent from professional services). (35)
The 5 full-time student union officers (5)
One undergraduate student from each faculty, elected by students in that faculty (5)
Two post-graduate students elected by the students union (2)
One mature student elected by the students union. (1)
The librarian.

Whether or not this is discriminatory or democratic is a matter for debate I suppose. I'd only note that senate being democratic is not specified in the university's statues.

The powers of senate are a matter for discussion and in recent years the power of senates in most British universities is not seen as that great, with the exception of Oxford and Cambridge whose equivalent bodies (Regent House and Congregation) include almost all permanent academic staff at the university. However, while these bodies nominally have the final say, they are so large and unwieldy that they seldom intervene.


What should I do if I want to do a PhD at a particular lab but cannot secure a scholarship?

Talking to your prospective advisor is the best option as they should know what other funding opportunities there are. If you demonstrate determination to study a PhD with them and enthusiasm for research they will most likely try harder to find you funding and support you in the mean time. Try to develop ideas for the PhD, think about what you really want to research. Volunteering or working temporarily for the advisor could be a way in to potentially get a publication. If you can get your name on a publication, you will be much more likely to secure funding. But I suggest you call the professor instead of emailing, especially if you are not comfortable writing the email.

As @Sayan mentioned, making multiple applications to different laboratories is also a good idea. International tuition is often crippling, but there might be better funding opportunities in another country which could take care of that. Letting the potential supervisor know you are doing this will further demonstrate your enthusiasm for research, and taking up an offer elsewhere does not mean you will never work with your first choice.


Is 8:00 AM an unreasonable time to meet with my graduate students and post-doc?

It depends entirely on whether you have consulted the other meeting participants. There is nothing inherently wrong about an 8 a.m. meeting if it is convenient for everyone involved.

If you have set the time without consulting the other participants, there are two serious problems.

You may be giving one or more of them a practical problem. For example, consider a parent whose child's school starts at 8 or later. You may be disrupting carpool arrangements. It may conflict with a class one of the students wants to attend.

The other problem is more subtle, and applies even if none of the participants actually has a problem with the meeting time. Setting the time for a small meeting without consulting the other participants and considering their views is very disrespectful. It tells them that you consider your schedule, your convenience, to be so much more important than theirs that you don't need to consider them at all. That sort of message is not good for a working relationship.


Is it possible that implementations based on same paper show different performance?

It's certainly possible. You just demonstrated that. (I assume you have compared implementations in the same language, compiled the same way.)
I don't think it's surprising. Implementing any reasonably complex algorithm calls for many choices that can affect performance to different degrees - choice of data structures and libraries, efficient use of space or memory.
Whether you should or want to compare the implementations "line by line" to ferret out the differences depends on how the difference in performance matters to you.


Is there any research on the prevalence of academic theft?

Is there any research on the question: how common is academic theft, really? Such as surveys of people having experienced (or committed!) such theft according to an appropriate definition, possibly compared to peoples perception as to the risks.

See the related articles:

  De Vries, Raymond, Melissa S. Anderson, and Brian C. Martinson. "Normal misbehavior: Scientists talk about the ethics of research." Journal of empirical research on human research ethics: JERHRE 1.1 (2006): 43.

and

  Martinson, Brian C., Melissa S. Anderson, and Raymond De Vries. "Scientists behaving badly." Nature 435.7043 (2005): 737-738.

Among a sample of 3,247 NIH-funded scientists in the United States, asked about the behavior "Using another's ideas without permission or giving due credit":

1.4% said they themselves have engaged in this behavior within the last three years
45.7% agreed with the statement, "I have observed or had other direct evidence of this behavior among my professional colleagues including postdoctoral associates, within the last three years."

Please read the article for methodology, limitations, etc.


Join a research group at a university I do not attend

This will depend on the field. In my area (in computer science), research groups frequently work with external collaborators from industry. From the perspective of a research group, such collaborations can be very desirable, since practical motivations or, even better, applications can improve their research. There are even conferences with a specialized "industry" track, where perspectives of practitioners are sought explicitly.

Teaching-wise, this will depend on the country as well. In Germany, it's not unheard of that people from industry are employed on a part-time contract to give a lecture with a practical focus.

I think you should directly contact a suitable research group (professors and maybe post-docs), rather than the university, since employees of the university administration might be unaware of those specifics.


This is something that you need to discuss specifically with your advisors. They may or may not be interested in the publication—but they may also have an interest in ensuring that your goal of publishing doesn't interfere with your paid work. (For instance, spending a lot of time editing your "hobby" manuscript when you should be working on your talk for an upcoming conference for your "paid" project.)

You should also check with your university's intellectual property office about the guidelines for such work. So long as you're doing things on your own without university assistance or resources, there might not be a problem. But if you need to use equipment owned by them to produce your idea, things might change.


Should I trust a study that doesn't mention sample size, but that is published in a scholarly journal?

Why don't you write the corresponding author and ask them what the sample size was. You can always cite the sample size, if you decide to use the study, as a personal communication.


Is it safe to send official GREs almost on deadline (e.g., the day before)?

I am in the same predicament. I asked Princeton Admissions about this and they said:

We continue to match scores to applications as we receive them, even after the deadline.  If we already have your scores on file when you submit your application, it can take up to seven business days for the scores to match.  If you recently took an exam or recently made a request to the test administrator to send the scores to Princeton, it can take up to three weeks from the test date for us to receive your official score report and electronically match your scores to your submitted application. You will be able to monitor your submitted application checklist and will see the test date once the scores have matched.  You will not see the test scores.


Which license should be chosen in arXiv for a paper to be published in IEEE TPDS?

I am no lawyer and I have not read the complete legalese, but as far as I see, the first option (non-exclusive and irrevocable license to distribute the article) is the only possible valid one, as it is the most restrictive.

All the Creative Commons licenses would allow others to distribute a copy of your paper (with attribution and some possible restrictions, such as the non-commercial clause). However the IEEE policy allows only the following:

  Author’s personal website
  Author’s employer’s website
  arXiv.org
  Funder’s repository

  [...] The posted article must be removed from any other third-party servers.

So using a CC license would result in a conflict, as you cannot both allow others to distribute copies while at the same time guaranteeing to the IEEE that there will be no copies on other servers.

This does not guarantee that the first option is the right one, however since the IEEE explicitly allows arXiv.org and we have excluded all the others, they will probably not complain...


What does it mean to be on a short list?

Nope, there's no widely agreed upon definition of "short list".  Sometimes a committee draws up an official short list, while sometimes people informally talk about a short list based on who is being seriously considered even if there's no official list.  Sometimes the short list consists of the people being interviewed, sometimes it's the people for whom letters are being requested, and sometimes it's in between.  Things can get more complicated when there are several forms of interviews (e.g., interviews at an annual meeting vs. fly-ins).  Sometimes a reference to the short list is a meaningless pleasantry meant to soften the blow of rejection when a committee member knows an applicant personally.  Ultimately, the only thing you can say for sure is that it's better to be on the short list than off it.  Beyond that, you have to guess from context or ask for clarification.


Meeting like-minded people for forming collaborative research relationships

In reality collaborations come easier to some than to others. Here are the factors I found help most:

Be a member of the community. Go to conferences, give talks (or present posters, or demos, or whatever else is common in your community), organize events and workshops. Talk to people about your work. A first step towards collaboration is that others need to be aware that you exist, and what you are working on. Once people are aware of your work, chances are somebody is working on a related problem and would like to know your opinion on it.
Be a nice person, and make sure that you are pleasant to work with. When you collaborate with somebody on anything, make sure to be constructive and deliver what you promise on time. News travels fast about collaborators who have a tendency to be overcommitted or who use collaborations mainly as cheap paper producing machines.
Have ideas. You say you don't want to go around asking whether people "need help" - well, no, you should not - collaboration is not a consulting service. You should listen to their current work, and propose directions that combine their problems or expertise with yours.
Have uncommon (but helpful) technical or methodological skills, and be sure that people know about them. If all you can do others can do similarly well, why would people want to collaborate with you?
Have access to data that others don't have access to. This may be a proprietary data set, but it can also be that you just understand a public data set very well and have good tooling to effectively work with it.


It shows up correctly in a general Google Search. I think you just didn't wait long enough for the indexing behind the scenes.


Methodology and Literature review in Masters dissertation

Defining such a number implies that you adjust your scientific work so that it fits into a fixed document breakdown. There are many arguments against such an approach, but since you asked for the number, here are some ideas for how to get it:

Solution 1: Talk to your supervisor.

He or she is the one deciding about your grade, so it would be smart to follow their opinion about the structuring and divisioning of your thesis parts.

Solution 2: Find examples.

Most universities make masters theses public, either on the homepage or in their library. Go through some of them and figure out how other people structured their document. Use their work as guiding example.

Solution 3: Write a paper.

A masters thesis is something like your first scientific publication, so you can structure it as a conference paper:

Introduction + problem statement + methodology (15%)
Related work / literature study (25%)
Your approach and experiments (35%)
Your results and conclusion (25%)

The weighting will highly vary, depending on the problem class. Pure survey papers have no experiments, so you spend way more space for the literature study part. Engineering papers only have a short related work section, so that there is more space for the approach / architecture section.


TVöD pay scale for 1st year PhD in Bayern

Here is the table.

You have to look at row E13, which is the standard monthly pay for PhD students with a full position in Germany. The first column is for the first year, then you advance to the second column at the beginning of the second year, and to the third column at the beginning of the fourth year.

Those are values before taxes. Clicking on the number leads you to an online calculator that estimates the value after taxes.

This amount is paid 12.5 times a year: one salary per month plus an additional half salary in November as Christmas money (Weihnachtsgeld/Sonderzahlung).

The above is valid for doctoral students with full positions, which are common in engineering. It is common in many other fields to have partial positions (50% or 65% of a position). In this case, the contract will specify a reduced number of hours per week (20.05 or 26.65 instead of 40.1 hours per week in Bayern) and the corresponding percentage will be applied to the salary before taxes. The percentage after taxes will be higher due to a reduced tax rate: there are online calculators such as this one that estimate this value.


Are INRIA working reports publicly available?

You could try to contact the author of the 1993 publication citing them.

And as Massimo Ortolano mentions, those titles are probably not the original translations. Maybe you can get the institute to send you a list of the 1981 publications and look for anything contributed by H. Mortazavian?


European Ph.D. student salary range web site

Partial answer;
In the Netherlands you have a couple of different possibilities when it comes to PhDs. You can be a student (and thus have to pay), a payed phd (who also has teaching obligations), and an external PhD (who, depending on the professor, might have to pay).

The paid PhDs salary per month vary from 2,125 euro in the first year to 2,717 euro (in the fourth year, which should be the last year) according to the VSNU (look at the P column). There is also a 13th month and vacation money. Of course tax and social premiums still has to be deducted to get to the salary you get on your account.


How do you know if university is right for you?

What do you want to do with your life? University is one way of getting to some of the answers. Trade school or apprenticing is another, if you think that's closer to what you want to spend your life doing.

It's also legitimate to say you don't know yet -- in which case you need to decide whether starting classes would help you decide what interests you, or if doing something else for a year makes more sense.

I knew what I wanted to study (or thought I did; turns out I was close but not on the mark), but even so I decided to take a year off before college; I needed a bit of maturation time, and to switch from being the youngest in the class to being one of the older kids, for my own comfort. Spent the year doing volunteer work in a hospital (electronic repair, "biomedical engineering"), which was certainly educational in the general sense, helped build my self confidence, and may actually have helped my college application stand out from others.

"... There are nine and sixty ways / of constructing tribal lays, / And every single one of them is right!" -- Kipling


Overcoming depression and getting back on rails with PhD work

Depression is very common amongst graduate students and faculty. So know that you are not alone.

  About 60% of graduate students said that they felt overwhelmed, exhausted, hopeless, sad, or depressed nearly all the time. One in 10 said they had contemplated suicide in the previous year. --  AAS Science Careers

However, there is very little that the community on SE can do to help you. We are not therapists and cannot provide a therapeutic relationship.

Know that there is no shame in seeking help. Your university almost always has a mental health clinic with free or subsidized service. Whether you prefer talk therapy or psychopharmaceuticals (or both) is up to you and your insurance plan -- but please do go seek help from specialists.


Contact the editor. It happened to me once that the referees were divided, so the editor sent the paper to more referees, hence prolonging the process. He just forgot to notify me. Moving to another journal is a bad decision, since you haven't been rejected yet. What if then you are liaising with two journals and both accept it? Not good.

Also, check the average processing time of the journal. Some do take long time, even up to six months!


What do I do when a student working in my lab "ghosts" me?

I wrote him mails on a weekly basis asking for a status update and inquiring whether he was stuck.

It seems that you are completing your duties as an advisor well. You can and should continue to offer help and suggestions in accordance with your duties. Perhaps this student is too busy or too anxious to respond to your emails. In that case, you could provide links to resources that might benefit them without the necessity of responding (if you feel that they need more advising).

While I personally try to respond to emails in a timely fashion, I often work better independently and only reach out when I am in need of assistance; this student might function the same way.

  I already have escalated the issue to my supervisor

Great, this means that your supervisor is aware of the issue and is likely to be understanding in the event that your student does not do well.

  he told me to let it student fail if required

This is also fine. If the student does not adequately complete their work, this is the expected outcome. If you are concerned that the student is unaware of this, you could send an email letting them know (or possibly reminding them of policies in the syllabus regarding this).

  Are there other options for me?

You cannot force the student to respond or work on their project. You should continue to advise this student to the best of your ability, but beyond that it is their responsibility to follow through.


E-assignment submission system made my effort go to nothing

You can explain the situation to your professor, and he/she may understand the situation and confusion. However, if what you say is true and how your last submission overwrote your original submissions - assuming your original submission is now lost, then it looks like you submitted nothing and it looks like you missed your deadline. Your best bet is to contact the professor. Perhaps he/she can see your previous submission details.


Current Masters student, need advisor for PhD (no public announcements in the department)?

Rather than emailing lots of faculty asking for openings, I would recommend emailing a few faculty who seem most interesting to you asking for a discussion about the possibilities of joining their department.  The reason is that rather than just polling for openings, you want to get connected to the referral network (which your current professor appears unwilling or unable to do for you).  I would thus recommend approaching the discussion not as:

  Hi, can you hire me?

but instead as:

  Hi, I'd like to figure out whether my research interests and personality are a good match with you or others in the department.  If they are, can you hire me or else can you point me to somebody else who is likely to be interested in doing so?

This way, instead of asking a simple yes/no question, you are engaging the person in a way that may also lead you to good connections that you wouldn't have even thought of asking about.  By following the leads from such conversations, I think you are significantly more likely to find a good match than just by sending out polling emails.


How does a graduate program's admissions committee operate?

I've been on the grad admissions committee at my university for 30 years, and have been Dir of Grad Studies in math on two different occasions, so I have a good sample of what goes on here.
First, in the last few years all our applications are electronic, so the admissions cte doesn't have to be in a little room with piles of paper any more. This also allows much more asynchronous appraisal of files, which allows not wasting time trying to figure out common meeting times.
Typically, a preliminary screening is done in a "distributed" sense, that is, obviously-not-qualified or misguided applicants are removed from the "active possibilities" queue. By this, I mean engineering or computer science students, or crackpots, who declare interest but have no documentable mathematics background, no letters of recommendation from mathematicians, no GRE subject test, no nothing. :)
Even after this initial filtering, we have many fewer (funded as TAs or RAs) spots than approximately-qualified candidates. Even though we expect maybe 50-percent accept rate of our offers, the number of approximately-qualified candidates is still too large by a factor of 2 or 3 or more.
Candidates from small colleges in the U.S. typically have a very thin background, whether or not they've done special summer programs, so are at some initial disadvantage in comparison to candidates from Europe or Asia who have seen much more coursework, if only due to the structure of "college" there. This also precipitates discrepancies in GRE subject test scores. Nevertheless, we have found that this discrepancy is often very temporary, and after two years, or less, success in our program is almost completely uncorrelated with such things. Thus, many of the pretend-objective measures of prior success are of very limited value.
Further, the import of letters of recommendation depends greatly on the author, and their prior experiences, basis for comparison.
So we are left trying to compare candidates from widely varying backgrounds...
To get to the "final list" of offers thus consists partly of winnowing out candidates who are perhaps vaguely qualified but indicate no genuine interest in anything about our program, while putting onto the "definite" list candidates who seem to be focused and have a particular interest in the research program(s) of our faculty.
Documentably strong background and prior success is good, obviously, but, again, undergrad work, summer REUs, and such are a different enterprise than genuine graduate work and long-term research. Success in a highly structured environment gives very ambiguous indication about success in an unstructured environment. Success when there are unambiguous answers to questions that can be answered in a few hours is different from success in situations where the program can take months, and one is not quite sure what the question is.
So there is considerable discussion and re-reading of personal statements and letters of recommendation, trying to project into the future and a new environment, based on our prior experience. Not easily turned into an algorithm.
As to the specific questions: an obviously implausible applicant could be appraised in 5-10 minutes. At the other end, the final decisions about the better obviously-qualified applicants may involve repeated appraisal, so that the total time spent might be 5-10 person-hours in the end.
As to whether we look at on-line manifestations of applicants: this is a potentially delicate issue. The default approach would be to absolutely not do so, certainly not look at Facebook or other social media. If the application gives a pointer to a "professional" web page, of course this is considered useful, and positive if that site gives evidence of good work of the applicant. But "snooping around" would be unethical, inappropriate. Even if there is a pointer to a site in the application, if the application is not otherwise plausible I don't think I'd look at the web site.
EDIT (29 Aug 2020): since this thread got bumped to the top anyway, I thought it'd be not too disruptive to update remarks about GRE subject tests: the ETS (Educational Testing Service), which creates and administers the GRE, have cancelled the subject tests for this autumn (in the northern hemisphere, I hasten to add, having someone recently note my hemisphere-ism! :)... As I've said in this thread and others, in fact my dept does definitely does not consider GRE subject test scores good predictors of future success. The only aspect of interest has always been whether or not students succeed in understanding that (in the past) many or most places did consider a subject test score essential to an application... so we here would wonder why a student wouldn't have that score, even if we didn't care what it was...
Now, the Dir Grad Studies office is composing a highly revised statement of our attitude about the GRE subject test, at least saying that we are not interested in it, do not require it, and do not want to see it. (Apparently my math dept does not want to make any remarks that might be interpreted as "snarky"...)


First of all, don't be too worried, switching after the Bachelors is not "very late" and happens more often than you seem to think.

Now for your question: I would first try to find a university/program you like to join. Maybe even more than one, in case that you don't get into your first choice.

Then, you should contact the advisor(s) responsible for this program and ask them your questions. The requirements are a little different for every program, some offer the chance to catch up on missing courses during the program, others require it before the program or don't offer it at all. Thus, we can't really give you a general answer here, as every program handles things a little different. But, as I said in the beginning, it is not entirely uncommon for students to switch paths, so most program advisors should be familiar with such cases.


Include publication done outside PhD study

It sounds like these previous papers were not within the scope of your PhD project, so on that basis should not be mentioned in the thesis.


Tenure possibilities for junior professorship

It depends: There are W1 professorships with a tenure track, and there are those without. If there is a tenure track, then that is usually prominently advertised, and more importantly, in writing. If there is nothing about tenure in writing, then the safe assumption is that you won't get tenure, and you will have to leave after 6 years. Verbal assurances that you might get something aren't worth much.

As to the teaching load, there are those that focus on allowing the person to qualify for a "real" professorship (W3), i.e. either as an alternative to a Habilitation or as a possibility to write your Habil. There are others were the position is used as a form of cheap labor for teaching. W1 positions with tenure track tend to fall in the first category, but there are also W1 positions without tenure track that fall in the first category. In that case, the W1 position is a stepping stone that helps getting a W3 at another university. Again, if it is a W1 aimed at allowing the inhabitant to qualify for a W3 professorship, then that is prominently mentioned and in written form. Only verbal assurances would make me worried.

If you know someone who work at a German university that you trust, you may want to let that person have a look at it. For an outsider it can be hard to read between the lines.


Searching databases for scientific work/ articles

Searching for articles on a topic is a skill that you get better at over time. Here are some tips to get started:

Ask your colleagues in your field which databases they use most commonly.  For instance, PubMed targets journals in the biosciences and medical fields.  PsychInfo indexes psychology journals, etc.
Google Scholar is a very capable tool, though the scope is typically broader than a more focused search engine.
Using a few articles you already have as starting points, review the reference list and pick out additional articles cited in the work that are of interest, then go read those, then repeat the process.  After time, you'll start to have an intuition on the authors, journals, and keywords that help you construct a search.
Use a 'cited by' search - first find a particular article you already have on your topic, then find the articles that cite that article. This can open up further routes for exploration.


Does stating terminal degree as Master's (and not PhD) hamper my chances of getting selected in a grad school?

It probably won't hurt your chances of getting accepted, but it will definitely hurt your chances of getting funding from the department.


Is it legal to accept a later offer (e.g., came after 15 April), despite having previously accepted an offer from a university before 15 April?

You ask whether it is "legal", but it is probably not a legal matter.  You can drop out of an academic program at any time with no legal consequences beyond paying the relevant fees.  Unless your acceptance means signing a contract which specifically requires something on your end, I don't see what you could possibly be legally held to.  I am not an attorney but rather a professor, and I can say that in practice no American graduate program would pursue legal recourse against a student in this way barring some truly bizarre, unique set of circumstances.

The relevant questions are rather whether it is ethical, whether it is polite, and whether it is in your own best interests.  The first question seems quite clear.  Are you really asking whether it is "okay" to rescind your word in a professional context?  I would hope that you know the answer.

There may be some situations in which it is so much in your best interests to renege on an offer that it could be worth asking about the possibility of doing so.  Most graduate programs in particular are not insistent on keeping students who have decided that they don't want to stay there.  But if you're asking about accepting now with the explicit plan of reneging later: I don't really know what to say without it sounding like a lecture on adult responsibility.  This is not a specifically academic issue. I can only hope that your life up until now has given you some useful experience.


As a member of my department's graduate admissions committee, I have been participating in a bunch of interviews, just like what you are describing, this very month.  We invite the prospective students to give a brief talk, ten to fifteen minutes, about a project they have done in the past, at the beginning of each interview.
Sometimes, students who are currently in master's programs talk about earlier work they did (usually from their times as undergraduates), rather than their current thesis work.  I don't see anything negative about this, and I don't think the other committee members do either.  So I think you will be fine talking about an earlier project—although don't be surprised if there are some general questions about your more recent work.
The goal of an admissions intervew is to show what you know and your level of familiarity with research.  The faculty interviewers are evaluating the students they talk with for their potential; they are not specifically evaluating their current research work.  Showing a lot of detailed data is not necessary and may even be counterproductive, since it may draw attention away from the big picture of what you are trying to convey—which is that you know your field and will be able to do good research in that field.  If there were problems with your earlier experiments, you can explain that and use that explanation as a way to show that you understand the difficulties that are encountered in research; if you can explain how those problems could be fixed—even if you are not going to be able to implement those fixes yourself—that can be a very good way to demonstrate research competency and maturity.


Advice for early grad student: how to professionally present tentative research idea(s) before one has chosen a topic

You should be honest for sure. If you don't know something, do not pretend you do because you may face a person who really knows what you try to talk about and then, if you have only a superficial grasp of the subject, you are toast. Just say straight that you've heard that X is an interesting subject, that you have already read , that you want to learn more about it and, perhaps, try a research project in that particular area, and that you have this and that idea and wonder what can be made of them. That will get you the warmest response you can expect from the person you are talking to ("the warmest" doesn't mean "warm", by the way) and you may get some good advice or help this way from a "complete stranger".

I admit that many people fail to understand that knowing and openly delineating the limits of one's knowledge and powers is "a professional behavior". Nevertheless, those whose respect you should really earn during your academic career (whether they are your professors or your fellow students at the current moment) will judge you from this standpoint. The opinions of the rest may make a lot of difference on the short run but none on the long one.


Asking for more than three letters of recommendation from four professors to reduce the risk of missing letters?

The two different application management systems that I've used at both a public and private R1 (intensive research oriented doctoral granting universities) don't care once you've hit the minimum required -- the application is marked complete if it meets the minimum number of items in that category even if there are other letters that might be pending.

So it's a good strategy to request more letters than are minimally required because of the strong possibility of professorial flakitude.


Should an arXiv paper indicate the conference it was rejected from?

No, you should not do that. Rejections are not to be advertised. Everyone who will read the paper will be prejudiced against it and you simply do not want that. After all, many papers are initially rejected before being accepted at a suitable venue. You want other people to know when your work got finally accepted and not the other way around.

If you want to establish the initial date of the paper, next time I would suggest to upload immediately after rejection and after addressing the reviewers' comment that lead to your rejection. This way, you have a better paper uploaded, you establish priority before submitting to the next conference and you can cite your work in subsequent publications.


How should I state a 'PhD dropout' in my CV?

Rule #1 in resume writing is to never lie on your resume. Never, ever, ever. That doesn't mean you're doomed with a scarlet letter, of course.
I had a similar situation in the past, and worked with quite a few people to hammer out the singular line of that issue. It is quite hard to write, and you will want to talk with someone who has resume-reading/recruiting experience to make sure it sounds okay. Make sure you account for all the time you can.
Here's an example:

Mathematics, Department of Mathematics, Foo Baz University, BB, (Performed four years of studies in pursuit of PhD before exiting program) August 2011 – March 2015
B.S. in Mathematics, Department of Mathematics, John Doe University, DD, June 2011

Try to avoid using words with negative connotation, such as "dropped out" or "failed."
Regardless of how you write it, people will ask you about it. However, it's much easier to defend your situation in an interview, especially knowing it's a question that will come up. I basically indicated that I no longer found it reasonable or practical to continue my pursuit of a medical degree and decided to focus on something that I was equally, if not better at, suited for, when I interviewed.
Since I don't know what your situation is regarding your MS, I've left that out, but if you're sure you're going to get it, you can add a line for that saying that it is tentative and to be awarded at a future point for work done during the PhD.


How to submit two separate works simultaneously to two conferences when the works are similar in a few parts?

I had done something similar during my PhD (upon advice by my supervisors). I'll explain my situation as it seems similar to yours (though you only told us about the similarities but not the differences between the content you have for your two papers).

I've developed a novel technique as well, and had quite a bit of results, though not quite enough for a journal submission. We submitted two conference papers:

The first one was targeting a smaller, very specialized conference, specifically in the subfield focused on the theory used in my technique; here we submitted a paper dissecting the theory behind my new technique and offering an exhaustive test of parameters and similar.
The second one in a much wider-topic conference, focusing on the performance of the method on the datasets of wide interest and comparison to other state of the art.

The theory was discussed at length in the theoretical paper. However, as there was no guarantee either of the papers would be published, we also introduced the theory in the other paper in a much denser and shorter, but still complete (i.e. containing everything necessary to make my experiments repeatable) manner. We then referred to the theory paper in the performance paper.

For cross-citation of such papers:

upload them both to preprint services (arXiv is fine but occasionally there is institutional services which are much less demanding to use)
cite them as (submitted) or (submitted to X) or (under review) and update it through the submission process (if you pass the first round of reviews)
some conferences allow/require to send a copy of any relevant but unpublished materials, so you can also send the second manuscript as supporting material with the submission (especially if, for any reason, you did not manage to use a pre-print service).
make sure there is no "significant overlap" between the papers (which would constitute auto-plagiarism) and that you are not re-using your own text

Most importantly though, if you can, talk to your supervisor. They will likely have experience and will be able to advise you best since they know your work.


Can I submit the anonymous referee report from a previous submission to another journal together with my manuscript?

Could I send this report, together with the manuscript, to another journal?

This is a confusing wording: the first two times I read it, I thought you meant you were submitting the referee report for consideration of publication!  But I think I understand what you mean now: I'm guessing (though please confirm) that the referee said some good things and in particular regarded, either implicitly or explicitly, the result as being correct, but just not good enough for publication in Annals (as are at least 99.9% of mathematical results), and you would like the positive aspects of the referee report to follow you to your next submission.

If all of the above is right, the answer is that you cannot do this directly: it is simply not the part of the established protocol for paper submission.  And there are good reasons for this.  On the one hand, how does the next editor know that you did not fabricate the report or modify it in some way?  On the other hand, referee reports are never anonymous to the editors, so "submitting an anonymous referee report" undercuts most of its value.  However the next journal could contact the Annals and get the report officially and the identity of the referee.  Which brings me to what you should do: if you want a referee report from Journal A to be carried over to Journal B, you should write to the editors at both journals and request this to happen.  This definitely happens sometimes, although in my experience it is most commonly initiated by someone other than the author.


When you get paid to do research, but you're not a graduate student/PI, is it mandatory to put in extra time?

A: Ask a labor or employment attorney in your local area

B: No. The law in most western economies is structured so that you have some form of redress (union, contract, employment law, etc.) so that you cannot be forced to work longer than a specific or nominal work week which can range from 35 to 40 hours per week (in my experience) without additional pay. Anything more is slavery and/or illegal employment practices. Now that doesn't mean that a savvy employer can't find a fake reason to fire you if you don't work enough hours to satisfy them. In lots of places that have "at will" employment (many states in the US, for example), you can be fired for the color of your shoes, your smell, etc., except for protected classes like race, gender, religion, country of origin, etc. Still savvy employers can find ways around this, even if you have an employment contract.

What's you're real question? Are you worried about expectations from an employer, are you under the gun to work harder, or something else? Typically, unless something is weird, you're allowed to voluntarily work more hours than the standard work week, but you also can't be forced to without receiving legally mandated overtime pay. Some unscrupulous employers can even find ways around this, like by doctoring your time records, but this usually highly illegal and worth reporting to the correct authorities. Some classes of employees in the US are exempt from overtime, but a technician wouldn't often fall into that class in my experience.


Should each substantive chapter of a PhD dissertation be of similar length?

It's just a general guideline, don't worry about it too much. Aside from the fact that there are many ways to lay out a thesis, there are many reasons this would be violated.  I would venture that a better way to state this rule would be, "A chapter should be of medium length." If a given chapter is too short, it's likely an indicator that it can be combined with some other section. If a single chapter is too long, split it up into parts (experiment 1, exp 2, discussion, etc).

In any event, you should first check into how your advisor wants the thesis laid out. Consider asking your advisor to see some dissertations of other previous students to get a feel for how he likes to have things laid out; that'll be a good way to get a feel for how to lay out your own.


I had some similar experiences in the recent past.

  I still feel I am far away of being an expert in it

No one can be an expert in a whole domain. Being expert/perfect is an ideal situation in my personal opinion. So in case you are not an expert, there is nothing bad in it. You admit that you are not an expert so this is a positive point, it means you are able and willing to improve yourself and your knowledge. It means that even if you get a PhD degree, you'll still try to get more knowledge.

  even if I do get my PhD I think I will feel like I don't deserve it

You seem to be a perfectionist. But remember no one is actually perfect. Each one of us has some strengths as well as weaknesses. How can you measure perfection? This is not absolute in my personal opinion. Have you ever thought why relative grading system is mostly used for evaluation instead of absolute grading? Because we cannot live in isolation. We are living in a society,interacting with our fellow human beings. So we need to be evaluated relative to our fellows. If you don't deserve a PhD, what about your fellows? When your supervisor is sure that you have possess certain knowledge level at which you can present your work, it means it is relatively better than many others. If those others can get a PhD, you can also deserve it. (Even if you ACTUALLY don't deserve a PhD after some time when you'll get out of this phase of life, you'll start thinking this way).

  In retrospect, all the proofs I stuggled seem so easy to me

Why don't you try to think yourself as an intelligent or genius person? The same proofs may be too difficult for someone else who is not actually interested in this domain. You may disagree but in my personal opinion, apart from the industry-academia discussion, you are interested in your research domain because without interest one can't achieve this level. However, you have been working too much on the same things for a long time that you have got bored from the same lifestyle and you need a break and a change.

  Although I never considered acedemia as a career path and only consider industry

I consider industry-academia debate to be separate from the research-development debate. And i think you are getting confused between the two. Industry is incomplete without academia and vice versa. Similarly research and development support each other. Most of us consider one of them to be more important that the other and hence get confused. We can characterize them in two ways... 1. what we get, 2. what we give
 Try to think seriously about choosing industry, academia or a combination of both and evaluate the pros-cons of each choice in terms of your time, energy, monetary benefits, work-life balance many other job motivational/demotivational factors. However, according to my personal experience and understanding, you are sick and tired of your routine in academia and you have been overloaded with work in the recent past which has disturbed your work-life balance. Considering industry as an alternative would only worsen the situation because job in industry can be more time and energy consuming.

  I work 10 hours each day, at most a day off weekends and having no time left to cultivate my interests, develop new friendships or develop other useful skills.

Take out some time for yourself. If you are able to afford, take some leave from your current job (atleast a month or so) and spend some time at home with your family and friends. Make sure that you are completely disconnected with the official/research work/supervisor and any relevant person who can give you relevant news. After spending around 15 days of your holiday, start working part time with some other faculty member of almost the same domain but with relatively different research interests as your supervisor. You'll probably automatically start comparing that faculty member with your supervisor and will most probably start missing your supervisor. You'll realize that you were taking him/her for-granted. Its just that you have been working with your supervisor for some time now and you know much about him/her technically so you don't find something new in this experience. As a result, you start thinking that their is nothing special in what you are doing. Hopefully at the end of your holidays,you'll be back fully energetic and enthusiastic to pursue your work.


What could be an electronic way to verify that someone is from a specific university department or university?

There is no good fully automated way of doing this, because there is no central clearing-house are too many ways the humans maintain imprecise machine-readable records.

If you are willing to have a human process, you can deal with a lot of the problem cases with a combination of Google and phone calls.  That still won't ensure that an institution that you personally aren't familiar with is real, given all of the diploma mills in the world, but it will at least reduce the likelihood of giving access to a legitimate institution to the wrong person.


Why do some editors/journals withhold response letters from reviewers?

You learnt that the  authors' response was essentially "we accept the reviewers comments and have revised the manuscript accordingly."  If such revisions were clear to the editor there's no need for further review or communication.

Don't forget that while you may turn reviews round quickly (or you may not), there are plenty of reviewers who even for a second review  have a high chance of sitting on the paper for an unreasonably long time.  This (on top of workload) is a further incentive for the editor to minimise unnecessary links in the chain.


Can i put the submitted paper in the arxiv?

If you have just submitted the paper, chances are you haven't given the rights over to the committee. As long as you haven't agreed to some terms and conditions that gives temporary ownership to the conference, then you should still have ownership of the paper and can do what you want with it.

If you want to be doubly sure, a short email to the conference proceedings editor can erase any doubt you may have.


The National Center for Educational Statistics publishes reports mostly yearly regarding tuition fees as part of its Digest of Educational Statistics.

Relevant Table for graduate admissions from the most recent report. Information appears to go back to the 80s even with the 1995 report. Earlier data might be available from the Department of Education itself on request.

Professional degree type 1988 to 2010 Of note is that most fields have ballooned in cost the past three decades.


Is a publication with co-authors worth less that a sole-author paper? Does this explain people's reluctance to include someone as a co-author?

This is, in my (admittedly limited) experience, heavily dependent on your field.

In some fields, single-authorship is the norm; I believe a lot of highly-theoretical mathematics and some social sciences go this route. In other fields, such as astrophysics, this is almost never the case, as the work is often conducted among dozens of researchers working on multiple continents.

From what I can tell, publishing with co-authors tends to signify one or more of the following things:

The work is highly multidisciplinary (even within a single field) -- some research requires many experts in many different domains working together.
The work is "labor-intensive" -- some research requires a great deal of preparation that would be infeasible for a single researcher. For example, in my field of computer engineering, there's usually a significant amount of coding that goes into the research, which is most easily/quickly accomplished by many students and postdocs working together.
The work is large in scope -- larger, more ambitious projects require a higher level of support and more minds working together.
The work involves someone famous and everyone wants a piece of the pie -- okay, admittedly I made this one up.

That's not to say that single-author paper don't fit into one or more of these categories. These are just some rules of thumb that I've seen so far.

As for why some people are reluctant to "acknowledge your participation and contribution": well, this ranges the gamut of everything from the evils of:

Narcissism
Ego
Desire for fame/prestige

to the more mundane/less evil problems of:

Disagreements on what constitutes a large enough contribution to claim authorship
Misunderstandings as to what is being contributed (by one or both parties)
Traditions on what is deemed worthy of acknowledgement in publication.

In short: human nature.

If you're concerned that you aren't being credited for your work, you need to speak with the other party ASAP and set out clear guidelines moving forward as to where credit will be given and for what. Get this in writing -- timestamped and signed preferably, email is great for this.


Should I give professor gift at the beginning of my PhD?

I would prefer not get a gift from someone that is dependent on me. I don't want to end up in a situation of perceived (by the person receiving the gift, giving the gift, or by an outsider) bribery. I realize that in many cases it is an innocent show of appreciation, but just saying (or writing) "thank you" will achieve the same goal without the risk of it being perceived the wrong way.


Seeing that someone is already a PhD student during the application process, or later seeing that someone was a PhD student at two different institution always raises questions. But these questions are easy to answer in your statement of purpose or later application documents, and being in a country that "is going down a dark path and I want to get out asap" is a perfectly good reason anyone will understand.
In other words, I would not worry about it: Whatever questions anyone might have, you have a good answer for it and, moreover, your own personal happiness/mental health is more important than anything else anyway. So do it, if you can!


From your comment, $MMM is on the order of US$20,000.  This is almost certainly the stipend for one academic year.

It will probably be paid in monthly or semimonthly installments, over 9 or 12 months.


Recommendation letter from assistant professor vs professor

You will want a recommendation from someone who is familiar with your work and who can speak to your strengths. Overall, I think the content of the letter matters more than the exact person writing it, provided s/he has the qualifications to write the letter in the first place (e.g., a professor or someone otherwise qualified to assess your academic and research work).

If you have had considerable interaction with the new professor through research, class time, et cetera, then s/he would be a good choice for a letter. Probably the only time you may even consider going with the senior professor (and weaker letter) is if the absence of the letter from him/her would be a red flag. For example, if the senior professor was your advisor, most people would find it concerning not to see a letter from him/her.


How to name and cite different versions of Microsoft Kinect?

It is commonly called Kinect V1 and V2. In the research community, it is widely accepted, just because it is their name, example here.

Note that it is not the true name, as you stated. The best thing I could think of, is to highlight at the beginning of your article (or in the part you spoke about Kinect) that Kinect V1 refers to Kinect for XBox 360 and Kinect V2 refers to Kinect for XBox One (note there is a standalone version for Windows).


How much experience is required to apply to be on the editorial board of a journal

I believe this will depend partly on the field, and heavily on the journal. Is this a prestigious journal? Is it an area specific journal? In my own field, however, you can often email the editor (for smaller journals specific to your own specific area) if you've published a few articles with that journal, and they ask you regularly (say, 3-4 times a year) to review an article for them. In those cases, they will sometimes be happy to add you to the editorial board if you ask. Obviously, more prestigious journals will have steeper requirements, but if you're an early career academic, you should probably start off with a smaller, area specific, journal.

In this specific case, it can't hurt to apply. But if it's a prestigious journal in your field, I wouldn't keep your hopes up. If it's a smaller journal in your field, ask yourself if you want them to send you every paper with odd-ball stats that you need to review. Is it worth it in that case? It's helpful to everyone to be on an editorial board, so be sure to ask yourself why they have to put out an open call to find a board member. It may be because it's a smaller journal and there are no experts in the field, or it may be something else. You'd be the best judge of that question.


Writing PhD thesis as part of consortium project

A thesis is not an academic paper - you are supposed to be a little bit more self-centred than usual to show that you have applied the right kind of thinking to the problem, and the right methods.
Since you have re-done a lot of the analysis yourself because the collaborators did a poor/uninterested job, I would acknowledge the collaborators in the acknowledgements section at the beginning of the thesis, but then stick as much as you can to the work you did and the story that follows from there.

The alternative is that you don't talk about the work you did (bad idea), and might even give the reader the impression that you didn't know better having signed off on a sub-standard analysis (also bad idea).

Also, as someone in a similar situation, can you raise the issue with someone at the consortia? They need to know that PhDs are having a hard time forming a traditional "thesis" of work when they are being dropped into a service role rather than a traditional open-ended PhD, and that funding in the future must go to the labs that have thought about this problem in advance.


I attended a junior college before finishing my BS Math at university. My University Physics II instructor at the junior college had a BS Physics and a Master in Church Music. I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to find a job teaching mathematics at a junior college with your doctorate.


Does staying in a Master's program for too long look bad on PhD applications?

It seems to me that the strongest argument in favor of a 3.5 year master's degree you mustered was "it would be convenient for me to do so."  You said yourself that you don't think the extra time spent will pay sufficient academic dividends; rather, you are hoping to break even but worried that it will look bad.  I think your worries on this are plausible: 3.5 years is a long time to spend in a master's program.  The explanation of wanting to stay in the same city as your husband is certainly reasonable from the greater perspective of life, but I have a hard time seeing how your advisor could swing that in a really positive way in a recommendation letter.

Why don't you want to spend a year or two working at a "real job," presumably making real money, and (bonus) developing skills that you could then use in a PhD program?

Pro Tip: staying in grad school because it's easy, or because you're vague on the alternatives, is pretty much never a good idea.  The time dilation experienced by an insufficiently motivated grad student is amazing: it is not an exaggeration to say that many grad students spend a year doing what a really passionate (and capable, and well-trained) student could do in a month or even a week.  Again, that is not an exaggeration: I've seen plenty of instances.  The thing you're allowing a 2:1 (or 12:1 or 50:1) time dilation on is in fact (a big part of) your life.

Of course, the flip side of all of that is: tell us again why you can't do good or great work rather than average work?  And also talk to your advisor about it:

  My advisor is happy for me to stick around...

Not great or even good.  She either has an overly self-centered attitude to student mentorship or somehow has gotten the impression that you're not a very serious student.  But you could be if you wanted to, right?  And if you're really not...then just finish up your degree and move on.


How to reference different sources in a list?

I think the method you've proposed, while cumbersome and intrusive, is also the correct way to do things, as you will be assigning a specific item to a specific source. That is the point of citing original source material in the first place. So while it may be somewhat unsightly (particularly if using a Harvard-like style in which the authors are listed as part of the reference), what you're doing has the advantage of being unambiguous and completely legitimate.


Long Interview for Visiting Assistant Professorship

Deans will want to talk big picture, because they are paid to think big picture. You could ask them to talk about new initiatives or how the college has been adapting to the social and economic changes of 2020. They will probably have some softball questions for you.


Harvard citation of original journals but accessed online?

If you read and refer to the final version of the paper, cite it as if you had read the hard copy:

I'd suspect the vast majority of journal articles only ever gets read in their digital form by people who cite them.
A journal isn't less of a journal just because it appears as a digital edition.


What are the most important things to include in your thesis defense presentation?

Tailor the presentation to those who assess it. You say that will be your supervisors. If that means they are people closely familiar with your subject matter, you can devote more time to project details. That means 60-70% of your time. If they are non-experts (researchers from a different department/specialization), spend less time on technical details. When in doubt, always focus more on

-What's the big question/motivation for this study

-how does your contribution tie into big question

-Why was it a difficult project to tackle (important for non-experts)

-how did you overcome those difficulties

-how can the big question be addressed now that you made your contribution?

The last ties back into the beginning and may feel repetitive to you. But it is important for people listening to the talk.


What should I do if I cannot afford a journal Article Processing Charge?

Where are you based? If you're at an institution, I'd get in contact with your library. They usually have funds of some sort to cover APCs these days.

Depending on where you're submitting, it is still possible to get a fee waiver if you can provide financial justification (which it seems like you should be able to do). I don't know how well this works at most journals, but those like PLOS ONE and PeerJ are well known for providing fee waivers for researchers with OA support (apart from a couple of incidents).

Alternatively, you could pursue the 'green' route of OA. Submit your paper, but don't make it OA (via the 'gold' route), and self archive the pre-print, post-print, or whatever the options available for your journal are. You can check policies here: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

Try playing with these options a bit, and then report back if there are further complications or details to add.


How does one with a B.S. in Mathematical Sciences become a software developer?

My answer is coming from the experience of graduating with a B.S. in Mathematics (with a Physics minor) and then work as a programmer.

I had comparable programming experience before graduating and had actually planned on taking a second major in CS before dropping in in favor of Physics. I quickly realized that I would only find work in a programming position. It was quite a shock to work on a enterprise class application with hundreds of classes and a complicated architecture. I was incredibly lucky to find a position that was willing to train me up to speed.

I have found that sometimes I will use my math background to come up with an algorithm easily that other programmers will be stunned by. Other times I will feel critically behind the curve, especially when asked to design/architecture a new project.

I have filled in some of these gaps by supplementing my education through MOOCs, reading tons of books and forums (although I have only now started contributing), and picking my coworkers brains. I have had a goal of improving my skills with software patterns, and adding a new language/technology every year. However, keeping up with my mathematical skills (especially linear algebra and statistics) has opened many doors.

Also, improving "soft skills" like communication, networking, and organization is very important. In a lot of positions the goal in training is for you to generate business for the company.

Getting the lingo right away is critical. Once you know what can be done it is simply a matter of finding out how.

After three years as a junior programmer I am starting to look at Masters programs and I feel much more prepared and my job will be partially reimbursing me for classes. In addition I have a much better sense of what programs will benefit my career and how. For the type of work I am interested in I am looking into CS programs but also Systems Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Statistics.

That being said, I was incredibly fortunate to find a position that nurtured my abilities. To be clear, my supervisors were expecting a year before I contributed in a meaningful way, a lot of places will not take that bet on anyone. In order to get where I am I worked hard, usually 50 hrs at work and an additional 10 hrs of outside research.


Since we don't know your field, I'll add generally-speaking for my field, economics:

Slides are common for discussants at large, formal conferences, but never for more informal brown bags
Again, at conferences discussants tend to go longer, 10-15 minutes.  At a brown bag, five minutes or less seems about right
You should engage the audience in the form of opening up a thoughtful insight or question on the paper, one that the audience can then pursue in Q&A.  Usually it's presented in the form of you talking to the presenter though.

But those are just broad strokes, the key here is I think you should just ask.  You don't have to mention you've never done this before; just ask how long they want you to talk for and whether you should prepare anything.


How to cite marginalia in a second-hand book?

As far as I can see, you have 3 options: not using the material, using it without citing it and using it with citation. As you have no idea whether anyone is ever going to publish the ideas in those margins, not publishing seems overly cautious. Especially since you want to use the ideas there but seem to have no other source to credit.
Using without citing it seems like a very bad idea. Even disregarding the risk of the original author of those margins coming forward, passing someone else's ideas as your own is unethical.
That leaves citing the margins as is. You could explain the unusual circumstances in the publication you intent to use it in. If you have a personal webpage, you could publish photo's of the margins and also refer to those. Also you could simply offer anyone interested in those margins to contact you.


Both of these organisations are International but you can search by region and study area.

Top Universities is complied by the QS Quacquarelli Symonds
This page explains the methodology they use to rank institutions.

The Times Higher Education rankings are compiled by the Times Higher Education magazine in the UK with the help of Thomson Reuters. According to their site

  rankings employ 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons available, which are trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments.


I feel I've done enough for a PhD but my supervisor disagrees

This is a really hard problem that is hard to give advice for. If the advice is bad, you will suffer, not the person giving the advice. You know the personalities better than we do. But, as an outsider, it seems like you are being abused. You are giving, but getting little in return at this point.

Fighting with an advisor is seldom a wise choice. But quitting after five years with good productivity seems equally terrible, maybe worse.

For your consideration only, let me suggest a possibility. Work with the graduate advisor on a plan to get you out the door properly. Tell them that you are feeling abused and defeated unjustly and you need to graduate. It is at least partly the responsibility of the institution to assure that you have a clear path. Take their advice to stay an extra semester, but put them on notice that you need funding, either from them or from a proper job elsewhere. Other professors in the department might also be able to apply some pressure if they are approached properly. They can prevail with your advisor even when you can't. Advisors need the support of their peers, generally, and need to be seen as fair in dealing with students. But don't try any of this if your reading of the personalities suggests it would be counterproductive. But you have a right to insist on a fair path and a right to insist that your advisor and the graduate director do their jobs properly.

If you trust that outside professor enough to ask for a letter applying some pressure on the graduate director, it might be useful (or not, depending, again, on personalities). Most especially if they would consider hiring you.


How much does it cost the publisher to publish an academic article?

Ubiquity Press breaks down their £300 ($500) APC as follows:

38% indirect costs for things not related to the publishing of a single paper but which are needed for the business (£114 or $190)
34% covers editorial and production aspects, which appears to be the costs associated with producing the paper, managing submissions, responding to authors, preparing proofs, typesetting, XML etc. (£102 or $170)
16% is a waiver premium charged so they can offer 0 or low APCs to people who genuinely cannot pay (£48 or $80)
8% is used to pay for indexing, archival (in case they go bust), DOI etc (£24 or $40)
4% goes towards costs of billing you and taking payment (£12 or $20)

Depending on what you consider to be the actual publishing costs (here probably the 34% editorial & production costs + 8% Indexing & Archiving) you would be looking at ~ £126 or $210.

Ubiquity don't break their indirect costs down into server/platform costs; this all goes into the 38% indirect cost column.


If in doubt, "Prof. Lastname" is always appropriate for an undergraduate addressing a professor.

I sign all of my emails with my first name, but would find it quite strange if an undergraduate student started addressing me by it, unless we had done research projects or extensive service together justifying that far more intimate form of address.


Is it important to publish my article in a journal indexed on Thomson ISI?

If we momentarily disregard from discussions regarding the cons of ISI and Thomson-Reuters who run the service etc. and focus on the usefulness of ISI indexed journals for ones career, the answer is yes, it is important at least to some extent. The importance is in part depending on your discipline since ISI indexing is not evenly distributed over disciplines. But generally speaking the ISI listing means the journal publishes papers that are referenced, which is an indication that it is research of some quality and importance.

This does not mean non-ISI-listed journals are not "honourable". But, when choosing a journal in which to publish, you need to make sure it is read by other in your field so that your research is seen and your ideas known by others. You should make a survey of journals that are of reference and if you find ISI-listed journals there is a reason to consider them if your papers fulfill their quality criteria because they will be  seen as prestigeous references when you are evaluated for a position etc.


How should a social scientist deal with envy of disciplines that are more quantitatively rigorous?

Speaking as one outside of the social sciences whose work has been strongly influenced by readings from social science, I think it may be clearer if you tease apart three concepts that are often conflated: rigor, funding, and importance:

The mathematical or analytical rigor of a subject makes it more difficult for outsiders to understand or hold an opinion on, and inaccessibility can make things seem more important, but all it really shows is that it is hard to understand.
The amount of money thrown at a subject is another easy proxy for importance, but all that really shows is either popularity or market structure.

Social sciences actually deal with a lot of the really hard problems of society, the things that we all struggle with and don't know how to deal with well, like injustice and politics and social conflict.  We in the hard sciences and engineering like to pretend that we can solve these problems by the injection of new technologies, but all we can really do is create disruptions that destabilize the current order, following which society may become either more inclusive (e.g., the creation of the internet) or more exploitative (e.g., the creation of QoS protocols, leading to the current battle over net neutrality).

Social sciences are further challenged by problems of instrumentation (most of what they care about is really hard or inappropriate to measure), replicability (many phenomena are large enough or long enough duration that we've only got one or a few data points), and experimental controls (many interesting experiments cannot be performed because they would be horrifyingly unethical, e.g., isolating populations from the rest of society).

And yet... and yet I think the social sciences produce some of the most important work for us as humanity, because the work done therein is part of the reason that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.

So I think it's OK for a social scientist to envy the accessibility of data for people who only need to build a multi-billion dollar machine in order to do their research.  But don't envy them their field: your problems are just as important as theirs.


Applying to a psychology PhD with only neuroscience research experience

You ask how you should go about applying. Just do it. The evaluation of whether your background is lacking or not will be made be any a committee at any institution you apply to. We can't judge that here. And, your record is what it is.

But the committee will e looking for indicators of success so make sure that your materials and statements indicate a high likelihood of success, not the possibility of failure. In particular use positive terms in describing your background. Don't say "Sorry, I only studied neuroscience...". Say, "I have a strong research background in neuroscience". That is to say, leave out words like "only".

I don't know the fields at all, but on the face of it I would think that (a) any research experience at all is a plus and (b) neuroscience gives you pretty good insight into some of the problems in psychology.

In some places there is an opportunity in doctoral studies to take additional courswork to fill in any gaps. This would be true in the US, for example.

Keep it positive. Knock 'em dead.


Verifying that cited results are still current before publishing

I think what you're looking for are the papers that cite a given paper. This is often listed as "Cited by" in various databases. If paper B shows that paper A is incorrect, paper B will almost always cite paper A. In that vein, you can look at all the works that cite a given paper to see if any disprove the results.

More typically, though, if a paper published 10 years ago is still relevant today, there are other more recent papers on the same topic which will either cite that paper or derivative works thereof, and you would use those more recent papers to ascertain the current state of the research. Old papers, particularly in quick-moving fields, tend to either fade away pretty quickly or serve as foundations for other research. If no one else has cited it in the interim period, it's probably worth taking a very critical look at why that is the case before throwing in all your chips on that single paper.


Which license should I choose on arxiv.org for later publication?

I think there are two factors you will usually take into account:

The policy of the journal or journals you expect to submit the work to.  You must choose a license that is permitted by that journal.  You can easily determine what is allowed using Sherpa/Romeo.  Just search for the journal and look at what is allowed for "submitted version" (or accepted version) in a subject repository.

Your own preferences.  This is straightforward -- read the license and make sure you agree with what it allows/doesn't allow.

When in doubt, the minimal non-exclusive license is the safest bet.


I could not apply for a scholarship that I cleared the cutoff for. Can I mention that I was eligible in my graduate applications?

It doesn't much matter whether you've been eligible for a scholarship. You didn't get it, so by definition you didn't earn it. There are some cases where you may be declared an official "runner-up" and for a sufficiently prestigious award it may be worth reporting, but this does not describe your situation. I know some people might report a scholarship they ultimately turned down - that is, it was offered to them but they chose not to take it for some reason - but even this seems to me like a bit of a reach outside extraordinary circumstances and again does not apply to your situation.
If I'm understanding correctly, your potential eligibility is solely based on some percentile rank you've achieved. You can certainly report your percentile rank and advertise that, but I wouldn't advertise that despite this rank you were unable to obtain an endorsement for this scholarship. "It's not my fault and the teacher was too hard on me" isn't an argument that is likely to play well. Stick to positive things about yourself, not negative treatment by others.


No response from summer school. Should I email?

Ask. That is, send a polite email inquiring if there is any news.

There's a possibility that the decisions have simply not been made yet - the organizers of the summer school, just like the rest of us, are busy and bad at keeping to deadlines - but it's still okay to ask (politely).


Do private religious institutions ever consider hiring someone clearly not affiliated with said religion for a faculty position?

You should check the particular university in question.  They will usually make it pretty clear in their job postings and/or application process.

Some will say explicitly "We welcome applications from all candidates regardless of faith", or "We do not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, ..., religion, ...".   The Jesuit institutions with which I'm familiar are of this kind.

If they say that, it's likely that they mean it.  They'd have no particular desire to get applications from candidates that they don't intend to consider; it would just be more work for them.  If they did want to discriminate on the basis of religion, they wouldn't have to hide it, since it's perfectly legal under US law for religious institutions to do so.

You might still be asked to demonstrate that you share their values, even if you don't share their religion, and that you will be comfortable working in that environment.  You might look up the university's mission statement (they pretty much all have one) and see if it's something you can get behind.

Conversely, universities that only accept applicants of a particular religion will typically signal this in the job posting.  (Again, they want to avoid wasting your time or theirs.)  A common way is to require a "statement of faith" as part of the application, in which the applicant is expected to demonstrate adherence to the appropriate religion.  I recall another posting that asked the applicant to state their religion, "for instance, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, ..." - their list only included denominations of Christianity, making it pretty clear that non-Christians need not apply.

You might also find this explained on a generic "about the university" page on their website.


How to handle citing duplicate publications?

The purpose of references is for readers to look up the sources of the information you present in your article. If these publications are exactly the same, word for word, then I would not worry too much about it and I would cite the most easily accessible source or the one with a DOI and only cite it once, so that it will be easier for readers to find the source without having to access some articles that are published in less accessible journals.


At what point is someone considered too old (in terms of experience) for an Assistant Professor position?

No sane committee is ever going to turn down a candidate solely for being 'too experienced', and it is rarely meaningful to reduce someone's CV and accumulated experience to just a few numbers. However, this comes with some qualifications:

If someone is reaching career milestones (e.g. first Asst. Prof. job) much later than the norm, a committee might question why, and whether this is a sign that future development will be slow.
If someone is applying for a job that is 'too junior' for them, committees might be concerned that either (i) they're not really a serious applicant, or (ii) that they'll quit as soon as something better comes along.
By definition, if someone has more experience, then the committee has more information on which to base a decision. Junior candidates often have to be assessed in terms of 'potential for success' rather than 'evidence of success'. This can count for or against the more experienced applicant: some committees may prefer to gamble on a rising star, others may prefer the security of an established candidate.
Hiring decisions (just as everything else) are influenced by many external factors. Everything from financial considerations (experienced candidate may cost more) through to government policy (how candidate's metrics would influence the university's ranking and hence income) may help sway a decision for or against a particular candidate.


Should you talk about your other research areas in a tenure-track job talk?

No, a job talk is not just a regular seminar. You'll need to focus more on selling yourself, your field, and your research agenda, not (only) present some interesting research.

Generally speaking, job talks tend to have the following coarse structure:

Speaker Intro (who you are, keep this part short)
Research Overview (your overall research agenda)
Deep Dive into one topic (select one topic and go into details)
Outlook (what do you plan to do in the future? what's the impact of your research?)

(1) is more of a tradition, I think most listeners don't really care about this part as the info you give here should be pretty much visible from your CV anyway. (2) is important, as it should show the audience that you actually have an agenda that goes beyond what you did in your thesis or in your good papers. (3) is not much different to a regular conference or seminar talk (4) is again pretty crucial, as you'll need to sell not only that your work is good for somebody in your field, but that your field is one that is of great interest to the faculty and science in general.

Also remember that your audience is going to be not only from your field, so you cannot overwhelm the audience with a lot of technical detail all the time. Some advice from my PhD advisor was: part (1) everybody needs to understand, part (2) needs to be understood by the people that work in reasonably close fields, part (3) should not be entirely comprehensible for anybody but you, part (4) needs to be understandable for everybody again.

(the comment re point (3) was of course somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but the idea is that for (3) you will really need to sell that what you are doing is not only important, but also difficult and interesting, which means you shouldn't oversimplify here)